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Fusion Science and Technology
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General Kenneth Nichols and the Manhattan Project
Nichols
The Oak Ridger has published the latest in a series of articles about General Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The series has been produced by Nichols’ grandniece Barbara Rogers Scollin and Oak Ridge (Tenn.) city historian David Ray Smith. Gen. Nichols (1907–2000) was the district engineer for the Manhattan Engineer District during the Manhattan Project.
As Smith and Scollin explain, Nichols “had supervision of the research and development connected with, and the design, construction, and operation of, all plants required to produce plutonium-239 and uranium-235, including the construction of the towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. The responsibility of his position was massive as he oversaw a workforce of both military and civilian personnel of approximately 125,000; his Oak Ridge office became the center of the wartime atomic energy’s activities.”
T. Tanabe, K. Miyasaka, M. Rubel, V. Philipps
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 924-928
Material Interaction and Permeation | Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology Tsukuba, Japan November 12-16, 2001 | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A22720
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to investigate tritium behavior in tokamak, we have measured surface distributions of deuterium and tritium on graphite limiter tiles used in TEXTOR under D-D operation by means of an ion beam analysis and tritium imaging plate technique, respectively. It was found that both distributions were quite different, i.e. deuterium retention was higher at the deposited area, whereas tritium retention was higher at the erosion dominated area. This is because tritium produced by the D-D reaction, initially having 1 MeV, did not fully lose its energy in the TEXTOR plasma and implanted into the plasma facing materials nearly homogeneously, whereas deuterium was codeposited with carbon and boron, the main impurities in the TEXTOR plasma. This is also confirmed by the finding that high level of tritium was detected beneath the deposited layer. Tritium distribution, however, was modified by the temperature increase due to plasma heat load. Thus the comparison of tritium profiles with the deuterium profile gives a large amount of important and new information on PMI, and may be used as a new diagnostic technique for PMI.