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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.”
Matthew C. Carroll, John G. Gilligan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 5 | Number 3 | May 1984 | Pages 334-349
Technical Paper | First-Wall Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST84-A23109
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A model for predicting bremsstrahlung energy deposition in first-wall materials and the effect of this energy deposition on wall temperature distributions is proposed. In this model the bremsstrahlung energy spectrum is divided into a finite number of discrete energy groups, each with an overall power fraction and average wavelength. The volumetric heating effects of each of these individual groups are superimposed to obtain overall temperature distributions in first-wall configurations using rectangular and cylindrical coordinates. The proposed multigroup model is then applied to several first-wall designs and compared with existing models, notably the “surface-heating” model, which utilizes the assumption that the bremsstrahlung energy is deposited on the wall surface. It is concluded that in many designs involving advanced fuels or low-Z first-wall materials the surface-heating model over-predicts wall temperatures near the plasma side, and the multigroup model may be necessary for accurate temperature calculation.