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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.”
R. W. Moir, J. D. Lee
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 619-623
Blanket Design and Evaluation | Proceedings of the Seveth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Reno, Nevada, June 15–19, 1986) | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24812
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We adapted the helium-cooled, FLiBe-breeder blanket to the commercial tandem-mirror fusion-reactor design, MINIMARS. Vanadium was used to achieve high performance from the high-energy-release neutron-capture reactions and from the high-temperature operation permitted by the refractory property of the material, which increases the conversion efficiency and decreases the helium-pumping power. Although this blanket had the highest performance among the MINIMARS blankets designs, measured by Mnth (blanket energy multiplication times thermal conversion efficiency), it had a cost of electricity (COE) 18% higher than the University of Wisconsin (UW) blanket design (42.5 vs 35.9 mills/kW·h). This increased cost was due to using higher-cost blanket materials (beryllium and vanadium) and a thicker blanket, which resulted in higher-cost central-cell magnets and the need for more blanket materials. Apparently, the high efficiency does not substantially affect the COE. Therefore, in the future, we recommend lowering the helium temperature so that ferritic steel can be used. This will result in a lower-cost blanket, which may compensate for the lower performance resulting from lower efficiency.
