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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.”
Roberto Baratti, Anna Maria Polcaro, Pier Francesco Ricci, Antonio Viola, Giancarlo Pierini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 2 | September 1986 | Pages 266-274
Technical Paper | Tritium System | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24978
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A mathematical model has been developed to determine the amount of tritium that permeates the cooling circuit of a tritium breeding blanket containing the liquid eutectic alloy 17Li-83Pb. This model, which has been applied to phase 2A of the International Tokamak Reactor/Next European Torus project, is used to predict the effect of the operating conditions of the blanket, as well as those of a spray tower employed as a tritium recovery unit, and the kinetic parameters for the permeation and desorption processes. The results of this theoretical study indicate that the amount of permeated tritium proved to be not very different for the maximum [10.82 kPa1/2 · m3(mol · T)−1] and minimum [0.7 kPa1/2 · m3(mol · T)−1] values of Sievert's constant (Ks) existing in literature. This amount, moreover, can be reduced to 0.1 to 0.01 g/day of tritium by the presence of small oxide barriers (a permeation reduction factor of α ≅ 100) on the cooling tubes and by the easy operating conditions of the spray tower, which include a droplet diameter of 0.5 mm; a tritium pressure of 0.13 kPa at 673 K; and a residence time of 0.5 s.