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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.”
C. R. Walthers, E. M. Jenkins, D. W. Sedgley, T. H. Batzer, S. Konishi, S. O'Hira, Y. Naruse
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1811-1813
Impurity Control and Plasma-Facing Component | Proceedings of the Ninth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Oak Brook, Illinois, October 7-11, 1990) | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29606
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In 1988, a prototypical vacuum system was added to the Tritium Systems Test Assembly (TSTA) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Since then various pumping scenarios, which might be expected in a fusion reactor, have been performed without any serious shortcomings being apparent in the use of compound cryopumps as reactor high vacuum pumps. Last year, the question of whether a compound pump was necessary was addressed in a pair of runs in which deuterium helium mixtures were pumped on a single 4K activated charcoal panel. In these tests, the condensing stage of the pump was maintained at 77K and did not contribute to pumping either deuterium or helium. Results were very encouraging: in both tests the charcoal readily pumped helium until a max loading of 0.4 T 1 cm−2 of helium on charcoal was attained. Helium speed was not affected by deuterium which may have been pumped by either a condensing or sorbing mechanism or by a combination of both. In addition, the helium loading at saturation was 0.4 T 1 cm−2 even though the D2/He ratio was doubled between runs. Conjecture about why the charcoal helium capacity was constant led to the pump operation described in this paper. It was felt that measurement of helium capacity after careful deuterium preloads might help to explain the mechanism involved in co-pumping of a condensible and a noncondensible on a single 4K cryosorber surface. This paper presents the results of series of helium capacity runs preceded by a range of deuterium preloads and attempts to explain the mechanism involved.