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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.”
M. Z. Youssef, A. Kumar, M. Abdou, M. Nakagawa, K. Kosako, Y. Oyama, T. Nakamura
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1891-1902
Neutronic | Proceedings of the Ninth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Oak Brook, Illinois, October 7-11, 1990) | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29619
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Effort in Phase IIC of the US/JAERI Collaborative Program on Fusion Neutronics was focused on performing integral experiments and post analyses on blankets that include the actual hetergeneities found in several blanket designs. Two geometrical arrangements were considered, namely multilayers of Li2O and beryllium in an edge-on, horizontally alternating configuration for a front depth of 30 cm, followed by the Li2O breeding zone (Be edge-on, BEO, experiment), and vertical water coolant channels arrangement in which one is placed behind the first wall and two other channels (width of 0.5 cm each) are placed at depths of 10 and 30 cm from the first wall (WCC experiment). The objectives are to experimentally verify the enhancement in tritium production in the first experiment and to examine the accuracy of predicting tritium production and other reaction rates around these heterogeneities in the two experiments. In the BOE system, it was shown that, with the zonal method to measure tritium production from natural lithium (Tn), the calculated-to-measured values (C/E) are 0.95 − 1.05 (JAERI) and 0.98 − 0.9 (U.S.), which is consistent with the results obtained in other Phases of the Program. In the WCC experiment, there is a noticeable change in C/E values for T6 near the coolant channels where steep gradients in T6 production are observed. The C/E values obtained with the Li-foils to measure T6 are better than those obtained by the Li-glass method. As for T7, calculations and measurements by NE213 method are within ± 15% in JAERI's analysis, but larger values (∼ 20–25%) are obtained in the U.S. analysis. Around heterogeneities, the prediction accuracy for T7 is better than that for T6. In both experiments, the prediction accuracy for high-threshold reactions [(e.g. 93Nb(n,2n)] is within ± 10% as obtained by both Monte Carlo and Sn codes, however, it was shown that the 58Ni(n,2n) cross-section of ENDF/B-V should be increased by 25–30% at high incident neutron energies to give better C/E values.