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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.”
Chungpin Liao, Mujid S. Kazimi, John E. Meyer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 23 | Number 2 | March 1993 | Pages 208-217
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST93-A30148
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The steady-state operational conditions for large tokamaks impose high performance requirements that cast suspicion on the employment of conventional solid surface divertors. Flowing liquid-metal divertors are thus being considered as an alternative. A preliminary evaluation is made of some aspects of this concept. To understand the hydrogen (i.e., deuterons and tritons) recycling behavior in liquid metals, the transport and chemistry aspects of the hydrogen/liquid-metal interaction are investigated, including hydrogen gettering, tritium inventory, and blistering caused by hydrogen bubble eruptions. It is shown that when operating in the high-recycling mode (i.e., as the liquid metal is filled with deuterons and tritons, one implanting ion will immediately cause the emission of one neutral particle), lithium would have a large tritium inventory. Gallium, on the other hand, does not have the same problem because of its negligible hydrogen solubility and the decomposition of its hydrides in the temperature range of interest. However, to avoid blistering, the flow speed of a gallium neutralizer has to be high. An edge plasma simulation model is briefly introduced, and its outcome for the high-recycling liquid-metal (lithium and gallium) divertors is presented. This model gives more realistic predictions of plasma temperature than some of the existing simulation models. Results of this model show that denser and cooler edge plasmas can be achieved by liquid-metal divertors than by conventional stationary surface divertors. Evaporation and sputtering of liquid-metal divertors are shown not to be as serious a problem as might be suspected at first glance.