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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.”
Fatollah Tehranian, Mohamed A. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 27 | Number 3 | May 1995 | Pages 298-313
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30392
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Accurate prediction of the thermomechanical responses of particle beds in fusion blankets depends strongly on the availability of experimental data on their thermal properties as a function of the blanket operating conditions. In this study, a series of experiments is conducted to measure the effective thermal conductivity and interface conductance of single-size aluminum, beryllium, and lithium zirconate particle beds as a function of applied external load in the 0- to 1.6-MPa range. Experiments are carried out with both helium and air as cover gas over a pressure range of 30 to 760 Torr. In both the aluminum and beryllium beds, as the applied load is increased to 1.5 MPa, the effective thermal conductivity increases by a factor of ∼3 to 7 in an air cover gas and by a factor of ∼2 to 3 in helium. With 1.2-mm lithium zirconate particles and air or helium as the cover gas, changes in the bed thermal conductivity when the applied load is varied in the 0 to 1.6-MPa range are small and within the experimental error. The increase in the interface conductance values with applied external load shows variations similar to those of the thermal conductivity. Based on the Hertz elastic equation and finite element models, the particle-to-particle contact areas as a function of the applied external load are evaluated and used in a predictive model by Bauer, Schlunder, and Zehner to calculate the effective thermal conductivity of a beryllium particle bed as a function of external pressure. The experimental results are in good agreement with the model predictions.