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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.”
A. Honig, Q. Fan, C.-K. Hsu, X. Wei
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 5 | December 1995 | Pages 1859-1864
Technical Paper | Inertial Confinement Fusion Targets | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30426
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The emissivities and accommodation coefficients for helium and deuterium gas were measured for polystyrene target shells from several production batches. The shells varied in wall thickness, diameter and surface conditions as viewed with an optical microscope. For emissivity measurements, it is desirable for the radiative heat transfer to dominate over conductive heat transfer via the surrounding gas and the sample (and thermometer) mount. This is achieved by maintaining very low gas pressure (free molecular conduction regime) and by a novel contact-less thermometric measurement, in which the temperature of the shell is determined from the strongly temperature-dependent shell outgassing rate. The accommodation coefficient is also obtained in the process. Emissivity and accommodation coefficient results are reported in the temperature range 250 – 350K. The values are very low, in the 0.01 range for the former, and 0.003 range for the latter, which augurs well for thermal stability after the shroud removal prior to a target shot. For measurements at lower temperatures (down to 4K), other contact-less thermometry methods are proposed, with electronic magnetic susceptibility shown to be very favorable.