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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.”
S.K. Sood, C. Fong, K.M. Kalyanam, K.B. Woodall, A. Busigin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 3 | October 1995 | Pages 742-747
Tritium Processing | Proceedings of the Fifth Topical Meeting on Tritium Technology in Fission, Fusion, and Isotopic Applications Belgirate, Italy May 28-June 3, 1995 | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30493
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The High Temperature Isotopic Exchange (HITEX) process has been proposed as a simple and reliable option for detritiating impurities in the ITER plasma exhaust.1 The process relies on the well known principle of catalytic equilibration, does not involve complicated decomposition reactions, and avoids the formation of tritiated water. The original HITEX process was conceived as a simple batch system which could yield extremely high detritiation factors (∼ 109). However, batch operation (for an ITER scale/impurity feed compositions) necessitates the holdup of tritium inventory (101 gT) equivalent to one batch in the HITEX feed tank. This paper compares batch and once-through HITEX options in light of calculated and experimental results. Tritium inventories, hydrogen swamping rates and Decontamination Factors (DF's) are compared with the objective of optimizing the process configuration for ITER. A promising HITEX configuration for ITER is composed of a once-through first stage which removes the bulk of the tritium in the impurities, followed by a batch-wise second stage which provides a large decontamination factor. Such a hybrid arrangement promises to produce the required DF of 600,000 with a tritium inventory of < 5 g and a hydrogen swamping ratio of about 26:1. The hybrid arrangement is expected to be robust, since it can be built using industrially proven components.