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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.”
C. Housiadas, K. Douglas
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 3 | October 1995 | Pages 871-876
Tritium Safety | 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-A30514
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental set-up is used to carry out static exposure tests to study the uptake and oxidation of tritium released in ambient room air, routinely or accidentally, in the presence of selected surface materials. Tritium, in its elemental form at concentrations of the order of ∼0.4 GBq/m3 (10−2 Ci/m3), is injected into the glass exposure chamber containing the selected surface material and air at atmospheric pressure. Periodically, samples of the chamber atmosphere are analysed, using liquid scintillation counting, to obtain the concentrations of HTO and T2. The exposures have been performed using aluminium, 316L stainless steel and painted stainless steel plates, as the selected surface materials. Results are compared with predictions using the ITER approved TMAP4 code. The results indicate practically the same conversion rate, of about 0.02% per day, for both the aluminium and stainless steel samples and give reasonable agreement with modelling predictions. Strong absorbtion of both T2 and HTO by the painted surface is observed, suggesting the use of high values for the solubility constant to correctly predict this behaviour.
