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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.”
Arthur Nobile, Thomas Bieniewski, Kandy Frame, Robert Little, Kane Fisher
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 3 | October 1995 | Pages 1558-1565
Tritium Waste Management and Discharge Control | 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-A30634
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reaction engineering approach was used to design a SAES St 198 metal getter reactor for a glovebox detritiation system. The detritiation system will be used to decontaminate and decommission an Li(D,T)-contaminated glovebox previously used in the U.S. nuclear weapons program. The approach involved development of a model that calculates reactor breakthrough curves as a function of various reactor physical parameters. Experiments involving flow of deuterium in nitrogen through a small metal getter reactor validated the model. The model was then used to investigate the effects of temperature, getter pellet size, reactor diameter, and reactor volume on the reactor performance. The resulting design was a 7 cm diam. by 40 cm long cylindrical reactor that operates at 250 °C, and is filled with 5 kg of as-received SAES St 198 getter pellets. The reactor handles a flow rate of 100 L/min. An St 909 getter reactor was used upstream of the St 198 reactor for impurity removal and water decomposition. The glovebox cleanup system design and getter reactor mechanical design are discussed.