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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.”
Peng Li, Weiping Shen, Shuming Wang, Chulei Zhou, Shiliang Xu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 142-149
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-709
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a W mockup with an interlayer of diamond/Cu (DC) composite material. As a joining interlayer, DC composite material has high thermal conductivity and accommodative coefficient of thermal expansion. By adjusting the thickness of the DC layer and comparing different forms of armor, the optimal design is the brush armor mockup with a 1-mm-thickness DC layer. The thermal-structural behavior of this mockup was analyzed under the steady-state and transient heat flux by using ANSYS Workbench. The calculated temperature and stress indicate that the mockup can tolerate 10 MW/m2 steady-state heat flux at most. Then a transient heat flux (300 MW/m2 for 5 ms) is loaded on the top surface upon steady-state heat flux of 8 MW/m2. The surface temperature instantly rises to 2300°C, but a cracking trend is not shown at the loaded surface.
