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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.”
M. Dalle Donne, A. Goraieb, G. Piazza, F. Scaffidi-Argentina
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 38 | Number 3 | November 2000 | Pages 310-319
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Beryllium Technology for Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST00-A36144
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the next generation fusion reactors with a ceramic breeder blanket the use, as a neutron multiplier, of either a binary bed of large (≈ 2 mm) and small (≈ 0.1–0.2 mm) beryllium pebbles or a single size bed made of 1 mm or 2 mm pebbles is foreseen. The heat transfer parameters of such a binary pebble bed, namely the thermal conductivity and the heat transfer coefficient to the containing wall, have been investigated previously in the experimental device PEHTRA available at FZK. The experiments allowed to measure the effect of the bed temperature and of constraint exerted by the containing walls. The constraint is defined by the bed interference, i.e. the difference in the radial expansion between bed and the constraining walls related to the bed thickness (Δℓ/ℓ). However, with the PEHTRA experiments, it was only possible to achieve a Δℓ/ℓ value of 0.1 % .1 A new experimental rig (SUPER-PEHTRA) has been constructed at FZK, which allows to achieve Δℓ/ℓ values of 0.3 % and to measure the pressure of the expanding bed on the containing walls. First experiments with a binary bed have been performed.2 The present paper reports on further experiments with binary beds and the establishing of equations correlating the data obtained for the present binary beds and for the binary bed experiments described in Ref. [2].