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ANS Student Conference 2025
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Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.”
X. R. Wang, M. S. Tillack, C. Koehly, S. Malang, H. H. Toudeshki, F. Najmabadi, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 193-219
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-798
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ARIES-ACT2 is a conventional tokamak power plant conceptual design that uses a dual-coolant lead-lithium (DCLL) blanket concept with a RAFS (reduced-activation ferritic steel) first-wall (FW) and blanket structure. The design concept is the first fully integrated study of the DCLL blanket in a tokamak power plant. The major engineering efforts were to develop a credible configuration that can meet aggressive maintenance goals and achieve high availability and maintainability; to design a DCLL blanket that can meet tritium breeding requirements with reasonable helium and Pb-17Li cooling schemes to remove the surface and volumetric thermal power in the blanket while keeping the helium pressure drop, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) pressure drop, and total pumping power low, and material temperatures and stresses at an acceptable level; to design manifolding and access pipes to connect/disconnect the inboard and outboard blanket sectors to the ring headers located underneath the reactor without affecting maintenance operations and creating major MHD effects when feeding all the Pb-17Li/He mass flow. Detailed three-dimensional finite element analysis of the DCLL blankets together with design iterations have been performed to finalize and optimize the major design parameters of the FW and blanket structure. The helium-cooled W plate-type divertor concept was adopted and integrated into the ACT2 DCLL power core to accommodate the peak surface heat flux of ∼10 MW/m2 predicted by edge plasma physics.