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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.”
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Fusion facilities like ITER and DEMO will circulate several kilograms tritium and deuterium per day in their fuel cycle. For the separation of the hydrogen isotopologues the Isotope Separation System (ISS), based on cryogenic distillation, was developed at Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK). One challenge is to find and develop an in situ and real time method to analyse the isotopologic composition of the column content. Calibration tests with IR absorption spectroscopy (FTIR) with chemically equilibrated samples have been performed at the Tritium absorption IR Spectroscopy Experiment (TApIR). From this previous work and from literature, it is known that the dependence between IR absorbance and the concentrations is non-linear. This makes it impossible to extrapolate the calibration from equilibrium to non-equilibrium samples. This work shows a full D₂, H₂, and HD calibration with samples in and off the high temperature. This enables us now to measure composition of inactive liquid hydrogen samples with an accuracy of better than 5%. In addition, one of the main challenges on the way to a calibration with tritiated mixtures is shown, the IR absorbance at molecular dimers, which tremendously increases the complexity of IR absorption spectra.