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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
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.”
Jeffery F. Latkowski, Javier Sanz, Jasmina L. Vujic
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 30 | Number 3 | December 1996 | Pages 1470-1474
Safety and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A11963156
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial fusion energy (IFE) will operate and magnetic fusion energy (MFE) power plants may operate in pulsed modes. The two confinement schemes, however, will have quite different time periods. Typical repetition rates for IFE power plants will be 1-5 Hz. MFE power plants will likely ramp up in current for about 1 hour, shut down for several minutes, and repeat the process. Traditionally, activation calculations for IFE and MFE power plants have assumed continuous operation and used either the “steady-state” (SS) or “equivalent steady-state” (ESS) approximations.1-5 It has been shown, however, that the SS and ESS methods may not yield accurate results for all radionuclides of interest.6 The present work expands that of Sisolak, et al. by applying their formulae to conditions which might be experienced in typical IFE and MFE power plants. In addition, complicated, multi-step reaction/decay chains are analyzed using an upgraded version of the ACAB radionuclide generation/depletion code.7 Our results support previous work in the conclusion that the SS method is suitable for application to MFE power plant conditions.6 We also find that the ESS method generates acceptable results for radionuclides with half-lives more than a factor of three greater than the time between pulses. For components that are subject to 0.05 Hz (or more frequent) irradiation (such as the first wall and coolant), use of the ESS method is recommended. For components or materials that are subject to less frequent irradiation (such as high-Z target materials), pulsed irradiation calculations should be used.
