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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.”
Tom Braun, Sung Ho Kim, Monika M. Biener, Alex V. Hamza, Juergen Biener
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 73 | Number 2 | March 2018 | Pages 229-236
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1392203
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Spherical ablator shells that contain a thin layer of ultralow-density polymer foam have recently attracted attention in the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) community as they can be used to bring dopants for diagnostics and nuclear physics experiments in direct contact with the deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel or to study new ignition regimes by enabling the formation of uniform liquid DT fuel layers. We developed a method to fabricate these foam-lined ablator shells using a prefabricated ablator as a mold to cast the foam liner within the shell. One crucial component of this new approach is the removal of solvent from the ablator shells without collapsing the ultralow-density porous polymer network. Here, we report on a supercritical drying approach with liquid carbon dioxide that provides critical information on how to produce thin layers of low-density polymer foams in ablator shells for ICF experiments. Diffusion experiments were used to study the time required for complete solvent exchange in 2-mm-inner-diameter diamond shells and the data were used to demonstrate the fabrication of uniform porous polymer films inside ablator shells.