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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.”
Yannick Nicolas Hörstensmeyer, Silvano Tosti, Alessia Santucci, Giacomo Bruni
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 232-237
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1705690
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Palladium alloy permeators are foreseen for the retrieval of hydrogen in the fusion fuel cycle of the European DEMO power plant. Driven by a pressure gradient, unburned fuel permeates through a thin-walled metallic membrane within the permeator while other gases cannot pass this barrier. With a theoretically unlimited selectivity with regard to nonhydrogenic species, a very high proportion of unburned fuel can be recovered in a continuous process from the exhaust gas and reused after a very short time. A potential candidate for the design of such a permeator consists of a tube (l = 500 mm, d = 10 mm) with a 125-μm-thick, self-supporting membrane made of a palladium-silver alloy all combined in the shape of a so-called finger-type design. A two-stage process then connects several of these permeators in parallel and in series to match the required throughput of DEMO during plasma operation at a given degree of separation. As the first design point in the scope of the current preconceptual design phase, a model was developed using the commercial software ASPEN Custom Modeler to estimate important parameters such as the tritium inventory and the scale of the permeator unit. How the hydrogen pressure profile is calculated over the length of a permeator using the Sieverts’ Law and the Finite Volume Method is thoroughly described. As a result, the integral performance of the combined permeators is presented as well as all important boundary conditions and assumptions that led to it. For the current DEMO baseline scenario, the total number of permeators of the abovementioned shape is found to be about 50.