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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.”
Haozhe Qiu, Kun Lu, Xiaojun Ni, Jianghua Wei, Songbo Han
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 8 | November 2022 | Pages 676-682
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2103312
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The vacuum vessel is the core component of the Chinese Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor (CFETR); its main function is to remove nuclear heating, provide safety shielding, and maintain a high-quality vacuum environment. Therefore, the safety of the vacuum vessel is of great significance to the CFETR, and examining its dynamic performance is necessary. However, the conventional finite element method takes too long to perform the dynamic analysis of the vacuum vessel, which greatly reduces the efficiency of the design and analysis. Based on the modal synthesis method, this study uses ANSYS software to establish a substructure model of the CFETR vacuum vessel. A modal analysis and harmonic response analysis are conducted, and their results are compared with those of the conventional finite element model. The results show that the substructure model not only has the same accuracy as conventional finite element models, but that it also greatly reduces the time of dynamic calculation.