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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.”
K. Kotoh, M. Tanaka, T. Sakamoto, S. Takashima, T. Asakura, T. Uda, T. Sugiyama
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 184-189
Tritium, Safety, and Environment | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8899
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Authors have been studying the adsorption or/and desorption behavior of H2 or/and D2 with synthetic zeolite packed-beds under the cryogenic condition of liquid nitrogen temperature, aiming at developing a pressure swing adsorption (PSA) process of hydrogen isotope separation useful for tritium processing in fusion fuel cycle and environmental tritium safety confinement, or convenient for deuterium production. We examined the mass transfer in the adsorption system of D2 diluted in H2 with zeolite packed-beds, experimentally and analytically. The results have been presented, where it is shown that the enrichment factor of D2 in packed-beds matches with estimated from the isothermal adsorption characteristics and that the mass transfer is controlled in the macro-pore media of adsorbents. In this work, the behavior of tracer HD added in a H2-D2 mixture with zeolite 5A and 13X packed-beds was experimentally investigated, and was analyzed by the curve-fitting as well as for the behavior of D2. In this report, the experimental results demonstrate that the breakthrough curves of HD exhibit analogous to those of D2 but reduced in the breakthrough time in comparison to the latter. The analytical results verify that the HD/H2 separation factor in packed-beds agrees with predicted from the isothermal adsorption characteristics, and show that the isotope effect on the mass transfer depends on the molecular mass effect.