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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.”
Daniel Papp, Dinh Truong, Alice Ying, Nicola Zaccari
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 1058-1063
Fusion Materials | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9051
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lithium metatitanate (Li2TiO3) is a candidate tritium breeding material for fusion reactor blankets. In an actual blanket the pebbles are geometrically confined in a containing structure subjected to displacement and stress constraints under operating conditions. For an accurate description of pebble behavior during operations, existing data of pebble deformation under compressive loads is inadequate. In this study a uniaxial compression experimental apparatus was built to investigate time dependent creep on a single pebble as a function of applied force and temperature relevant to blanket conditions. Experimental results shows that at a temperature range of 700-800 °C, the crush load of Li2TiO3 pebbles is reduced by about half of its room temperature crush load. The experimental results allow for the establishment of a pebble creep failure map as a function of force and temperature, which provides guidance to the blanket designs. The study also introduces an FEA model based on experimental deformation data to obtain the constitutive equation needed for Discrete Element Model simulation of the pebble bed.