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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.”
Kunio Higashi, Akio Oya, Jun Oishi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 32 | Number 2 | May 1968 | Pages 159-165
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A19728
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Usually a number of separating stages have to be connected in series to attain the desired degree of isotope separation by gaseous diffusion. Such a series-connected group of stages is called a cascade. In this paper the differential equation describing the time-dependence of a tapered cascade in which the interstage flow changes stage by stage is derived and solved under some reasonable assumptions. On the basis of these analytical results, the static and dynamic characteristics of a tapered cascade are discussed. For the same total number of stages, the cascade requiring the largest equilibrium time to reach steady-state condition is described. Also shown is that the so-called ideal cascade is not recommended from the standpoint of dynamic characteristics, although its superiority in static characteristics is familiar. It is pointed out that by a slight reduction of the cut θ from that of the ideal cascade θideal the dynamic characteristics are improved to some extent, but the selection of θ greater than θideal results in both static and dynamic characteristics being unfavorable. It is also shown that the equilibrium time of a tapered cascade tends to increase with the total number of stages N in proportion to N2 as in a square cascade. The top stage is not always the last to reach the steady-state condition. A simple method is proposed to predict how the equilibrium time differs in each stage of the cascade.