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ANS Student Conference 2025
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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.”
James F. Davis, Richard S. H. Mah, William F. Stevens, Balabhadra Misra, Victor A. Maroni
Nuclear Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | November 1979 | Pages 149-158
Technical Paper | ISotopes Separation | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A32387
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A control scheme is proposed based on our analysis of the disturbances expected during normal operation of the lead column in the fuel enrichment distillation cascade for a near-term tokamak fusion reactor fuel cycle. The primary objective of this control scheme is to minimize both the time and the amount that the atom percent protium in the bottoms product is above a setpoint level. As a secondary objective, distillate stream flow and composition fluctuations should be minimized to avoid downstream operational and control problems without requiring intermediate storage. A fixed material balance control scheme was found to be satisfactory for meeting the control requirements of this system. Because the concentration of protium in the bottoms product (the controlled variable) was relatively small, the distillate stream composition and the tritium/deuterium ratio in the bottoms stream proved to be essentially independent of the choice of controller parameters. This insensitivity permitted the controller parameters to be chosen solely on the basis of the primary objective and led to a high gain setting and low reset value for the controller. With the provision of a bottoms storage to dampen out the effect of oscillatory response, these controller settings minimized the overshoot and produced an averaged protium concentration in the bottoms very close to the setpoint level