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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.”
Rainer Köster, Günter Rudolph
Nuclear Technology | Volume 96 | Number 2 | November 1991 | Pages 192-201
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34605
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The release of radionuclides from a waste form into an aqueous phase is often assessed using a source term that considers diffusion and/or congruent matrix dissolution as the rate-determining release mechanisms. As an alternative approach, an equilibrium concept is proposed here that can be applied under the condition that there is no appreciable exchange of fluid with the environment of the waste package / form after the water inflow into the near field for a long time. In this case, all reactions that may give rise to radionuclide release will be completed after a certain time and stable final conditions will be established, in which, for each radionuclide, chemical equilibria exist between the dissolved phase and the various coexisting solid phases. Thereafter, a release of radionuclides from the near field is possible only by escape of the aqueous phase into the environment. Release rate predictions on the basis of this concept are of particular interest for the long-lived radionuclides, especially the actinides. Current efforts are aimed at predicting equilibrium concentrations both in theoretical computations and in experimental measurements. Some results available from corrosion studies on cemented waste forms in salt brine are presented. For specimens doped with cesium, strontium, plutonium, or americium these results show that for each radionuclide a partition equilibrium exists between the corrosion products of cement and the surrounding salt brine, which keeps the concentration in solution at a low level.