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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.”
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Validation of the ÉTOILE code through a comparison with experimental bundle/duct interaction (BDI) data is discussed. ÉTOILE is a newly developed three-dimensional finite element program that uses a new analytical method to predict distortions and mechanical behavior in wire-wrapped-type fuel-pin bundles during irradiation in liquid-metal fast breeder reactor cores. Comparisons between the ÉTOILE solutions and the experimental data for bundle stiffnesses and minimum pin-to-pin and pin-to-duct clearances under bundle compression suggest that BDI performance can be predicted reasonably well with a suitable choice of friction coefficient and initial spiral wire displacement. Application of the code in the analysis of the mechanical behavior of soft bundles with distributed wireless pins is also presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this design in reducing the interaction forces between a fuel-pin bundle and a duct wall under bundle compression. Agreement with the experimental data is fairly good for the reduction in bundle stiffness when the configuration is changed from the normal bundle to the soft bundle.