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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.”
Julio Diaz, Robert Adams, Victor Petrov, Annalisa Manera (Univ of Michigan)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 241-249
The work presented in this report describes the current status of the High-Resolution Gamma-ray Tomography System (HRGTS) under development at the University of Michigan (UM) for high-resolution measurements of void fractions in complex geometries such as fuel bundles and high-pressure test sections, including various test measurements. The system consists of a high-resolution fan-beam gamma tomography system based on an Ir-192 source and a custom modular detector array. The module arrangement is composed of eight detectors, each consisting of a LYSO (Lu1.9Y0.1SiO5) scintillator read out by two Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) arranged in parallel for improved light collection. Custom pulse-processing electronic boards for each module amplify the analog signals and count events at two independently-defined pulse height thresholds per detector. The individual detector modules have WiFi capabilities so that the detector arc can be easily expanded, requiring only a single PC to operate the entire array remotely. Reconstructed images of test phantoms have confirmed a spatial resolution of about 1.5 mm. Further tests were performed using a static mock-up of a 5x5 fuel assembly. The complete detector arc is mounted on a rotating stage with a large inner hole of 470 mm in order to accommodate flow channels, such that the source and detector are rotated around the stationary channel in order to collect the range of projection angles needed to perform tomographic reconstruction.