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Remembering Charles E. Till
Charles E. Till
Charles E. Till, an ANS member since 1963 and Fellow since 1987, passed away on March 22 at the age of 89. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Saskatchewan and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Imperial College, University of London. Till initially worked for the Civilian Atomic Power Department of the Canadian General Electric Company, where he was the physicist in charge of the startup of the first prototype CANDU reactor in Canada.
Till joined Argonne National Laboratory in 1963 in the Applied Physics Division, where he worked as an experimentalist in the Fast Critical Experiments program. He then moved to additional positions of increasing responsibility, becoming division director in 1973. Under his leadership, the Applied Physics Division established itself as one of the elite reactor physics organizations in the world. Both the experimental (critical experiments and nuclear data measurements) and nuclear analysis methods work were internationally recognized. Till led Argonne’s participation in the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE), and he was the lead U.S. delegate to INFCE Working Group 5, Fast Breeders.
S. Bhandarkar, S. A. Letts, S. Buckley, C. Alford, E. Lindsey, J. Hughes, K. P. Youngblood, K. Moreno, H. Xu, H. Huang, A. Nikroo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 51 | Number 4 | May 2007 | Pages 564-571
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1445
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The choice of the mandrel material has a significant bearing on the properties of the sputter-coated beryllium shell needed for NIF targets. Here, we present our work on screening four mandrel materials, their impact on the Be shell and issues related to their subsequent removal. Beryllium shells sputter deposited on hollow glow discharge polymer or GDP spheres met most of the target specifications. However, they had greater opacity due to partial oxidation of the Be during the GDP burnout step. Poly (-methyl styrene), silicon and nickel beads were explored as alternative mandrels but were plagued with problems such as cracking of the Be shell or incomplete removal. The most promising approach was a two-step coating process mediated by a thin 6m Be mandrel that is made using GDP.