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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.”
R. Kodama, P. A. Norreys, Y. Sentoku, R. B. Campbell
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 3 | April 2006 | Pages 316-326
Technical Paper | Fast Ignition | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1151
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reentrant cone concept for efficient heating of high-density plasmas has been studied as an advanced fast ignition scheme. The roles of the reentrant cone, as indicated by particle-in-cell (PIC) code simulations and confirmed by basic experiments, are reviewed, particularly the efficient collection and guidance of the laser light into the cone tip and the direction of the energetic electrons into the high-density region. It has been shown that the energetic electrons converge to the tip of the cone as a result of the surface electron flow guided by self-generated quasi-static magnetic fields and electrostatic sheath fields. As a result, the energetic electron density at the tip is locally greater than the case of using an open geometry such as a normal flat foil target. Using these advantageous properties of the reentrant cone, efficient fast heating of imploded high-density plasmas has been demonstrated in integrated fast ignition experiments. A hybrid PIC code (LSP) has been used to understand the relativistic electron beam thermalization and subsequent heating of highly compressed plasmas. The simulation results are in reasonable agreement with the integrated experiments. Anomalous stopping appears to be present and is created by the growth and saturation of an electromagnetic filamentation mode that generates a strong back-electromagnetic force impeding energetic electrons.