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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.”
Michel Martin, Géraldine Moll, François Lallet, Alexandre Choux, Rémy Collier, Olivier Legaie, Laurent Jeannot
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 166-170
Technical Paper | Nineteenth Target Fabrication Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST59-166
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Smooth and uniform solid deuterium-tritium (DT) layers inside a spherical shell are needed in order to achieve ignition on the Laser Mégajoule (LMJ) facility. The thermal environment around the capsule is the key to meeting the DT layer requirements. While keeping high mode roughness within the specifications at the shot temperature is now guaranteed by a rapid cooling technique, low mode roughness ("shape" of the layer) is still a complicated and demanding subject. A perfectly uniform temperature field around the capsule is needed. Final results of the constant thermal perturbation effects on the layer can be calculated, but the dynamic of reaction is not known. This paper presents a model that allows calculation of the low mode layer behavior depending on a change in the temperature field. This comes down to calculating a target lifetime for the low modes during a thermal transient state.