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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.”
A. D. Beklemishev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 184-186
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11603
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Some open traps, like GOL-3, may be heated by axial electron beams. Since the heating is turbulent, it is associated with anomalous resistivity, so that the reverse induction current is pushed out to flow in the shell plasma along the beam edge. It is shown that such complicated distribution of axial current in equilibrium causes exponential amplification along the trap of any initial (at entrance) azimuthal modulation of the beam current density. As a result, the shape of the beam cross-section develops features like spiral arms, etc. at the end-plate, even if its shape was nearly circular at the entrance. Amplification occurs whenever there is an off-axis extremum on the radial distribution of the axial current density.