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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.”
H. Weisen, A. V. Melnikov, S. Perfilov, S. Lysenko
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 2 | February 2011 | Pages 418-426
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11656
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper examines the possibility of using the principle of conservation of canonical momentum applied to heavy ion beam orbits to obtain an estimate of the local poloidal flux at the position of ionization in a tokamak plasma. The presence of a nonaxisymmetrical ripple field, induced by the discreteness of the toroidal field coils, precludes a strict application of the principle. However, the results suggest that toroidal ripple in regions outside the plasma can be accounted for using knowledge of the particle beam's initial position and angular momentum together with measurements of the secondary beam's position and angular momentum to obtain an accurate estimate of the local poloidal flux in the plasma. A way of measuring the toroidal momentum of the secondaries is proposed, using two position measurements along the trajectory. The proposed method potentially provides powerful constraints if combined with an equilibrium code for solving the Grad-Shafranov equation.