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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.”
J. A. Snipes, D. J. Campbell, T. Casper, Y. Gribov, A. Loarte, M. Sugihara, A. Winter, L. Zabeo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 3 | April 2011 | Pages 427-439
Lecture | Fourth ITER International Summer School (IISS2010) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11688
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Controlling the plasma in ITER to achieve its primary mission goals requires a complex and sophisticated plasma control system (PCS) that will be based initially on those of existing tokamaks, with some significant differences. An overview of the physical phenomena on which the ITER PCS will be based is presented with particular emphasis on magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities. The ITER PCS is logically structured into five parts that work closely together: (a) wall conditioning and tritium removal; (b) plasma axisymmetric magnetic control, including plasma initiation, inductive plasma current, position, and shape control; (c) plasma kinetic control, including fueling, power and particle flux to the first wall and divertor, noninductive plasma current, plasma pressure, and fusion burn control; (d) nonaxisymmetric control, which includes sawteeth, neoclassical tearing modes, edge localized modes, error fields and resistive wall modes, and Alfven eigenmodes; and (e) event handling, including changing the control algorithm or scenario when a plant system fault or a plasma-related event occurs that could affect plasma operation, which includes disruption mitigation. At high plasma performance, the control of MHD instabilities will become particularly important in ITER to maintain the fusion burn and to avoid potential damage to the first wall.