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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.”
F. Gandini, T. S. Bigelow, B. Becket, J. B. Caughman, D. Cox, C. Darbos, T. Gassmann, M. A. Henderson, O. Jean, K. Kajiwara, N. Kobayashi, C. Nazare, Y. Oda, T. Omori, D. Purohit, D. A. Rasmussen, D. M. S. Ronden, G. Saibene, K. Sakamoto, M. A. Shapiro, K. Takahashi, R. J. Temkin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 4 | May 2011 | Pages 709-717
Technical Paper | Sixteenth Joint Workshop on Electron Cyclotron Emission and Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating (EC-16) | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-38
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The transmission line (TL) subsystem associated with the ITER electron cyclotron heating and current drive system has reached the conceptual design maturity. At this stage the responsibility of finalizing the design has been transferred from the ITER Organization to the U.S. Domestic Agency. The purpose of the TL is to transmit the microwaves generated by the 170-GHz gyrotrons installed in the radio-frequency building to the launchers located in one equatorial and four upper tokamak ports. Each TL consists of evacuated HE11 waveguides, direct-current breaks, power monitors, mitre bends, polarizers, switches, loads, and pumping sections and will have a typical length that ranges from 100 to 160 m. Overall transmission efficiency could be as high as 92% depending on the specific path between a given gyrotron and launcher. All components are required to be 2-MW compatible, and their layout and organization have been optimized for simplifying the maintenance accessibility and monitoring the primary tritium barrier integrity. Two different TL layouts are at the moment under study, to accommodate the two alternative options for the European sources: four 2-MW units or eight 1-MW units. In this paper the actual design is presented and the technical requirements are discussed.