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This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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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.”
Barbora Gulejová, Richard Pitts, David Tskhakaya, David Coster
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 48-55
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12404
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Although the most complex currently available fluid-neutral Monte-Carlo plasma boundary code package, SOLPS, has been a major player in the ITER divertor design, it has not yet been systematically used for the study of kinetic phenomena such as ELM transients. This paper investigates the relevance of fluid code results for transients, in particular at the targets where kinetic effects are most manifest, by comparing power and particle fluxes at the targets from SOLPS5 time-dependent simulations of TCV Type III ELMs with those obtained from dedicated Particle-in-Cell (PiC) kinetic transport code (BIT1) simulations. Although reasonable agreement is found in terms of the absolute magnitude of total heat fluxes, the arrival of the ion pulse at the target from upstream is significantly faster in SOLPS than expected on the basis of sonic transit times (as also seen in PiC). Adjustments of kinetic heat flux limiters to render the heat fluxes more convective in SOLPS are necessary in order to correct for this discrepancy. Moreover, because SOLPS does not account for the transfer of heat from electrons to ions inside the sheath, correction terms to the electron and ion power fluxes at the targets are required in SOLPS in order to better match PiC results. However, it does not appear possible within the scope of these sensitivity studies to simultaneously achieve expected delays and ion-electron power sharing in the fluid simulations.