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Fusion Science and Technology
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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. S. Ware, D. A. Spong, L. A. Berry, S. P. Hirshman, J. F. Lyon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 236-244
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1241
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work examines bootstrap current in quasi-symmetric stellarators with a focus on the impact of bootstrap current on the equilibrium properties of stellarator configurations. In the design of the Quasi-Poloidal Stellarator (QPS), a code was used to predict the bootstrap current based on a calculation in an asymptotically collisionless limit. This calculation is believed to be a good approximation of the bootstrap current for low-collisionality plasmas but is expected to be higher than the actual bootstrap current for more collisional plasmas. A fluid moments approach has been developed to self-consistently calculate viscosities and neoclassical transport coefficients. The viscosities and transport coefficients can be used to calculate the bootstrap current for arbitrary collisionality and magnetic geometry. The bootstrap current calculations from the two codes were done for low-density, electron cyclotron-heated (ECH) plasmas and high-density, ion cyclotron-heated (ICH) plasmas for a range of configurations, and provide a benchmark for the moments code and a test of the range of validity of the collisionless code. In the configurations examined here, namely, QPS, the National Compact Stellarator Experiment, the Helically Symmetric Experiment, the Large Helical Device, and the Wendelstein-7X Stellarator, the bootstrap currents predicted from the two codes agree qualitatively for both ICH and ECH profiles.