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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.”
T. Andreeva, J. Kißlinger
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 258-261
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1243
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, which is currently under construction in Greifswald, Germany, is a five-period machine, and many of the planned operational plasma scenarios are characterized by the rotational transform /2 = 1 at the plasma boundary. Such magnetic configurations are particularly sensitive to the symmetry-breaking perturbations caused by fabrication and assembly errors, which can occur at different stages of the device construction. Analysis of nonplanar and planar winding packs (WPs) fabricated up to the present time has confirmed the existence of a systematical portion in the manufacturing deviations. The level of the magnetic field perturbation due to the statistical part in manufacturing errors can be expected to be of order 1 × 10-4 at the end of the WP production. Validation of different assembly steps and the resulting distortion of the current path will be done on the basis of the reference point measurements. The influence of the assembly errors and corresponding uncertainties on the magnetic field perturbation is estimated for some cases.