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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.”
L. Bromberg, H. Hashizume, S. Ito, J. V. Minervini, N. Yanagi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 635-642
Alternate Concepts & Magnets | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12455
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since the discovery of high temperature superconductors (HTS) more than 2 decades ago, there has been interest in their use for future fusion machines. Lack of performance of commercially available materials, however, dampened the initial optimism. However, recent advances in HTS materials, mostly second-generation tapes, open attractive topologies. In addition to reduced cryogenic loads and increased superconducting stability, the HTS tapes may allow demountable magnets that could be very helpful in the long term (for reactor maintenance) and in the intermediate term, for component-testing machines which require large access. Tests on joints have demonstrated that the thermal load due to the Joule dissipation in these joints is small, allowing operation with very long pulses without restrictions on cost of electricity or power availability.There are challenges in the use of HTS in magnets in general, and fusion specifically. The excellent properties of HTS materials, e.g., YBCO (YBa2Cu3O7-) superconductors operating at elevated temperatures (> 30K) also offer operational advantages for fusion machines, but there are challenges, such as the manufacturing of high current cables and methods of quench protection.In addition to tapes, HTS can be fabricated as monoliths. These monoliths offer the possibility of field control for complex geometries, such as generating stellarator-like fields from simple toroidal fields.This paper summarizes work at MIT and in Japan on concept development and testing, as well as challenges ahead.