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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. Castejón, J. M. Reynolds, J. M. Fontdecaba, R. Balbín, J. Guasp, D. López-Bruna, I. Campos, L. A. Fernández, D. Fernández-Fraile, V. Martín-Mayor, A. Tarancón
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 3 | October 2006 | Pages 412-418
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1263
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It was observed previously that the ion temperature profile of low-density electron cyclotron resonance-heated TJ-II plasmas is almost flat and that energetic ions are present well outside the last closed magnetic surface. The heat diffusivity obtained for such ion temperature profiles is very high, and therefore, transport cannot be described by Fick's law. In this work, ion trajectories with different pitches and starting points have been calculated for the relevant magnetic configuration. It is found that a feasible explanation for such a flat mean energy profile is that ion orbits are wide enough to communicate distant parts of the plasma radius, thus giving an effective flat ion temperature profile, for these low-density (<1019-m-3) plasmas. The distribution function is also obtained without considering collisions; thus, non-Maxwellian features are found. The final particle density shows inhomogeneities on a magnetic surface.
