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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.”
Gen Chen, Yanping Zhao, Yuzhou Mao, Shuai Yuan, Gaowei Zheng, Fen Zheng, Zhongxin He, Shenglin Yu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 4 | May 2012 | Pages 301-308
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST61-301
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Ion cyclotron range of frequency (ICRF) heating has been used in tokamaks as one of the most successful auxiliary heating tools and has been adopted in EAST. To ensure the steady operation of the ICRF heating system in EAST, the research and development of the fast ferrite tuner (FFT), which aimed to achieve real-time impedance matching of transmitter to antenna, has been carried out. The design and analysis of the FFT is an iterative process where multiple parameters have to be taken into account. The dimensions of the FFT should be chosen as a compromise between relative equivalent electrical length and high-power performance by using the finite element method and numerous computer simulations. The first prototype aimed at achieving a response time of milliseconds and operation with a peak power of 300 kW, which will inform us about the radio-frequency and the high-power performance of such a ferrite tuner. The bench test results have demonstrated that the FFT with a tuning speed of [approximately]200 ms is faster than the traditional methods, and it can be one of the candidates for the real-time impedance matching of the ICRF heating system in EAST. The high-power performance of the FFT should be tested in the EAST 2012 spring campaign. To be fit for the real-time impedance matching for ICRF heating experiments, development of a new prototype, which aims at a response time of 0.5 ms, an insertion loss of <1%, and operation with a peak power of 1.5 MW, is in progress.