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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.”
D. H. Edgell, R. S. Craxton, L. M. Elasky, D. R. Harding, S. J. Verbridge, M. D. Wittman, W. Seka
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 51 | Number 4 | May 2007 | Pages 717-726
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1469
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Backlit optical shadowgraphy is the primary diagnostic for hydrogenic ice-layer characterization in cryogenic targets at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). Reflection and refraction of light passing through the ice layer produce characteristic rings on the image. The position of the most prominent of the shadowgraph rings, known as the bright ring, can be resolved to ~0.1-pixel rms, corresponding to less than 0.2 m for typical target shadowgraphs. The LLE target characterization stations use two camera angles and target rotation to record target shadowgraphs from many different views (typically 48) and build a three-dimensional (3-D) topology of the ice layer. The standard method of bright-ring analysis using spherically symmetric ray-trace calculations to determine the ice surface is limited to mode numbers up to around [script l]max = 10 by gaps in the data and the effects of ice-layer asymmetries that invalidate the symmetric ray trace calculations. A 3-D ray-tracing model has been incorporated into the shadowgraph analysis. The result is a self-consistent determination of the hydrogen/vapor surface structure for cryogenic targets up to higher-mode numbers ([script l]max = 16). This reduces the standard deviation between the measured bright rings and those predicted for the 3-D ice surface (by 45% from 1.5 m to 0.8 m in the example shown).