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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.”
Karl Lackner, Hartmut Zohm
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 43-48
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-520
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tokamak equilibria with a snowflake divertor configuration are studied using a wire current model in toroidal geometry. A set of conditions for the formation of a snowflake divertor that can also be applied in full equilibrium calculations using a Grad-Shafranov solver is presented. It is shown that by taking into account the vertical force balance of the plasma, previously obtained results using a simple wire model have to be corrected. For a reactor-type device with coils far away from the plasma to accommodate the shielding requirements, the poloidal field coil currents become so high that they will represent a major technological challenge.
