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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.”
Ji-Feng Wang, Tsuneo Amano, Yuichi Ogawa, Nobuyuki Inoue
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 32 | Number 4 | December 1997 | Pages 590-600
Technical Paper | Special Section: Plasma Control Issues for Tokamaks / Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A19906
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The dynamics of burning plasma for various transient situations in International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) plasma have been simulated with the 1½-dimensional up-down asymmetry Tokamak Transport Simulation code. Attention is paid primarily to intrinsic plasma transport processes such as confinement improvement and changes of plasma profiles. A large excursion of fusion power is shown to take place with a small improvement of plasma confinement; e.g., an increase of the global energy confinement by a factor of 1.2 yields a fusion power excursion of ∼30% within a few seconds. Given this short timescale of the fusion power transient, any feedback control of fueling deuterium-tritium gas is difficult. The effect of plasma profile on fusion power excursion is studied by changing the particle transport denoted by the peaking parameter Cv. When the fusion power excursion is mild and slow, the feedback control is quite effective in suppressing the fusion power excursion and in shortening the duration time of the power transient. Changes of the pumping efficacy are also studied, and large excursions of fusion power are not observed because of a decrease of the fuel density itself when the pumping efficacy is increased; and helium ash accumulates in the case of a decrease of the pumping efficacy. Finally, magnetohydrodynamic sawtooth activity leads to a fusion power fluctuation of ±20%, although such activity is helpful for helium ash exhaust.