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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.”
Nermin A. Uckan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 14 | Number 2 | September 1988 | Pages 299-319
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A20263
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A simple global analysis is developed to examine the relative merits of size (L = a or R0), field (B0), and current (I) on ignition regimes of tokamaks under various confinement scaling laws. Scalings of key parameters (nτE, β, Paux, Pfus, etc.) with L, B0, and I are presented at several operating points, including (a) optimal path to ignition (saddle point), (b) ignition at minimum beta, (c) ignition at 10 keV, and (d) maximum performance at the limits of density (nmax ∼ B0/R0) and beta (βcrit ∼ I/aB0). Expressions for the saddle point and the minimum conditions needed for ohmic ignition are derived analytically for any confinement model of the form τE ∼ nxTy. For a wide range of confinement models, the “figure of merit” parameters and I are found to give a good indication of the relative performance of the devices, where q* is the cylindrical safety factor. As an illustration, the results are applied to representative “CITs” (a class of compact, high-field ignition tokamaks) and “Super-JETs” [a class of large-size (few × JET), low-field, high-current (≳20-MA) devices].
