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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.”
Yong Liu, Enyao Wang, Xuantong Ding, Longwen Yan, Shangjie Qian, Jiancheng Yan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 42 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 94-101
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A215
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental progress with the HL-1M tokamak has been made in many areas including confinement improvement, auxiliary heating, plasma fueling, and wall conditionings. An H-mode induced by a biased electrode was obtained with the formation of an internal transport barrier at the region of r/a ~ 0.4 to 0.5. Confinement improvement by lower-hybrid current drive (LHCD) was extensively investigated. Confinement improvement seems to be related to the production of the radial electron field during LHCD. In off-axis electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH), double sawteeth in soft X-ray radiation were observed, which implies that reversed magnetic shear could be formed during ECRH. At higher ECRH power, when the resonance position is near the q = 1 surface, fishbone instability was observed and investigated. An eight-shot pellet injector was used for the experiments. The pellet ablation process was investigated with a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and an H emission detector array. Clearly, asymmetry in the pellet cloud was observed in both the toroidal and poloidal directions. It has been found that the pellet velocity slows down clearly after the pellet enters the plasma. The density limit has been investigated on HL-1M at different wall conditionings with three kinds of fueling methods. It was found that a higher density limit could be achieved under the following conditions: (a) a strong reduction of the impurity content after siliconization and (b) a peaked density profile with pellet injection and/or supersonic molecular beam injection. With a neutral beam injection (NBI) system of 1 MW, preliminary results of NBI experiments were obtained with an increase of ion temperature from 450 to 700 eV.