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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.”
I. Maya, Hugh D. Campbell
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 135-140
Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22857
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analysis of the thermal balance of a fusioning plasma from a control system perspective has been performed. The requirements for stability and the response characteristics of the thermal balance have been evaluated. The results show that open-loop equilibria are characterized by restrictively narrow stable operating temperature regimes and generally poor system performance. Closed-loop proportional feedback using the fuel feedrate and injection energy can be used to extend the stable operating temperature regime and significantly improve the system response. Thus, high open-loop temperature overshoots without neutral beam injection can be reduced to acceptable levels at temperatures as low as 20 keV, with a decrease in the settling time to under 30 sec. With 75 keV injection energy, acceptable overshoot can be obtained at plasma temperatures as low as 10 keV, with the time-to-peak below 20 sec and settling times less than 30 sec. It is still difficult to simultaneously satisfy overshoot and speed of response requirements at low temperatures with low feedback fractions. Additional improvement is available using proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control.
