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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.”
M. E. Fenstermacher, N. A. Uckan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 502-506
Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22913
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A formalism has been developed in terms of a drift kinetic equation with a Fokker-Planck collision operator to calculate alpha particle loss and energy deposition rate coefficients for one position in space and for steady-state operating conditions in an ELMO Bumpy Torus (EBT) reactor. Pitch angle and energy scattering terms were retained in the collision term so that the analysis provides information on alpha particle behavior due to pitch angle scattering into loss regions in velocity space and information on alpha energy deposition during slowing down in the device. A square well magnetic field shape is assumed and the resulting particle loss rates and energy deposition rates are calculated. For typical EBT reactor parameters, results show that while 80-90% of the alpha particles are scattered into a pitch angle loss region and lost from the device, more than 70% of the alpha particle energy is deposited in the core plasma and about 1–2% goes to alphas retained in the plasma as ash. Parametric studies are performed, and the sensitivity to plasma potential, the pitch angle, the width of loss regions, and computational procedures are analyzed.