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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.”
R.E. Potok, H. Becker, L. Bromberg, D.R. Cohn, N. Diatchenko, P .B. Roemer, J.E.C. Williams
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 1314-1319
Alternate Concepts | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A23038
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present an analytical and numerical analysis of a tokamak reactor with a set of helical coils added in order to eliminate plasma disruptions. The optimal helical configuration was found to be a set of continuous, = 2 stellarator coils which are made of copper and are internal to the toroidal field coils, being the number of poloidal field periods. (The optimization process did not include evaluation of the viability of a modular stellarator reactor). Scaling laws were developed for this optimal configuration, and a series of parametric scans are performed with varying assumptions for the forces on the helical coils and the ratio of helical coil transform to plasma transform (M*). The option space available for attractive reactor designs is strongly constrained and involves large forces on the helical coils, low q plasma operation (q being the plasma safety factor), and moderately low M* (3 to 5). Numerical calculations showed that M* must be > 3 in order to obtain well defined flux surfaces. This is in agreement with results from the JIPP-TII tokamak.
