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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.”
Hiroshi Horiike, Masato Akiba, Masanori Araki, Masaaki Kuriyama, Shinzaburo Matsuda, Mamoru Matsuoka, Yoshihiro Ohara, Yoshikazu Okumura, Kiyoshi Shibanuma, Shigeru Tanaka
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 7 | Number 2 | March 1985 | Pages 171-179
Technical Paper | Plasma Heating System | doi.org/10.13182/FST85-A24532
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Countermeasures against mechanical warpage of the extraction electrode for the JT-60 ion source were studied experimentally. A conventional plasma electrode, consisting of a single thin plate, exhibited unacceptably large deflections during long-pulse operation at extraction power levels exceeding 75 kV, 35 A. To measure the deflection characteristics of this electrode, hot water was circulated in the electrode cooling channels. Results from this test showed that an unacceptably large warpage occurs at temperatures moderately below the operation temperature. To suppress warpage, two modified electrodes were fabricated and tested. In the first design, the electrode was stiffened by adding material at the edges of the aperture area. In the second design, constraints on the thermal expansion of the aperture area were released by segmenting the aperture area and joining them to the stiff electrode frame through a bellows. Both designs successfully reduced electrode deflection and were used to extract 100-kV, 40-A, 10-s beams. These tests provided a measure of the permissible deflection level of the plasma electrode.