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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.”
C. C. Baker, D. A. Ehst, J. N. Brooks, K. Evans, Jr.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 709-716
Fusion Reactor Design—I | Proceedings of the Seveth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Reno, Nevada, June 15–19, 1986) | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24825
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A number of advances in plasma physics and engineering promise to greatly improve the reactor prospects of tokamaks. The following features, in particular, have been examined: (a) large aspect ratio (A ≈ 6), which may ease maintenance; (b) high beta (β ≳ 0.20) without indentation, which brings the maximum toroidal field down to about 7 T; (c) low toroidal current (I ≈ 5MA), which reduces the cost of the current drive and equilibrium field system; and (d) steady state operation with current density control via fast and slow wave current drive. The key to high beta operation with low toroidal current lies in utilizing second stability regime equilibria with the required current distributions produced by an appropriate selection of wave driver frequencies and power spectra. The ray tracing and current drive calculation is self-consistent with the actual magnetic fields produced in the plasma. In addition to matching desirable high-beta equilibria, this method is capable of producing a large variety of new equilibria, many of which look attractive. The impurity control activities in TPSS have emphasized the self-pumping concept as applied to using the entire first wall or “slot” limiters. The blanket design effort has emphasized liquid metal and Flibe concepts. The reference concept is a liquid lithium/vanadium, self-cooled configuration. Overall, there exists a number of major design improvements which will substantially improve the attractiveness of tokamak reactors.