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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.”
Kiyoshi Yoshikawa, Yasushi Yamamoto, Hisayuki Toku, Akira Kobayashi, Toru Okazaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 15 | Number 4 | July 1989 | Pages 1541-1559
Technical Paper | Energy Storage, Switching, and Conversion | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A25343
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 5-yr study of beam direct energy conversion was performed at the Kyoto University Institute of Atomic Energy to clarify the essential features of direct energy recovery from monoenergetic ion beams so that the performance characteristics of energy recovery can be predicted reasonably well by numerical calculations. The study used an improved version of an electrostatically electron-suppressed beam direct converter originally proposed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Secondary electron suppressor grids were added, and a helium ion beam was used with typical parameters of 15.4 keV, 90 mA, and 100 ms. By adopting negatively biased secondary electron suppressor grids, the energy recovery efficiency increased from 72 ± 4 to 87 ± 6% even at relatively high pressures of 10−2 Pa, based on three independent measurements of the incident ion current, including a newly developed “in situ” measurement by a Rogowski coil sensor. The operational region could also be extended to more high-pressure regions. A comparison of experimental results with numerical results by the two-dimensional Kyoto University Advanced DART (KUAD) code, including evaluation of atomic processes, shows excellent agreement. Adoption of the mesh-type electron suppressor instead of the solid suppressor results in further improvements in the beam direct energy recovery.