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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.”
K. T. Hsieh, W.F. Weldon, M.D. Werst, E. Montalvo, R. Carrera
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1089-1094
Ignition Device | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29488
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Texas fusion ignition experiment (IGNITEX) device is a 20 T single turn coil tokamak designed to produce and control an ignited plasma using ohmic heating alone. As a baseline design, IGNITEX has a 1.5 m major radius and operates at a toroidal field (TF) of 20 T on-axis. The small version of IGNITEX (R = 1.2 m) represents the smallest, low cost experiment that can produce fusion ignition under the saturated Neo-Alcator energy confinement scaling. The large version of IGNITEX (R = 2.1 m) represents the smallest experiment that can produce fusion ignition using the most pessimistic extrapolation of the Goldston scaling in L-mode. The Ignition Technology Demonstration (ITD) program was initiated to design, build, and test the operation of a single turn, 20 T, TF coil powered by an existing 9 MA, HPG power supply system. The ITD TF coil is a 0.06 scale of the IGNITEX and is now operating at the Center for Electromechanics at The University of Texas at Austin (CEM-UT). Data from the ITD experiment is used to confirm the complex computer model utilized for the IGNITEX design and analysis. In this paper, feasibility of the TF magnets is evaluated based on the electromechanical and thermomechanical considerations.
