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ANS Student Conference 2025
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.”
D. W. Swain, M. D. Carter, J. R. Wilson, P. M. Ryan, J. B. Wilgen, J. Hosea, A. Rosenberg
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 4 | June 2003 | Pages 503-513
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A297
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ion cyclotron heating and current drive system on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) has delivered over 3 MW reliably for pulse lengths over 100 ms with various phasings of the antennas. A circuit model of the system that includes the 12 coupled antennas and six radio-frequency sources has been developed that gives good agreement with vacuum measurements. When it is used to experimentally determine the S-matrix of the system under different plasma conditions, pronounced asymmetries in the off-diagonal values of the S-matrix are seen. The S-matrix in the presence of plasma has been calculated with the RANT3D code using measured edge density profiles in front of the antenna; these agree remarkably well with the measurements. The asymmetry is caused primarily by the large pitch angle of the magnetic field in front of the antenna, coupled with the gradients in the plasma edge.
