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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.”
Keiji Tani, Ryuji Yoshino, Takashi Tuda, Tomonori Takizuka, Masafumi Azumi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 21 | Number 2 | March 1992 | Pages 103-113
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A29730
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The technique of ripple injection has been proposed for refueling in tokamak reactors. The usefulness of ripple-assisted fueling has been investigated by using an orbit-following Monte Carlo code. The penetration depth strongly depends on the beam energy. The ripple-enhanced outward flow of ripple-detrapped fast ions is not a serious problem. If Eb/Te0 ≤ 4 is chosen, the fuel efficiency becomes >80%. There is an optimum toroidal angle of the injection beamline to enhance the penetration depth of fast ions, and the range of angles that are effective for fueling is rather wide. The loss of alpha particles incident to the fueling has also been investigated by using the same code. By regulating the shape of the ripple-well region, the total alpha-particle loss can be reduced to <5%. Ripple-assisted fueling in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) has also been investigated. Because of the small aspect ratio, the field ripple is strongly decayed in the plasma. Consequently, central fueling presents some difficulties in ITER. However, fueling near one-half of the plasma minor radius is possible with an ∼6% alpha-particle power loss.