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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.”
R. D. Pillsbury, Jr., S. Fairfax, R. Granetz, S. Horne, I. Hutchinson, G. Tinios, S. Wolfe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 21 | Number 3 | May 1992 | Pages 1898-1904
Magnetic | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A29996
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Alcator C-MOD is the latest in a line of high field, compact tokamaks built and operated by the Plasma Fusion Center at MIT. From the electromagnetic standpoint the machine is characterized by toroidal field (TF) coils with sliding joints, a poloidal field (PF) coil set that is inside the bore of the TF coils, and very thick-sectioned, toroidally continuous, vacuum vessel and metal structures. The tokamak is cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures and pulsed. At the toroidal field of 9 T, the maximum temperature in the TF rises to approximately room temperature. The pulsed nature of the current together with this wide temperature range requires a solution of the coupled electromagnetic and thermal diffusion problems. In addition, eddy currents induced in the thick electrically conducting structures perturb the spatial and temporal distribution of the poloidal magnetic field in the vacuum chamber, especially for the plasma breakdown and initiation phase and during fast plasma position control. The transient electromagnetic field problem associated with these regimes must be taken into account in the design and analysis of the tokamak. The results of analyses of the electromagnetic behavior of Alcator C-MOD will be compared with measured data.
