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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.”
E. Tucker, J. Gilligan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 4 | December 1994 | Pages 1265-1274
Technical Paper | First-Wall Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A30311
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Energetic (> 10-keV) particles incident on divertor plate surfaces may penetrate the vapor shield formed under extremely high heat flux conditions (> 1010 W/m2). In this case, the total energy transmission factor f through the vapor shield can increase drastically, which leads to more surface damage. A one-dimensional time-dependent coupled magnetohydrodynamic-radiation transport code MAGFIRE, originally used in modeling the vapor shield development under a blackbody radiation source, has been modified to include a charged-particle source. The sources used to model a disruption are monoenergetic beams of electrons and/or deuter-ons with any given incident heat flux and energy per particle. An electron source (≤20 keV) will eventually (for times ≤10 µs) be completely absorbed by the vapor resulting in f converging to the same f (for times ≥100 µs) as an equivalent ion heat flux source. Results show that in fact all three sources converge (at ∼100 µs) to the same steady-state value of f for any given heat flux. Results also show that steady-state f decreases for increasing heat fluxes on a carbon surface. Non-steady-state f, however, depends on total incident beam energy fluence and electron energy per particle. The energetic electron spectrum incident on divertor plates during a disruption needs to be measured on large tokamaks so that reliable simulation can be done for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)-like conditions.