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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.”
Kyekyoon(Kevin) Kim, Qichen Feng
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 5 | December 1995 | Pages 1790-1796
Technical Paper | Inertial Confinement Fusion Targets | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30414
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel gas-dynamic levitation technique has been developed to facilitate noncontact coating of spherical ICF targets. Using this technique three metal balls 450 µm, 650 µm and 950 µm in diameter were levitated very stably for several hours, with the balls rotating continuously. Unlike the conventional gas-dynamic levitation scheme in which a single gas-emitting fixture, placed below an object, lifts it up and contains it in a confined volume, the present scheme relies on two fixtures, one placed under and the other above the object. The bottom fixture, as is with the conventional scheme, is a gas emitter; however, the top one is a gas collector shaping the flow field around the object so as to confine the object near the axis of symmetry of the levitation system. As a result, the present system exhibits excellent stability and robustness, and is immune to such external disturbances as nonuniform temperature fields and air currents, and small changes in the levitation gas pressure. The apparatus is inexpensive to fabricate and simple to operate. The details of the apparatus and the preliminary data demonstrating the capability of the levitation scheme are presented. A target coating method, compatible with the present target levitation scheme and suitable for uniform coating of ICF targets, is indicated.