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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.”
Mitsushi Abe, Kazuhiro Takeuchi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 2 | March 1996 | Pages 277-293
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30714
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tokamak operation techniques to control the poloidal magnetic field using multivariable poloidal field coils (MPFCs) were applied to the Hitachi tokamak HT-2, Two problems encountered in operating a tokamak with MPFCs were identified: low-voltage startup and equilibrium control without interference. The key to their solution was accurate control of the poloidal magnetic field. To obtain multipole fields, a singular value decomposition was applied to a response matrix from the coil current to the magnetic flux value at the plasma surface region. The multipole fields are orthogonal bases of the poloidal field, and the interference was cleared using these modes. A control technique using the multipole fields was applied to control the null point position of the poloidal magnetic field during breakdown, which made it possible to get breakdown with a low loop voltage. During the flattop phase, good controllability without interference was obtained using the concept of a multipole magnetic field.
