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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.”
Robert R. Peterson, Joseph J. MacFarlane, Ping Wang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 522-526
Fusion Material and Plasma-Facing Component | Proceedings of the Eleventh Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy New Orleans, Louisiana June 19-23, 1994 | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A40210
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Vaporization of material from tokamak divertors during disruptions is a critical issue for tokamak reactors from ITER to commercial power plants. Radiation transport from the vaporized material onto the remaining divertor surface plays an important role in the total mass loss to the divertor. Radiation transport in such a vapor is very difficult to calculate in full detail, and this paper quantifies the sensitivity of the divertor mass loss to uncertainties in the radiation transport. Specifically, the paper presents the results of computer simulations of the vaporization of a graphite coated divertor during a tokamak disruption with ITER CDA parameters. The results show that a factor of 100 change in the radiation conductivity changes the mass loss by more than a factor of two.
