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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.”
Xiang M. Chen, Per F. Peterson, Michael T. Tobin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 814-818
National Ignition Facility | Proceedings of the Eleventh Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy New Orleans, Louisiana June 19-23, 1994 | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A40255
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The tests in the chamber of National Ignition Facility will involve complex multi-dimensional dynamics phenomena. Many safety concerns relate to the ablation of the chamber material and the re-condensation of it. The x-ray induced ablation can vaporize surfaces of internal structures. The deposition of the ablated mass to the laser optics can cause significant damage to the laser optics. This study presents a typical analysis of the ablation from the target positioner in the NIF chamber with the TSUNAMI two-dimensional gas dynamics code. Results reveal that the geometry of target positioner has strong influence to the vapor mass amount and distribution over the chamber wall. The analysis done here shows that it is possible to perform parametric study for different NIF chamber design configurations.
