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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
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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.”
Ronald W. Petzoldt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 34 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 831-839
Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A11963716
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experiment is being conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to investigate and demonstrate the engineering feasibility of accurately • injecting and tracking IFE targets into a vacuum chamber. A helium gas gun is used to inject non-cryogenic, aluminum and delrin (plastic) target-sized projectiles. They are optically tracked at three locations using photodiodes. An essential part of this experiment is tracking each projectile's position and predicting when and where it will arrive close enough to the driver beam focal spot so that with active beam steering, IFE driver beams can accurately hit each target Although the standard deviation in projectile position in each lateral direction is about 2 mm, projectile position measurements 1 m from the gun barrel have been used to predict position measurements at 3 m from the barrel with standard deviation less than 100 μm in the lateral directions. These results are encouraging and meet the expected beam steering distance and target position prediction accuracy requirements for indirect drive IFE power plants. Later this year, we intend to combine this experiment with a focused ion beam experiment and use real time position calculations to steer the beam through a small hole in the projectile.