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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.”
Ghanshyam Thakur, Raju Khanal, Bijoyendra Narayan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 4 | May 2019 | Pages 324-329
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1579623
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, plasma is produced by arc discharge between two copper electrodes and is characterized by a movable single probe and a double Langmuir probe. The movable Langmuir single-probe technique has a reference point since it is biased with reference to one of the electrodes of the plasma-producing system. In some situations such as radio-frequency discharges, no reference point is available to bias the movable single probe. In the double-probe method, each probe is biased with respect to each other and allowed to move through the arc plasma. Depending on the magnitude of the biasing potential, charges are collected by the probes, and the probe current flowing to the circuit is calculated. After that, we obtain the electron temperature and plasma density of the arc plasma. By using the double-probe method, the value of the plasma density is more precise than with the single-probe method. Hence, the double-probe method is more appropriate than the single-probe method.