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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.”
Hiroshi Tamai, Shinichi Ishida, Gen-Ichi Kurita, Hiroshi Shirai, Katsuhiko Tsuchiya, Shinji Sakurai, Makoto Matsukawa, Akira Sakasai
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 4 | June 2004 | Pages 521-528
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A527
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 1.5-dimensional time-dependent transport analysis has been carried out to investigate steady-state operation scenarios with a central current hole by off-axis current drive schemes consistent with a high bootstrap current fraction for the JT-60SC large superconducting tokamak. A steady-state operation scenario with HHy2 = 1.4 and N = 3.7 has been obtained at Ip = 1.5 MA, Bt = 2 T, and q95 = 5, where noninductive currents are developed during the discharge to form a current hole with beam-driven currents by tangential off-axis beams in combination with bootstrap currents by additional on-axis perpendicular beams. The bootstrap fraction increases up to ~75% of the plasma current, and the current hole region is enlarged up to ~30% of the minor radius at 35 s from the discharge initiation. The current hole is confirmed to be sustained afterward for a long duration of 60 s. The present transport simulation shows that heating equipment designed for JT-60SC is capable of forming and sustaining the current hole only by using off-axis beam-driven currents and bootstrap currents. The stability analysis shows that the beta limit with the conducting wall can be ~N = 4.5, which is substantially above the no-wall ideal magnetohydrodynamic limit.
