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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.”
Sergey Ananyev, Aleksei Dnestrovskij, Andrei Kukushkin, Boris Ivanov, Boris Kuteev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 4 | May 2023 | Pages 381-398
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2097571
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The dependence of the neutron yield of the FNS-ST (spherical tokamak) fusion neutron source on the fraction of tritium in the core D+T plasma is analyzed for the case of using tritium neutral beam injectors with 200-keV energy and 6-MW power. The FNS-ST operating regimes are explored using the SOLPS4.3 and ASTRA codes for different values of core plasma density ne, T fraction in the plasma, and particle diffusivity. The FC-FNS code is used to estimate the fluxes of the fuel components in the fuel cycle (FC), which are produced by different injection systems: gas puffing, pellet injection, and neutral beam (T) injection. It is shown that in the case of the Т beam injection, in the operating range of parameters, the neutron yield can reach 6.0 × 1017 s−1, which is the value comparable to that obtained for the scenario of D-beam injection into the balanced D+T plasma. In the case of the T-beam injection, in the range of parameters, for which the neutron yield is close to its maximum, the amount of tritium in the FC is lower than in the case of the D-beam injection. The neutron yield can be increased to 6.5 × 1017 n/s if full separation of the D and T is introduced for the gas pumped out from the divertor and puffed back into the torus. With this approach, in the case of the tritium beam, the amount of tritium in the FC is Tinv of ~170 g. If this approach is used in the case of the deuterium beam, the neutron yield can reach 7.0 × 1017 n/s. However, in this case, the amount of tritium contained in the FC increases to 215 g. The results of the analysis performed are used for optimizing the FC of the FNS-C (compact) fusion neutron source, which is planned for construction in the framework of the comprehensive program of the State Corporation Rosatom “Development of Engineering, Technology and Scientific Research in the Field of Using Atomic Energy in the Russian Federation for the Time Period up to 2030.”
