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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.”
Craig D. Beidler, Yuri L. Igitkhanov, Horst F. G. Wobig
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | July 2004 | Pages 64-76
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The paper describes the electric field in stellarator equilibria and discusses the methods of how to compute the electric potential. The momentum balance in a given magnetic field including viscous and friction forces is considered in the frame of a multifluid model. A general ambipolar condition on closed pressure surfaces is derived that is still valid if magnetic surfaces do not exist. The need for an extended model originates from the singularities of the plasma current in the ideal magnetohydrodynamic model of stellarator equilibria, where parallel current density becomes singular leading to singular parallel electric fields. Viscosity and friction forces eliminate these singularities. The paper investigates the mathematical implications of the extended plasma model and discusses the existence of solutions using the methods of functional analysis.
