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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.”
Rainer Burhenn, Jürgen Baldzuhn, Rudolf Brakel, Hartmut Ehmler, Louis Giannone, Peter Eckhard Grigull, Jens Knauer, Maciej Krychowiak, Matthias Hirsch, Katsumi Ida, Henning Maassberg, Gerald Kent McCormick, Ekkehard Pasch, Henning Thomsen, Arthur Weller, W7-AS Team, ERCH Group, NI Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | July 2004 | Pages 115-128
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A547
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The dependence of impurity transport on plasma parameters in the modular stellarator Wendelstein 7-AS was investigated by means of a laser blow-off technique. An increased impurity transport at higher heating power and lower magnetic field strength as well as no effect of the isotope composition on the impurity confinement was observed. The most critical scaling with respect to stationary operation at high density is the improved confinement of impurities at high densities, leading to a degradation of plasma energy by increasing radiation and to a loss of density control. This was attributed to a reduction of the impurity diffusion coefficient with density. After installation of island divertor modules, a transition from normal confinement into the high-density H-mode (HDH) at a certain power-dependent threshold density appeared. This transition is characterized by a strong reduction of the impurity confinement time and an increase in energy confinement time. In the HDH operational regime, access to even higher densities (4 × 1020 m-3) than achieved before became possible under stationary operation conditions. Impurity transport measurements and model predictions indicate that the reduction of the impurity confinement in HDH is caused by not only a reduction of the inward convection in the core plasma but also possibly by changes in the edge transport. Comparison of experimental data with an axisymmetric transport model should elucidate the role of stellarator-specific transport aspects.