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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.”
Wilfred Anthony Cooper, Sergi Ferrando i Margalet, Simon J. Allfrey, Johann Kißlinger, Horst F. G. Wobig, Yoshiro Narushima, Shoichi Okamura, Chihiro Suzuki, Kiyomasa Y. Watanabe, Kozo Yamazaki, Maxim Yu. Isaev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 2 | September 2004 | Pages 365-377
Technical Papers | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A576
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The impact of the bootstrap current is investigated on the equilibrium properties of a two-period quasi-axisymmetric stellarator reactor with free boundary and on the corresponding ideal magnetohydrodynamic stability properties. Although the magnetic field strength B spectrum is dominated by a m/n = 1/0 component, the discrete filamentary coils trigger some small-amplitude symmetry-breaking components that can disturb the quasi-symmetry of B. Finite causes the plasma column to shift outward in the absence of bootstrap current. With a self-consistent bootstrap current in the 1/ regime, the plasma becomes more elongated and more distorted in the horizontally elongated up-down symmetric cross section. At [approximately equal to] 3.25%, the plasma can be restored to its near-vacuum shape with the application of a vertical field with coil currents 20% of those of the modular coils, but at the expense of a significant mirror component in the B-field spectrum. The bootstrap current causes the rotational transform profile to increase above the critical resonant value (c = 1/2 for 1.1%) and combines with the Pfirsch-Schlüter current to destabilize a m/n = 2/1 external kink mode for 1.8%.