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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.”
M. Hirata et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 215-217
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A642
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Significant effects of sheared transverse electric fields in plasmas on both turbulent fluctuations and drift waves are experimentally demonstrated with improvement in plasma confinement for the first time in the tandem mirror GAMMA 10. Here, electron-cyclotron heatings (ECH) for ion-confining potential formation are applied in association with a significant rise in the absolute value of the central-cell potential and the resulting formation of a strong shear of electric fields of the order of 10 kV/m2 in the radial direction of the plasma column (dEr/dr). The central-cell line density increases during ECH in association with decreasing fluctuations. Various fluctuation diagnostics, in particular, the frequency analyses of end-loss ion currents and central soft x-ray brightness, show the consistent features. This encourages the usefulness of potentials and radial electric-field shear for confinement improvements.
