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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.”
Anders Hagnestål, Olov Ågren, Vladimir Moiseenko
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 127-130
Technical Paper | Seventh International Conference on Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A6997
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Coil systems for producing the Straight Field Line Mirror field using axisymmetric and quadrupolar coils are calculated. Two applications are intended, a fusion-fission nuclear waste transmutation device and a small plasma deposition device. Position, size and current for the axisymmetric coils are optimized as well as radial profile and current for the quadrupolar coils for the two applications. Calculations show that such a coil system can produce the Straight Field Line Mirror field for long-thin mirrors with moderate mirror ratio, but some other coil configuration needs to be found for mirrors where the coils cannot reside close to the plasma edge. In this work, the material science experiment mirror can be produced with about 1% error but the fusion-fission device field has not at this moment been reproduced with acceptable errors.
