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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.”
Dale M. Meade
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 393-399
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A720
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The overall vision for FIRE is to develop and test the fusion plasma physics and plasma technologies needed to realize capabilities of the ARIES-RS/AT power plant designs. The mission of FIRE is to attain, explore, understand and optimize a fusion dominated plasma which would be satisfied by producing DT fusion plasmas with nominal fusion gains ~10, self-driven currents of [is approximately to]80%, fusion power ~ 150 - 300 MW and pulse lengths up to 40 s. Achieving these goals will require the deployment of several key fusion technologies under conditions approaching those of ARIES-RS/AT. The FIRE plasma configuration with strong plasma shaping, a double null pumped divertor and all metal plasma facing components is a 40% scale model of the ARIES-RS/AT plasma configuration. "Steady-state" advanced tokamak modes in FIRE with high , high bootstrap fraction and 100% non-inductive current drive are suitable for testing the physics of the ARIES-RS/AT operating modes. The development of techniques to handle power plant relevant exhaust power while maintaining low tritium inventory is a major objective for a burning plasma experiment. The FIRE H-modes and AT-modes result in fusion power densities from 3 - 10 MWm-3 and neutron wall loading from 2 - 4 MW m-2 which are at the levels expected from the ARIES-RS/AT design studies.
