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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.”
Reinhard Uhlemann, Jef Ongena
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 35 | Number 1 | January 1999 | Pages 42-53
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A76
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The neutral beam injectors of the tokamak experiment TEXTOR produce neutral particle beams in the megawatt range at 55 keV and up to a 10-s pulse length of the light atoms hydrogen, deuterium, 3He, and 4He for heating the fusion plasma of TEXTOR. The two injectors are equipped with one 5-MW ion source (plug-in neutral injector) each. The injected power of ~1.5 MW of each injector can be varied from 0 to 100% by opening the main beam target vertical aperture in steps of ~2 cm to the full opening of 50 cm. The symmetric truncation of the neutral beam profile at a target position 4.5 m from the ion source leads to no major deformation of the profile downstream at the entrance into the torus plasma at a 6-m distance from the ion source. Whereas usually the particle energy, i.e., acceleration voltage, and beam current or, alternatively, the gas pressure in the neutralizer at fixed energy must be varied to change the injected power, these beam parameters can be kept constant with the reported method to study the effect of different injected neutral beam powers on the fusion plasma. The transmitted power to the torus is detected by the calorimetrically measured remaining power on the beam target. The resulting transmitted neutral beam power as a function of the target aperture is in good agreement with the expected integral of the thus-truncated Gaussianlike beam profile, i.e., the error function. The scaling of the resulting injected neutral beam power, beam profiles, vertical full-width-at-half-maximum, and central power density with variation of the beam target aperture are in good agreement with the beamline simulation code PADET.