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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.”
Chris Weber, Bradley Motl, Jason Oakley, Mark Anderson, Riccardo Bonazza
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 460-464
IFE Drivers and Chambers | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8945
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The growth of an interfacial perturbation after acceleration by a shock wave, known as the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (RMI), plays an important role in the compression of an ICF target. Experiments studying the RMI are performed in a vertical shock tube by observing the growth of the interface between a pair of gases after acceleration by a planar shock wave. A near 2D, sinusoidal, membraneless interface is created in a shock tube by oscillating rectangular pistons at the stagnation plane between the two gases. The interface is visualized by seeding one of the gases with acetone, smoke, or atomized oil and observing the fluorescence or Mie scattering from a planar laser sheet. The results presented here span a range of Atwood numbers, 0.30<A<0.95, and shock wave strengths, 1.1<M<3. Numerical simulations of the experimental conditions are performed and compared with the experiments using the 2D hydrodynamics code Raptor (LLNL).
