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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.”
Kai Masuda, Tomoya Nakagawa, Taiju Kajiwara, Heishun Zen, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa, Kazunobu Nagasaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 523-527
Experimental Facilities and Nonelectric Applications | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8956
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion device driven by a ring-shaped built-in ion source is proposed and designed aiming at a reduced operating gas pressure in order to explore a possibility of a drastic enhancement in the fusion reaction rate in the envisaged beam-beam collision regime. In the present scheme ions will be extracted from a ring-shaped magnetron discharge plasma toward an IEC cathode grid placed concentrically at the center. A prototype ion source showed an accessible pressure of 5 mPa, which is hundreds times as low as the conventional glow-discharge-driven IEC. Dependence of the ion source current and extraction efficiency on the central IEC cathode voltage was studied by prototype experiments and numerical calculations. An IEC device with a built-in ion source was then designed based on these results. The expected IEC grid current is ~0.4 mA at 5 mPa, where observation of the beam-beam fusion contribution is anticipated.
