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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.”
A. V. Anikeev et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 104-107
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11584
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The following work presents the results of investigation of microinstabilities in the anisotropic synthesized hot ion plasmoid (SHIP). Plasmoid is located in a small mirror section that is installed at one side of the GDT facility, which is an axially symmetric magnetic mirror device of gas dynamic trap type. To define the type and the parameters of the developing microinstability a set of high-frequency electrostatic and magnetic probes was used. The microinstability observed in the additional section of GDT is the Alfven ion cyclotron instability (AIC), because of small azimuthal wave numbers, magnetic field vector rotating in the direction of ion gyration and oscillation frequency below the actual ion cyclotron frequency. AIC instability threshold was registered at the following plasma parameters: fast ion density n > 3 × 1013 cm-3, ratio of ion pressure to magnetic field pressure [approximately equal] 0.02, anisotropy A = 40, ai/Rp [approximately equal] 0.23, where ai is the ion gyroradius and Rp is the plasmoid radius.