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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.”
Shahram Sharafat, Aaron T. Aoyama, Nasr Ghoniem, Brian Williams
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 208-212
Divertor & High Heat Flux Components | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12353
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A rectangular single channel low pressure drop helium-cooled refractory metal heat exchanger (HX) tube for divertor applications was designed and manufactured for testing in the SNL E-beam facility. A unique fabrication feature of the rectangular HX channel design is that all welds, brazes, and joints are located at or near the bottom of the rectangular channel, i.e., far from any heated surface. The HX tube concept uses a thin (~2mm) layer of open-cell refractory foam bonded underneath the heated surface to enhance heat transfer to the helium coolant.The helium coolant flows through a 2-mm-wide slot and then through the thin foam layer (~2 mm × 12 mm × 127 mm; H/W/L) from the inlet to the outlet plenum. This design minimizes the path of helium flow through foam to about 11 mm and thus the pressure drop through the porous media is more or less constant along the length of the channel. The concept is scalable for cooling large flat surfaces, such as a flat-plate divertor, without substantially increasing the coolant pressure losses.We present CFD analyses used to optimize the design for minimum pressure drop through the porous media and for highest uniformity of surface temperatures. A design-for-manufacturing concept for a single HX-channel was developed with the goal to minimize welds or joints near heated surfaces. Based on the advanced HX-channel design a number of HX-channels were manufactured using Mo as a surrogate material instead of tungsten.