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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.”
Kenzo Miya, Takayuki Iizuka, Joseph Silverman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 7 | Number 1 | January 1985 | Pages 99-110
Technical Paper | ICF Chamber Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST85-A24522
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A shock wave induced in liquid metal is analyzed numerically by application of the finite element method. Since the governing equations of motion of the fluid are nonlinear, an incremental method is combined with the finite element method to obtain a convergent solution of the shock wave without an interaction technique. To demonstrate the validity of the method developed, shock wave problems in an inertial confinement spherical reactor with a liquid lithium “waterfall” are solved for two cases of surface heating due to soft x-ray absorption and bulk heating due to 14-MeV neutron absorption. The solution is based on a combination of the conservation equations for mass, energy, and momentum along with the following equation of state for liquid metals: p = Pb[(ρ/ρ0)n − 1]. Numerical results show that peak pressure induced in the liquid lithium is very high even for a comparatively small energy release ET = 700 M J/microexplosion of a pellet. Dynamic stress induced in a 5-cm-thick stainless steel pressure vessel is 1.14 × 103 MPa for the surface heating. The numerical results also show that the dynamic stress induced by bulk heating is superimposed on that due to surface heating within the same period. Two appropriate ways to reduce the high stress are application of two-phase flow of liquid lithium or an increase in the thickness of the pressure vessel.