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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.”
L. Barleon, L. Bühler, K.J. Mack, R. Stieglitz, B.F. Picologlou, T.Q. Hua, C.B. Reed
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 21 | Number 3 | May 1992 | Pages 2197-2203
Blanket Shield and Neutronic | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A30045
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In designing a self-cooled liquid metal blanket based on the poloidal-toroidal flow concept, the magnitude of the MHD pressure drop and the character of the velocity distribution in the first wall coolant channels, that result from 3-dimensional MHD effects associated with the required right angle bends in the coolant flow, represent important design issues. To address these issues and to verify the relevant models used in the design, a joint MHD-experiment was conducted by Argonne National Laboratory (AND and Kernforschungszen-trum Karlsruhe (KfK). The test article was designed and built at ANL, and the experiments were performed at KfK's MEKKA facility using a 3.6 Tesla superconducting solenoid magnet and a eutectic sodium potassium alloy working fluid. In the experiments, detailed voltage and pressure distributions on the duct walls and voltage distributions within the liquid metal were measured under a variety of Hartmann numbers and interaction parameters. Representative results from these measurements are presented and compared to analytical predictions valid for very high interaction parameters (inertialess flow). Results indicate that deviation between analysis and experiment is confined to the immediate vicinity of the right angle sharp corner and that, for fusion blanket conditions, the 3-dimensional pressure drop in the radial-toroidal bend of an electrically separated single channel is small compared with the pressure drop of the radial flow.