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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.”
S. G. Durbin, M. Yoda, S. I. Abdel-Khalik
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 718-723
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Divertor and Plasma-Facing Components | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A770
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The HYLIFE-II conceptual design uses arrays of high-speed oscillating and stationary slab jets, or turbulent liquid sheets, to protect the reactor chamber first walls. A major issue in thick liquid protection is the hydrodynamic source term due to the primary turbulent breakup of the protective slab jets. During turbulent breakup, drops are continuously ejected from the surface of turbulent liquid sheets and convected into the interior of the cavity, where they can interfere with driver propagation and target injection. Experimental data for vertical turbulent sheets of water issuing downwards from nozzles of thickness (small dimension) = 1 cm into ambient air are compared with empirical correlations at a nearly prototypical Reynolds number Re = 1.2 × 105. A simple collection technique was used to estimate the amount of mass ejected from the jet surface. The effectiveness of boundary-layer cutting at various "depths" into the flow to reduce the source term and improve surface smoothness was evaluated. In all cases boundary-layer cutting was implemented immediately downstream of the nozzle exit. Planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) was used to visualize the free-surface geometry of the liquid sheet in the near-field region up to 25 downstream of the nozzle exit. Large-scale structures at the edges of the sheet, typically observed for Re < 5.0 × 104, reappeared at Re = 1.2 × 105 for sheets with boundary-layer cutting. The results indicate that boundary-layer cutting can be used to suppress drop formation, i.e. the hydrodynamic source term, for a well-conditioned jet but is not a substitute for well-designed flow conditioning.