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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.”
R. H. Chen, M. L. Corradini, G. H. Su, S. Z. Qiu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 173 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 1-14
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-10
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A molten fuel breakup model that considers solidification effects is proposed in this paper. Both the effect of a solid crust layer and the effect of thermal stresses on the fuel particle fragmentation are taken into account in this model. This solidification model predicts the transient temperature profile and crust layer thickness of the fuel particle by numerically solving the Fourier heat conduction equation under specific initial and boundary conditions. This fuel particle breakup model and transient temperature profile model were incorporated into the TEXAS fuel-coolant interaction (FCI) model; this revised TEXAS FCI model is called TEXAS-VI. This paper compares TEXAS-VI to the FARO L14 experiment (FARO L14), for which fuel-coolant mixing and quench data have been published. The FARO L14 pressure history, liquid water pool temperature, and vapor temperature were found to be in good agreement with the revised model predictions. This mixing behavior will also have an impact on FCI explosion energetics. The solidification effect is under investigation for energetics.
