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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
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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.”
Heinz Vollmer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 34 | Number 2 | November 1968 | Pages 148-157
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A19540
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Local and weighted transient temperatures in a cylindrical, cladded fuel rod and a single-phase compressible coolant are determined by a linear analytical model applying Laplace transformation. All independent variables determining the channel temperatures and the interaction between fuel, canning, and coolant temperatures are taken into account. Assuming constant material properties in the fuel rod, the calculation of fuel and clad temperature is shown to require four functions defined such that one argument is real and depends on geometry only. Material properties affect only the other (imaginary) argument, and different properties result in parallel displacement of the functions. These features enable a relative general presentation of the functions for various geometries and material properties. The functions determining coolant temperature may be given in an integral-free form if, essentially, the can-to-coolant heat transfer coefficient is space independent. The model was originally developed for use in steam cooled fast reactor analysis. It may be applied to other fast or thermal systems with single-phase coolants. Furthermore, it may serve as a means for evaluating numerical approximations of nonanalytical finite difference methods (e.g., to establish the necessary number of subregions).