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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.”
Woong Heo, Yonghee Kim
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 189 | Number 1 | January 2018 | Pages 41-55
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1373516
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thermomechanical effects, irradiation, and structural restrictions result in very tangled behavior of assemblies in sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs). Reactivity feedback caused by the assembly behavior (deformation or distortion) is one of the key parameters in the inherent safety analysis of fast reactor systems. However, to date there has been no accurate and efficient deterministic way to compute directly the reactivity changes by actual local perturbation. This paper evaluates the feasibility of applying the Galerkin finite element method (GFEM) based on linear shape functions to estimate reactivity changes due to local core deformations in SFRs. Assessment of reactivity changes is conducted for six types of deformation scenarios of the two-dimensional prototype Gen-IV SFR. Uniform expansions and local deformations are included in the scenarios. The results from the multigroup diffusion equation based on the GFEM are compared with references calculated by MCNP5. The study shows that diffusion analysis based on the GFEM with linear shape functions can properly estimate reactivity changes by core deformation in the fast reactor with ~13% relative error of Δρ.
