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ANS Student Conference 2025
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Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.”
Shi-Xiang Qu, Yan-Hua Wu, Zhao-Zhong He, Kun Chen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 189 | Number 3 | March 2018 | Pages 282-289
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1405652
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The vortex diode is a key candidate for the equipment of the passive safety system of the molten salt reactor. Experimental studies to determine the diodicity (ratio of reverse flow Euler number to the forward flow Euler number at the same Reynolds number) using high-temperature molten salt are strongly limited because of the huge technical effort and financial requirements for such studies; moreover, possible solutions that involve a scaling method that uses surrogate fluid to obtain the diodicity must be validated. To determine the diodicity and verify the scaling method, an experiment using one kind of heat transfer oil (Dowtherm-a) as the surrogate fluid was carried out. In addition, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation method was also adopted to study the flow characteristics in the vortex diode using three different fluids. The results show the following: it is feasible to study the diodicity of a vortex diode by a scaling experimental method using surrogate fluid, the CFD simulation method established in this paper can be applied to study the diodicity of the vortex diode, and the structure of the flow field and velocity distribution in the vortex chamber for reverse flow are independent of fluids and only related to the Reynolds number.