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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.”
Thanh-Tuan Tran, Thi-Mai-Trang Le, Phu-Cuong Nguyen, Dookie Kim, Thong M. Pham, Kashif Salman, Seongkyu Chang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 12 | December 2021 | Pages 1327-1346
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1920796
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study presents the Probabilistic Seismic Demand Model (PSDM) and explores optimal intensity measures (IMs) for nuclear power plant (NPP) equipment when subjected to ground motions having high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) contents. To this end, the PSDM is first constructed in terms of the IM and the corresponding engineering demand parameter, and its outcomes are utilized to select the optimum IMs based on the satisfaction of certain essential properties (i.e., efficiency, practicality, and proficiency). Regarding earthquake excitation, different IMs (i.e., structure-independent and structure-dependent IMs) are studied. The results show that the most appropriate IMs for the seismic performance of the cabinet are velocity spectrum intensity and spectral accelerations for the structure-independent IMs and the structure-dependent IMs, respectively.
Moreover, fragility analysis is performed to assess the vulnerability of NPP equipment. The outcomes indicate that the cabinet is highly vulnerable to HF earthquakes as a consequence of response amplification. In addition, the selection of the earthquake IM has an important influence on the collapse capacity of the cabinet, and the fragility curves obtained from structure-dependent IMs are more reliable in comparison to those of structure-independent IMs.