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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.”
Jiaqi Chen, Caleb S. Brooks
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 886-906
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2103347
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The axial-flow centrifugal bubble separator designed for the gaseous fission product removal system in liquid-fueled molten salt reactors is simulated using the Eulerian two-fluid model coupled with the Adaptive Multiple Size Group method to account for the significant coalescence and breakup in the bubble separator. The behavior of the gas core in the bubble separator is mimicked by the symmetric interfacial area concentration model. The separator efficiency, local velocity, and pressure profiles at various conditions are compared with experimental data. Good agreement is found between the experiment and the simulation for the separator efficiency. With the coalescence and breakup being accounted for, the effect of the inlet void fraction on the separator efficiency is correctly captured. For the local pressure and velocity profiles, the agreement is only quantitative due to the simplifications on the geometry and potential limitations of the current computational fluid dynamics models. As good agreement is found for the separator efficiency, the sensitivity study is performed for various operational and design parameters with further simplified two-dimensional axisymmetric simulation.
