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ANS Student Conference 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.”
Gabriele Ferrero, Raffaella Testoni, Massimo Zucchetti
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 4 | April 2024 | Pages 898-913
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2219815
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Molten salt systems have become of growing interest in the energy industry due to a wide range of applications (concentrated solar power systems, energy storage, Generation IV fission reactors, and high magnetic field fusion reactors). Because of the high temperature that characterizes such materials, radiative heat transfer (RHT) may become a nonnegligible heat transfer mechanism in molten salt components. In this paper, an investigation of FLiBe RHT has been conducted, with a focus on Affordable, Robust, Compact (ARC)–class fusion reactors, a preconceptual design proposed by Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. This class of reactors largely employs FLiBe molten salt due to its thermal and neutronic properties. The reactor is characterized by high temperatures, and its 0.5-m-thick liquid immersion blanket is a component where RHT contribution to the temperature distribution is yet to be evaluated. Therefore, this study is the first work that quantifies the contribution of RHT in ARC-class reactor FLiBe systems. FLiBe optical property spectral-banding assessment is carried out, and the impact of RHT in FLiBe systems is assessed in operational ARC-class scenarios through computational fluid dynamics models by taking advantage of COMSOL® Multiphysics. Heat transfer, thermal-dependent properties, and buoyancy effects are considered in a comparison between scenarios with and without RHT modeling. The flow field in the tank is unaffected by RHT effects, even when considering buoyancy effects. The external layer of the vacuum vessel shows an average decrease in the temperature of 5.4 K and an average decrease in temperature on the surface in contact with the FLiBe tank of 8.1 K. Results indicate that for ARC-class reactors, RHT phenomena are negligible (<1% increase in heat transfer) in operational conditions.