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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.”
Xiangyun Zhou, De’An Sun, Shixiang Hu, Weiding Zhuo, Min Lin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 6 | June 2024 | Pages 1308-1319
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2245281
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study aims to model the temperature evolution near the heater of an in situ heating test for a nuclear waste repository. Based on the governing equation of heat conduction, a mathematical model is established to obtain temporal and spatial temperature distributions in the in situ heating test. Then, semi-analytical solutions are derived using the Laplace and Fourier transforms and their inverse transforms. The corresponding results in the time domain are obtained by conducting the Crump method. The semi-analytical solution is applied to predict temperature change near the heater in two in situ heating tests. Finally, a parametric study is conducted to explore the impacts of some parameters on the temperature evolution of the buffer layer for one prototype repository in situ heating test. The results show that the semi-analytical solution of the proposed model can well predict the temperature change near the heater in the two in situ heating tests. The thermal conductivities of the buffer layer and the rock layer and the thickness of the buffer layer have significant effects on the temperature evolution of the buffer layer in the prototype repository in situ heating test.
