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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.”
Antonio F. Dias, Laurance D. Eisenhart, Ronald E. Engel, Lance J. Agee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 121 | Number 3 | March 1998 | Pages 346-358
Technical Paper | RETRAN | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2846
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The rod ejection accident in a pressurized water reactor and the control rod drop accident in a boiling water reactor are analyzed in this paper, both in a best-estimate (realistic) and a conservative manner. CORETRAN, a modern three-dimensional time-dependent nodal code, is used for all simulations. In all considered cases, the resulting peak fuel enthalpy is far less than the current licensing limit of 180 cal/g. The advantage of using a three-dimensional code over the classical point-kinetics approach can be summarized: The power peak is nominally a factor of 10 times lower, and the pulse is 10 times wider. Therefore, a three-dimensional approach predicts a much milder event. Sensitivity studies were performed to identify the influence of several parameters on the reactivity insertion simulations.
