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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.”
Rajgopal Vijaykumar, Mohsen Khatib-Rahbar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 128 | Number 3 | December 1999 | Pages 313-326
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A3034
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The applicability of the empirical approach in the CONTAIN computer code for the simulation of induced flow and heat transfer in asymmetrically heated, vertical parallel-plate channels is investigated. The physical situation is related to containment cooling in the Westinghouse AP600 reactor. The countercurrent flow of air in the channel is induced by the thermal buoyancy force. In CONTAIN, the heat and mass transfer analogy (with Sherwood number calculated based on an empirical Nusselt number correlation for fully developed flows), including the film theory correction for high mass transfer, is used to calculate film evaporation. The buoyancy-induced flow is calculated through coupled solutions to lumped-parameter mass, energy, and momentum equations. The CONTAIN predictions are first compared with the Purdue results of a more detailed two-dimensional model under identical conditions in a simple parallel-plate channel. Then the CONTAIN predictions are compared with the results of the Purdue two-dimensional model and with data for two selected (forced and free convection) tests performed in the Westinghouse Large Scale Test (LST) Facility. Analyses show that the CONTAIN-calculated Sherwood numbers, the total heat fluxes, the steam mass fraction, and the bulk velocity in the channel are comparable to the two-dimensional Purdue investigations for the parallel-plate simulations and for the conditions of the Westinghouse LST Facility.