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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.”
Miguel Ceceñas-Falcón, Robert M. Edwards
Nuclear Technology | Volume 131 | Number 1 | July 2000 | Pages 1-11
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3100
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new test platform for stability studies is presented that can be used to generate a power time series, which in turn may be used to validate the capability of boiling water reactor stability-monitoring algorithms. The thermal hydraulics for boiling channels are modeled and coupled with neutron kinetics to analyze the nonlinear dynamics of the closed-loop system. The model uses point kinetics to study core-wide oscillations, and it couples two time-domain calculations, for the fundamental and first harmonic modes, to study out-of-phase oscillations. The channel coolant flow dynamics is dominant in the power fluctuations observed by in-core nuclear instrumentation, and additive white noise is added to the solution for the channel flow in the thermal-hydraulic model to generate a noisy power time series. Autoregressive analysis performed with the computer-generated series agrees with the stability properties of the boiling channel. The operating conditions of the channel can be modified to accommodate a wide range of stability conditions.
