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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.”
Chien-Hsiung Lee, I-Ming Huang, Chin-Jang Chang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 135 | Number 2 | August 2001 | Pages 109-122
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT01-A3209
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermal-hydraulic behavior of a postulated 1% cold-leg break loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) in a pressurized water reactor system was investigated experimentally by the three-loop Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (INER) Integral System Test (IIST) facility with the passive core cooling system (PCCS) and numerically by the RELAP5/MOD3.2 computer code. The PCCS of the IIST facility includes three core makeup tanks (CMTs), three accumulators, and a four-stage automatic depressurization system. The aim of this research is to study the performance of the CMTs with the actuation of the ADS during a small-break LOCA. The experimental results show that the IIST PCCS has the capability to maintain long-term cooling under a postulated 1% cold-leg break LOCA. The comparison of the RELAP5/MOD3.2 simulation against the experimental data shows good agreement in major thermal-hydraulic phenomena in the reactor coolant system, but the prediction of the asymmetric behavior for the three CMTs during a gravity drain period is inadequate.
