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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.”
A. Segev, R. E. Henry, S. G. Bankoff
Nuclear Technology | Volume 46 | Number 3 | December 1979 | Pages 482-492
Technical Paper | Nuclear Power Reactor Safety / Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A32356
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Shock tube experiments with a variety of liquids have been conducted in which large pressures were obtained for systems of water-Wood’s metal, butanol-Wood’s metal, and water-molten salt. With the water-Wood’s metal system, three separate regions were observed. When the hot liquid temperature was below 210°C (which can be identified as the spontaneous nucleation temperature), no thermal interaction occurred, and the cold liquid column only bounced if vapor were present initially (region A). When the hot liquid temperature was greater than the spontaneous nucleation temperature but the contact interface temperature was less than this value (region B), the low rate of vaporization resulted in bouncing of the liquid column, which in turn produced high pressures on the order of the theoretical “water hammer” pressure. Those hydrodynamic pressures are larger than the vapor pressure corresponding to the bulk temperature of the hot liquid and larger than the maximum pressure that may be generated from single-phase pressurization. The third region, observed when the hot liquid temperature was above the spontaneous nucleation temperature upon contact (region C), resulted in fast production of vapor and impulses larger than the theoretical impulse for stopping the liquid column. The mechanism for producing the high pressures in region C is a combination of hydrodynamic impact and thermal interaction. Since pressures produced in region C are also on the order of impact pressures, the only indication for thermal interaction is a considerable increase in the resulting impulse of pressure pulses with short rise time (<1.0 ms). When the initial pressure in the system was increased (by means of a thicker diaphragm), the bouncing behavior was suppressed. This was evident from the reduced number of bounces (if any at all), the low relative pressures and impulses, the temperature history, and the shape of pressure pulses. Experiments conducted with Freons and oils (mineral and silicon), which did not result in any explosive type of interaction, also fall in a high-pressure category and are in agreement with pouring experiments. As was shown in these experiments, the hydrodynamic effects may be very significant in any shock tube analyses, especially when multiple interactions are observed. However, this was not the case in the Wright et al. experiments, in which no bouncing was observed and the pressures generated on the first impact were much higher than the theoretical impact pressure. From mixing and heat transfer considerations, it is shown that a limited amount of hot liquid can transfer its energy to the cold liquid during the intermixing stage and produce the observed pressures.