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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.”
Subhash Chandra
Nuclear Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | February 1983 | Pages 278-290
Technical Paper | Radiation Effects and Their Relationship to Geological Repository / Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT83-A33084
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A computer code, ANEXDI (analysis of extended disassembly), has been prepared for scoping studies of hydrodynamic interactions in typical core disruptive accidents in a fast power reactor. A two-phase compressible thermohydrodynamic model is coupled with neutron point kinetics equations and solved numerically, employing the well-known implicit multifield Eulerian technique for the hydrodynamics and an integrating factor method for the neutronics. Hydrodynamics of the ANEXDI code includes, at least parametrically, (a) interphase momentum transfer depending on the phase velocity difference, the phase acceleration difference, the radius of the dispersed phase particles, the viscosity coefficient of the continuous phase, and the drag coefficient, (b) intra-and interphase heat transfer depending on the various conductivity coefficients, and (c) local vapor generation and the concurrent pressurization. A good agreement is shown between some analytically solvable, one- and two-phase shock wave problems and the numerical solutions of the ANEXDI hydrodynamics and also between ANEXDI and VENUS calculations for a typical hypothetical core disruptive accident (HCDA) in a small 40-MW(thermal) fast reactor. Some calculations along with a simple mathematical theory are presented to emphasize the effect of certain interphase phenomena and of a modeling uncertainty of the two-phase flow hydrodynamic equations on a typical HCDA. This uncertainty does not visibly affect the shock tube simulation results due to the diffused shock wave fronts produced by the computer code, but it does affect some HCDA results quite significantly, as the reactivity calculation and hence the fission power calculation are very sensitive to the density profiles of a disassembling reactor system.