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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.”
Yukiharu Ohga, Kohyu Fukunishi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 2 | November 1985 | Pages 402-410
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33692
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An on-line method of predicting reactor water level and pressure under small loss-of-coolant-accident (LOCA) conditions has been proposed. The method features initialization of a simplified reactor model in transient conditions. This is done by using plant data in time series and estimating unknown parameters, such as break area, by a nonlinear optimization method. Off-line simulations were performed for small LOCAs (break area: ∼100 cm2) using the results of a reference LOCA analysis code for plant data. These showed that the difference from the reference calculation during a 10-min period was within 10%, normalized by the value at the initialization time, and the estimation error for break area was below 11%. The overall CPU time required for the prediction was below 10 s in a general purpose computer of 10 million instructions per second.