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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.”
Rainer Böer, Alfred Knoll
Nuclear Technology | Volume 142 | Number 2 | May 2003 | Pages 137-145
Technical Paper | OECD/NRC MSLB Benchmark | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3379
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents and discusses results obtained with the nuclear plant safety analysis code system RELAP5/PANBOX (R/P/C) for the return-to-power scenario of exercises 2 and 3 of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development/Nuclear Energy Agency Main Steam Line Break (MSLB) Benchmark. Both the external and internal coupling options of R/P/C have been considered for exercise 3; i.e., the COBRA module of PANBOX was used to calculate the core thermal hydraulics in the external coupling option, whereas the core thermal hydraulics of RELAP5 was used in the internal coupling option. For the representation of thermal-hydraulic channels, a fine channel geometry based on the 177 fuel assemblies was selected for the external coupling option, and a coarse channel geometry based on 19 coarse channels has been investigated for the internal coupling option. The comparison of the results shows very good agreement of important core parameters between the considered coupling variants. Both exercises 2 and 3 have been investigated with respect to local safety parameters like fuel centerline temperatures and minimum departure from nucleate boiling ratios using the on-line hot subchannel analysis capability of R/P/C in the external coupling option. The results show that both quantities are far from the safety-related limits.The benchmark demonstrates, that R/P/C - as part of the integrated CASCADE-3D core analysis system of Framatome ANP GmbH - has proven to be a powerful tool for detailed analyses of an MSLB accident.