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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.”
Alfred W. Reed, Herbert Meister, Daniel J. Sasmor
Nuclear Technology | Volume 78 | Number 1 | July 1987 | Pages 54-61
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT87-A34008
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the elements used to compute the dryout heat flux of a debris bed is the capillary pressure/saturation curve. This relationship describes the pressure difference between liquid and vapor phases in a porous bed as a function of saturation. It is used in the calculation of the liquid and vapor pressure drops in the debris and in the calculation of channel depth. The first complete correlation of capillary pressure/saturation data was reported in 1941 by Leverett. Leverett demonstrated that the data for unconsolidated sand in the 45- to 180-µm range could be non-dimensionalized using the liquid surface tension, bed permeability, and void fraction. At the time, the primary interest was in geologic materials and further work on unconsolidated particulate was limited. The presented measurements of capillary pressure are designed to check the range of validity of the Leverett correlation. For beds with narrow particle size distributions, the Leverett correlation is found to be adequate. For beds composed of broad size distributions, the capillary pressure curve changed significantly.
