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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.”
Karl Verfondern, Werner Schenk, Heinz Nabielek
Nuclear Technology | Volume 91 | Number 2 | August 1990 | Pages 235-246
Technical Paper | Safety of Next Generation Power Reactor / Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT90-A34431
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The high fission product retention potential of coated particle fuel combined with inherently passive temperature controls guarantee almost complete fission product retention during an accident in a small modular high-temperature reactor. Extensive experimental results provide the basis for this claim to inherent safety. Models and codes have been developed to (a) predict realistic, or at least conservative, overall release rates from the primary circuit, (b) reduce the large number of experimental results to a small set of characteristic coefficients, and (c) predict release beyond experimental conditions. Conservative predictions of release from the core have been done using a traditional pressure vessel model for release from fuel particles and simplified diffusion models for fission product transport. This approach is based on experimental work that has been done on nearly all possible accident conditions and is limited by the finite number of experiments. Data reduction has been achieved with two different modeling approaches combined into a new model that is equally relevant to all volatile fission products. The safety design of the 200-MW(thermal) HTR-Modul is based on Kernforschungsanlage Jülich experimental results from fuel accident condition performance testing and the modeling effort has been applied to a safety review.