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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.”
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Plate-type research reactor cores have involute or rectangular coolant channels with channel gap size in the range 2 ≤ d ≤ 5 mm. Heat transfer under fully developed nucleate boiling (FDNB) and low-velocity (<0.15 m/s) upward flow conditions is important in accident situations where core cooling may be by natural convection. Using data from previous experimental work with 2 ≤ d ≤ 4 mm rectangular channels, it is shown that (a) wall superheat (ΔT_sat) in thin channels under FDNB decreases with increasing probability of bubble contact, (b) ΔT_sat is a function of the bubble departure diameter D_b as well as d, and (c) ΔT_sat can be significantly overestimated by the FDNB correlations that are conventionally used in plate-type research reactor analysis but that are based on higher pressure and larger d flow data and that predict ΔT_sat as a function of local channel heat flux and pressure only (e.g., as in the Jens-Lottes and Thom correlations). A new FDNB correlation is proposed that represents the bubble contact mechanism through the dimensionless number (d — cD_b)/d, where c is a fitting parameter that accounts for the statistical aspects of bubble formation and contact. The ΔT_sat predictions of the new correlation agree with the experimental data to within 16% and approach those obtained from the Jens-Lottes correlation with decreasing D_b/d.