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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.”
Mohamed Belhadj, Tunc Aldemir, Richard N. Christensen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 95 | Number 1 | July 1991 | Pages 95-102
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34571
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
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 (ΔTsat) in thin channels under FDNB decreases with increasing probability of bubble contact, (b) ΔTsat is a function of the bubble departure diameter Db as well as d, and (c) ΔTsat 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 ΔTsat 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 — cDb)/d, where c is a fitting parameter that accounts for the statistical aspects of bubble formation and contact. The ΔTsat predictions of the new correlation agree with the experimental data to within 16% and approach those obtained from the Jens-Lottes correlation with decreasing Db/d.