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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.”
W. H. Amarasooriya, Hongfei Yan, Umesh Ratnam,†, Theo G. Theofanous
Nuclear Technology | Volume 101 | Number 3 | March 1993 | Pages 354-384
Technical Paper | Severe Accident Technology / Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34794
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This is the third part of a three-part series of papers addressing the probability of liner failure in a Mark-I containment. The purpose is to quantify the corium/concrete interactions and liner attack phenomena in a form suitable for use in the probabilistic framework as discussed in the first part of this series. In the quantifications of corium/concrete interactions, the principal parameter of interest is the melt superheat transient, especially as it is affected by the oxidation of the metallic components in the melt. A computer code specifically developed for this purpose is also described and compared with available experimental data. In the quantification of the liner attack phenomena, the principal parameters are melt-to-liner heat transfer coefficient and liner failure criteria. The assessment of the heat transfer coefficient is based on experiments that simulate the melt-to-liner contact (recirculating) flow regime, which were specifically run for this purpose. The consideration of liner failure criteria includes finite element analyses addressing the potential for structural failure (due to loss of strength in high-temperature steel) in addition to straightforward failure by melting. The two-dimensional and transient aspects of the heat transfer problem, including solid-liquid phase change at the melt-liner interface, are shown to be important, and the quantification is carried out by means of an analysis tool specifically developed for this purpose.