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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
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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.”
Yoshinori Miyoshi, Masafumi Itagaki, Masanori Akai, Hideyuki Hirose, Masao Hashimoto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 103 | Number 3 | September 1993 | Pages 380-391
Technical Paper | Nuclear Criticality Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34858
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the nuclear criticality safety design of a nuclear fuel cycle facility, the geometric buckling of the fuel core is one of the most important quantities used in estimating criticality. When the material buckling value is known for a system consisting of fissile materials, it is possible to judge whether or not the system is subcritical by comparing the material buckling with the geometric buckling. It is widely known that the geometric buckling of a given core can be calculated by using a simple formula for some geometries, e.g., square, cylinder, slab, and sphere. The experimental results of the geometrical buckling for typical regular polygons are described. Geometric buckling for three types of regular polygons has been measured in light-water-moderated UO2-H2O lattices in the tank-type critical assembly at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. Based on the known critical buckling of a given experimental lattice and the measured critical water levels, the horizontal buckling has been evaluated for various sizes of regular hexagonal, square, and regular triangular cores. This method is based on the separability of geometric buckling into horizontal and vertical components. From the measured critical water levels of each core, it was found that the horizontal buckling of the effective core region is inversely proportional to the square of the radius of the circumscribed circle of the core. The geometric buckling can therefore be expressed in the form of (aN/Rc)2 using the geometric constant aN. The data for geometric buckling values on these geometries are available for the validation of calculation codes, and the empirical formula for geometric buckling obtained in this study can be applied to the basic criticality safety design of fuel cycle facilities.
