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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.”
Jayan K. George, Jagdeep B. Doshi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 108 | Number 3 | December 1994 | Pages 338-349
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A35016
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The pressure disturbance propagation through a weakly compressible medium, bound by rigid structure as well as material interfaces, has an important bearing on the safety analysis of liquid-metal-cooled fast breeder reactors. The analyses have been carried out using numerical algorithms based on Eulerian, Lagrangian, or mixed formulations. Even though the results obtained from these schemes compared well with the benchmark experimental results, certain drawbacks, such as less accurate treatment of material interfaces in the Eulerian schemes and mesh distortion in the La-grangian schemes, and so forth, remain. These drawbacks may be overcome by using a method of characteristics in two dimensions known as the near-characteristic method to solve the problem. The region of interest is discretized into Eulerian grids, and the flow parameters are obtained from the compatibility equations corresponding to the near characteristics generated from the grid points. The material interfaces are tracked explicitly, using the near-characteristic scheme. The scheme is used to analyze a typical core disruptive accident problem, and the results are compared with experimental results as well as those ob. tained using two other numerical schemes. Good agreement is observed among the results; indeed, the one-dimensional problem of exploding wire phenomena and the two-dimensional problem of core disruptive accident analysis validate the effectiveness of the scheme. The future extension of the present scheme will include fluid structure interaction and complex internal structures.