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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.”
Peter P. Cebull, Yassin A. Hassan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 109 | Number 3 | March 1995 | Pages 327-337
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35081
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A small-break loss-of-coolant accident experiment conducted at the PMK-2 integral test facility in Hungary is analyzed using the RELAP5/MOD3.1 thermal-hydraulic code. The experiment simulated a 7.4% break in the cold leg of a VVER-440/213-type nuclear power plant as part of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Fourth Standard Problem Exercise (SPE-4). Blind calculations of the exercise are presented, and the timing of various events throughout the transient is discussed. A posttest analysis is performed in which the sensitivity of the calculated results is investigated. The code RELAP5 predicts most of the transient events well, although a few problems are noted, particularly the failure of RELAP5 to predict dryout in the core even though the collapsed liquid level fell below the top of the heated portion. A discrepancy between the predicted primary mass inventory distribution and the experimental data is identified. Finally, the primary and secondary pressures calculated by RELAP5 fell too rapidly during the latter part of the transient, resulting in rather large errors in the predicted timing of some pressure-actuated events.