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ANS Student Conference 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.”
Yoshiyuki Kataoka, Michio Murase, Tadashi Fujii, Kenji Tominaga
Nuclear Technology | Volume 111 | Number 2 | August 1995 | Pages 241-250
Technical Paper | Nuclear Criticality Safety Special / Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35133
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An external water wall type containment cooling system is one of the passive containment cooling systems that use no active components and are intended for system simplification in the next generation power reactors. The core decay heat during a postulated loss-of-coolant accident is accumulated in the suppression pool (SP) and transferred to the outer pool, which is a cooling pool located outside and adjacent to the SP, by only natural phenomena such as natural convection, heat conduction, and evaporation. The temperature profiles and the convection heat transfer coefficients in the pools were measured using a 5-m height apparatus. The formation of a thermal stratification boundary at the vent outlets, which restricts the effective heat transfer area between pools, was clarified, and a correlation for natural convection heat transfer coefficients was obtained. Condensation heat transfer coefficients on the containment vessel wall and evaporation heat transfer coefficients on the SP surface under a noncondensable gas presence, which strongly affected the heat removal from the wet well, were evaluated based on the test results, and the correlations were obtained. The heat removal evaluation models, which analyze the trends of the temperatures and pressure, were developed and verified with system tests. As for the improvement of heat removal capability, two methods were proposed. One is a baffle plate to mitigate thermal stratification in the SP and enlarge the effective heat transfer area between pools. The second method is a divided wet well to avoid noncondensable gas effects. The thermal-hydraulic behavior in the SP with a baffle plate was clarified by three-dimensional analysis, and the effectiveness of these methods was experimentally confirmed.