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Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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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.”
Tetsuo Sawada, Hisashi Ninokata, Akinao Shimizu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 2 | February 1996 | Pages 167-176
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35186
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Validation studies are described of a computational model for the freezing of molten core materials under core disruptive accident conditions of fast breeder reactors. A series of out-of-pile experiments named SIMBATH, performed at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Germany, has already been analyzed with the SIMMER-II code. In the current study, TRAN simulation tests in the SIMBATH facility are analyzed by SIMMER-II for its modeling validation of molten material freezing. The original TRAN experiments were performed at Sandia National Laboratories to examine the freezing behavior of molten UO2 injected into an annular channel. In the TRAN simulation experiments of the SIMBATH series, similar freezing phenomena are investigated for molten thermite, a mixture of Al2O3 and iron, instead of UO2. Two typical TRAN simulation tests are analyzed that aim at clarification of the applicability of the code to the freezing process during the experiments. The distribution of molten materials that are deposited in the test section according to the experimental measurements and in calculations by SIMMER-II is compared. These studies confirm that the conduction-limited freezing model combined with the rudimentary bulk freezing (particle-jamming) model of SIMMER-II could be used to reproduce the TRAN simulation experiments satisfactorily. This finding encourages the extrapolation of the results of previous validation research for SIMMER-II based on other SIMBATH tests to reactor case analyses. The calculations by SIMMER-II suggest that further improvements of the model, such as freezing on a convex surface of pin cladding and the scraping of crusts, make possible more accurate simulation of freezing phenomena.