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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.”
Man Gyun Na, Sun Ho Shin, Dong Won Jung
Nuclear Technology | Volume 150 | Number 3 | June 2005 | Pages 293-302
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3623
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Venturi meters are used to measure the feedwater flow rate in most current pressurized water reactors. These meters can decrease the thermal performance of nuclear power plants because the feedwater flow rate can be overmeasured due to their fouling phenomena that make corrosion products caused by long-term operation accumulate in the feedwater flow meters. Therefore, in this paper, a software sensor using a fuzzy inference system is developed in order to increase the thermal efficiency by accurately estimating online the feedwater flow rate. The fuzzy inference system to be used for black-box modeling of the feedwater system is equipped with an automatic design algorithm that automates the selection of the input signals to the fuzzy inference system and its fuzzy rule generation including parameter optimization. The proposed algorithm was verified by using the numerical simulation data of the MARS code for Kori Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 and also the real plant data of Yonggwang Nuclear Power Plant Unit 3. In the simulations using numerical simulation data and real plant data, the relative 2 errors and the relative maximum error are small enough. The proposed method can be applied successfully to validate and monitor the existing feedwater flow meters.