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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.”
Kyoung M. Kang, Michael L. Corradini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 196 | Number 3 | December 2016 | Pages 511-523
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-157
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work proposes a model to explain concrete anisotropic ablation by corium during a molten core–concrete interaction (MCCI). As a result of recent MCCI prototypic material experiments, core-concrete interaction (CCI) tests, and VULCANO tests, one observes that concrete ablation behavior consistently depends on the concrete materials used in the experiments. Specifically, tests with limestone-common-sand (LCS) concrete yielded isotropic concrete ablation, i.e., equal axial and radial concrete erosion. This is in comparison to anisotropic ablation in tests with siliceous (SIL) concrete, where radial ablation was much larger than axial ablation. This was an unexpected result because prior results of many MCCI simulant experiments indicated that nearly isotropic ablation was expected in prototypic material experiments regardless of concrete type. A new phenomenological model is proposed in this work based on a hypothesis that unifies the result of both previous simulant and prototypic material experiments, i.e., heat transfer area enhancement and delayed gas release caused by the presence of unmelted solid aggregate material that enters the molten pool. This model offers a logical and phenomenological explanation concerning anisotropic ablation as well as the capability to simulate anisotropic ablation. This model is implemented into the CORQUENCH code as part of this work. Comparisons of these simulation results obtained with this new model to the CCI experiments for cases with SIL concrete and anisotropic ablation show better agreement with the test data than the existing model.