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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.”
Y. J. Chung, S. H. Yang, H. K. Kim, M. K. Chung, K. K. Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 165 | Number 1 | January 2009 | Pages 32-42
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A4060
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experiment on a heat transfer and a natural-circulation performance for an integral-type reactor have been carried out using the VISTA facility, and the calculated results using the TASS/SMR and MARS codes have been compared with the experimental results. The VISTA is an experimental facility that consists of a primary system, a secondary system, and a passive residual heat removal system (PRHRS), to simulate the SMART (SysteM integrated modular Advanced ReacTor) plant. The experimental results show that the fluid is stabilized well in the primary system and the PRHRS under natural-circulation conditions. The TASS/SMR and MARS codes predict the overall characteristics of the natural circulation in the primary system and the PRHRS well. From the calculation results, most of the heat transferred from the primary system is removed at the PRHRS heat exchanger by a condensation heat transfer. Under natural-circulation conditions in the integral reactor, a smoothing function at the transition region between different heat transfer modes will be adopted in the TASS/SMR code and a pressure-loss model needs to be improved on the cross-flow bundle geometry in the MARS code.
