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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.”
Abdelfatah Abdelmaksoud, Said Haggag, Magdy M. Zaky, Moussa Osman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 9 | September 2022 | Pages 1471-1483
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2035644
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the present study, an analysis of a hypothetical complete loss-of-coolant accident in a typical open-pool research reactor is conducted. The reactor core is assumed to be completely uncovered and exposed to the ambient air. The possibility of passively cooling the decay heat of the exposed reactor core by natural convection to air and thermal radiation until core reflooding is investigated. A three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics analysis is conducted for the uncovered core while cooled by air natural convection and thermal radiation. The reactor core is simulated as a porous zone with decay heat generation specified as a cosine-shape distribution. The reactor core decay heat acts as a driving force for the coolant flow from the cold leg to the hot leg. The thermal equilibrium porous media model is used to represent the energy equation inside the core region. This study is conducted for core uncover time (the time interval between reactor shutdown and the moment when the reactor core is drained of water) of 10E3, 10E4, 10E5, 10E6, 10E7, and 10E8 s. Contour plots of temperature, velocity, density, and pressure at different values of core uncover time are illustrated. It’s found that for core uncover times of 10E3, and 10E4 s, the maximum core temperature exceeds the cladding melting point. The core maximum temperature is well below the melting point for uncover times of 10E5, 10E6, 10E7, and 10E8 s.