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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.”
Kyoung-Ho Kang, Rae-Joon Park, Sang-Baik Kim, Seong-Wan Hong
Nuclear Technology | Volume 167 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 211-222
Technical Paper | NURETH-12 / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A8863
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sustained heating experiments, named Experiments on Late-phase coolant Injection to ASsess the mitigation of focusing effect of metallic layer (ELIAS), were performed to quantify the boiling heat removal rate at the upper surface of a metallic layer for precise evaluations on the effect of a late-phase in-vessel coolant injection. Heat fluxes from the melt layer to the water pool varied from 250 to 550 kW/m2 depending on the surface temperature of the metallic layer. Comparison of boiling heat fluxes between the ELIAS experiments and the calculation using Berenson's film boiling correlation shows that effective heat removal was accomplished via late-phase coolant injection in the ELIAS experiments. In this study, a simple model was developed to evaluate the mitigation of focusing effect in the metallic layer via late-phase coolant injection. The ELIAS experimental data on the heat transfer rate at the upper surface of the metallic layer were used as input data in the simple model. The calculation results for the large-break loss-of-coolant accident in the APR1400 show that the risk induced by the focusing effect is highly dependent on the metallic layer thickness and an enhanced integrity of the reactor pressure vessel could be achieved via late-phase coolant injection during this time period.