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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.”
Roberta Concilio Hansson, Hyun Sun Park, Truc-Nam Dinh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 167 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 223-234
Technical Paper | NURETH-12 / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A8864
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The present study aims to develop a mechanistic understanding of the thermal-hydraulic processes in a vapor explosion, which may occur in nuclear power plants during a hypothetical severe accident, involving interactions of high-temperature corium melt and volatile coolant. Dynamics of the hot liquid (melt) droplet and the volatile liquid (coolant) were investigated in the Micro-Interactions in Steam Explosion Experiments (MISTEE) facility by performing well-controlled, externally triggered, single-droplet experiments, using a high-speed visualization system with synchronized digital cinematography and continuous X-ray radiography, called Simultaneous High-speed Acquisition of X-ray Radiography and Photography (SHARP). After an elaborate image processing, the SHARP images depict the evolution of both melt material (dispersal) and coolant (bubble dynamics) and their microscale interactions. The analysis of the data shows a deficiency in using the bubble dynamics alone to provide a consistent explanation of the energetic behavior. In contrast, the SHARP data reveal a correlation between the droplet's dynamics in the bubble's first cycle and the energetics of the subsequent explosive evaporation in the bubble's second cycle. The finding provides a basis to suggest that a so-called melt-droplet preconditioning, i.e., deformation/prefragmentation of a hot melt droplet immediately following the pressure trigger, is instrumental to the subsequent coolant entrainment, evaporation, and energetics of the resulting vapor explosion.