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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.”
Kwi-Seok Ha, Hae-Yong Jeong, Chungho Cho, Young-Min Kwon, Yong-Bum Lee, Dohee Hahn
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 134-142
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9358
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As part of the development of a safety analysis methodology for a liquid-metal reactor (LMR) in Korea, the Multidimensional Analysis of Reactor Safety (MARS) code was selected as a system transient safety analysis code. The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute developed the MARS code to analyze safety and thermal-hydraulic phenomena related to a two-phase flow in the transients of water reactors a decade ago. The addition of thermal-hydraulic models related to liquid metal as a coolant and reactivity feedback models associated with the kinetics calculation of an LMR core is required for the application of the MARS to the transients of an LMR design. A table for various properties of liquid sodium, several heat transfer coefficients according to flow regimes and geometries, and the models for a pressure drop due to the wire spacers of the LMR core were newly implemented. The improved MARS code was verified through the analysis of three shutdown heat removal tests (SHRT)-17, -39, and -45 conducted in the Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR)-II reactor. The SHRT-17 test involved a simultaneous loss of electrical power to all pumps and a reactor scram from 100% power and flow. Thus, the test simulated a thermal-hydraulic transition from a forced convection to the totally passive decay heat removal due to a natural circulation. SHRT-39 and SHRT-45 are loss-flow tests without a reactor scram. However, the pump coastdown periods and initial states of the plant are different from each other. Simulated results for the flow rate and temperature for an instrumented subassembly agree well with the experimental data.