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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.”
Alexander W. Abboud, Donna P. Guillen (INL), Richard Pokorny (UCT Prague)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 557-571
A computational fluid dynamics model was developed to support the testing of a laboratory-scale waste glass melter. This work focuses on providing an understanding of how the heat flux convected from the melt pool is affected by the forced bubbling and by the foam layer underneath the cold cap formed by reaction gases. Simulations were performed for high-level waste glass simulants with viscosities near the minimum and maximum values that are expected during the Hanford tank waste vitrification campaign. The model resolves the forced convection bubbling in the molten glass and bubbles in the foam that forms beneath the cold cap. The glass with higher viscosity shows the formation of significantly larger bubbles to overcome the higher viscous force. The foaming thickness under the cold cap in higher viscosity cases is cleared less easily than the low viscosity glass case. However, the percentage of foam in contact with the cold cap is decreased at higher viscosity since the higher viscous force tends to prevent direct contact. This trend is reversed when there is no forced convection supplied by the bubblers. The heat fluxes at the bottom of the cold cap are compared for cases with and without forced convection bubbling. As expected, the convective heat flux increases with bubbling, and the average values for heat transfer coefficients from the CFD show reasonable agreement with Nusselt number correlations for flat plates.