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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.”
Gary L. Solbrekken, Gerhard H. Schnieders, Jerome Rivers (Univ of Missouri, Columbia), Adrian Tentner, Cezary Bojanowski, Erik Wilson (ANL)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 612-624
A series of experimental and numeric studies are being carried out to support the safety assessment of a new potential low-enriched uranium fuel for high power research and test reactors. A set of experiments designed to provide a database of high-fidelity data was obtained on a curved test plate at the University of Missouri flow loop over velocity sweep ranging from a nominal 2 m/s to a nominal 4.3 m/s. The data suggested that there was a hysteresis over the course of the velocity sweeps that could not be explained by pure mechanical arguments. Temperature measurements of the water flowing through the test section indicated that the circulating pump increased the reservoir temperature by about 7 oC over the course of the 120 minute experiment. Numeric simulations of the thermal expansion suggested that plate deflections on the order of 0.025 mm (1 mil), similar to those seen during the flow experiments, were possible at the leading edge of the test plate. Therefore, it is necessary to correct experimental data for thermal expansion if the temperature of water flowing through the test section does increase.