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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
The Frisch-Peierls memorandum: A seminal document of nuclear history
The Manhattan Project is usually considered to have been initiated with Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in October 1939. However, a lesser-known document that was just as impactful on wartime nuclear history was the so-called Frisch-Peierls memorandum. Prepared by two refugee physicists at the University of Birmingham in Britain in early 1940, this manuscript was the first technical description of nuclear weapons and their military, strategic, and ethical implications to reach high-level government officials on either side of the Atlantic. The memorandum triggered the initiation of the British wartime nuclear program, which later merged with the Manhattan Engineer District.
Lane Carlson, Mark Tillack, Farrokh Najmabadi, Charles Kessel
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 459-463
Power Plant, Demo, and FNSF | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST60-459
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A graphical user interface (GUI) is being developed by the ARIES team to visually display large amounts of system parameter data relevant to tokamak power plants. The objective of the Visual ARIES Systems Scanning Tool (VASST) is to harness the scanning power of the new systems code by filtering the tremendous amount of data and displaying it in an interactive and exploratory manner. The goal of the software tool is to better understand the tradeoffs between design parameters and to gain insight into parametric trends.Progress has been made in creating a GUI that allows the user to intuitively and interactively create color-coded plots using any of the parameters within the database. Among other features, a user-input constraint allows the user to limit the parameter space to include/exclude certain ranges of data that are of interest.VASST is being utilized in conjunction with system analysis scans for the ARIES studies reviewing aggressive and conservative physics and technology assumptions to help define tokamak power plants.