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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
J. W. Kim, T. C. W. Wong, F. K. W. Tang, A. Reid
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1427-1430
Detritiation and Isotope Separation | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12699
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For safe and efficient operation of the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station's Tritium Removal Facility (DTRF), it is necessary to track the amount of operational tritium inventory within the DTRF's process systems. Previous methodology that tracks operational tritium inventory is based on performing a tritium mass balance and does not provide an instantaneous way to determine inventory in the DTRF. The estimate of operational tritium inventory using this method is susceptible to increasing cumulative error of approximately ±2.6% per day as the DTRF continues to operate. Current methodology attempts to compensate for this cumulative error by assuming a constant value for operational tritium inventory whenever Mass 5 is detected by mass spectroscopy of tritium drawoff gas. However, this assumption is flawed and introduces significant error to the estimation of operational tritium inventory. A new method based on temperature of the cryogenic high tritium distillation (HTD) process is proposed which can track operational tritium inventory in a more instantaneous fashion and provides a result with a constant error of ±14% that does not increase over time.