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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.
G. Pantis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 3 | Number 3 | May 1983 | Pages 498-505
Technical Paper | Economic | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A20872
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We investigated the power capabilities and the economic performance of a semicatalyzed-deuterium hybrid reactor with a fissionable blanket fueling a D-3He field-reversed mirror satellite. The hybrid reactor consists of five cells each producing 15-MW fusion power by a total injection of 29 MW of 160-keV deuterium. With a blanket multiplication of four, it supplies a net electric output power of 61 MW, corresponding to an economic figure-of-merit (FOM) of roughly 1800 dollar/kW(electric), which compares favorably with conventional fission reactors. The D-3He satellite is a single-cell reactor of 1 0-MW net electric power, showing a rather high economic FOM of ∼4300 dollar/kW(electric), giving an average economic FOM of ∼2200 dollar/kW(electric) for the combined system.
