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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
M. Z. Youssef, A. Kumar, M. Abdou, M. Nakagawa, K. Kosako, Y. Oyama, T. Nakamura
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1891-1902
Neutronic | Proceedings of the Ninth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Oak Brook, Illinois, October 7-11, 1990) | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29619
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Effort in Phase IIC of the US/JAERI Collaborative Program on Fusion Neutronics was focused on performing integral experiments and post analyses on blankets that include the actual hetergeneities found in several blanket designs. Two geometrical arrangements were considered, namely multilayers of Li2O and beryllium in an edge-on, horizontally alternating configuration for a front depth of 30 cm, followed by the Li2O breeding zone (Be edge-on, BEO, experiment), and vertical water coolant channels arrangement in which one is placed behind the first wall and two other channels (width of 0.5 cm each) are placed at depths of 10 and 30 cm from the first wall (WCC experiment). The objectives are to experimentally verify the enhancement in tritium production in the first experiment and to examine the accuracy of predicting tritium production and other reaction rates around these heterogeneities in the two experiments. In the BOE system, it was shown that, with the zonal method to measure tritium production from natural lithium (Tn), the calculated-to-measured values (C/E) are 0.95 − 1.05 (JAERI) and 0.98 − 0.9 (U.S.), which is consistent with the results obtained in other Phases of the Program. In the WCC experiment, there is a noticeable change in C/E values for T6 near the coolant channels where steep gradients in T6 production are observed. The C/E values obtained with the Li-foils to measure T6 are better than those obtained by the Li-glass method. As for T7, calculations and measurements by NE213 method are within ± 15% in JAERI's analysis, but larger values (∼ 20–25%) are obtained in the U.S. analysis. Around heterogeneities, the prediction accuracy for T7 is better than that for T6. In both experiments, the prediction accuracy for high-threshold reactions [(e.g. 93Nb(n,2n)] is within ± 10% as obtained by both Monte Carlo and Sn codes, however, it was shown that the 58Ni(n,2n) cross-section of ENDF/B-V should be increased by 25–30% at high incident neutron energies to give better C/E values.