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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.
Koichi Maki, Satoshi Satoh, Hideyuki Takatsu, Yasushi Seki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 27 | Number 2 | March 1995 | Pages 176-182
Technical Paper | Special Section: Pulsed High-Density Systems / Maintenance | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30374
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
According to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) conceptual design activity, after reactor shutdown, damaged segments are pulled up from the reactor and hung from the reactor room ceiling by a remote handling device. The dose rate in the reactor room and the environment is estimated for this situation, and the following results are obtained: First, the dose rate in the room is >108 µSv/h. Since this dose rate is 107 times greater than the biological radiation shielding design limit of 25 µSv/h, workers cannot enter the room. Second, lenses and optical fiber composed of glass that is radiation resistant up to 106 Gy would be damaged after <100 h near the segment, and devices using semiconductors could not work after several hours or so in the aforementioned dose-rate conditions. Third, during suspension of one blanket segment from the ceiling, the dose rate in the site boundary can be reduced by one order by a 23-cm-thicker reactor building roof. To reduce dose rate in public exposure to a value that is less than one-tenth of the public exposure radiation shielding design limit of 100 µSv/yr, the distance of the site boundary from the reactor must be greater than 200 m for a reactor building with a 160-cm-thick concrete roof.