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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.
Zongwei Wang, Qi Wang, Xiaojun Ma, Dangzhong Gao, Xiaoshan He, Jie Meng, Kai Jiang, Yong Hu, Qianqian Gu, Xue Chen, Weichao Tong, Xing Tang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 69-75
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1291045
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An X-ray equivalent absorption technique is developed to determine the doped concentrations of the inertial confinement fusion shells. Doped atoms in the shells are used to increase the opacity for radiation, to improve the absorptive capacity of the shell wall for X-ray, and to restrain the growth of hydromechanics instability. The doped concentrations in the shells are difficult to determine for the relatively thick shell wall and the spatial resolution. A novel model is proposed to determine the doped concentrations by a theory of X-ray equivalent absorption. The advantage of this model is that optical density (D) and the exposure curve [D = Φ(I)] of film plates are not necessary to calculate the doped concentrations. The model is validated with a thickness error of 2% by the polypropylene step wedge, the aluminum step wedge, and the polystyrene sphere. The error of results for doped concentration between this method and the energy-dispersive spectroscopy method is less than 0.1 at. %. The uncertainty also is analyzed and the combined expanded uncertainty is better than 0.2 at. % for the Ge-doped glow discharge polymer shell (k = 2).