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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.
I.R. Lindemuth, R. C. Kirkpatrick
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 4 | December 1991 | Pages 829-833
Inertial Confinement Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A11946944
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the third International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems [1], we presented computational results which suggested that “breakeven” experiments in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) may be possible with existing driver technology. Our computations used a simple zero-dimensional model to survey the parameter space available for magnetized fuel. The survey predicted the existence of a totally new region in parameter space where significant thermonuclear fuel burn-up can occur. The new region is quite remote from “conventional” parameter space and is characterized by very low fuel densities, very low implosion velocities, and, most importantly, driver requirements reduced by orders of magnitude [2]. Whereas our initial computations considered only the yield from a hot, magnetized central fuel, we have extended our simple model to include a “cold fuel” layer. In the same spirit as our earlier work, our extended model is intended to provide a starting point for more comprehensive investigations. Our extended model predicts that it is possible to obtain a large cold fuel burn-up fraction, leading to very high gain, and once again, the optimum parameter space is quite remote from that of conventional high gain targets. Although conventional drivers optimized for conventional targets are probably not optimum for magnetized fuel at its extremes, there is a continuum between the conventional parameter space and the new parameter space, suggesting a possible role for conventional drivers. However, it would appear that magnetized fuel warrants a complete rethinking of the entire driver/target configuration.