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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.
D. Hernández-Arriaga, D. M. Ventura-Ovalle, M. Nieto-Pérez
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 2 | February 2019 | Pages 148-159
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1554390
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Using infrastructure from the old TPM-1 tokamak in Mexico, there is an ongoing project to bring it back into operation, but with important upgrades. One of the main planned improvements will be the substitution of the continuous winding used to generate the toroidal field (TF) with a set of discrete circular coils. The new toroidal magnetic field configuration should also allow stable operation of the machine at plasma currents of up to 50 kA for 30 ms. At this design stage, decisions regarding number and characteristics of the coils and power delivery strategy to them need to be addressed. In the present paper, a study regarding the parameters required for the generation of the adequate TF are presented, including the process for determining number of TF coils, their size and position, the required current pulse for operation, and a potential strategy for generating such pulse based on passive pulse-forming networks.