ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
August 2025
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.
N. J. McCormick, R. E. Schenter, R. P. Omberg
Nuclear Technology | Volume 29 | Number 2 | May 1976 | Pages 200-208
Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT76-A31579
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Gas tagging consists of adding small amounts of gas with a unique isotopic composition for each assembly to nuclear reactor fuel and control assemblies. During subsequent irradiation, when any pin of an assembly fails, the tag gas released along with other gas from the pin plenum enables location of the defective assembly by a mass spectrometric analysis of a sample of the reactor cover gas. The general procedure presented for the design of a gas tag system has been used to produce three designs for the gas ratios for Cores I through IV of the Fast Flux Test Facility. The designs are compared with and without “age tagging,” the use of information from tag gas burnup to help discriminate between failures of different assemblies. A few comments included on the operation of a gas tag system help ensure that the system will operate within the assumptions made in the design of the gas tag ratios.