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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
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.
C. C. Stone, J. A. Ford, F. E. Tippets, J. S. McDonald, G. Grant, J. L. Epstein
Nuclear Technology | Volume 55 | Number 1 | October 1981 | Pages 60-87
Technical Paper | Materials Performance in Nuclear Steam Generator / Material | doi.org/10.13182/NT81-A32832
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The development of sodium-heated steam generators remains a technical challenge after nearly 30 years of design, development, and testing experience in the U.S. Selection of materials, design configurations, and operating conditions have been pursued with the objective of minimizing costs, improving operating efficiencies, and providing increased assurance that high reliability and positive separation of sodium and water can be maintained throughout the operational life of a commercial reactor facility. The early development and operational history of steam generators included the use of both ferritic and austenitic steels, single and double-wall tube construction, straight tubes and tubes with thermal expansion compensation, and once-through and recirculation type of designs. This early work provided the basis for selection of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Plant (CRBRP) concept in the early 1970s and has since been followed by an active program of steam generator development, with a major effort devoted to determination of material properties as related to structure design and environmental compatibility. A full size CRBRP unit is planned to be tested for verification of the hockey stick design concept. The approach in the U.S. program has gone beyond development, construction, and testing of the CRBRP steam generators to include development of alternate designs for future liquid-metal fast breeder reactor plants. These alternatives include a scaled-up version of the CRBRP hockey stick design, a single-wall helical-coil design, and a doublewall straight-tube design. A program consisting of the design, fabrication, and testing of 70-MW(thermal) prototype models of both the double-wall straight-tube and the single-wall helical-coil concepts is currently under way