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.
Hideaki Asaka, Yutaka Kukita, Taisuke Yonomoto, Kanji Tasaka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 96 | Number 2 | November 1991 | Pages 202-214
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34606
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Three 0.5% hot-leg small-break loss-of-coolant accident experiments are conducted at the ROSA-IV Large-Scale Test Facility (LSTF), a volumetrically scaled full-height model of a pressurized water reactor. Three experiments simulate breaks located at the side, bottom, and top of the horizontal hot-leg piping to investigate the effects of break orientation on system thermal-hydraulic responses. Although the overall system responses in the three experiments are qualitatively the same, the break flow rate is affected significantly by the break orientation for most of the time preceding the initiation of core uncovering: The break flow rate is largest for the bottom break and smallest for the top break. The RELAP5/MOD2 code fails to predict the differences in break flow rate observed in the experiments. However, several modifications, based on separate-effect experiments, made particularly to the break flow calculation models enable this code to simulate the experimental results well.