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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.
David A. White, Suttichai Assabumrungrat, Ahmad Moheb
Nuclear Technology | Volume 120 | Number 2 | November 1997 | Pages 149-157
Technical Paper | Radioisotopes and Isotope | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35423
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The methodology for the optimization of an electrolytic plant for the production of deuterium is described. The basis of the optimization is to minimize the amount of electricity used in the electrolytic process, and this is assumed to be proportional to the total amount of gas evolution from the plant. Because the plant consists of two sections, i.e., the feed cascade and the reflux cascade, the conditions where the amount of gas evolution in each cascade is minimum were developed separately. The no-entropy condition, where two feed streams fed to a stage must have the same composition, was used in the optimization of the reflux cascade. From the results of the optimization, it was found that the location of the feed inlet to the reflux cascade and the number of stages in the reflux cascade are the major parameters in the optimization and, also, that the number of stages in the feed cascade does not significantly affect the optimum gas evolution results.