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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 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!
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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.
Hitesh Rajput, Tanmoy Som, Soumitra Kar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 2 | November 2015 | Pages 125-132
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-154
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel used in nuclear reactors contains fissile material. The fission process releases a huge amount of energy, and hence, the fissioning components must be held in a robust form capable of enduring high operating temperatures and an intense radiation environment. The shape and integrity of the fuel structures must be maintained over a period of several years within the reactor core to prevent the leakage of fission products into the reactor coolant. Further, the fuel rods must be in a nondistorted state for proper alignment in the fuel assembly to ensure proper fuel bundle power distribution. Improper core power distribution can breach the safety and operational limits on fuel and channel powers. The strategy discussed includes the methodology to verify the fuel assembly using image processing techniques. The methodology uses the Radon transform and contains four phases: image reading, preprocessing, Radon transform, and verification. The approach has been validated on 1026 fuel assemblies of a nuclear power plant, for which experimental results are shown.