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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.
Tatsuya Sakurahara, Zahra Mohaghegh, Seyed Reihani, Ernie Kee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 3 | December 2018 | Pages 354-377
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1486159
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nearly half of the U.S. nuclear power plants (NPPs) are in the process of transitioning, or have already transitioned, to a risk-informed, performance-based fire protection program. For this transition, Fire Probabilistic Risk Assessment (Fire PRA) is used as a foundation for fire risk evaluation. To increase realism in Fire PRA by reducing conservative bias, the authors have developed an Integrated Probabilistic Risk Assessment (I-PRA) methodological framework that does not require major changes to the existing plant Probabilistic Risk Assessments (PRAs). The underlying failure mechanism models associated with fire events are developed in a separate module, which can be interfaced and connected to the existing plant PRA. This paper explains the areas of methodological advancements in I-PRA, comparing them with the existing Fire PRA of NPPs. This comparison is further demonstrated in a realistic case study that applies the I-PRA framework to a critical fire-induced scenario at an NPP. The core damage frequency (CDF) for the selected scenario, computed by the I-PRA framework, is compared with the results of the Full Compartment Burn screening method and the existing Fire PRA methodology. Using the I-PRA framework, the CDF for the selected scenario has decreased by a factor of 20 compared with the Full Compartment Burn screening approach and by a factor of 2 compared to the existing Fire PRA methodology based on NUREG/CR-6850 and the subsequent NUREGs that have updated the data and methods for individual steps.