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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.
Douglas E. Peplow, Thomas M. Evans, John C. Wagner
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 785-792
MC Calculations | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-9
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo is quite useful for calculating specific quantities in complex transport problems. Many variance reduction strategies have been developed that accelerate Monte Carlo calculations for specific tallies. However, when trying to calculate multiple tallies or a mesh tally, users have had to accept different levels of relative uncertainty among the tallies or run separate calculations optimized for each individual tally. To address this limitation, an extension of the Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) method, which is used for difficult source/detector problems, has been developed to optimize several tallies or the cells of a mesh tally simultaneously. The basis for this method is the development of an importance function that represents the importance of particles to the objective of uniform Monte Carlo particle density in the desired tally regions. This method utilizes the results of a forward discrete ordinates solution, which may be based on a quick coarse-mesh calculation, to develop a forward-weighted source for the adjoint calculation. The importance map and the biased source computed from the adjoint flux are then used in the forward Monte Carlo calculation to obtain approximately uniform relative uncertainties for the desired tallies. This extension is called forward-weighted CADIS, or FW-CADIS.