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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.
Kwi-Seok Ha, Hae-Yong Jeong, Chungho Cho, Young-Min Kwon, Yong-Bum Lee, Dohee Hahn
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 134-142
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9358
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As part of the development of a safety analysis methodology for a liquid-metal reactor (LMR) in Korea, the Multidimensional Analysis of Reactor Safety (MARS) code was selected as a system transient safety analysis code. The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute developed the MARS code to analyze safety and thermal-hydraulic phenomena related to a two-phase flow in the transients of water reactors a decade ago. The addition of thermal-hydraulic models related to liquid metal as a coolant and reactivity feedback models associated with the kinetics calculation of an LMR core is required for the application of the MARS to the transients of an LMR design. A table for various properties of liquid sodium, several heat transfer coefficients according to flow regimes and geometries, and the models for a pressure drop due to the wire spacers of the LMR core were newly implemented. The improved MARS code was verified through the analysis of three shutdown heat removal tests (SHRT)-17, -39, and -45 conducted in the Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR)-II reactor. The SHRT-17 test involved a simultaneous loss of electrical power to all pumps and a reactor scram from 100% power and flow. Thus, the test simulated a thermal-hydraulic transition from a forced convection to the totally passive decay heat removal due to a natural circulation. SHRT-39 and SHRT-45 are loss-flow tests without a reactor scram. However, the pump coastdown periods and initial states of the plant are different from each other. Simulated results for the flow rate and temperature for an instrumented subassembly agree well with the experimental data.