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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
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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Latest News
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.
Ricardo Garcia, Cristina Corrales, Mateo Ramos (Tecnatom SA)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 150-157
The Spanish Centralized Interim Storage facility will provide temporary storage for all spent fuel and high-level waste from Spanish nuclear power plants. The most critical process is performed in the hot cell, where the casks of spent fuel are unloaded and encapsulated into canisters. To validate the control system design and the operation of the equipment used in the unloading process, Tecnatom has developed an engineering simulator. The simulator has both the Human Machine Interface (HMI) for the remote operation of the equipment replicating the one of the control systems, as well as a virtual reality environment of the hot cell. A series of functionalities have been introduced to analyze the operation an detect aspects to be improved in the design. Thanks to this, the HMI has been properly redesigned, potential issues of the control system has been early detected, and a better understanding of the system achieved. In addition, the virtual reality environment of the hot cell helps decision-making for other aspects of the design, such as the location of video cameras. Finally, the simulator can be used in the future as a training platform and be the basis of a digital twin of the facility.
