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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.
B. R. Christensen, A. R. Raffray, M. S. Tillack
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1180-1186
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A847
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During injection, inertial fusion energy (IFE) direct drive targets are subjected to heating from energy exchange with the background gas and radiation from the reactor wall. This thermal loading could cause phase change (vaporization and/or melting) of the deuterium-tritium (DT). In the past, it was assumed that any phase change would result in a violation of the stringent smoothness and symmetry requirements imposed on the target. This work summarizes the results from a one-dimensional finite difference model that was created to simulate the coupled thermal and mechanical response of a direct drive target to an imposed heat flux.The objective of this work is to investigate methods of increasing the thermal robustness of targets.