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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.
John S. Hendricks, Brian J. Quiter
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 150-161
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-17
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The angular distribution of scattered photons is incorrect in MCNPX and MCNP5 because the incoherent and coherent form factors are obsolete. The obsolete data affect all photon transport problems with E > 74 keV. Elastic backscatter for E > 105 keV is completely missing. Consequently, a new ACE-format photoatomic data library, tentatively named MCPLIB05 and referred to herein as MCPLIB05T, has been developed for MCNP/X. Data in MCPLIB05T other than form factors are identical to that in its predecessor photoatomic library, MCPLIB04. The new form factor data in MCPLIB05T come directly from ENDF/B-VII (rev. 0) and are in a format incompatible with older versions of MCNP/X. Consequently, a new version of MCNP/X has been developed to identify and use the new MCPLIB05T data and yet retain backward compatibility, including tracking, when MCPLIB04 is used. The NJOY nuclear data processing system is undergoing development to enable future generations of photoatomic data libraries with modern form factor data in the new format.
