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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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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.
Jae Min Kim, Gyumin Lee, Seung Jun Lee (UNIST)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 422-430
Nuclear power plants have abnormal operating procedures to prepare abnormal events occurring. An operator should choose and follow the appropriate procedure according to alarms and plant parameters which indicate the plant state. However, with enormous information, it is sometimes hard for the operators to judge the plant state in a short period of time. In the field, the skilled operators are well trained in the entry conditions of the abnormal operating procedures, so that they can quickly select a procedure that is appropriate to the current situation. Nevertheless, this task has a potential risk for less skilled operators to make mistakes of the judgement, which would result in response time delayed. Therefore, this paper suggests nuclear power plants abnormality diagnosis algorithm to support the judgement. This paper covers two of three steps to develop the diagnosis system; setting the training data production environment by analyzing the abnormal operating procedures and comparison between deep learning algorithms using the convolutional and recurrent neural networks. The abnormal operating data were generated from the nuclear power plant simulator. In addition, to reduce the dimensionality of the data, principal component analysis was used as data preprocessing. The algorithm is expected to reduce work load of the operators by providing selection of the proper procedure in a short time with high accuracy.