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Remembering Joseph M. Hendrie
Joseph M. Hendrie
To those of us who knew Joe, even prior to his appointment as chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it is an understatement to say that he was a larger-than-life member of the nuclear science and technology enterprise. He was best known to the broader community for two major accomplishments: the design and construction of the High Flux Beam Reactor (HFBR) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the creation of the standard review plan (SRP) for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
In addition to the products of these endeavors becoming major fundaments to their respective communities, they were uniquely Joe. The safety analysis report for the HFBR was written essentially single-handedly by him. This was true of the SRP as well, which became the key safety review document for the NRC as it performed safety reviews for the growing number of power reactor applications in the United States. His deep technical knowledge of nuclear engineering and his extraordinary management skills made this possible.
A. dos Santos, H. Pasqualeto, L. C. C. B. Fanaro, R. Fuga, R. Jerez
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 133 | Number 3 | November 1999 | Pages 314-326
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2091
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new experimental quantity is presented to serve as a benchmark to verify the adequacy of the newly released 235U thermal and subthermal cross sections for the determination of the reactivity coefficients of light water reactors. Such a quantity is denominated the inversion point, and by definition it is the temperature for which the isothermal reactivity coefficient of a reactor system becomes positive. The experimental bases for its determination are discussed. The experiment has been performed in the IPEN/MB-01 reactor facility. Instead of heating the reactor system as usual in experiments considering temperature variations, the reactor system is cooled to ~8.5°C. By means of a heating/cooling system, the temperature is allowed to increase slowly in a stepwise manner. For each step, the control bank critical position is recorded, and by analyzing its behavior as a function of temperature, the inversion point is inferred. The inversion point has been found to be an adequate experimental quantity to validate the thermal and subthermal 235U cross section because it does not require any sort of calculated correction factors or any quantity that comes either from the calculational methodologies or from another experiment. In addition, the inversion point is an experimental quantity that can be measured with an excellent level of accuracy due mainly to the very precise characteristics of the control bank system of the IPEN/ MB-01 reactor. The final value obtained for the IPEN/MB-01 reactor is 14.99 ± 0.15°C.