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Latest News
Task force charts growing interest in civilian maritime nuclear applications
Readers of Nuclear News will have heard of historical applications of civilian maritime nuclear power, like the merchant ship NS Savannah and the USS Sturgis floating power plant. With a few exceptions there has been little action in this area for over 50 years, and there are plenty of reasons and opinions as to why, but over the last few years the dramatic increase in interest from the maritime industry and its stakeholders has been undeniable.
H. T. Bach, T. H. Allen, D. D. Hill, P. T. Martinez, R. B. Schwarz, S. N. Paglieri, J. R. Wermer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 1 | July 2008 | Pages 197-201
Technical Paper | Tritium Measurement | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1795
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Before surplus plutonium pits can be decommissioned and converted into metal oxides to be used as reactor fuels, residual tritium must be reduced to an acceptable level. We have developed two analytical methods involving melting and acid dissolution, combined with liquid scintillation counting as a quantitative and sensitive technique for measuring residual tritium in Pu metal. The detection limit, linearity, and reproducibility of these analytical methods must be validated with a series of metal tritide standards. Since there are no commercially available metal tritide standards, we have developed a technique for their synthesis. The synthesis of these low-level metal tritide standards is accomplished by charging cerium powder with a known amount of tritium to form a master cerium tritide alloy and then by aliquoting from this master alloy and diluting with pure cerium powder to form a series of standards with different tritium concentrations. The major difficulty in synthesizing these standards is that the samples contain extremely low levels of tritium, which span over three decades of concentrations. The synthesis technique and initial data obtained for cerium hydride samples will be presented.