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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Remembering ANS member Gil Brown
Brown
The nuclear community is mourning the loss of Gilbert Brown, who passed away on July 11 at the age of 77 following a battle with cancer.
Brown, an American Nuclear Society Fellow and an ANS member for nearly 50 years, joined the faculty at Lowell Technological Institute—now the University of Massachusetts–Lowell—in 1973 and remained there for the rest of his career. He eventually became director of the UMass Lowell nuclear engineering program. After his retirement, he remained an emeritus professor at the university.
Sukesh Aghara, chair of the Nuclear Engineering Department Heads Organization, noted in an email to NEDHO members and others that “Gil was a relentless advocate for nuclear energy and a deeply respected member of our professional community. He was also a kind and generous friend—and one of the reasons I ended up at UMass Lowell. He served the university with great dedication. . . . Within NEDHO, Gil was a steady presence and served for many years as our treasurer. His contributions to nuclear engineering education and to this community will be dearly missed.”
I. Bonnett, A. Busigin, A. Shapiro
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 1 | July 2008 | Pages 209-214
Technical Paper | Waste Handling | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1797
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent increased interest from regulators and the public has led more organizations to consider the environmental impact and safety considerations of tritium handling. Examples include the significance of the tritium isotope separation system on ITER licensing, remediation of ground water from power utilities and government facilities and concerns of high tritium concentrations within operational CANDU reactors.GE Healthcare, formerly Amersham plc, has been producing tritium-labelled chemicals since the late 1940s. GE's manufacturing site located near Cardiff, UK has installed a tritium waste treatment and enrichment facility to radically reduce tritium discharges to the environment. This facility employs a continuous processing plant that recovers tritium from a complex mixture of tritiated organic and aqueous waste compounds. Two isotope separation techniques are used to achieve a final pure tritium product, which is used in the manufacturing of labelled compounds.Building upon this experience, together with Special Separations Applications Inc. (SSAI), GE has developed a large-scale diffusion-based isotope separation process as an alternative to conventional cryogenic distillation. Having a tritium inventory an order of magnitude lower than conventional cryogenic distillation, this process is attractive for heavy water detritiation, applicable to single and multi-unit CANDU reactors and research reactors as well as fusion applications. Additionally, the new process has advantages of being cryogen-free, less complex, simple to operate and having improved conventional and radiological safety.