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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
DOE announces NEPA exclusion for advanced reactors
The Department of Energy has announced that it is establishing a categorical exclusion for the application of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures to the authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors.
According to the DOE, this significant change, which goes into effect today, “is based on the experience of DOE and other federal agencies, current technologies, regulatory requirements, and accepted industry practice.”
Krystyna Cedzynska, Fritz G. Will
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 22 | Number 1 | August 1992 | Pages 156-159
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A30065
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A closed-system procedure for the analysis of tritium in palladium has been developed that has a sensitivity and accuracy of 5 × 107 tritium atoms, corresponding to one tritium atom per 1013 palladium atoms for a typical 0.1-g palladium sample. The technique involves palladium dissolution in acid, distillation of the tritiated water, and catalytic oxidation of tritium gas to tritiated water, followed by liquid scintillation counting. This technique is not subject to false tritium findings from a variety of chemical factors or environmental influences that may affect the results of open-system analytical procedures. The closed-system procedure has been applied to nearly 100 as-manufactured palladium wire samples of various lots and sizes from two different sources. None of these samples show any tritium contamination within the detection limit of 5 × 107 tritium atoms. By comparison, others, employing an open-system procedure, have reported tritium contamination in as-manufactured palladium 10000 times larger than the values obtained by this closed system method.