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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.”
Henry Makowitz, James R. Powell, Richard Wiswall
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 78 | Number 4 | August 1981 | Pages 395-404
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE81-A21374
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new concept for the transmutation of fission products and transuranics is studied. This concept, termed HYPERFUSE, allows one inertial reactor to transmute objectionable fission products (137Cs and 90Sr) from a large number (e.g., ∼30) of light water fission reactors, while at the same time generating electric power from the HYPERFUSE plant at a reasonable net plant efficiency (e.g., ∼30%). The cost of transmutation should be relatively low compared to other fission waste transmutation concepts due to the high support rate (number of fission reactors per HYPERFUSE reactor) and the effective generation of power by the HYPERFUSE reactor. Although the HYPERFUSE concept offers the possibility of a very effective means for waste transmutation and significant reductions in both high-integrity waste storage (burial) time and long-term risk potential, hazards will be introduced by such a system due to chemical processing and handling of radioactive materials in the recovery, partitioning, and fabrication stages as well as process and accidental losses. Such process risks need to be quantified for both conventional and advanced, chemical, and isotopic separation methods in order to evaluate the overall advantages and disadvantages of such a system. A system such as HYPERFUSE, however, leads to a quantifiable set of near-term risks for the nuclear waste problem, and a possibility of the elimination of a need for long-term nuclear waste disposal over a time scale of 106 years.
