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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Trinity Test at 80: American Nuclear Society CEO Craig Piercy reflects on the Manhattan Project
By Craig H. Piercy, CEO and Executive Director of the American Nuclear Society
Eighty years ago today, at exactly 5:29:45 a.m. local time* on July 16, 1945, the United States Army detonated the world’s first nuclear bomb in the Jornada del Muerto desert of southern New Mexico. The searing flash and thunderous shockwave marked the culmination of the Manhattan Project, a secret, three-year national effort to harness nuclear fission and hasten the end of the Second World War.
The Trinity test, overseen by Manhattan Project director Major General Leslie Groves and Los Alamos Laboratory director Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, was the final act of that race to build the atomic bomb. Hoisted atop a 100-foot steel tower, the plutonium implosion device, known as the Gadget, unleashed a blast equal to 21,000 tons of TNT and temperatures hotter than the center of the Sun.
From ten miles away, observers wearing darkened welder goggles, looked on in stunned silence. “We knew the world would not be the same,” recalled Oppenheimer.
R. Harjula, J. Lehto, A. Paajanen, L. Brodkin, E. Tusa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 137 | Number 2 | February 2001 | Pages 206-214
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2186
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A transition metal hexacyanoferrate product CsTreat has been utilized at industrial scale for radioactive cesium separation at several nuclear power plants (NPPs) in several countries. A granular hexacyanoferrate ion exchanger has been used in packed-bed column mode operations for the removal of cesium from a variety of wastewater types. CsTreat beds have successfully purified both high-salt evaporator concentrates and dilute floor drain waters at NPPs in Finland and the United States. Furthermore, medium-active reprocessing solutions, containing high concentrations of sodium nitrate, have been decontaminated by a CsTreat bed at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. These solutions are described as are other industrial applications of this ion exchange material, which, of all the commercial materials, has been shown to be the most selective exchanger for cesium. In addition, some prospective fields of hexacyanoferrate utilization, such as the use of CsTreat powder in a precoat filtration system, are discussed.