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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.”
Robert E. Einziger, Sharon D. Atkin, David E. Stellrecht, V. Pasupathi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 57 | Number 1 | April 1982 | Pages 65-80
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT82-A16187
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Postirradiation studies on failure mechanisms of well-characterized pressurized water reactor rods were conducted for up to a year at 482, 510, and 571°C in limited air and inert gas atmospheres. No cladding breaches occurred even though the tests operated many orders of magnitude longer in time than the lifetime predicted by Blackburn’s analyses. The extended lifetime is due to significant creep strain of the Zircaloy cladding, which decreases the internal rod pressure. The cladding creep also contributes to radial cracks, through the external oxide and internal fuel-cladding chemical interaction layers, which propagated into and arrested in an oxygen stabilized alpha-Zircaloy layer. There were no signs of either additional cladding hydriding, stress corrosion cracking, or fuel pellet degradation. If irradiation hardening does not reduce the stress rupture properties of Zircaloy, a conservative maximum storage temperature of 400°C based on a stress-rupture mechanism is recommended to ensure a 1000-yr cladding lifetime.
