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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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DNFSB’s Summers ends board tenure, extending agency’s loss of quorum
Lee
Summers
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the independent agency responsible for ensuring that Department of Energy facilities are protective of public health and safety, announced that the board’s acting chairman, Thomas Summers, has concluded his service with the agency, having completed his second term as a board member on October 18.
Summers’ departure leaves Patricia Lee, who joined the DNFSB after being confirmed by the Senate in July 2024, as the board’s only remaining member and acting chair. Lee’s DNFSB board term ends in October 2027.
S. R. Bierman, L. E. Hansen, R. C. Lloyd, E. D. Clayton
Nuclear Technology | Volume 6 | Number 1 | January 1969 | Pages 23-26
Technical Papers and Note | doi.org/10.13182/NT69-A28264
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results and analyses are presented from the latest series of experiments in a continuing program for determining the critical parameters of plutonium mixtures having concentrations that are typical of wet powders, precipitates, slurries, and polymers. The initial series of measurements in this program were made on 15 H/Pu fuel having 240Pu isotopic concentrations of 2.2 and 8.08 wt%. The latest experiments were conducted with fuel having a 240Pu isotopic concentration of 11.46 wt% and a H/Pu atom ratio of 5. Generally, these results indicate that the published values for the critical sizes and masses of plutonium should be increased for the highly concentrated systems. Additional data are needed, however, to better establish the criticality curves in this region. The 11.46 wt% 240Pu isotopic concentration caused an increase of ∼30% in the spherical critical mass of a bare 239Pu-water system at 5 H/Pu. In the reflected system the increase was ∼43%.