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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.”
R. L. French, L. G. Mooney
Nuclear Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | March 1971 | Pages 348-365
Technical Paper | Radiation | doi.org/10.13182/NT71-A30969
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Techniques were developed for applying the results of Straker’s recent discrete ordinates calculations of neutron transport in an air-over-ground geometry to predict the neutron -radiation environment produced by the detonation of nuclear weapons. Straker’s results include the spatial, energy, and angle distributions of neutrons at the air-ground interface from source neutrons in each of nine source-energy bands emitted from a point isotropic source 50 ft above the ground. The source-energy bands cover the range from 0.0033 to 15.0 MeV. The energy spectrum of the leakage neutrons from a particular weapon may be integrated over corresponding energy bands toob-tain source intensities which are then multiplied by the transport data for corresponding bands and summed over source energy. The results thus obtained are for Straker’s original air density of 1.1 x 10-3 g/cm3, but they may be sealed to other air densities by use of mass equivalent ranges. A satisfactory adjustment to source heights other than the 50-ft height used in the original calculations may be made with the “first-last collision method” if the source-detector separation is as much as 2 or 3 mean-free-paths (∼1000 ft). When folded with leakage spectra for numerous test devices and adjusted to the proper air density and burst height, Straker’s data give neutron-dose spatial distributions generally within 25% of those measured infield tests.