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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.
N. R. Chellew, W. E. Miller, R. W. Kessie, C. C. McPheeters, P. A. Nelson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 21 | Number 2 | February 1974 | Pages 125-132
Technical Paper | Instrument | doi.org/10.13182/NT74-A31368
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Work has been completed to demonstrate the feasibility of a new cladding-failure monitoring technique based on determination of the 135I content of the primary sodium coolant of Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors (LMFBRs). The method was devised to aid in detecting the penetration of fuel element cladding by sodium coolant. The method consists of isolating a small volume of primary sodium, sparging it with an inert gas to strip out dissolved gases which are discarded, further sparging the sample to strip 135mXe produced by 135I decay, and calculating the 135I content of the sodium from the 135mXe content of the second sparge. A sparging monitor was built and tested to determine the time required to sparge dissolved radioxenon (133Xe) from molten sodium. This time varied from ∼1 to 1.5 min, depending on experimental conditions. For the calculated background level of 135I in the primary sodium of Experimental Breeder Reactor II, a counting time of ∼2 min would be required to determine the amount of 135mXe removed by the second sparging to a 1σ counting precision of ±4%. A shorter counting time would be required for higher 135mXe levels that would occur during fuel failure. A system with automatic controls was designed for monitoring 135I in the primary sodium of an LMFBR.