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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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New coolants, new fuels: A new generation of university reactors
Here’s an easy way to make aging U.S. power reactors look relatively youthful: Compare them (average age: 43) with the nation’s university research reactors. The 25 operating today have been licensed for an average of about 58 years.
M. V. Ramaniah, H. C. Jain, S. K. Aggarwal, S. A. Chitambar, V. D. Kavimandan, A. I. Almaula, P. M. Shah, A. R. Parab, V. L. Sant
Nuclear Technology | Volume 49 | Number 1 | June 1980 | Pages 121-128
Technical Paper | Nuclear Power Reactor Safety / Chemical Processing | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A32513
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Isotope Dilution Alpha Spectrometry (IDAS) and Reverse Isotope Dilution Alpha Spectrometry (RIDAS) have been developed for determining the concentration of plutonium in the irradiated fuel dissolver solution. The method exploits 238Pu in IDAS and 239Pu in R-IDAS as a spike and provides an alternative method in the event of nonavailability of 242Pu, which is required in Isotope Dilution Mass Spectrometry (IDMS). Depending upon the burnup of the fuel, 238Pu or 239Pu is used as a spike to change the 238Pu/(239Pu + 240Pu) alpha activity ratio in the sample by a factor of 10. This change is determined by alpha spectrometry on electro-deposited sources using a solid-state silicon surface barrier detector coupled to a multichannel analyzer. The validity of a simple method based on the geometric progression decrease for the far tail of the spectrum to correct for the tail contribution of 238Pu (5.50-MeV) peak to the low energy 239Pu + 240Pu (5.17-MeV) peak is established. Results for the plutonium concentration on different irradiated fuel dissolver solutions with burnup ranging from 1000 to 100 000 MWd/tU are presented and compared with those obtained by IDMS. The values obtained by IDAS or R-IDAS and IDMS agree to within 0.5%.
