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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
Standards Program
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
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%.
