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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.”
F. S. Becker, K. L. Kompa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 58 | Number 2 | August 1982 | Pages 329-353
Technical Note | Radioisotopes and Isotope | doi.org/10.13182/NT82-A32941
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Today, the most actively pursued uranium laser isotope separation methods work with uranium vapor, organic uranium compounds, or uranium hexafluoride. The atomic vapor process has reached the highest development level, but its commercial realization is facing severe obstacles due to the aggressivity of the uranium vapor and the low working pressure. For a commercial separation plant, UF6 would be the most attractive process gas. A promising approach to overcome the problems caused by the small UF6 isotope shift seems to be the use of two infrared wavelengths in the 16- and 9-μm range. Currently, only the CO2 laser pumped CF4 laser and the stimulated rotational Raman scattering of CO2 laser radiation in para-hydrogen are able to provide the energies required for the selective 16-μm excitation, with the Raman method offering better prospects with regard to scalability and frequency tuning. The state-of-the-art of both of these lasers is not advanced enough for a commercial separation plant, where a narrowing of the complex UF6 spectrum by means of a supersonic beam is probably indispensable. Their development level, however, is sufficient to carry through the experiments necessary to clarify the still unanswered questions, i.e., to what extent and with what yield the absorption differences of the two isotopic UF6 species can be transformed into a selective dissociation.