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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.”
C. Don Fletcher, Mark A. Bolander
Nuclear Technology | Volume 81 | Number 1 | April 1988 | Pages 52-62
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT88-A34078
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In Westinghouse four-loop pressurized water reactors (PWRs), many long small-diameter instrument tubes are employed to route flux monitoring instrumentation lines from the lower plenum of the reactor vessel to a flux mapping seal table. A recent safety concern is that a seismic event could hypothetically rupture instrument tubes at the seal table, effectively causing a lower plenum small-break loss-of-coolant accident (SBLOCA). Continued cooling of the reactor core during a SBLOCA requires depressurization of the primary coolant system such that emergency core cooling (ECC) injection flow balances the break flow. For a lower plenum SBLOCA, the break remains liquid-covered, thus retarding primary coolant system depressurization. As a result, for continued cooling of the core, the break must be sufficiently small such that ECC flow balances break flow at elevated pressures. This study investigates instrument tube ruptures at the seal table location. Separate effects analyses investigate instrument tube pressure and heat loss, instrument lines remaining within the tubes, and tube nodalization effects. Systems effects analyses evaluate the significance of the safety concern through a best-estimate, single-failure analysis for the Zion-1 PWR.