ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
A. Trivedi, R.B. Richardson, D. Galeriu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 3 | October 1995 | Pages 982-987
Tritium Safety | Proceedings of the Fifth Topical Meeting on Tritium Technology in Fission, Fusion, and Isotopic Applications Belgirate, Italy May 28-June 3, 1995 | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30533
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritiated watero (HTO) represents the mosl important occupational and environmental exposures to tritium, as far as radiation protection is concerned We have studied the dynamics of HTO and organically bound tritium* (OBT) in urine, feces and blood from male workers at 100–300 d following an acute intake of HTO. Blood and cumulative 24 h urine and fecal samples were collected and analyzed for HTO and OBT. The activity concentrations oi HTO in urine and HTO in feces were in equilibrium and were representative of HTO in the body water (HTO in blood). The ratio of bound tritium per gram hydrogen (Bq·H−1) in organic matter in feces (OBTfeces) to urine (OBTurine) was 1.0 ± 0.1. Similarly, the ratios of OBTblood to OBTurine and OBTblood to OBTfeces were 0.9 ± 0.2 and 1.1 ± 0.2, respectively. These results suggest that, providing an equilibrium condition exists, a measurement of the tritium activity per unit mass of organic matter in urine or feces can provide an assessment of the specific activity of tritium in the organic fraction ol the soft tissue. The activity concentrations of HTO and OBT in urine samples, from a few days up to 300 d post-exposure, were examined for the clearance kinetics of HTO in urine and OBT in urine. The early presence of OBT in urine indicated that a portion of tritium from the ingested HTO is rapidly fixed into organic constituents of the body. The half-life for the longer-term component of OBT in urine is comparable to the half-life for the longer-term component of HTO in urine. This close relationship between the longer-term excretion of HTO in urine and OBT in urine suggests that most of the HTO produced in its longer-term component is a by-product of metabolized OBT. This work has demonstrated that OBT is excreted in urine in all examinations, up to 300 d post-exposure to HTO, and that a fraction of the metabolized OBT is also excreted in feces.
