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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.”
R. E. Moore, J. H. Shaffer, C. F. Baes, Jr., H. F. McDuffie, C. E. L. Bamberger
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 17 | Number 2 | October 1963 | Pages 268-273
Solvent Extraction Chemistry Symposium. Part II. | doi.org/10.13182/NSE63-A28889
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A solvent extraction process for the purification of beryllium has been described previously in which ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid (EDTA) is used as a masking or sequestering agent to retain metallic impurities in an aqueous phase from which the beryllium is extracted into an organic phase (CCl4) as a complex with acetylacetone (HX). Subsequent back extraction of the beryllium into nitric acid, followed by the precipitation of beryllium hydroxide, filtering, drying, and calcination to 1000°C, has given BeO products of high purity. Approximately 1300 gm of BeO have been prepared in 23 batches. The average impurity content of these batches (based on BeO) has been very low—less than 10 ppm each of Ca, Al, and Si; less than 5 ppm each of Fe, Mg, and Cu; all other metallic impurities were below the level of detection by the spectrographic method of analysis. The maximum impurity contents for individual metallic species among all these batches were, in ppm BeO, Al-9, Ca-10, Cu-13, Mg-5, Fe-10, Si-11; these are considered to reflect the difficulty of keeping small batches free from contamination by dusty air and should not occur in larger operations. A quantitative treatment of the extraction equilibria and masking equilibria involved in the process has been undertaken. Spectrophotometric analytic techniques recently applied to the simultaneous determination of acetylacetone and its beryllium complex have greatly facilitated this study; radioactive beryllium-7 has been used as a tracer to make possible the rapid determination of distribution coefficients. The results have generally been as expected; the formation constants for the mono- and di-acetylacetonates of beryllium were calculated (at I = 0.10) to be: Anomalously high distribution coefficients were noted under conditions associated with the presence of high concentrations of NaCl, and even the disodium salt of EDTA, in the aqueous phase. The significance of the anomalous conditions is discussed in terms of water activity and the degree of hydration of the acetylacetone complex of beryllium.
