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Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Thomas E. Blue
Nuclear Technology | Volume 82 | Number 3 | September 1988 | Pages 304-310
Technical Paper | Radioisotopes and Isotope Separation | doi.org/10.13182/NT88-A34131
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An accelerator-based 145Sm production method is described. A target of a natural samarium compound, for example, Sm2O3, is bombarded with protons in the 70-MeV energy range. The resulting nuclear reactions produce 145Eu as well as other europium isotopes that are chemically separated from the samarium target. If this separation is performed more than 15 min following the irradiation, then only 145Eu and europium isotopes with half-lives longer than the halflife of 145Eu remain in the europium fraction. Following the first separation, the separated europium undergoes radioactive decay until most of the 145Eu in the europium fraction has decayed into 145Sm. Then, a second chemical separation is performed in which the 145Sm is removed from the long-lived europium radioactivities that accompanied the 145Eu in the first separation. The result of the two chemical separations is a high-specific-activity 145Sm product with contaminations from europium radioactivities that depend on the efficiencies of the separations and the time of their performance. The 145Sm yield and purity for this production method for a high-current accelerator are compared with the yield and purity of 145Sm from a reactor-based production method for a high-flux reactor. The yield of 145Sm/day for the accelerator-based production method exceeds the yield per day for the reactor-based production method for reactor targets less than ∼1 g. For modest ratios of europium-to-samarium separation efficiencies for the first separation (∼10), the specific activity of the accelerator-produced 145Sm exceeds the specific activity of the reactor-produced 145Sm for reactor irradiation times <2 days. However, the activity of the 145Sm contaminants is larger for the accelerator-produced 145Sm than for the reactor-produced 145Sm, unless the ratio of europiumto-samarium separation efficiencies for the second separation is greater than ∼5000.
