Merson Booth, 88, a retired nuclear engineer with the old Atomic Energy Commission, died Oct. 26 at his home in Bethesda. He had Parkinson’s disease, his son William Booth said.

Mr. Booth was a 1946 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Early in his naval duty, he was assigned to work on the U.S. nuclear weapons program in Los Alamos, N.M.

In the early 1950s, he was recruited by Adm. Hyman S. Rickover to participate in the early development of the Navy’s first nuclear-powered vessels.

While serving in the Navy, Mr. Booth attended graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving advanced degrees in naval architecture and marine engineering in 1953 and in nuclear engineering in 1955.

He resigned from the Navy as a lieutenant commander in 1958 and joined the Atomic Energy Commission. He worked in reactor development and retired in 1972 as chief of systems.

Merson Booth was born in Minneapolis. He was a member of the Naval Academy’s Class of 1947 but graduated a year early as part of an accelerated wartime program. He was captain of the sailing team at the Naval Academy.

In later years, Mr. Booth sailed a Hinckley Bermuda 40 sailboat on Chesapeake Bay and was a commodore of the Chesapeake Bay Bermuda-40 Association. He was a member of the Gibson Island Club [ see Gibson Island, Maryland ] in Anne Arundel County and River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bethesda.

He volunteered at St. John’s College in Annapolis and completed the course work for a doctorate in philosophy at Georgetown University.

Survivors include his wife of 64 years, Barbara Winter Booth of Bethesda; three children, James Booth of Davis, Calif., Kathryn Johnson and William Booth, both of Bethesda; and seven grandchildren.

FOREWORD

This is the fourth report prepared under the auspices of the Nuclear Safety Information Center, which was established in March 1963 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory under the sponsor- ship of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The Center serves as a focal point for the col- lection, storage, evaluation, and dissemination of information in the following areas:

• Containment of nuclear facilities
• Fission-product release, transport, and removal
• Nuclear instrumentation, control, and safety systems
• Radioactive effluent control monitoring, movement, and dosage 0 Reactor transients, kinetics, and stability
• Meteorological considerations

In addition, the Center prepares the quarterly technical progress review Nuclear Safety and has a reference file stored on magnetic tape for the computer search of safety information and the preparation of a quarterly, indexed bibliography of the nuclear safety literature.

Inquiries concerning the services, capabilities, and operation of the Center should be addressed to:

Wm. B. Cottrell, Director

Nuclear Safety Information Center Oak Ridge National Laboratory

P. 0. Box Y

Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831

The present report was prepared at the request of Merson Booth of the Analysis and Eval- uation Branch of the AEC Division of Reactor Development. The subject is of particular interest, both because of the extensive research and development in the subject area for a number of years in this country and elsewhere - particularly in the United Kingdom - as well as its potential use in reactor safety evaluations. While this active interest makes the report quite timely, it should be recognized that it is, in a sense, a progress report, because new and per- tinent information on the subject is being generated daily. Nevertheless, the authors have attempted to condense, to summarize, and to some extent, to evaluate the present state of knowledge on the behavior of fission-product iodine when it is released into a containment system as a result of a reactor accident. It has not been possible to use or even to refer to all published work on iodine behavior, because of the large mass of the available information. The authors furthermore recognize some bias toward the use of data and references originating in the research and development program at ORNL, but they have tried not to neglect the more pertinent information from other installations.