The Third International Conference on Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry (RANC-2023) was held in Budapest, Hungary May 7–12, 2023. We launched this series of conferences in 2016, the second meeting was in 2019, and this third one could be organized a year later than planned. RANC-2023 was a great reunion for colleagues and friends working in the different fields of radioanalytical and nuclear chemistry after the difficult years of the pandemic.

We dedicated the conference and also a memorial session to the founder and honorary Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, Tibor Braun who passed away in September 2022 at the age of 90. The summary of the commemorations can be found after this Foreword in the Special Issue.

We had more than 250 participants from 40 countries, which seems like a substantial participation after the crisis of the lockdown and during the sad times of war (Fig. 1). There were 10 plenary talks, 36 invited talks, 130 contributed talks, and 67 posters presented (Fig. 2). The digital posters proved to be such successful last time, that we repeated the digital sessions now, too. The participants exploited this new medium creatively.

Fig. 1
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The conference photo

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Fig. 2
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Opening

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The conference, as usual, started with the presentation of the Hevesy Medal Award. HMA-2023 has been given to Melissa A. Denecke, whose laudation and her article based on the award presentation can be found in this special issue, as well (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
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Digital poster session

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The topics were similar to those of last times, see them below. The members of the international organizing committee are given in parentheses, many of them helped us also at the earlier RANC conferences. The session topics and their organizers were:

  • Actinide analytical chemistry (Lav Tandon and Angela Olson)

  • Collaborative material exercise (Jon Schwantes)

  • Radioecology and environmental radioactivity (Georg Steinhauser)

  • Nuclear forensics (Stephen LaMont and Zsolt Varga)

  • Advances in radiochemistry supporting the nuclear fuel cycle (David DiPrete)

  • Radiolabeled compounds and radiopharmaceuticals (Bernd Neumayer)

  • Radioanalytical methods of long-lived radionuclides (Xiaolin Hou and Nóra Vajda)

  • Mass spectrometry (Pavel Povinec)

  • Neutron activation analysis (Amares Chatt)

  • Nuclear instrumentation and methodology (Jerzy Mietelski)

  • Prompt gamma activation analysis (László Szetntmiklósi)

  • Production of radionuclides (Ferenc Tárkányi)

  • Radionuclide separation (Susanta Lahiri)

  • Education in radiochemistry (Noémi M. Nagy)

  • Nuclear methods in material structure studies (Zoltán Homonnay)

The social programs included guided walks in the castle district and a boat tour on the Danube which always enjoys a great popularity thanks to the beautiful illuminated buildings along the river, the good food and the good dance music (Fig. 4).

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Waiting for the boat

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In the closing ceremony, we again rewarded our most outstanding reviewers. During the years 2020–2022 they were: Zhirong Liu, Andrei Ivanets, Gulay Bayramoglu, Vladimir Semenishchev, Nataša Todorović, Nóra Vajda, Johannes Ermert, K. A. Venkatesan, Gregory Kennedy, Zeynep Mine Şenol, Yu Tachibana, Fotini Noli, Zsolt Varga, Raghunath Acharya, Mohamed Soliman, Galina Lujaniene, Jerzy W. Mietelski, Dragoslav Nikezić, Mirza Nuhanović, Punam Thakur, Steven Biegalski, Illarion Dovhyi, Truong Hong Loan, Jiří Janda, Norbert Kávási, Maria Ângela Menezes, Michael Simpson, László Szentmiklósi. Colleagues who could not be present received their scrolls per mail. A special reward was given to Georg Steinhauser who contributed the most to JRNC publications with nearly a hundred submissions or reviews during the past ten years. We express our special thanks for their untiring efforts.

In this Special Issue, selected papers of the conference are collected, we hope our readers can get a good overview about RANC-2023 and the developments in radioanalytical and nuclear chemistry.

I would like to thank Csengele Hajdú and the AKCongress team for the professional organization. As always, it has been a great experience to work with them.

We are looking forward to meeting you in Budapest at RANC-2027 in May 2027.

Zsolt Révay.

Munich, May 2024.