Radioactive metal waste makes up a significant portion of the waste currently being sent for disposal. Recovery of this metal as a valuable resource is possible through the use of decontamination technologies. Through the development and use of expert systems a comparison can be made of laser decontamination, a technology currently under development at Ames Laboratory, with currently available decontamination technologies for applicability to the types of metal waste being generated and the effectiveness of these versus simply disposing of the waste. These technologies can be technically and economically evaluated by the use of expert systems techniques to provide a waste management decision making tool that generates, given an identified metal waste, waste management recommendations. The user enters waste characteristic information as input and the system then recommends decontamination technologies, determines residual contamination levels and possible waste management strategies, carries out a cost analysis and then ranks, according to cost, the possibilities for management of the waste. The expert system was developed using information from literature and personnel experienced in the use of decontamination technologies and requires validation by human experts and assignment of confidence factors to the knowledge represented within.

Using new experimental techniques, the spectra of $gamma$-rays from the capture of neutrons by $sup 181$Ta were measured at the Livermore 100-MeV linac for neutrons from 2 eV to 9 x 10$sup 4$ eV with a (Ge(Li)-NaI) three-crystal spectrometer. Individual primary $gamma$-ray lines were resolved to 1778-keV excitation in $sup 182$Ta. Neutron resonances were resolved to 200-eV neutron energy. Data analysis techniques and codes were developed to extract positions and intensities of resolved transitions from the large data matrices accumulated in this experiment. Techniques were developed to unfold the unresolved $gamma$- ray spectra using the simple response of the three-crystal spectrometer. The resolved transition data were used to place 110 states with spin and parity assignments in the $sup 182$Ta level diagram below 1780-keV excitation. A set of 1240 E1 transition strengths were analyzed to extract 1.38 +- 0.11 degrees of freedom for the most likely chisquared fit to the distribution of widths. The E1 strength function was extracted for E/sub gamma/ = 4 to 6 MeV and compared with previous results. The $gamma$-ray spectra for E/sub gamma/ = 1.5 to 6.1 MeV were unfolded for neutron energy groups between 20 and 9 x 10$sup 4$ eV. Below 5-MeV $gamma$-ray …