The Department of Energy, under a government-to-government program, hosted the first visit with the Russian Federation to exchange information and technologies for special nuclear material control, accounting, and physical protection at a plutonium storage facility. The Russian specialists toured a storage facility at the Hanford Site near Richland, Washington, and were shown the physical protection and materials control systems that DOE employs to protect excess nuclear materials. Technical discussions included topics associated with protective forces and their operation, perimeter and interior intrusion detection and assessment equipment/systems, vulnerability assessment demonstrations, and the vault monitoring and materials control systems. In October, the Russian Federation hosted a reciprocal visit to the Mayak Enterprise civil plutonium storage facility, previously known as Chelyabinsk-65. The US specialists participated in technical discussions on the protection and control of plutonium and supported an evaluation of safeguards and security at the Mayak storage facility.

A Workshop on the Role of Natural Analogs in Geologic Disposal of High-Level Nuclear Waste was held in San Antonio, Texas on July 22--25, 1991. The proceedings comprise seventeen papers submitted by participants at the workshop. A series of papers addresses the relation of natural analog studies to the regulation, performance assessment, and licensing of a geologic repository. Applications of reasoning by analogy are illustrated in papers on the role of natural analogs in studies of earthquakes, petroleum, and mineral exploration. A summary is provided of a recently completed, internationally coordinated natural analog study at Pocos de Caldas, Brazil. Papers also cover problems and applications of natural analog studies in four technical areas of nuclear waste management-. waste form and waste package, near-field processes and environment, far-field processes and environment, and volcanism and tectonics. Summaries of working group deliberations in these four technical areas provide reviews and proposals for natural analog applications. Individual papers have been cataloged separately.

Rapid feedback control is needed for practical microwave processing of continuous ceramic oxide filaments to regulate the process temperature where the -dielectric properties of the filaments change rapidly with temperature. These dielectric changes can produce large rapid changes in the resonant frequency, the reflectivity, and the power density of the cavity. A broadband traveling wave tube (TWT) amplifier provides a highly versatile process control platform for filament processing. By comparing a RF signal from the cavity to a reference signal from the TWT, phase information can be used in a negative feedback loop to allow the oscillator to track the cavity frequency as it shifts due to the changing dielectric constant in the filaments being heated. By sampling the electric field level in the cavity with a detector, amplitude control can be done to maintain a constant absorbed power in a fiber tow, which is important for controlling the tow heating and temperature. This paper describes the design and testing of feedback controller with mullite rods in a single-mode TE{sub 10n} resonator driven by a commercial TWT.

The folded waveguide (FWG) antenna is an advanced ICRF launcher under development at ORNL that offers many significant advantages over current-strap type antennas. These features are particularly beneficial for reactor-relevant applications such as ITER and TPX. Previous tests of a development folded waveguide with a low density plasma load have shown a factor of 5 increase in power capability over loop antennas into similar plasma conditions. The performance and reliability of a FWG with an actual tokamak plasma load must now be verified for further acceptance of this concept. A 58 MHz, 4 MW folded waveguide is being designed and built for the PBX-M and TFTR tokamaks at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. This design has a square cross-section that can be installed as either a fast wave (FW) or ion-Bernstein wave (IBW) launcher by 90{degree} rotation. Two new features of the design are: a shorter quarter-wavelength resonator configuration and a rear-feed input power coupling loop. Loading calculations with a standard shorting plate indicate that a launched power level of 4 MW is possible on either machine. Mechanical and disruption force analysis indicates that bolted construction will withstand the disruption loads. An experimental program is planned to characterize the plasma loading, …

A major public health concern is the degree to which environmental or occupational exposures to exogenous chemicals result in adverse health effects. Biological markers have the potential for helping to answer this important question by providing links between markers of exposures and markers of early stages of the development of disease. However, that potential requires in-depth, mechanistic research to be fully realized. Biological markers of exposure have been extensively investigated, and mathematical models of the toxicokinetics of agents have been developed to relate exposures to internal doses. The field of clinical medicine has long used clinical signs and symptoms to detect disease. However, the critical area of research needed to improve the application of biomarkers to environmental health research is mechanistic research to link dose to critical tissues to the development of early, pre-clinical signs of developing disease. Only if the mechanism of disease induction is known can one determine the ``biologically effective`` dose and the earliest biological changes leading to disease.

This document, Volume 1, includes papers presented at the 7th International Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal-Hydraulics (NURETH-7) September 10--15, 1995 at Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The following subjects are discussed: Progress in analytical and experimental work on the fundamentals of nuclear thermal-hydraulics, the development of advanced mathematical and numerical methods, and the application of advancements in the field in the development of novel reactor concepts. Also combined issues of thermal-hydraulics and reactor/power-plant safety, core neutronics and/or radiation. Selected papers are indexed separately for inclusion in the Energy Science and Technology Database.