Highlights of the Chemical Technology (CMT) Division's activities during 1989 are presented. In this period, CMT conducted research and development in the following areas: (1) electrochemical technology, including high-performance batteries (mainly lithium/iron sulfide and sodium/metal chloride), aqueous batteries (lead-acid and nickel/iron), and advanced fuel cells with molten carbonate and solid oxide electrolytes; (2) coal utilization, including the heat and seed recovery technology for coal-fired magnetohydrodynamics plants and the technology for fluidized-bed combustion; (3) method, for recovery of energy from municipal waste and techniques for treatment of hazardous organic waste; (4) nuclear technology related to a process for separating and recovering transuranic elements from nuclear waste and for producing 99Mo from low-enriched uranium targets, the recovery processes for discharged fuel and the uranium blanket in a sodium-cooled fast reactor (the Integral Fast Reactor), and waste management; and (5) physical chemistry of selected materials in environments simulating those of fission and fusion energy systems.

This manual was designed to provide complete documentation for the computer system used by the EBR-II Fuels and Materials Department, Argonne National Laboratory-West (ANL-W) for accountability of special nuclear materials (SNM). This document includes background information on the operation of the Fuel Manufacturing Facility (FMF), instructions on computer operations in correlation with production and a detailed manual for PC-DYMAC operation.

A conference at Argonne National Laboratory for executives and technical personnel in small and medium-size manufacturing companies summarized how materials evaluation and inspection by nondestructive methods are changing and broadening. The application of these rapidly emerging techniques in maintaining and improving the quality and competitiveness of manufactured products was stressed. Individual papers have been cataloged separately.

Progress report of the Argonne National Laboratory's Nuclear Technology Programs, including R&D in three areas: applied physical chemistry, separation science and technology, and nuclear waste management.

Progress report of the Argonne National Laboratory's Nuclear Technology Programs, including R&D in three areas: applied physical chemistry, separation science and technology, and nuclear waste management.

A strategy for the experimental validation of waste package performance assessment has been developed as part of a program supported by the Repository Technology Program. The strategy was developed by reviewing the results of laboratory analog experiments, in-situ tests, repository simulation tests, and material interaction tests. As a result of the review, a listing of dependent and independent variables that influence the ingress of water into the near-field environment, the reaction between water and the waste form, and the transport of radionuclides from the near-field environment was developed. The variables necessary to incorporate into an experimental validation strategy were chosen by identifying those which had the greatest effect of each of the three major events, i.e., groundwater ingress, waste package reactions, and radionuclide transport. The methodology to perform validation experiments was examined by utilizing an existing laboratory analog approach developed for unsaturated testing of glass waste forms.

A comprehensive set of elementary functions has been implemented portably in Ada. The high accuracy of the implementation has been confirmed by rigorous analysis. Moreover, we present new test methods that are efficient and offer a high resolution of 0.005 unit in the last place. These test methods have been implemented portably here and confirm the accuracy of our implemented functions. Reports on the accuracy of other function libraries obtained by our test programs are also presented.

OTTER (Organized Techniques for Theorem-proving and Effective Research) is a resolution-style theorem-proving program for first-order logic with equality. OTTER includes the inference rules binary resolution, hyperresolution, URresolution, and binary paramodulation. Some of its other abilities are conversion from first-order formulas to clauses, forward and back subsumption, factoring, weighting, answer literals, term ordering, forward and back demodulation, evaluable functions and predicates, and Knuth-Bendix completion. OTTER is coded in C, it is free, and it is portable to many different kinds of computers.

On August 6--10, 1990, Argonne National Laboratory hosted a Theory Institute in Automated Reasoning. The institute was organized by the Mathematics and Computer Science Division and was supported by special funding from Argonne's Physical Research Program Administration. The focus of the Institute was on the obstacles confronting the effective automation of reasoning. The objective was to lay the groundwork for formulating a theory governing the interrelationship of representation, inference rule, and strategy. Here we summarize the activities that took place during the week-long Institute. We also present an evaluation of the progress achieved-progress that includes the solution of challenge questions, the increasing use of both our database of problems and our automated reasoning program OTTER, and the discovery of new used for OTTER.

This paper is the final report on DOE-OSS Task ANLE88002 Fast Air Chamber Calorimetry.'' The task objective was to design, construct, and test an isothermal air chamber calorimeter for plutonium assay of bulk samples that would meet the following requirements for sample power measurement: average sample measurement time less than 20 minutes. Measurement of samples with power output up to 10 W. Precision of better than 1% RSD for sample power greater than 1 W. Precision better than 0.010 watt SD, for sample power less than 1 W. This report gives a description of the calorimeter hardware and software and discusses the test results. The instrument operating procedure, included as an appendix, gives examples of typical input/output and explains the menu driven software.

Over the past 25 years, researchers have written numerous deduction systems based on resolution and paramodulation. Of these systems, a very few have been capable of generating and maintaining a formula database "containing more than just a few thousand clauses. These few systems were used to explore mechanisms for rapidly extracting limited subsets of relevant" clauses. We have written this tutorial to reflect some of the best ideas that have emerged and to cast them in a form that makes them easily accessible to students wishing to write their own high-performance systems.

This report discusses the results of the environmental monitoring program at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) for 1989. To evaluate the effects of ANL operations on the environment, samples of environmental media collected on the site, at the site boundary, and off the ANL site were analyzed and compared. A variety of radionuclides were measured in air, surface water, groundwater, soil, grass, bottom sediment, and milk samples.

In FY 1987, a program was initiated to demonstrate technology for recovering transuranic (TRU) elements from defense wastes. This hot demonstration was to be carried out with solution from the dissolution of irradiated fuels. This recovery would be accomplished with both PUREX and TRUEX solvent extraction processes. Work planned for this program included preparation of a shielded-cell facility for the receipt and storage of spent fuel from commercial power reactors, dissolution of this fuel, operation of a PUREX process to produce specific feeds for the TRUEX process, operation of a TRUEX process to remove residual actinide elements from PUREX process raffinates, and processing and disposal of waste and product streams. This report documents the work completed in planning and starting up this program. It is meant to serve as a guide for anyone planning similar demonstrations of TRUEX or other solvent extraction processing in a shielded-cell facility.

Proton (¹H) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging techniques are investigated as a means to nondestructively characterize green-state (unfired) Si{sub 3}N{sub 4} ceramic components. Spectroscopic results indicate that the organic additives used in the injection molding of ceramics behave as soft solids, with broad spectral peak widths (T₂ <0.5 ms) and moderate multicomponent spin-lattice relaxation rates (T{sub 1} ranging from 11 ms to 1 s). Because of the intrinsically different spectral characteristics of the organic additives, conventional-solution NMR imaging techniques cannot be applied to these materials. Hence, the authors developed specialized NMR imaging accessories capable of applying high magnetic field gradients in a back-projection protocol. NMR images were acquired of injection-molded test bars that had been fabricated with different mixing and molding parameters. Organic concentrations determined from the NMR images were correlated with results obtained through destructive testing. The correlation suggests that NMR imaging is a viable technique for quantifying organics in injection-molded green-state ceramics.