The dielectric wakefield transformer (DWT) is one route to practical high energy wakefield-based accelerators. Progress has been made in a number of areas relevant to the demonstration of this device. In this article we describe recent bench measurements and beam experiments using 7.8 and 15.6 GHz structures and discuss some remaining technical challenges in the development of the DWT.

One of the options to mitigate the effects of irradiation on reactor pressure vessels (RPVs) is to thermally anneal them to restore the toughness properties that have been degraded by neutron irradiation. Even though a postirradiation anneal may be deemed successful, a critical aspect of continued RPV operation is the rate of embrittlement upon reirradiation. There are insufficient data available to allow for verification of available models of reirradiation embrittlement or for the development of a reliable predictive methodology. This is especially true in the case of fracture toughness data. Under the U.S.-Russia Joint Coordinating Committee for Civilian Nuclear Reactor Safety (JCCCNRS), Working Group 3 on Radiation Embrittlement, Structural Integrity, and Life Extension of Reactor Vessels and Supports agreed to conduct a comparative study of annealing and reirradiation effects on RPV steels. The Working Group agreed that each side would irradiate, anneal, reirradiate (if feasible ), and test two materials of the other. Charpy V-notch (CVN) and tensile specimens were included. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) conducted such a program (irradiation and annealing, including static fracture toughness) with two weld metals representative of VVER-440 and VVER-1000 RPVs, while the Russian Research Center-Kurchatov Institute (RRC-KI) conducted a program (irradiation, annealing, reirradiation, …

The results of molecular dynamics (MD) displacement cascade simulations in bcc iron have been used to obtain effective cross sections for two measures of primary damage production: (1) the number of surviving point defects expressed as a fraction of the displacements calculated using the standard secondary displacement model of Norgett, Robinson, and Torrens (NRT), and (2) the fraction of the surviving interstitials contained in clusters that formed during the cascade event. Primary knockon atom spectra for iron obtained from the SPECTER code have been used to weight these MD-based damage production cross sections in order to obtain spectrally-averaged values for several locations in commercial fission reactors and materials test reactors. An evaluation of these results indicates that neutron energy spectrum differences between the various enviromnents do not lead to significant differences between the average primary damage formation parameters. In particular, the defect production cross sections obtained for PWR and BWR neutron spectra were not significantly different. The variation of the defect production cross sections as a function of depth into the reactor pressure vessel wall is used as a sample application of the cross sections. A slight difference between the attenuation behavior of the PWR and BWR was noted; this …

A universal limitation of RF and imaging front-end sensors is that they easily produce data at a higher rate than any general-purpose computer can continuously handle. Therefore, Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a custom Reconfigurable Computing Array board to support a large variety of processing applications including wideband RF signals, LIDAR and multi-dimensional imaging. The boards design exploits three key features to achieve its performance. First, there are large banks of fast memory dedicated to each reconfigurable processor and also shared between pairs of processors. Second, there are dedicated data paths between processors, and from a processor to flexible I/O interfaces. Third, the design provides the ability to link multiple boards into a serial and/or parallel structure.

Safe Pu management is an important and urgent task with profound environmental, national, and international security implications. Presidential Policy Directive 13 and analyses by scientific, technical, and international policy organizations brought about a focused effort within the Department of Energy (DOE) to identify and implement long-term disposition paths for surplus Pu. The principal goal is to render surplus Pu as inaccessible and unattractive for reuse in nuclear weapons as Pu in spent reactor fuel. In the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision for the Storage and Disposition of Weapons- Usable Fissile Materials (1997), DOE announced pursuit of two disposition technologies: (1) irradiation of Pu as MOX fuel in existing reactors and (2) immobilization of Pu into solid forms containing fission products as a radiation barrier. DOE chose an immobilization approach that includes �use of the can-in-canister option.. . for a portion of the surplus, non-pit Pu material.� In the can-in-canister approach, cans of glass or ceramic forms containing Pu are encapsulated within canisters of HLW glass. In support of the selection process, a technical evaluation of retrievability and recoverability of Pu from glass and ceramic forms by a host nation and by rogue nations or subnational groups was …

We present recent results of x-ray laser amplification of spontaneous emission in Ne-like and Ni-like transient collisional excitation schemes. The plasma formation, ionization and collisional excitation can be optimized using two laser pulses of 1 ns and 1 ps duration at table-top energies of 5 J in each beam. High gain of 35 cm{sup -1} has been measured on the 147 {Angstrom} 4d{r_arrow}4p J=0{r_arrow}1 transition of Ni-like Pd and is a direct consequence of the nonstationary population inversion produced by the high intensity picosecond pulse. We report the dependence of the x-ray laser line intensity on the laser plasma conditions and compare the experimental measurements with hydrodynamic and atomic kinetics simulations for Ne-like and Ni-like lasing.