The decontamination of the present Hanford reactors involves a once-through cleaning operation. Considerable interest has also been shown in determining the feasibility of this once-through technique for cleanup of certain portions of the NPR system. This report contains information on a series of tests performed in the 242-B single pass flow facility. Information concerning the following are presented: (1) Efficiency of decontaminating KER Loop 1 and 2 contaminated specimens. (2) Efficiency of decontaminating present reactor pigtails by different methods. (3) Areas that need further study.

Organic compounds with high boiling points and low corrosion qualities have been considered for use as reactor coolants and moderators. Those being considered, however, have a greater tendency to leak than does water. A program to evaluate mechanical closures to be used for a leak-tight system for organic fluids has been established. Report HW-59446 covered descriptions of the facility used in this study and the primary results of tests covering two liquids, fittings, and instrumentation. This report will cover final results and other pertinent information.

A part of the development activities of the Process Equipment Development Group, Chemical Development, HLO through the year 1959 has consisted of test evaluation of some of the never products of manufacturers, design and refinement of novel units to do certain specialized jobs and development of improved components for existing plant equipment. Modification of present chemical processing methods and investigation of new basic procedures have made it necessary to utilize different and "exotic" materials, titanium, has given rise to another problem-- that of the selection of adequate and compatible bearings where the titanium is used as moving or rotating part.

The design of NPR shows large quantities of carbon steel pipe and fittings in the front and rear face areas. These are also the area where the most work must be done during an outage, and consequently lower radiation levels are needed here than elsewhere in the piping system. A single pass decontamination of the front and rear piping without going through the entire loop is desirable. Because of the quantities of chemicals and available down time, an effective shorty interval process is needed. This report gives some recent laboratory data on this subject.

This report describes the work carried out in 321 Building semiworks equipment, to define the factors contributing to high corrosion-product contamination and presents recommendations for reducing the impurity level to meet current specifications (maximum of 200 parts total metals per million parts U).

Report discussing information relative to the pyrophoricity of uranium for the purpose of reactor core fire safety. The report includes physical and chemical properties of uranium.

Review of previous work is presented in addition to the results of recent studies concerning loss of primary coolant when the system is cold and pressurized and the problem of supplying adequate cooling following the injection of light water.

This report describes the development of an ultrasonic instrument for resin level measurements in an ion exchange column.

Specifications including detail dimension, materials, fabrication steps, acceptance criteria, and final assembly steps for the swaged uranium dioxide, 19-rod cluster Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor fuel element.

Report documenting the Halogen Collector Test program, which was undertaken to provide "methods of removing trace quantities of radioactive iodine from an air stream" (p. 1). The report includes designs of the program and the test facility, test results, analysis of these results, and encountered problems. Appendices begin on page 38.

Chain reacting conditions for plutonium nitrate in water solution have been examined experimentally for a variety of sizes of spheres and cylinders.

This development work was undertaken to investigate and standardize scintillation detector and transistorized circuitry techniques in instruments used for detecting and measuring alpha and beta particles, gamma photons, and both slow and fast neutrons. At the present time, the standard radiation detection instrumentation used at Hanford employ vacuum-tube circuitry with typical detectors being ion chambers, G-M tubes, HF3 tubes, etc. The vacuum tubes require excessive battery power, and some of the circuits are adversely affected by humidity and temperature conditions.

In the last two or three years there has been a notable improvement in the knowledge and understanding of reactor lattice physics. During this interval, measurements of parameters have been improved and the methods of analysis have been greatly strengthened. It has become apparent that the classical ways for computing the lattice parameters are not sufficient. It is the purpose of this report to publish under one cover as much of the most recent information as possible.

aluminum has been considered as a material for cladding fuel elements to be used in reactors cooled by high-temperature recirculating water. Aluminum is abundant, chap, has a relatively low cross section for thermal neutrons, and is readily fabricated into complex shapes. For these reasons, it appears that the use of aluminum rather than steel, Zircaloy or other candidate materials for fuel element cladding, would result in considerable savings in operating expense. The actual economics will of course depend on specific factors such as core materials and design of the reactor/. Aluminum appears particularly attractive for cladding the cores of aluminum-plutonium alloy proposed for the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor since, in this case, the physical characteristics of the core and cladding would be practically identical.

In many cases of analysis of two-phase flow in systems, considerable computation or program time could be saved if the critical pressures ratio were known. If a reservoir or plenum pressure is fixed, the usual computational procedure involves the assumption of several critical pressures and the generation of several momentum terms to find the applicable critical pressure ratio and thereby the critical flow. The formulation of an equation of state make it possible to compute critical pressure ratios directly.

Late in 1958 it became apparent that some fuel elements were failing in the Hanford reactors as a result of water entering through the weld. The mode of entry appeared to be first through a void in the weld, then through a non-wet area or a train of voids in the braze, and finally to the uranium core. Defective closures of a similar nature were also typical of many fuel elements which have failed in the autoclaving operation as shown in Figure 1.

The amount of dry air or inert gas supplied to a "one pass" glove box ventilation system is proportional to the glove box inleakage. Most glove boxes in the 234r5 Building are equipped with sundry attachments, each contributing to the inleakage. No individual leak rate date is available for these auxiliary components in the "as installed" condition. Nor is the effect of time upon the leak rates known. Knowledge of these values, or at least an indication of the order of magnitude of the leakage attributable to each item, would provide a basis for analyzing glove box ventilation problems and for establishing criteria for new glove box designs.

This is the second of two reports describing the phases of a study of the wear and galling of autoclaved Zircaloy-2 by various fuel element support materials. The first report (1) showed that increasing contact area between the autoclaved Zircaloy-2 support and the autoclaved Zircaloy-2 process tube will not significantly improve the fuel support performance, and that a large flat contact area between the fuel supports and the process tube would be impractical to endeavor to achieve and maintain. It also showed that metals softer than Zircaloy-2 do not scratch the process tube but that loss of these metals by abrasion into the reactor coolant might be a problem.

The decontamination of the present Hanford reactors involves a once-through cleaning operation. Considerable interest has been shown in determining the feasibility of this once-through technique for cleanup of certain portions of the NPR system. This is the second interim report of a series that covers tests performed in the 242-B Single Pass Flow Facility. The first was distributed in January, 1960.

Theoretically aqueous hydrazine will react with dissolved oxygen for form only nitrogen and water. Most of the experimental evidence, however, indicates that the reaction proceeds rather slowly in low-temperature systems. Tests are currently being conducted to determine whether or not it is feasible to use activated carbon to catalyze the reaction in filtered water. A system of this type would be useful in high temperature reactors when it becomes necessary to convert to single-pass operation.

In order to prevent dangerous concentrations of combustible gases such as hydrogen and ammonia in Redox dissolvers, a continuous analysis of the off-gases is needed. Hydrogen is evolved from most fuel element dissolution processes now used or planned for use at Redox. Ammonia is also released from ammonium fluoride dissolution of zirconium and caustic dissolution of aluminum cladding. Oxides of nitrogen and hydrogen are formed during nitric acid dissolution of uranium or plutonium-aluminum alloys. Since no fixed ratio exists between the concentrations of any two of these gases, the determination of combustible gases in complex mixtures is not possible with a single bulk property analyzer.

With the development of the zircaloy-2 clad uranium fuel element, it was necessary to develop a method of closing the end of the element after the extruded tubes were cut to the desired length. Regardless of the ultimate design of the closure, a satisfactory zircaloy-2 fusion welding technique had to be worked out. The first fully successful welding was performed with electron beam welding in a vacuum chamber. To make satisfactory welds, the electron beam welding involved time and equipment, plus undue maintenance on the equipment.

Space has been reserved near the southeast corner of the 100-N Area for the 122-N Decontamination Facility. Previous correspondence between Burns and Roe, Inc and General Electric bae discussed various facilities which might be needed in the building. The concepts of the decontamination processes are under active development by research groups at Hanford. At present, there are several workable processes known; each one has one or more fairly serious drawbacks.

The multi-purpose dissolver was designed to provide: 1. A critically safe vessel for dissolving uranium metal of enrichments up to one percent U-235. 2. A vessel which can be charged with fuel elements up to 10 feet long. 3. An off-gas arrangement which will eliminate return of ammonia to the dissolver during the Zirflex decladding process. 4. A vessel in which small charges can be dissolved without using extra chemicals. 5. A by-pass routing around the silver reactor during cladding removal.