The Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) at Argonne National Laboratory-West (ANL-W) was shutdown in September, 1994. This sodium cooled reactor had been in service since 1964, and by the US Department of Energy (DOE) mandate, was to be placed in an industrially and radiologically safe condition for ultimate decommissioning. The deactivation of a liquid metal reactor presents unique concerns. The first major task associated with the project was the removal of all fueled assemblies. In addition, sodium must be drained from systems and processed for ultimate disposal. Residual quantities of sodium remaining in systems must be deactivated or inerted to preclude future hazards associated with pyrophoricity and generation of potentially explosive hydrogen gas. A Sodium Process Facility (SPF) was designed and constructed to react the elemental sodium from the EBR-II primary and secondary systems to sodium hydroxide for disposal. This facility has a design capacity to allow the reaction of the complete inventory of sodium at ANL-W in less than two years. Additional quantities of sodium from the Fermi-1 reactor are also being treated at the SPF.

How to ensure the appropriate performance of our built environment in the face of normal conditions, natural hazards, and malevolent threats is an issue of emerging national and international importance. As the world population increases, new construction must be increasingly cost effective and at the same time increasingly secure, safe, and durable. As the existing infrastructure ages, materials and techniques for retrofitting must be developed in parallel with improvements in design, engineering, and building codes for new construction. Both new and renovated structures are more often being subjected to the scrutiny of risk analysis. An international conference, "Assuring the Performance of Buildings and Infrastructures," was held in May 1997 to address some of these issues. The conference was co-sponsored by the Architectural Engineering Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Institute of Architects, and Sandia National Laboratories and convened in Albuquerque, NM. Many of the papers presented at the conference are found within this issue of Techno20~. This paper presents some of the major conference themes and summarizes discussions not found in the other papers.

The 50Au-50CU (wt.%) alloy is a solid-solution strengthened braze alloy used extensively in conventional, hermetic metal/ceramic brazing applications where low vapor pressure is a requirement. Typical metal/ceramic base materials would be Kovar^TM alloy and metallized and Ni-plated 94% alumina ceramic. The elevated temperature mechanical properties are important for permitting FEA evaluation of residual stresses in metal/ceramic brazes given specific geometries and braze cooldown profiles. For material with an atomic composition of 76.084 at.% CL 23.916 Au (i.e., on the Cu-rich side of Cu₃Au) that was annealed for 2 hr. at 750°C and water quenched a Garofalo sinh equation was found to adequately characterize the minimum strain rate data over the temperature mnge 450-850°C. At lower temperatures (250 arid 350°C), a conventional power law equation was found to characterize the data. For samples held long periods of time at 375°C (96 hrs.) and slowly cooled to room temperature, a slight strengthening reaction was observed: with the stress necessary to reach the same strain rate increasing by about 15% above the baseline annealed and quenched data. X-ray diffiction indicates that the 96 hr at 375°C + slow cool condition does indeed order. The microhardness of the ordered samples indicates a value of …

Where there is a significant actuarial basis for decision making (e.g., the occurrence of fires in single-family dwellings), there is little incentive for formal risk management. Formal risk assessments are most useful in those cases where the value of the structure is high, many people may be affected, the societal perception of risk is high, consequences of a mishap would be severe, and the actuarial uncertainty is large. For these cases, there is little opportunity to obtain the necessary experiential data to make informed decisions, and the consequences in terms of money, lives, and societal confidence are severe enough to warrant a formal risk assessment. Other important factors include the symbolic value of the structure and vulnerability to single point failures. It is unlikely that formal risk management and assessment practices will or should replace the proven institutions of building codes and engineering practices. Nevertheless, formal risk assessment can provide valuable insights into the hazards threatening high-value and high-risk (perceived or actual) buildings and structures, which can in turn be translated into improved public health, safety, and security. The key is to choose and apply the right assessment tool to match the structure in question. Design-for-reliability concepts can be applied …

The off-shell aspects of the one-pion-exchange potential (OPEP) are discussed. Relativistic Hamiltonians containing relativistic kinetic energy, relativistic OPEP with various off-shell behaviors and Argonne v{sub 18} short-range parameterization are used to study the deuteron properties. The OPEP off-shell behaviors depend on whether a pseudovector or pseudoscalar pion-nucleon coupling is used and are characterized by a parameter {mu}. The authors study potentials having {mu} = {minus}1, 0 and +1 and they find that they are nearly unitarily equivalent. They also find that a nonrelativistic Hamiltonian containing local potentials and nonrelativistic kinetic energy provides a good approximation to a Hamiltonian containing a relativistic OPEP based on pseudovector pion-nucleon coupling and relativistic kinetic energy.

We report on studies of the top quark, beyond the measurements of its mass and produciton cross section, which have been carried out recently by the CDF and D0 collaborations, based on {approximately}110{+-}6 pb{sup -1} of proton-antiproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.8 TeV. Each experiment has searched for t{yields}H{sup +}b decays and, from the lack of observable signal, excluded previously unexplored regions of the [M{sub H+},tan{beta}] parameter space. D0 has studied the correlation between the spin states of pair-produced top quarks, and CDF has studied the helicity of the W bosons produced in the decay of top quarks. Within large statistical uncertainties, both measurements agree with predictions of the standard model.

The solidification behavior and resultant solidification cracking susceptibility of autogenous gas tungsten arc fusion welds in alloy HR-160 was investigated by Varestraint testing, differential thermal analysis, and various microstructural characterization techniques. The alloy exhibited a liquidus temperature of 1387 {deg}C and initiated solidification by a primary L - {gamma} reaction in which Ni, Si, and Ti segregated to the interdendritic liquid and Co segregated to the {gamma} dendrite cores. Chromium exhibited no preference for segregation to the solid or liquid phase during solidification. Solidification terminated at {approx} 1162 {deg}C by a eutectic-type L - [{gamma}+ (Ni,Co){sub 16}(Ti,Cr){sub 6}Si{sub 7}] reaction. The (Ni,Co){sub 16}(Ti,Cr){sub 6}Si{sub 7} phase is found to be analogous to the G phase which forms in the Ni-Ti-Si and Co-Ti-Si ternary systems, and similarities are found to exist between the solidification behavior of this commercial multicomponent alloy and the simple Ni-Si and Ni-Ti binary systems. Reasonable agreement is obtained between the calculated and measured volume percent of the [{gamma} +(Ni,Co){sub l6}(Ti,Cr){sub 6}Si{sub 7}] eutectic-typr constituent with the Scheil equation using experimentally determined k values for Si and Ti from electron microprobe data. The alloy exhibited a very high susceptibility to solidification cracking in the Varestraint test. This is …

On May 30, 1998 scrap metal containing radioactive Cesium-137 (Cs-137) was accidentally melted in a furnace at the Acerinox steel mill in Algeciras, Spain. Cs-137 was released from the mill's smokestack, and spread across the western Mediterranean Sea to France and Italy and beyond. The first indication of the release was radiation levels up to 1000 times background reported by Swiss, French, and Italian authorities during the following two weeks. Initially no elevated radiation levels were detected over Spain. A release of hazardous material to the atmosphere is the type of situation the Atmospheric Release Advisory Capability (ARAC) emergency response organization was designed to address. The amount and exact time of the release were unknown, though the incident was thought to have taken place during the last week in May. Using air concentration measurements supplied by colleagues of ARAC in Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Russia and the European Union, ARAC meteorologists estimated the magnitude and timing of the release (Vogt, 1999). Correctly locating the downwind footprint is the most important goal of emergency response modeling. In this study, we compare predicted results for the Algeciras event based on four wind data sources: (1) US Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction …

The material of choice for a solid oxide fuel cell cathode based on a yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolyte is doped lanthanum manganite, (La, Sr)MnO{sub 3}. It excels at many of the attributes necessary for a system to work at the required operating temperature and is flexible enough to allow for materials optimization. Although strontium-doping increases the electronic conductivity of the material, the ionic conductivity of the material remains negligible under operating conditions. Studies have shown that the internal equilibrium of the material heavily favors oxidation of the manganese and rather than the loss of lattice oxygen as a charge compensation mechanism. This lack of oxygen vacancies in the structure retards the ability of the material to conduct oxygen ions; thus the optimized system requires a large number of engineered triple point boundary locations to work efficiently. We have successfully doped the host LSM lattice to alter the interred equilibrium of the material to increase its ionic conductivity and thus lower the cathodic overpotential of the system. Our presentation will discuss these new materials, the results of cell tests, and a number of characterization experiments performed.