Before experiments using actinide elements are performed, synthetic routes are tested using lanthanides of comparable ionic radii as surrogates. Compound and solid solution formation in several lanthanide-containing titanate and zircono-titanate systems have been established using X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, which helped to define interesting and novel experiments, some of which have been performed and are discussed, for selected actinide elements. The aqueous solubilities of several lanthanide- and actinide-containing compounds, representative of the systems studied, were tested in several leachants, including the WIPP {open_quotes}A{close_quotes} brine, following modified Materials Characterization Center procedures (MCC-3). The WIPP {open_quotes}A{close_quotes} brine is a synthetic substitute for that found in nature at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. The concentrations of cerium, used as a surrogate for plutonium, leached by the WIPP {open_quotes}A{close_quotes} brine from all the cerium-containing compounds and solid solutions tested were below the Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) atomic emission spectrometry limit of detection (10 ppm) established for cerium in this brine. The concentrations of plutonium leached from the two plutonium-containing solid solutions were less than 1 ppm as determined by gross alpha counting and alpha pulse height analysis. Concentrations of strontium leached by the WIPP brine from stable strontium containing titanate …

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are suspected to contribute significantly to ``Sick Building Syndrome`` (SBS), a complex of subchronic symptoms that occurs during and in general decreases away from occupancy of the building in question. A new approach takes into account individual VOC potencies, as well as the highly correlated nature of the complex VOC mixtures found indoors. The new VOC metrics are statistically significant predictors of symptom outcomes from the California Healthy Buildings Study data. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to test the hypothesis that a summary measure of the VOC mixture, other risk factors, and covariates for each worker will lead to better prediction of symptom outcome. VOC metrics based on animal irritancy measures and principal component analysis had the most influence in the prediction of eye, dermal, and nasal symptoms. After adjustment, a water-based paints and solvents source was found to be associated with dermal and eye irritation. The more typical VOC exposure metrics used in prior analyses were not useful in symptom prediction in the adjusted model (total VOC (TVOC), or sum of individually identified VOCs ({Sigma}VOC{sub i})). Also not useful were three other VOC metrics that took into account potency, but did not adjust for …

This dissertation discusses studies of the electron-hole pair dynamics of CdS{sub x}Se{sub 1-x} semiconductor alloys for the entire compositional range from x = 1 to x = 0 as examined by the ultrafast fluorescence techniques of time correlated single photon counting and fluorescence upconversion. Specifically, samples with x = 1, .75, .5, .25, and 0 were studied each at a spread of wavelengths about its respective emission maximum which varies according to {lambda} = 718nm - 210x nm. The decays of these samples were found to obey a Kohlrausch distribution, exp [(t/{tau}){sup {beta}}], with the exponent 3 in the range .5-.7 for the alloys. These results are in agreement with those expected for localization due to local potential variations resulting from the random distribution of sulfur and selenium atoms on the element VI A sub-lattice. This localization can be understood in terms of Anderson localization of the holes in states whose energy distribution tails into the forbidden energy band-gap. Because these states have energy dependent lifetimes, the carriers can decay via many parallel channels. This distribution of channels is the ultimate source of the Kohlrausch form of the fluorescence decays.

This thesis examines the feasibility of a technique to extract ozone column depths from photographic stellar spectra in the 5000--7000 Angstrom spectral region. A stellar spectrographic plate is measured to yield the relative intensity distribution of a star`s radiation after transmission through the earth`s atmosphere. The amount of stellar radiation absorbed by the ozone Chappuis band is proportional to the ozone column depth. The measured column depth is within 10% the mean monthly value for latitude 36{degree}N, however the uncertainty is too large to make the measurement useful. This thesis shows that a 10% improvement to the photographic sensitivity uncertainty can decrease the column depth uncertainty to a level acceptable for climatic study use. This technique offers the possibility of measuring past ozone column depths.

The work described in this report was carried out at a national laboratory of the Department of Energy, during the time that the author was engaged in a Department of Energy Industrial Hygiene Graduate Fellowship. The national laboratory had a respiratory protection program with approximately 50 employees participating. The program was in place to protect employees from over-exposure to airborne contaminants while engineering and work practice controls were being installed and implemented. It was also in place to protect workers in situations where engineering and work control practices were not feasible, such as during maintenance and repair work, as well as in situations where engineering and work practice controls were not enough to lower the exposure to or below the Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) as set by the Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA) as an eight-hour time weighted average (TWA) or an excursion limit. Respirators were also used for emergencies by the emergency response team.

A methodology that incorporates variability and reducible sources of uncertainty into the probabilistic and consequence components of risk was developed. The method was applied to the north tunnel of the Exploratory Studies Facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. In this assessment, variability and reducible sources of uncertainty were characterized and propagated through the risk assessment models using a Monte Carlo based software package. The results were then manipulated into risk curves at the 5% and 95% confidence levels for both the variability and overall uncertainty analyses, thus distinguishing between variability and reducible sources of uncertainty. In the Yucca Mountain application, the designation of the north tunnel as an item important to public safety, as defined by 10 CFR 60, was determined. Specifically, the annual frequency of a rock fall breaching a waste package causing an off-site dose of 500 mrem (5x10{sup -3} Sv) was calculated. The annual frequency, taking variability into account, ranged from 1.9x10{sup -9} per year at the 5% confidence level to 2.5x10{sup -9} per year at the 95% confidence level. The frequency range after including all uncertainty was 9.5x10{sup -10} to 1.8x10{sup -8} per year. The maximum observable frequency, at the 100% confidence level, was 4.9x10{sup -8} …

Most modern nodal methods used today are based upon the transverse integration procedure in which the multi-dimensional flux shape is integrated over the transverse directions in order to produce a set of coupled one-dimensional flux shapes. The one-dimensional flux shapes are then solved either analytically or by representing the flux shape by a finite polynomial expansion. While these methods have been verified for most light-water reactor applications, they have been found to have difficulty predicting the large thermal flux gradients near the interfaces of highly-enriched MOX fuel assemblies. A new method is presented here in which the neutron flux is represented by a non-seperable, two-dimensional, semi-analytic flux expansion. The main features of this method are (1) the leakage terms from the node are modeled explicitly and therefore, the transverse integration procedure is not used, (2) the corner point flux values for each node are directly edited from the solution method, and a corner-point interpolation is not needed in the flux reconstruction, (3) the thermal flux expansion contains hyperbolic terms representing analytic solutions to the thermal flux diffusion equation, and (4) the thermal flux expansion contains a thermal to fast flux ratio term which reduces the number of polynomial expansion functions …

This thesis presents an experimental study of neutral particle dynamics in the Alcator C-Mod tokamak. The primary diagnostic used is a set of six neutral pressure gauges, including special-purpose gauges built for in situ tokamak operation. While a low main chamber neutral pressure coincides with high plasma confinement regimes, high divertor pressure is required for heat and particle flux dispersion in future devices such as ITER. Thus we examine conditions that optimize divertor compression, defined here as a divertor-to-midplane pressure ratio. We find both pressures depend primarily on the edge plasma regimes defined by the scrape-off-layer heat transport. While the maximum divertor pressure is achieved at high core plasma densities corresponding to the detached divertor state, the maximum compression is achieved in the high-recycling regime. Variations in the divertor geometry have a weaker effect on the neutral pressures. For otherwise similar plasmas the divertor pressure and compression are maximum when the strike point is at the bottom of the vertical target plate. We introduce a simple flux balance model, which allows us to explain the divertor neutral pressure across a wide range of plasma densities. In particular, high pressure sustained in the detached divertor (despite a considerable drop in the …

Studies of groundwater flow and contaminant transport in saturated, fractured geologic media are of great interest to researchers studying the potential long-term storage of hazardous wastes in or near such media. A popular technique for conducting such studies is to introduce tracers having different chemical and physical properties into a system and then observe the tracers at one or more downstream locations, inferring flow and transport mechanisms from the breakthrough characteristics of the different tracers. Many tracer studies have been conducted in saturated, fractured media to help develop and/or refine models capable of predicting contaminant transport over large scales in such media.