Transuranium elements have been introduced to the environment by a variety of ways including fallout from weapons testing, leakage from nuclear power reactors, waste effluent from nuclear fuel processing and leakage of radioactive waste from ocean dump sites. Several methods of curium detection and analysis in samples from marine ecosystems are contrasted and discussed in this paper.

The purpose of this document is to describe in both programmatic and technical terms the methodology that the US Department of Energy will use to commercialize a molten carbonate fuel cell power plant. Responsibility for the planning and management of the program resides in the molten carbonate fuel cell program office at the Argonne National Laboratory which reports to the Assistant Director for Fuel Cells in the Division of Fossil Fuel utilization of DOE/FE. The actual development of technology is carried out by selected contractors. The technology development phase of the program will culminate with the construction and operation of two demonstration power plants. The first power plant will be an industrial cogeneration plant which will be completed in 1987. The other power plant will be a baseload electric power plant to be completed in 1989.

A ten channel filter-fluorescer spectrometer was designed for measuring x-ray spectra from 2 to 115 keV at the Argus and Shiva laser facilities. Previously x-ray spectra were measured with filtered detectors; however, the higher fluxes and more complicated spectra observed in recent experiments requires the greater photon energy definition of this technique. Five filter-detector channels are also incorporated in the spectrometer for measuring low intensity sources. Five Pb-filtered detectors will be used for obtaining spectral information for energies greater than 100 keV. Provisions are being made to automate this diagnostic to produce the x ray spectrum minutes after shot time.

Fabrication of experimental breeder reactor fuel pellets by the common cold-press-and-sinter technique for irradiation testing in EBR-II is discussed. Fuel types include mixed thoria-plutonia, UO/sub 2/ enriched with 22 weight percent /sup 233/U in U, UO/sub 2/ enriched with thirty-four weight percent /sup 235/U in U, and mixed urania-plutonia.

High energy neutron irradiations have been performed on Nb/sub 3/Sn superconductors to assess their behavior in a fusion reactor environment. Irradiations were performed at 4.2/sup 0/K and property measurements were made without warming the samples. The critical current I/sub c/ increased with irradiation to a level about 50% above the unirradiated value at the highest fluences reached in our experiments. These results are compared with the results of other low temperature irradiations of Nb/sub 3/Sn.