An overall view is given of progress and plans for pressing forward with mirror research at Livermore. No detail is given on any one subject, and many interesting investigations being carried out at University laboratories in the U.S. that augment and support efforts at Livermore are omitted.

The STORET/MSP option was used to obtain county aggregated information on ambient water quality for sixty parameters during the period 1950 to 1978. Masks, extended EXTRACT specifications and bounds on allowable values limited inclusion of erroneous data. Remark codes were required to aggregate STORET parameters to obtain increased numbers of observations. Numerous statistical analyses led to the conclusions that medians were more useful than means, that trimming on number of observations was required to eliminate counties with extreme values, and that many parameters required logarithmic transformation to be useful in regional analyses. County aggregated data for nineteen water quality parameters were examined in terms of their ability to describe qualitative chemical characteristics of water. Anion--cation balances as well as expected relationships between conductivity and other parameters were correctly accounted for. Factor analysis indicated the existence of three principal components describing patterns between metal ions, non-metal ions, and alkalinity-bicarbonate, respectively. These factors were used in place of the original complete set of water quality parameters in a structural equation approach describing relationships between variables of mans activites. It was found that counties with high industrial electric consumption, farming and mineral shipments tended to have increased levels of most water quality parameters. …

An overview of inertial confinement fusion pellet physics is given. A discussion is presented of current estimated ICF driver requirements and a couple of pellet examples. The physics of driver/plasma coupling for two drivers which are being considered, namely a laser driver and a heavy ion accelerator driver, is described. Progress towards inertial confinement fusion that has been made using laser drivers in target experiments to date is discussed.

For the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a procedure was developed and tested for the evaluation of Material Control and Accounting (MC and A) Systems at nuclear fuel facilities. This procedure, called the Structured Assessment Approach, SAA, subjects the MC and A system at a facility to a series of increasingly sophisticated adversaries and strategies. A fully integrated version of the computer codes which assist the analyst in this assessment will become available in October 1979. The concepts of the SAA and the results of the assessment of a hypothetical but typical facility are presented.

The two DOE-owned facilities at Hanford, the Fuels and Materials Examination Facility (FMEF), and the Fusion Materials Irradiation Test Facility (FMIT), are described. The performance measurement systems used at these two facilities are next described. (DLC)

In any complex system, the interesting problems occur at the interface of dissimilar subsystems. Control of the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF) begins with the US Congress, which controls the dollars, which control the people, who control the nine top-level minicomputers, which control the 65 microprocessors, which control the hardware that controls the physics experiment. There are many interesting boundaries across which control must pass, and the one that this paper addresses is the man-machine one. For the MFTF, the man-machine interface consists of a system of seven control consoles, each allowing one operator to communicate with one minicomputer. These consoles are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and both hardware and software were designed in a top-down fashion. This paper describes the requirements and the design of the console system as a whole, as well as the design and operation of the hardware and software of each console, and examines the possible form of a future man-machine interface.

Preliminary calculations are given that indicate that a coaxial plasma gun might scale reasonably to reactor-grade operating conditions. Ongoing experiments and numerical simulations should shed some light on the validity of the described scaling laws.

This paper is a sequel to the one prepared by Atkinson, et al., in which the authors described the vacuum system of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's Tandem Mirror Experiment (TMX). We discuss here the final configuration, liquid nitrogen (LN/sub 2/) supply, and operation of the complete TMX vacuum system. The assembled vacuum system consists of two plug tanks with a volume of approximately 60 m/sup 3/ each and a center cell tank with a volume of approximately 10 m/sup 3/. In each plug tank there are 145 m/sup 2/ of titanium-gettered, LN/sub 2/-filled panels, which allow a pumping speed calculated to be 5 x 10/sup 7/ l/s for a period of 50 ms. The system maintains an operating pressure in the plasma chamber on the order of 10/sup -6/ Torr while 24 neutral-beam injectors are introducing 700 Torr l/s of hydrogen into the vacuum chamber.