The Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) will be used to blend aqueous radwaste (PHA) with solid radwaste (Sludge) in a waste receipt vessel (the SRAT). The resulting SRAT material is transferred to the SME an there blended with ground glass (Frit) to produce a batch of melter feed slurry. The SME material is passed to a hold tank (the MFT) which is used to continuously feed the DWPF melter. The melter. The melter produces a molten glass wasteform which is poured into stainless steel canisters for cooling and, ultimately, shipment to and storage in a geologic repository. The Product Composition Control System (PCCS) is the system intended to ensure that the melt will be processible and that the glass wasteform will be acceptable. This document provides a description of this system.

This paper presents a discussion of ASME Section 11 Pump and Valve Inservice Testing relief request reviews by the NRC and their contractors. Topics that will be discussed include the scope of USNRC reviews in Technical Evaluation Reports (TERs) (and Safety Evaluation, SEs); including the basis for granting relief requests, the status of relief requests in IST Program updates, and the Generic Letter 89-04 approval process; and the level of technical detail required in submitted programs. This presentation is based on the experiences of Brookhaven National Laboratory in reviewing IST Programs for the Mechanical Engineering Branch of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The SLD detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is a general purpose device for studying e{sup +}{epsilon}{sup {minus}} interaction at the Z{sup 0}. The SLD calorimeter system consists of two parts: a lead Liquid Argon Calorimeter (LAC) with both electromagnetic (22 radiation lengths) and hadronic sections (2.8 absorption lengths) housed inside the coil, and the Warm Ion limited streamer tubes Calorimeter (WIC) outside the coil which uses as radiator the iron of the flux return for the magnetic field. The WIC completes the measurement of the hadronic shower energy ({approximately}85% on average is contained in the LAC) and it provides identification and tracking for muons over 99% of the solid angle. In this note we report on the construction, test and commissioning of such a large system.

Lost circulation is the loss of drilling fluid from the wellbore to fractures or pores in the rock formation. In geothermal drilling, lost circulation is often a serious problem that contributes greatly to the cost of the average geothermal well. The Lost Circulation Technology Development Program is sponsored at Sandia National Laboratories by the US Department of Energy. The goal of the program is to reduce lost circulation costs by 30--50% through the development of mitigation and characterization technology. This paper describes the technical progress made in this program during the period April 1991--March 1992. 8 refs.

It is well-known that there are difficulties to obtain rf power sources of significant amount for frequencies larger than 3 GHz. Yet, rf sources in the centimeter/millimeter wavelength range would be very useful to drive, for example, high-gradient accelerating linacs for electron-positron linear colliders. We would like to propose an alternative method to produce such radiation. It makes use of a short electron bunch traveling along the axis of a waveguide which is at the same time excited by a TM propagating electromagnetic wave. It is well known that radiation can be obtained by wiggling the motion of the electrons in a direction perpendicular to the main one. The wiggling action can be included by electromagnetic fields in a fashion similar to the one caused by wiggler magnets. We found that an interesting mode of operation is to drive the waveguide with an excitation frequency very close to the cut off. For such excitation, the corresponding e.m. wave travels with a very large phase velocity which in turn has the effect to increase the wiggling action on the electron bunch. Our method, to be effective, relies also on the coherence of the radiation; that is the bunch length is taken …

The feasibility of utilizing the differential heating characteristics of microwave energy (MW) to aid in the chemical extraction and separation process of hazardous organic compounds from mixed hazardous waste, was studied at the INEL. The long-term objective of this work was to identify a practical method of separating or enhancing the separation process of organic hazardous waste components from mixed waste using microwave (MW) frequency radiation. Methods using MW energy for calcination, solidification, and drying of radioactive waste from nuclear facilities is becoming more attractive. In order to study the effectiveness of MW heating, samples of several organic chemicals simulating those which may be found at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex at the INEL were exposed to MW energy. Vapor collection and analysis was performed as a function of time, signal frequency, and MW power throughout the process. Signal frequencies ranging from 900 MHz t 8000 MHz were used. Although the signal frequency bandwidth of the selectivity was quite broad, for the material tested an indication of the frequency dependence in the selectivity of MW heating was given. Greater efficiency in terms of energy used and time required was observed. The relatively large electromagnetic field intensities generated at the resonant …

Par Pond and L Lake are reservoirs on the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Beds of aquatic macrophytes (primarily cattail and waterlilies) exist in Par Pond and are now beginning to develop in L Lake. Biophysical knowledge about Par Pond was used to develop environmental constraint criteria' to predict the future spatial distribution of aquatic macrophytes in L Lake. The L Lake biophysical data were placed in a 5 {times} 5 m raster geographic information system (GIS) and analyzed using Boolean logic. Areas in L Lake which were {le}4 m in depth, {le}10% slope, had a fetch of {le}500 m, and on suitable soil were identified. The final GIS model predicted the spatial distribution of 37.30 ha of aquatic macrophytes which met the environmental constraint criteria (cattails = 12.29 ha and waterlilies = 25.01 ha).

A Molecular Sieve Regeneration System (MSRS) is being added to the existing Tritium Waste Treatment system (TWT) within the Tritium Systems Test Assembly (TSTA) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This system is an upgrade to the TWT to provide accurate measurements of the liquid waste generated from this system. Within the TWT, hydrogen isotopes are removed from the effluent gas stream by the catalytic conversion to water and the subsequent removal of water by molecular sieve trapping prior to the release to the environment. Within the TWT and similar systems, molecular sieve regeneration is required to rejuvenate the beds. The major difference of the MSRS and other regeneration systems is the capability of direct assay of long-term storage waste containers. This is accomplished with loop-flow regeneration, water collection, and tritiated water assay by scintillation and calorimetric techniques. This paper describes the MSRS in detail and how it is interfaced with the Tritium Waste Treatment system.

This paper will discuss one of these automatic tools that has been developed recently by Cray Research, Inc. for use on its parallel supercomputer. The tool is called ATEXPERT; when used in conjunction with the Cray Fortran compiling system, CF77, it produces a parallelized version of a code based on loop-level parallelism, plus information to enable the programmer to optimize the parallelized code and improve performance. The information obtained through the use of the tool is presented in an easy-to-read graphical format, making the digestion of such a large quantity of data relatively easy and thus, improving programmer productivity. In this paper we address the issues that we found when the took a large Los Alamos hydrodynamics code, PUEBLO, that was highly vectorizable, but not parallelized, and using ATEXPERT proceeded to parallelize it. We show that through the advice of ATEXPERT, bottlenecks in the code can be found, leading to improved performance. We also show the dependence of performance on problem size, and finally, we contrast the speedup predicted by ATEXPERT with that measured on a dedicated eight-processor Y-MP.

There is growing interest in the environmental, health, and safety issues related to new photovoltaic technologies as they approach commercialization. Such issues include potential toxicity of II--VI compounds; the impacts of new environmental regulations on module manufacturers; and, the need for recycling of spent modules and manufacturing wastes. This paper will review these topics. 20 refs.

An experimental study of the plasma spraying of alumina-titania powder is presented in this paper. This powder system is being used to fabricate heater tubes that emulate nuclear fuel tubes for use in thermal-hydraulic testing. Coating experiments were conducted using a Taguchi fractional-factorial design parametric study. Operating parameters were varied around the typical spray parameters in a systematic design of experiments in order to display the range of plasma processing conditions and their effect on the resultant coating. The coatings were characterized by hardness and electrical tests, image analysis, and optical metallography. Coating qualities are discussed with respect to dielectric strength, hardness, porosity, surface roughness, deposition efficiency, and microstructure. The attributes of the coatings are correlated with the changes in operating parameters.

The objective of this study is to develop an improved sorbent which can reduce H{sub 2}S levels up to 1 ppmv or less, which can stabilize zinc, and produce economically recoverable amounts of elemental sulfur during regeneration. For this purpose, the desulfurization performance of sorbents prepared by the addition of various amounts of V{sub 2}O{sub 5} to the zinc ferrite sorbent is investigated.

A closer look at the energetics of antiproton annihilation in real systems, coupled to hydrodynamics, materials strength, particle transport, equations of state, and related interactions is necessary to assess ultimate viability. The systematics of antiproton microfission-fusion are the subject of this analysis, as well as technology constraints.

Acoustic telemetry has been a dream of the drilling industry for the past 50 years. It offers the promise of data rates which are one-hundred times greater than existing technology. Such a system would open the door to true logging-while-drilling technology and bring enormous profits to its developers. The basic idea is to produce an encoded sound wave at the bottom of the well, let it propagate up the steel drillpipe, and extract the data from the signal at the surface. Unfortunately, substantial difficulties arise. The first difficult problem is to produce the sound wave. Since the most promising transmission wavelengths are about 20 feet, normal transducer efficiencies are quire low. Compounding this problem is the structural complexity of the bottomhole assembly and drillstring. For example, the acoustic impedance of the drillstring changes every 30 feet and produces an unusual scattering pattern in the acoustic transmission. This scattering pattern causes distortion of the signal and is often confused with signal attenuation. These problems are not intractable. Recent work has demonstrated that broad frequency bands exist which are capable of transmitting data at rates up to 100 bits per second. Our work has also identified the mechanism which is responsible for …

This paper provides an overview of superconductor research and development activities, with emphasis on the potential of high-{Tc} materials for future applications. Superconductor applications are grouped under the following categories: electronics/instrumentation, bulk material/castings, research devices, industrial/commercial, electric power, and transportation/propulsion. Near-term applications are typically based on thin film and cast forms of high-{Tc} materials, while large-scale applications requiring long lengths of wire are considered intermediate to long term. As a major side benefit of high-{Tc} superconductor research, renewed interest is being focused on the use of low-{Tc} materials for large-scale applications.

A special technique is described for in situ transmission electron microscope (TEM) experiments involving simultaneous ion irradiation, in which the resultant phenomena are observed as in a cross-section TEM specimen. That is, instead of ion-irradiating the film or foil specimen normal to the major surfaces and observing in plan view (i.e., in the same direction), the specimen is irradiated edge-on (i.e., parallel to the major surfaces) and is observed normal to the depth direction with respect to the irradiation. The results of amorphization of Si, irradiated in this orientation by 1 or 1.5 MeV Kr, are presented and briefly compared with the usual plan view observations. The limitations of the technique are discussed and several experiments which might profitably employ this technique are suggested.

The numerical methods employed in the solution of many scientific computing problems require the computation of derivatives of a function f: R{sup n} {yields} R{sup m}. ADIFOR (Automatic Differentiation in FORtran) is a source transformation tool that accepts Fortran 77 code for the computation of a function and writes portable Fortran 77 code for the computation of the derivatives. In contrast to previous approaches, ADIFOR views automatic differentiation as a source transformation problem and employs the data analysis capabilities of the ParaScope Fortran programming environment. Experimental results show that ADIFOR can handle real- life codes and that ADIFOR-generated codes are competitive with divided-difference approximations of derivatives. In addition, studies suggest that the source-transformation approach to automatic differentation may improve the time required to compute derivatives by orders of magnitude.

Carbon sputtering and transport on the TFTR inner graphite bumper limiter is investigated with the impurity transport code REDEP. Analysis is carried out for a series of ohmic discharges in TFTR. Predictions for Z{sub eff} in the core plasma agree well with in-situ experimental measurements. Run-away self-sputtering of carbon is predicted at low densities and high edge plasma temperatures when the limiter surface was purged of deuterium. Surface erosion and deposition is analyzed. In general, redeposition reduces the peak erosion by about a factor of five. Analysis is also carried out for a typical neutral beam heated discharge with a noncircular plasma. Spatial surface erosion and deposition profiles are compared qualitatively with beta backscattering measurements of metal deposition found on the limiter.

The LIFE2 computer code is a fatigue/fracture analysis code that is specialized to the analysis of wind turbine components. The numerical formulation of the code uses a series of cycle mount matrices to describe the cyclic stress states imposed upon the turbine. However, many structural analysis techniques yield frequency-domain stress spectra and a large body of experimental loads (stress) data is reported in the frequency domain. To permit the analysis of this class of data, a Fourier analysis module has been added to the code. The module transforms the frequency spectrum to an equivalent time series suitable for rainflow counting by other modules in the code. This paper describes the algorithms incorporated into the code and uses experimental data to illustrate their use. 10 refs., 11 figs.

The Savannah River Site (SRS) has been operating a nuclear fuel cycle since the 1950's to produce nuclear materials in support of the national defense effort. About 83 million gallons of high level waste produced since operation began have been consolidated into 33 million gallons by evaporation at the waste tank farm. The Department of Energy has authorized the construction of the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) to immobilize the waste as a durable borosilicate glass contained in stainless steel canisters, prior to emplacement in a federal repository. The DWPF is now mechanically complete and undergoing commissioning and run-in activities. Cold startup testing using simulated non-radioactive feeds is scheduled to begin in November 1992 with radioactive operation scheduled to begin in May 1994. While technical issues have been identified which can potentially affect DWPF operation, they are not expected to negatively impact the start of non-radioactive startup testing.

Validation issues in aging risk evaluations are examined by considering how variabilities and uncertainties due to sparse component aging data, modeling assumptions, and risk quantification approaches may affect aging risk evaluation results and inferences. Sensitivity studies using a NUREG-1150 PWR evaluated the effect of component aging data uncertainties and variations in test and maintenance frequencies on aging prioritizations. Preliminary results indicate that while individual component rankings may be sensitive to aging data uncertainties, the top contributors as a group are not easily affected. Aging prioritizations seem to be quite sensitive to component test and maintenance frequencies. The results of the sensitivity study will help identify prioritization schemes which are robust and meaningful for applications.

Progress to date on assessing the nature of the expected changes in human performance and risk associated with the introduction of digital control, instrumentation, and display systems is presented. Expected changes include the shift toward more supervisory tasks, development of intervention strategies, and reallocation of function between human and machine. Results are reported in terms of the scope of new technology, human performance issues, and crews experience with digital control systems in a variety of industries petrochemical and aerospace. Plans to conduct a limited Probabilistic Risk Assessment/Human Reliability Assessment (PRA/HRA) comparison between a conventional NUREG-1150 series plant and that same plant retrofit with distributed control and advanced instrumentation and display are also presented. Changes needed to supplement existing HRA modeling methods and quantification techniques are discussed.

This is a review on the use of Tandem electrostatic accelerators for injection and filling of synchrotrons to accelerate intense beams of heavy-ions to relativistic energies. The paper emphasizes the need of operating the Tandems in pulsed mode for this application. It has been experimentally demonstrated that at the present this type of accelerators still provides the most reliable and best performance.

This paper summarizes the results of TRAC-PF1/MOD3 calculations of Mark-22 fuel assembly of loss-of-coolant accident/emergency cooling system (LOCA/ECS) power limits for the Savannah River Site (SRS) K Reactor. This effort was part of a larger effort undertaken by the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the US Department of Energy to perform confirmatory power limits calculations for the SRS K Reactor. A method using a detailed three-dimensional (3D) TRAC model of the Mark-22 fuel assembly was developed to compute LOCA/ECS power limits. Assembly power was limited to ensure that no point on the fuel assembly walls would exceed the local saturation temperature. The detailed TRAC model for the Mark-22 assembly consisted of three concentric 3D vessel components which simulated the two targets, two fuel tubes, and three main flow channels of the fuel assembly. The model included 100% eccentricity between the assembly annuli and a 20% power tilt. Eccentricity in the radial alignment of the assembly annuli arises because axial spacer ribs that run the length of the fuel and targets are used. Wall-shear, interfacial-shear, and wall heat-transfer correlations were developed and implemented in TRAC-PF1/MOD3 specifically for modeling flow and heat transfer in the narrow ribbed annuli encountered in the Mark-22 …