Today there exists in the United States a large volume of nuclear wastes that result from both military and commercial activities. The United States has to date placed major emphasis on disposal in only one rock type--salt--whereas other nations have considered other rock types, such as granite in England and Sweden and clays in Belgium. No comprehensive evaluation of isolation in rocks other than salt has been made in the United States, and it is most appropriate that other rock types be evaluated both for constructing disposal sites in areas devoid of salt and also for having alternative waste management plans in case substantial problems are encountered in using salt as a disposal medium. To evaluate the state-of-the-art, research needs, and research priorities related to waste disposal in largely-impermeable rocks, scientists and engineers working on geologic aspects of nuclear waste disposal were brought together. The Geotechnical Assessment and Instrumentation Needs (GAIN) Symposium for Nuclear Waste Isolation in Crystalline and Argillaceous Rocks was held July 16-20, 1978 in Berkeley. This report and recommendations are the proceedings from that symposium. The location, design, and testing of a potential nuclear waste disposal site are both a geologic and an engineering problem. Disposal requires …

Photocopy of an editorial from the Abilene Reporter News, section 4-A of the 1978-10-19 paper, discussing the passing and history of Gypsy Ted Sullivan Wylie. The photocopy has three duplicate images on the page.

A method was developed that allows the mode-locking process to go to its steady state condition before the laser is Q-switched. This is done by pumping the laser quasi-cw for about 5 ms. During this time, the loss in the Q-switch is such that the laser will just slightly go above threshold. The active modulator is on during this time, and the laser oscillates quasi-cw for a period long enough to obtain stable transform-limited short pulses. At the end of this prelase period, the laser is Q-switched, and a train of stable, short pulses is obtained.

Incomplete LU and incomplete-Cholesky conjugate gradient methods are becoming widely used in both laser and magnetic fusion research. In my original presentation of these methods, the problem of what to do if a pivot (L/sub ii/U/sub ii/) becomes very small or zero was raised and only partially answered by the suggestion that it be arbitrarily set to some non-zero value. In what follows it will be shown precisely how small the pivot can become before it must be fixed and precisely what value it should be set to in order to minimize the error in LU. Numerical examples will be given to show that not only does this prescription improve incomplete LU-conjugate gradient methods , but exact LU decomposition carried out with this prescription for handling small pivots and followed by a few linear or conjugate gradient iterations can be much faster than the permutations of rows and columns usually employed to circumvent small pivot problems.

Laser induced fusion is the forerunner of a class of inertial confinement schemes in which hydrogen isotopes are heated to thermonuclear conditions in a very short period. The process is characterized by such short time scales that fuel confinement is achieved through its' own finite mass and expansion velocity, approaching 1 ..mu..m/psec for ignition temperatures of order 10 keV (10/sup 8/ /sup 0/K). With current laser powers limited to several terrawatts one readily estimates, on the basis of energy conservation, target mass, and expansion velocity, that target size and laser pulse duration are on the order of 100 ..mu..m and 100 psec, respectively. Within these constraints, targets have been heated and confined to the point where thermonuclear conditions have been achieved. This paper describes a sampling of diagnostic techniques with requisite resolution (microns and picoseconds) to accurately describe the dynamics of a laser driven compression. As discussed in each case cited, these in turn provide insight to and quantitative measure of, the physical processes dominating the implosion. The success of the inertial confinement fusion program is strongly dependent on the continued development of such diagnostics and the understanding they provide.

We have carried out conceptual design studies of fusion reactors based on the three current mirror confinement concepts: the standard mirror, the tandem mirror, and the field-reversed mirror. Recent studies of the standard mirror have emphasized its potential as a fusion-fission hybrid reactor, designed to produce fission fuel for fission reactors. We have designed a large commercial hybrid based on standard mirror confinement, and also a small pilot plant hybrid. Tandem mirror designs include a commercial 1000 MWe fusion power plant and a nearer term tandem mirror hybrid. Field-reversed mirror designs include a multicell commercial reactor producing 75 MWe and a single cell pilot plant.

A large, new Mirror Fusion Test Facility is under construction at LLL. Begun in FY78 it will be completed at the end of FY78 at a cost of $94.2M. This facility gives the mirror program the flexibility to explore mirror confinement principles at a signficant scale and advances the technology of large reactor-like devices. The role of MFTF in the LLL program is described here.

This report is about the Clarification of LWR Dissolver Solutions.

The Savannah River Laboratory (SRL) is coordinating an interlaboratory effort to provide, test, and use state-of-the-art methods for calculating the environmental impact to an offsite population from the normal releases of radionuclides during the routine operation of a fuel-reprocessing plant. Results of this effort are the estimated doses to regional, continental, and global populations. Estimates are based upon operation of a hypothetical reprocessing plant at a site in the southeastern United States. The hypothetical plant will reprocess fuel used at a burn rate of 30 megawatts/metric ton and a burnup of 33,000 megawatt days/metric ton. All fuel will have been cooled for at least 365 days. The plant will have a 10 metric ton/day capacity and an assumed 3000 metric ton/year (82 percent online plant operation) output. Lifetime of the plant is assumed to be 40 years.

The hybrid reactor studies are reviewed. The optimization of the point design and work on a reference design are described. The status of the nuclear analysis of fast spectrum blankets, systems studies for fissile fuel producing hybrid reactor, and the mechanical design of the machine are reviewed. (MHR)

Winding of a Nb--Ti test coil at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is nearly complete. The conductor in this coil operates in a maximum field of 7.5 T and provides the 2-T field required by the Mirror Fusion Test Facility. Nb/sub 3/Sn multifilamentary conductors, made using the ''bronze'' technique, appear capable of providing the higher fields needed by commercial reactors.