The Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) will use cesium ion exchange to remove Cs-137 from Low Activity Waste (LAW) down to a maximum activity of 0.3 Ci/m3 in the Immobilized LAW (ILAW) product. The WTP Project baseline for cesium ion exchange is the elutable SuperLig(R) 644 (SL-644) resin (registered trademark of IBC Advanced Technologies, Inc., American Fork, UT) or a U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) approved equivalent. SL-644 is solely available through IBC Advanced Technologies. The WTP Project is conducting a three-stage process for selecting and qualifying an alternative ion exchange resin. Resorcinol formaldehyde (RF) is being pursued as a potential alternative to SL-644, to provide a backup resin supply. Resin cost relative to SL-644 is a primary driver. Phase I of the testing plan examined the viability of RF resin and recommended that a spherical form of RF resin be examined further. Phases II and III, now underway, include batch testing to determine the isotherm of this resin, kinetics to address the impacts of bead diameter and high sodium feed levels on processing Hanford waste with the resin, and multicycle column testing to determine how temperature and chemical cycling affects waste processing. Phases II and III …

Recent highlights in CP violation phenomena, are reviewed. B-factory results imply that, CP-violation phase in the CKM matrix is the dominant contributor to the observed CP violation in K and B-physics. Deviations from the predictions of the CKM-paradigm due to beyond the Standard Model CP-odd phase are likely to be a small perturbation. Therefore, large data sample of clean B's will be needed. Precise determination of the unitarity triangle, along with time dependent CP in penguin dominated hadronic and radiative modes are discussed. Null tests in B, K and top-physics and separate determination of the K-unitarity triangle are also emphasized.

Monosodium titanate is an inorganic adsorbent powder that effectively removes strontium, plutonium, neptunium, and other trace elements from alkaline high-level waste supernate. This work tested one commercial titanate and four general methods to engineer MST into particles large enough to use in adsorption columns. The most successful of the engineered products selected from batch contact and chemical stability testing succeeded in treating 2900 bed volumes of simulated salt waste containing dissolved plutonium and strontium. There was no detectable strontium breakthrough and only 6 percent plutonium breakthrough--well within the processing goal--at the end of the demonstration which operated at 5.3 BV/hour. Additional column tests at nominally 15 BV/hr demonstrated similar removal performance. Batch testing of adsorbents used both actual Savannah River Site tank supernate as well as simulated salt solutions spiked with strontium, neptunium, and plutonium. In tank waste tests, internal gelation beads produced by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory demonstrated a batch distribution coefficient of 35,000 +/- 4,000 mL/g for plutonium at a phase ratio of 1970 mL/g. In the same batch the sorbent demonstrated a batch distribution coefficient of 99,000 +/- 7,500 mL/g for strontium. These results indicate that this material should be able to process thousands of bed …