To identify emerging basic science and engineering research needs and opportunities that will require major advances in electron-scattering theory, technology, and instrumentation.

This report provides a summary of the results on the properties of cementitious waste forms obtained as part of the International Program. In particular, this report focuses on the results of Task 4 of the Program that was initially entitled ''Improved Retention of Key Contaminants of Concern in Low Temperature Immobilized Waste Forms''. Task 4 was a joint program between Khlopin Radium Institute and the Savannah River National Laboratory. The task evolved during this period into a study of cementitious waste forms with an expanded scope that included heat of hydration and fate and transport modeling. This report provides the results for Task 4 of the International Program as of the end of FY06 at which time funding for Task 4 was discontinued due to the needs of higher priority tasks within the International Program. Consequently, some of the subtasks were only partially completed, but it was considered important to capture the results up to this point in time. Therefore, this report serves as the closeout report for Task 4. The degree of immobilization of Tc-99 within the Saltstone waste form was measured through monolithic and crushed grout leaching tests. An effective diffusion coefficient of 4.8 x 10{sup -12} (Leach …

The IPP/DOE program office has finished its evaluation of the alpha-emitting isotope work with Kurchatov Institute and IPPE, and they have made an important decision about the future of this work. IPP/DOE has directed us to re-program the work and add more funds, so the emphasis will be on production of Th228. By making this re-direction of the isotope work, IPPE will see several important benefits: (a) the payments will be made faster to IPPE by using the ISTC Agreement; (b) a larger amount of money will be paid to IPPE; and (c) a profitable future business opportunity for IPPE is more probable.

We present a scheme to solve the nonlinear multigroup radiation diffusion (MGD) equations. The method is incorporated into a massively parallel, multidimensional, Eulerian radiation-hydrodynamic code with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). The patch-based AMR algorithm refines in both space and time creating a hierarchy of levels, coarsest to finest. The physics modules are time-advanced using operator splitting. On each level, separate 'level-solve' packages advance the modules. Our multigroup level-solve adapts an implicit procedure which leads to a two-step iterative scheme that alternates between elliptic solves for each group with intra-cell group coupling. For robustness, we introduce pseudo transient continuation ({Psi}tc). We analyze the magnitude of the {Psi}tc parameter to ensure positivity of the resulting linear system, diagonal dominance and convergence of the two-step scheme. For AMR, a level defines a subdomain for refinement. For diffusive processes such as MGD, the refined level uses Dirichet boundary data at the coarse-fine interface and the data is derived from the coarse level solution. After advancing on the fine level, an additional procedure, the sync-solve (SS), is required in order to enforce conservation. The MGD SS reduces to an elliptic solve on a combined grid for a system of G equations, where G is the …

This project examined the possibility of extending the recently demonstrated radoptic detection approach to gamma imaging. Model simulations of the light scattering process predicted that expected signal levels were small and likely below the detection limit of large area, room-temperature detectors. A series of experiments using pulsed x-ray excitation, modulated gamma excitation and optical pump-probe methods confirmed those theoretical predictions. At present the technique does not appear to provide a viable approach to volumetric radiation detection; however, in principal, orders of magnitude improvement in the SNR can result by using designer materials to concentrate and localize the radiation-absorption induced charge, simultaneously confining the optical mode to increase 'fill' factor and overlap of the probe beam with the affected regions, and employing high speed gated imaging detectors to measure the scattered signal.