In a well managed project, Quality Assurance is an integral part of the management activities performed on a daily basis. Management assures successful performance within budget and on schedule by using all the good business, scientific, engineering, quality assurance, and safety practices available. Quality assurance and safety practices employed on Nova are put in perspective by integrating them into the overall function of good project management. The Nova assurance management system was developed using the quality assurance (QA) approach first implemented at LLNL in early 1978. The LLNL QA program is described as an introduction to the Nova assurance management system. The Nova system is described pictorially through the Nova configuration, subsystems and major components, interjecting the QA techniques which are being pragmatically used to assure the successful completion of the project.

We have examined the effect of fission-spectrum neutrons from the JANUS reactor at Argonne National Laboratory, delivered either as acute or protracted irradiation, on the incidence of neoplastic transformation in the C3H 1OT1/2 mouse embryo cell line. Acute exposures were delivered at 10 to 38 rads/min, protracted exposures at 0.086 or 0.43 rad/min. The total doses for both ranged from 2.4 to 350 rads. In the low dose region (2.4 to 80 rads), there was a large enhancement in transformation frequency when the neutrons were delivered at the low dose rates compared with the high dose rates, but the survival of the cells was not significantly different between the two exposure conditions. Analysis of the initial parts of the curves shows that the regression line for protracted doses is about 9 times steeper than that for single acute exposures. Finally, the possibility is discussed that an error-prone repair process may be causing the enhanced transformation frequency by protracted neutron exposures. 12 references, 2 figures, 1 table.