Possible methods for disposing of the immobilized raffinate from TRUEX processing are reviewed. The purpose of the TRUEX process is to extract transuranium elements from high-level and TRU wastes into a small volume that can be managed at lower cost than that of the original wastes. The raffinate from the TRUEX process, containing negligible concentrations of transuranium elements, would be combined with salt solutions also derived from processing high-level waste, and the mixture would be converted to grout.

Metal cutting techniques that can be used to segment the reactor pressure vessel of the Experimental Boiling Water Reactor (EBWR) at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) have been evaluated by Nuclear Energy Services. Twelve cutting technologies are described in terms of their ability to perform the required task, their performance characteristics, environmental and radiological impacts, and cost and schedule considerations. Specific recommendations regarding which technology should ultimately be used by ANL are included. The selection of a cutting method was the responsibility of the decommissioning staff at ANL, who included a relative weighting of the parameters described in this document in their evaluation process.

In 1956, the Experimental Boiling Water Reactor (EBWR) Facility was first operated at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) as a test reactor to demonstrate the feasibility of operating an integrated power plant using a direct cycle boiling water reactor as a heat source. In 1967, ANL permanently shut down the EBWR and placed it in dry lay-up. This project plan presents the schedule and organization for the decontamination and decommissioning of the EBWR Facility which will allow it to be reused by other ANL scientific research programs. The project total estimated cost is $14.3M and is projected to generate 22,000 cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste which will be disposed of at an approved DOE burial ground. 18 figs., 3 tabs.

One aspect of Argonne research in parallel computing involves the speed and other properties of parallel SDI algorithms. Various algorithms under study have exhibited speedups resulting from parallelization on shared-memory machines. A weapon-target accessibility algorithm called ACCESS exhibited a high degree of inherent parallelism and has been studied on a wide variety of sequential and parallel multiple instruction multiple data (MIMD) machines. To study ACCESS on a massively parallel single instruction multiple data (SIMD) machine architecture, ANL researchers developed a version of ACCESS on a Thinking Machines Corporation 16K processor Connection Machine-2 (CM-2) located at the ACRF. ANL researchers wrote the Connection Machine version of ACCESS in C(*), a version of C by Thinking Machines Corporation with extensions to accommodate SIMD parallelism. Because of the large number of available physical processors and the ability to create virtual processors on the CM-2, the Connection Machine version of ACCESS was able to process an array of 128 x 1024 tasks in parallel. For the data tested, the CM-2 implementation of ACCESS was faster than both the parallel version run on the Alliant FX/8, the Encore Multimax, and the Sequent Balance and the sequential version run on the ANL Cray X-MP/14. For the …

This paper summarizes our investigations into the computational detection of secondary and tertiary structure of ribosomal RNA. We have developed a new automated procedure that not only identifies potential bondings of secondary and tertiary structure, but also provides the covariation evidence that supports the proposed bondings, and any counter-evidence that can be detected in the known sequences. A small number of previously unknown bondings have been detected in individual RNA molecules (16S rRNA and 7S RNA) through the use of our automated procedure. Currently, we are systematically studying mitochondrial rRNA. Our goal is to detect tertiary structure within 16S rRNA and quaternary structure between 16S and 23S rRNA. Our ultimate hope is that automated covariation analysis will contribute significantly to a refined picture of ribosome structure. Our colleagues in biology have begun experiments to test certain hypotheses suggested by an examination of our program's output. These experiments involve sequencing key portions of the 23S ribosomal RNA for species in which the known 16S ribosomal RNA exhibits variation (from the dominant pattern) at the site of a proposed bonding. The hope is that the 23S ribosomal RNA of these species will exhibit corresponding complementary variation or generalized covariation.