Zircaloy-2 has a strong tendency to absorb oxygen and nitrogen at elevated temperatures. These gas impurities are extremely harmful, causing brittleness and loss of corrosion resistance. The production of ductile corrosion-resistant welds by present methods required shielding of the weld metal by an inert gas atmosphere or by a vacuum. The alternative to an inert gas atmosphere or a vacuum is reduction of the welding time to a few milliseconds of time to prevent gas absorption.

At the request of the Hanford Operations Office of the Atomic Energy Commission, a criticality instrumentation meeting was held at Hanford on August 17 and 18, 1959. The purposes of the meeting were: (a) to review types of criticality control and/or alarm instrumentation at each site, their problems, shortcomings and potential obsolescence; (b) to discuss instrumentation in the area if approaching criticality; and (c) to consider for material balance purposes, the feasibility of devising instruments to detect the buildup of plutonium and enriched uranium bearing residues in process systems.

The recovery of plutonium and neptunium by anion exchange has been well demonstrated on a laboratory scale. (1, 2,3,4) The specific adsorbed by the resin is the tetravalent hexanitrate complex of either element. With plutonium (IV) and neptunium(V) in IWW, the plutonium is adsorbed but the neptunium is not. If nitrite is used as the reductant in strong (preferably 8 M or over) nitric acid, both plutonium and neptunium are obtained in the tetravalent state, and both are adsorbed on the resin. With stronger reductants, such as semi carbazide or ferrous sulfamate, plutonium (III) and neptunium (IV) are obtained so that only the neptunium is adsorbed. Optimum recovery of either element is obtained with between seven and eight M nitric acid.