A nonnuclear explosion involving an evaporator occurred in a shielded cell in the Radiochemical Processing Pilot plant at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Plutonium released from the processing cell contaminated areas in the pilot plant building and nearby streets and building surfaces. The explosion is considered the result of rapid reaction of nitrated organic compounds formed by the inadvertent nitration of about 14 liters of a proprietary decontaminating reagent.

This report summarizes progress on investigation into improving the technological limits of boiling water reactors, Vallecitos Boiling Water Reactor and other facilities.

Writing the VARI-II Program was motivated by the need for a method of analyzing the results for the Absorber Burn-Up Experiment in progress at the Vallecitos Atomic Laboratory.

A research and development program aimed at devising processes for the economical recovery of the potentially valuable long-lived fission products from Purex waste has been under wat at Hanford for several years. When this work has begun, the concentrated waste was primarily a nitric acid solution (6 to 10 M HNO3) containing the fission products and relatively small concentrations of iron, sulfate, and other corrosion products. Flowsheets based on classical separation schemes and rather similar to processes used by the Isotopes Division at the AEC's Oak Ridge operation served to separate the desired fission products from one another and from the corrosion products (1,2,3).These separation schemes employed careful step-wise pH adjustment to precipitate first the iron and then to separate the desired fission products from one another. The flowsheets were demonstrated on a pilot-plant scale with full-level plant waste. However, since the earlier work was complete, plant operations have been modified....

This paper reports an extension of previous experimental work with Alfven waves. We consider hydromagnetic waves propagating in a cylindrical plasma in a uniform axial magnetic field. The copper tube is filled with highly ionized plasma by an electrically driven switch-on ionizing wave. After the tube is filled with plasma, a hydromagnetic wave is induced by a radial current flow from the small molybdenum electrode to the copper tube. The force produced by this radial current together with the static axial magnetic field displaces the plasma in the azimuthal direction, and a transverse wave is propagated in the axial direction, along magnetic field lines. The transient magnetic field associated with the wave is also in the azimuthal direction.

This program was established to develop new information concerning the mechanism of diffusion of fission gases (krypton and xenon) through UO2 and UC. The work was to concentrated on measurements of diffusion rates in unirradiated materials in the temperature range of 1000°C to above 2000°C, these determinations being important to the projected use of refractory fuel materials in high-temperature, high-burnup reactors.