A new drift detector prototype which provides suppression of the lateral diffusion of electrons has been tested as a function of the signal charge up to high charge levels, when electrostatic repulsion is not negligible. The lateral diffusion of the electron cloud has been measured for injected charges up to 2 {center_dot} 10{sup 5} electrons. The maximum number of electrons for which the suppression of the lateral spread is effective is obtained.

The management of risks from radioactive and chemical materials has been a major environmental concern in the United states for the past two or three decades. Risk management of these materials encompasses the remediation of past disposal practices as well as development of appropriate strategies and controls for current and future operations. This symposium is concerned primarily with low-level radioactive wastes and mixed wastes. Individual reports were processed separately for the Department of Energy databases.

Equipe Basis (EB) is a new system for programmable applications which is under development at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. EB is designed to permit user control of teams of interconnecting processes in a heterogeneous environment. Current systems work with programs written in Fortran or C on a single processor. The programs of the future will be in many languages and distributed over many processors. The object-oriented kernel can communicate data and commands between processes that are unaware of each other`s inner structure. The programming language, Eiffel, is described. This document consists of extensive viewgraphs.

This work describes the development and testing of a new method for the separation and analysis of most actinides of interest in environmental samples. It combines simplified extraction chromatography using highly selective absorption resins to partition the individual actinides with the measurement of their alpha activities by liquid scintillation spectrometry. The liquid scintillation counting technique pioneered by McDowell proved useful in determination of alpha emitting radionuclide in a wide variety of matrices. Alpha emitters are chemically extracted into an organic phase which also contains the scintillation cocktail. Oxygen is purged from the solution to improve the energy resolution of the measurement and the counting sample is sealed in a small glass tube for assay. The Photon-Electron Rejecting Alpha Liquid Scintillation (PERALS{trademark}) Spectrometer provides high counting efficiency, low background, pulse shape discrimination for photon/electron/{beta} particle rejection and moderate energy resolution in a compact package. Chemical extraction/liquid scintillation counting significantly reduces the extensive chemical purification and electroplating required for conventional alpha spectrometry with semiconductor detectors. PERALS{trademark} analyses have been used routinely for quickly surveying suspect samples and determining the source of unknown alpha activities.

We could become convinced that a particular theory of very-high-energy physics is correct if (1) it has a tightly constrained structure and is linked strongly enough with observed particle interactions, or (2) it predicts new physics beyond the standard model which is discovered. The author makes the case that experiments of this decade and the next allow the possibility that we might become convinced that grand unification, a candidate theory of the second type, is correct.

The Westinghouse Savannah River Technology Center was requested by it`s sister site, West Valley Nuclear Service (WVNS), to develop a remote inspection system to gather wall thickness readings of their High Level Waste Tanks. WVNS management chose to take a proactive approach to gain current information on two tanks t hat had been in service since the early 70`s. The tanks contain high level waste, are buried underground, and have only two access ports to an annular space between the tank and the secondary concrete vault. A specialized remote system was proposed to provide both a visual surveillance and ultrasonic thickness measurements of the tank walls. A magnetic wheeled crawler was the basis for the remote delivery system integrated with an off-the-shelf Ultrasonic Data Acquisition System. A development program was initiated for Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) to design, fabricate, and test a remote system based on the Crawler. The system was completed and involved three crawlers to perform the needed tasks, an Ultrasonic Crawler, a Camera Crawler, and a Surface Prep Crawler. The crawlers were computer controlled so that their operation could be done remotely and their position on the wall could be tracked. The Ultrasonic Crawler controls were …

This presentation reviews the current status of quantum mechanical models for understanding the high-energy component of gamma spectra resulting from radiative capture of fast nucleons; i.e., the part of the spectrum that is not amenable to standard statistical model (Hauser-Feshbach) treatments. These models are based on the direct-semidirect (DSD) model and its variants. Included are recent results on the extension of the DSD model to unbound final states, a discussion of problems and improvements in understanding the form factors in this model, and a brief discussion of a model closely related to the DSD, the pure-resonance model.

We discuss the potential for making precision measurements of M{sub W} and M{sub T} at a muon collider and the motivations for each measurement. A comparison is made with the precision measurements expected at other facilities. The measurement of the top quark decay width is also discussed.

During a six-week period in the fall of 1994 a team of 31 US government and Y-12 personnel packaged and removed several thousand kilograms of material containing highly enriched uranium from the (former Soviet Union) Republic of Kazakhstan for interim storage at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This classified mission, known as PROJECT SAPPHIRE, had been initiated at the request of the Kazakhstan government in order to rid itself of possible security problems. Planning for the mission included assurance of the health and safety of the team members, as well as compliance with all local, IAEA, and US government regulations regarding the handling, packaging, transportation, and storage of radioactive and fissile material. The mission classification restrictions were relaxed following the return of the team and material to the United States. The material to be removed, in the form of small billets and rods of uranium metal and uranium-beryllium alloy and oxide powder, was sealed by team members on site into two-liter steel cans. Two or three cans each were loaded into more than 400 IAEA certified fissile material shipping container, and each container was packed into a large steel drum for transport by US Air Force cargo planes …

Increasing the content limits of radioactive material packagings can save money and increase transportation safety by decreasing the total number of shipments required to transport large quantities of material. The contents of drum packages can be limited by unacceptable containment vessel pressures and temperatures due to the thermal properties of the insulation. The purpose of this work is to understand and predict the effects of insulation properties on containment system performance.

Among the new methods being investigated for the post-combustion removal of nitrogen oxides (NO{sub x}) are based on non-thermal plasmas. These plasmas can be produced by electrical discharge methods or electron beam irradiation. The application of electron beam irradiation for NO{sub x} removal in power plant flue gases has been investigated since the early 1970`s in both laboratory- and pilot-scale experiments. Electrical discharge methods are relatively new entrants in the field of flue gas cleanup. Pulsed corona and dielectric-barrier discharge techniques are two of the more commonly used electrical discharge methods for producing nonthermal plasmas at atmospheric pressure. There are basically two types of reactions responsible for the depletion of NO by non-thermal plasmas: oxidation and reduction.

In this paper the authors present data on the non-thermal plasma processing of two representative VOCs: carbon tetrachloride and methanol. The investigation used a compact electron beam reactor, and two types of discharge reactors: a pulsed corona and a dielectric-barrier discharge. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first comparison of the energy efficiency of electron beam, pulsed corona and dielectric-barrier discharge processing of these VOCs under identical gas conditions. For most electrical discharge reactors the analysis suggests that the attainable electron mean energy is rather limited and cannot be significantly enhanced by changing the electrode configuration or voltage waveform. The experimental data confirms that there is no significant difference in the performance of the pulsed corona and dielectric-barrier discharge reactors. The authors observe that electron beam processing is remarkably more energy efficiency than electrical discharge processing in decomposing either of these VOC molecules. During electron beam processing, the specific energy consumption is consistent with the energy required for the ionization of the background air molecules. For carbon tetrachloride, the dominant decomposition pathway is dissociative electron attachment. For methanol, the dominant decomposition pathway is dissociative charge exchange.

We present the results of a series of experiments to measure the thermal recovery times of a flashlamp-pumped, Nd:Glass multi-segment laser amplifier. In particular, we investigated the thermal recovery times under the following cooling options: (1) passive cooling; (2) active cooling of the flashlamp cassettes, and (3) active cooling of the flashlamp cassettes and gas flow in the pump cavity.

A silicon microgripper with a large gripping force, a relatively rigid structural body, and flexibility in functional design is presented. The actuation is generated by Ni-Ti-Cu shape memory alloy (SMA) films and the stress induced can deflect each side of the microgripper up to 55 {mu}m for a total gripping motion of 110 {mu}m. When fully open, the force exerted by the film corresponds to a 40 mN gripping force on the tip of the gripper.

The conceptual design of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) 192 beam laser incorporates a low-power alignment beam injected in the pinhole plane of the final spatial filter with a wave length intermediate between the 1053 mn laser output and the 351 mn frequency-converted beam that illuminates the target Choosing the specific wavelength for which the spatial filter plane is reimaged in the same target chamber plane as the frequency-converted main laser pulse, achieves optimum accuracy without the need for additional means to insure precise overlap between the two beams. Insertion of the alignment beam after the last laser amplifier also allows alignment to the target while the amplifiers are still cooling from a previous shot.