This document is a summary of the history of Tank 241-Z-361 through December 1997. Documents reviewed include engineering files, laboratory notebooks from characterization efforts, waste facility process procedures, supporting documents and interviews of people`s recollections of 20 plus years ago. Records of transfers into the tank, past characterization efforts, and speculation will be used to estimate the current condition of Tank 241-Z-361 and its contents.

Residual free water expected to remain in a Multi-Canister Overpack (MCO) after processing in the Cold Vacuum Drying (CVD) Facility is investigated based on three alternative models of fuel crevices. Tests and operating conditions for the CVD process are defined based on the analysis of these models. The models consider water pockets constrained by cladding defects, water constrained in a pore or crack by flow through a porous bed, and water constrained in pores by diffusion. An analysis of comparative reaction rate constraints is also presented indicating that a pressure rise test can be used to show MCO`s will be thermally stable at operating temperatures up to 75 C.

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story. This story aired at 5:00 P.M.

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story. This story aired at 10:00 P.M.

This home movie excerpt documents the Pangburn family preparing for and celebrating the Christmas holiday. Footage includes Travis Pangburn spreading hay for Santa's reindeer, a tour of the house, and the family opening presents.

This report documents the results of a technical evaluation of the merits of ceramic and glass immobilization forms for the disposition of surplus weapons-useable plutonium. The evaluation was conducted by a Technical Evaluation Panel (TEP), whose members were selected to cover a relevant range of scientific and technical expertise and represented each of the technical organizations involved in the Plutonium Immobilization Program. The TEP held a formal review at Lawrence Liver-more National Laboratory (LLNL) from July 2%August 1, 1997. Following this review, the TEP documented the review and its evaluation of the two immobilization technologies in this report to provide a technical basis for a recommendation by LLNL to the Department of Energy (DOE) for the preferred immobilization form. The comparison of the glass and ceramic forms and manufacturing processes was a tremendous challenge to the TEP. The two forms and their processes are similar in many ways. The TEP went to great effort to accurately assess what were, in many cases, fine details of the processes, unit operations, and the glass and ceramic forms themselves. The set of criteria used by the Fissile Materials Disposition Program (FMDP) in past screenings and down-selections was used to measure-the two options. One …

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Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

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Photograph of the Mentone Community Church in Menton, Texas.

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The engineering process of integrating the Petawatt (10{sup 15} watts) laser system into the existing 30 kJ (UV) Nova laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is described in detail. The nanosecond-long, chirped Petawatt laser pulse is initially generated in a separate master oscillator room and then injected into one of Nova`s 10 beamlines. There, the pulse is further amplified and enlarged to {approximately}{phi}60 cm, temporally compressed under vacuum to <500 fs using large diameter diffraction gratings, and then finally focused onto targets using a parabolic mirror. The major Petawatt components are physically large which created many significant engineering challenges in design, installation and implementation. These include the diffraction gratings and mirrors, vacuum compressor chamber, target chamber, and parabolic focusing mirror. Other Petawatt system components were also technically challenging and include: an injection beamline, transport spatial filters, laser diagnostics, alignment components, motor controls, interlocks, timing and synchronization systems, support structures, and vacuum systems. The entire Petawatt laser system was designed, fabricated, installed, and activated while the Nova laser continued its normal two-shift operation. This process required careful engineering and detailed planning to prevent experimental downtime and to complete the project on schedule.

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The upcoming satellite missions MAP and Planck will measure the spectrum of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background with unprecedented accuracy. I discuss the prospect of using these observations to distinguish among proposed models of inflationary cosmology.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will use about 8,000 large optics to carry a high-power laser through a stadium-size building, and will do so on a very tight schedule and budget. The collocated Optics Assembly Building (OAB) will assemble and align, in a clean-room environment, the NIF`s large optics, which are the biggest optics ever assembled in such an environment. In addition, the OAB must allow for just-in-time processing and clean transfer to the areas where the optics will be used. By using a mixture of off-the-shelf and newly designed equipment and by working with industry, we have developed innovative handling systems to perform the clean assembly and precise alignment required for the full variety of optics, as well as for postassembly inspection. We have also developed a set of loading mechanisms that safely get the clean optics to their places in the main NIF building.

We discuss how solid-state laser technology can serve in the interests of fusion energy beyond the goals of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is now being constructed to ignite a deuterium-tritium target to fusion conditions in the laboratory for the first time. We think that advanced solid-state laser technology can offer the repetition-rate and efficiency needed to drive a fusion power plant, in contrast to the single-shot character of NIF. As discuss below, we propose that a gas-cooled, diode-pumped Yb:S-FAP laser can provide a new paradigm for fusion laser technology leading into the next century.

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A damage morphology study was performed with a 355 nm Nd:YAG laser on synthetic UV-grade fused silica to determine the effects of post- polish chemical etching on laser-induced damage, compare damage morphologies of cleaved and polished surfaces, and understand the effects of the hydrolyzed surface layer and waste-crack interactions. The samples were polished , then chemically etched in buffered HF solution to remove 45,90,135, and 180 nm of surface material. Another set of samples was cleaved and soaked in boiling distilled water for 1 second and 1 hour. All the samples were irradiated at damaging fluencies and characterized by Normarski optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. Damage was initiated as micro-pits on both input and output surfaces of the polished fused silica sample. At higher fluencies, the micro-pits generated cracks on the surface. Laser damage of the polished surface showed significant trace contamination levels within a 50 nm surface layer. Micro-pit formation also appeared after irradiating cleaved fused silica surfaces at damaging fluences. Linear damage tracks corresponding cleaving tracks were often observed on cleaved surfaces. Soaking cleaved samples in water produced wide laser damage tracks.

Installing the thousands of optics that make up the laser for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a complex operation. This paper introduces the Optical Transport and Material Handling designs that will be used to deliver the optics. The transport and handling hardware is being designed to allow autonomous, semiautonomous, and manual operations.

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