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In December 1992, the US Department of Energy (DOE) directed that the Plutonium-Uranium Extraction (PUREX) Plant be shut down and deactivated because it was no longer needed to support the nation`s production of weapons-grade plutonium. The PUREX/UO{sub 2} Deactivation Project will establish a safe and environmentally secure configuration for the facility and preserve that configuration for 10 years. The 10-year span is used to predict future maintenance requirements and represents the estimated time needed to define, authorize, and initiate the follow-on decontamination and decommissioning activities. Accomplishing the deactivation project involves many activities. Removing major hazards, such as excess chemicals, spent fuel, and residual plutonium are major goals of the project. The scope of the PUREX Transition Project is described within.

The new camera FXI was investigated. Spatial resolution, or its Fourier transform, the modulation transfer function (MTF), is critical for quantitative interpretation of recent hydrodynamic instability data taken on the Nova laser. We have taken data corresponding to backlit straight edges, pinholes, and grids, both on the bench and {ital in}{ital situ} on Nova. For both the pinhole and edge data, the MTF at all wavelengths of interest can be deduced from a single image. Grids are of more limited usefulness, giving the MTF value only at the spatial period of the grid. These different techniques for characterizing the MTF of gated x-ray pinhole cameras are discussed, with results specific to the FXI presented.

This work describes a particular concept for ion induction linac accelerators using high-charge-state ions produced by an intense, short pulse laser, and compares the costs of a modular driver system producing 6.5 MJ for a variety of ion masses and charge states using a simple but consistent cost model.

Nuclear production reactors operated at the U.S. Department of Energy`s Hanford Site from 1944 until 1988 to produce plutonium. Most of the irradiated fuel from these reactors was processed onsite to separate and recover the plutonium. When the processing facilities were closed in 1992, about 1,900 metric tons of unprocessed irradiated fuel remained in storage. Additional fuel was irradiated for research purposes or was shipped to the Hanford Site from offsite reactor facilities for storage or recovery of nuclear materials. The fuel inventory now in storage at the Hanford Site is predominantly N Reactor irradiated fuel, a metallic uranium alloy that is coextruded into zircaloy-2 cladding. The Spent Nuclear Fuel Project has rommitted to an accelerated schedule for removing spent nuclear fuel from the Hanford Site K Basins to a new interim storage facility in the 200 Area. Under the current proposed accelerated schedule, retrieval of spent nuclear fuel stored in the K East and West Basins must begin by December 1997 and be completed by December 1999. A key part of this action is retrieving fuel canisters from the water-filled K Basin storage pools and transferring them into multi@ister overpacks (MCOS) that will be used to handle and process …

Goal of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is to achieve thermonuclear ignition in a laboratory environment in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). This will enable NIF to service the DOE stockpile stewardship management program, inertial fusion energy goals, and advance scientific frontiers. All of these applications will make use of the extreme conditions that the facility will create in the target chamber. In the case of a prospected 20 MJ yield scenario, NIF will produce 10{sup 19} neutrons with DT fusion 14 MeV energy per neutron. There will also be high-energy x rays as well as solid, liquid, and gaseous target debris produced either directly or indirectly by the inertial confinement fusion process. A critical design issue is the protection of the final optical components as well as sophisticated target diagnostics in such a harsh environment.

In Dec. 1994, IAEA safeguards were initiated on inventory of Pu- bearing materials, originating from the US nuclear weapons complex, at vault 3 of DOE`s Plutonium Finishing Plant at Hanford. Because of the diversity and heterogeneity of the Pu, plant operators have increasingly used calorimetry for accountability measurements. During the recent commencement of IAEA safeguards at vault 3, destructive (electrochemical titration) methods were used to determine Pu concentrations in subsamples of inventory items with widely ranging chemical purities. The Pu concentrations in the subsamples were determined and contribution of heterogeneity to total variability was identified. Measurement results, gathered by PFP and IAEA laboratories, showed total measurement variability for calorimetry to be comparable with or lower than those of sampling and chemical analyses.

A recent source term analysis has shown a discrepancy between ORIGEN2 transuranic isotopic production estimates and those produced with the WIMS-E lattice physics code. Excellent agreement between relevant experimental measurements and WIMS-E was shown, thus exposing an error in the cross section library used by ORIGEN2.

This paper describes an application of the U.S. Department of Energy`s (DOE) performance goal based method for the design and evaluation of structures, systems, and components (SSCS) at Fluor Daniel Hanford, Inc. (FDH). The philosophy on which DOE`s method is based has been employed to construct a graded approach to the minimum structural design and evaluation criteriz@ used at the DOE Hanford Site that complies with the DOE Order 54E;0.28, Natural Phenomena Hazards Mitigation. The FDH structural design and evaluation criteria applies to both nuclear and non-nuclear SSCs that are not covered by a reactor safety analysis report.

The micro-structure of an atmospheric pressure, opposed flow, methane diffusion flame has been studied using heated micro-probe sampling and chemical kinetic modeling. Mole fraction profiles of major products as well as trace aromatic, substituted aromatic, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH up to C{sub 16}H{sub 10}, e.g. pyrene) were quantified by direct gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analysis of samples withdrawn from within the flame without any pre-concentration. Mole fractions range from 0.8 to 1.0 {times} 10{sup {minus}7}. The experimental measurements are compared to results from a newly-developed chemical kinetic model that includes chemistry for the production and consumption of aromatics and PAH species. The model predictions are in reasonable agreement with the experimental data for the major species profiles and for the peak concentrations of many of the trace aromatics and PAH species. 36 refs.

Designing a computer control system for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a complex undertaking because of the system`s large size and its distributed nature. The controls team is addressing that complexity by adopting the object-oriented programming paradigm, designing reusable software frameworks, and using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) for distribution. A prototype system for image-based automatic laser alignment has been developed to evaluate and gain experience with CORBA and OOP in a small distributed system. The prototype is also important in evaluating alignment concepts, image processing techniques, speed and accuracy of automatic alignment objectives for the NIF, and control hardware for aligment devices. The prototype system has met its inital objectives and provides a basis for continued development.

The fragmentation of a small asteroid in the atmosphere greatly increases its aerodynamic drag and rate of energy dissipation. The differential atmospheric pressure across it disperses its fragments at a velocity that increases with atmospheric density and impact velocity and decreases with asteroid density. Extending our previous work, we use a spherical atmosphere and a fitted curve to its density profile to find the damage done by an asteroid entering the atmosphere at various zenith angles. In previous work we estimated the blast damage by scaling from data on nuclear explosions in the atmosphere during the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. This underestimated the blast from asteroid impacts because nuclear fireballs radiate away a larger fraction of their energy than do meteors, so less of their energy goes into the blast wave. We have redone the calculations to allow for this effect. We have found the area of destruction around the impact point in which the over pressure in the blast wave exceeds 4 pounds/inch{sup 2} = 2.8 X 10{sup 5} dynes/cm{sup 3}, which is enough to knock over trees and destroy buildings. About every 100 years an impactor should blast an area of 300 km{sup 2} or more somewhere …

The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Decommissioning Program has decontaminated and demolished two filter plenum buildings at Technical Area 21 (TA-21). During the project a former hot cell was retrofitted to perform decontamination and size reduction of highly Pu contaminated process exhaust (1,100 ft) and gloveboxes. Pu-238/239 concentrations were as high a 1 Ci per linear foot and averaged approximately 1 mCi/ft. The Project decontamination objective was to reduce the plutonium contamination on surfaces below transuranic levels. If possible, metal surfaces were decontaminated further to meet Science and Ecology Group (SEG) waste classification guidelines to enable the metal to be recycled at their facility in oak Ridge, Tennessee. Project surface contamination acceptance criteria for low-level radioactive waste (LLRW), transuranic waste, and SEG waste acceptance criteria will be presented. Ninety percent of all radioactive waste for the project was characterized as LLRW. Twenty percent of this material was shipped to SEG. Process exhaust and glove boxes were brought to the project decontamination area, an old hot cell in Building 4 North. This paper focuses on process exhaust and glovebox decontamination methodology, size reduction techniques, waste characterization, airborne contamination monitoring, engineering controls, worker protection, lessons learned, and waste minimization. Decontamination objectives are …

This paper discusses the regulatory exemptions for shipping packages that contain limited amounts of fissile material and concerns that have arisen over the adequacy of these regulations. The results of an ongoing review of these exemptions by the various regulatory agencies will be presented in the session.

It has been suggested that large-scale climate changes, mostly due to atmospheric injection of greenhouse gases connected with fossil-fired energy production, should be forestalled by internationally-agreed reductions in, e.g., electricity generation. The potential economic impacts of such limitations are obviously large: greater than or equal to $10{sup 11}/year. We propose that for far smaller - less than 1% - the mean thermal effects of greenhouse gases may be obviated in any of several distinct ways, some of them novel. These suggestions are all based on scatterers that prevent a small fraction of solar radiation from reaching all or part of the Earth. We propose research directed to quite near-term realization of one or more of these inexpensive approaches to cancel the effects of the greenhouse gas injection. While the magnitude of the climatic impact of greenhouse gases is currently uncertain, the prospect of severe failure of the climate, for instance at the onset of the next Ice Age, is undeniable. The proposals in this paper may lead to quite practical methods to reduce or eliminate all climate failures.

The safe management of surplus weapons plutonium is a very important and urgent task with profound environmental, national and international security implications. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Presidential Police Directive 13 and various analysis by renown scientific, technical and international policy organizations have brought about a focused effort within the Department of Energy to identify and implement paths forward for the long term disposition of surplus weapons usable plutonium. The central, overarching goal is to render surplus weapons plutonium as inaccessible and unattractive for reuse in nuclear weapons, as the much larger and growing stock of plutonium contained in civilian spent reactor fuel. One disposition alternative considered for surplus Pu is immobilization, in which plutonium would be emplaced in glass, ceramic or glass-bonded zeolite. This option, along with some of the progress over the last year is discussed.

Narcisse is a graphics package developed by our French colleagues at Centre d`Etudes de Limeil Valenton of the Commissariat d`Energie Atomique. Narcisse is quite comprehensive; it can do two-, three-, and four-dimensional plots (the latter meaning that the surface is colored according to the values of an arbitrary function). One can open and send plots to a Narcisse window on a distant machine. Narcisse has a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) which, once a graph has appeared, allows the user to change its characteristics interactively. This enables one to find the best appearance for a particular plot without having to graph it repeatedly from the user program. Previously created files in various formats can also be imported directly into the Narcisse GUI and manipulated from there. Narcisse runs independently, as a graphics server. The user program communicates with Narcisse via Unix sockets. This communication is quite low level and very complex. The appearance of a plot is controlled by nearly 150 parameters for determining such things as the color palette, type of shading, axis scales, curve and surface labels, titles, angle and distance of view (for three- and four-dimensional graphs), hidden line removal, etc. Most end users do not wish …

We summarize our calculation of the total cross section for top quark production at hadron colliders within the context of perturbative quantum chromodynamics, including resummation of the effects of initial-state soft gluon radiation to all orders in the strong coupling strength.

The farmgate cost and available supply of biomass often exhibit considerable variation within a State. This variation, combined with the relatively high cost of transporting bulky biomass material, produces a wide range of expected delivered feedstock costs across a State. As a consequence, both production and transportation costs must be well-modeled when analyzing potential locations for conversion facilities. The Regional Integrated Biomass Assessment system consists of two phases. The descriptive phase characterizes a farmgate cost and supply surface for switchgrass production over a given State. These results are passed to the analytical phase, where a transportation model is used to compute the marginal cost of supplying an ethanol plant at a prescribed level of demand. The model generates a marginal cost surface that illustrates the most promising areas for locating an ethanol plant. Next, a sequential location model simulates the commercial development of ethanol production facilities. This model considers every road network node as a potential site and generates a sequence of likely plant locations. Results from the RIBA analysis demonstrate that the cost of switchgrass can increase dramatically from one location to another. This variation will seriously effect the economics of conversion in the proper sizing and locating of …

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), enacted in the 1985 Farm Bill, removes environmentally sensitive cropland from production in exchange for annual rental payments from the federal government. To reduce the cost of the program, economic use of CRP acres in exchange for reduced rental payments were proposed, but not implemented in the 1995 Farm Bill. This paper examines the potential impact an economic use policy would have on the market prices of bioenergy crops if they were permitted to be harvested from CRP acres. The analysis shows that at average yields of 11.25 dry Mg/ha/yr (5 dry tons/ac/yr) and total production of 9.1 million dry Mg (10 million dry tons) subsidized farmgate prices of as low as $16.5/dry Mg ($15/dry ton) for switchgrass and $24.2/dry Mg ($22/dry ton) for short-rotation woody crops can be achieved. Furthermore, the government can reduce the cost of the CRP resulting in a potential win-win situation.

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We have measured gain and saturation in sing;e mode Yb:silica fiber, and developed fiber lasers and amplifiers at 1053 nm. The lasers are tunable over 10`s of nanometers, with amplifier gain flattened by fiber gratings or dielectric filters.