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Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty does not guarantee the use of force to assist an ally under attack. Nonetheless, the U.S. pledge to assist an ally under attack has been the core of the alliance. Despite growing political functions, the NATO views collective defense, and not collective security, as its core function.

The surface properties of several well-characterized commercial carbon materials were modified by thermal and chemical treatments. The reversible capacities for lithium intercalation of a sponge green coke and a fuel green coke for lithium intercalation increased by as much as 25% after heat treatment in both reducing (5% H{sub 2}/Ar) and oxidizing (CO{sub 2}) environments. The irreversible capacity loss increased significantly with CO{sub 2} treatment at 800{degrees}C. The trend of larger capacity losses with CO{sub 2} treatment is also observed with a synthetic graphite (SFG6) which was produced by heat treatment at about 3000{degrees}C. Carbon fibers that were first impregnated with LiOH solution followed by reaction with CO{sub 2} to form Li{sub 2}CO{sub 3} tended to show lower irreversible capacity losses.

This Engineering Report (Conceptual Design) addresses remediation of the plutonium-bearing solutions currently in inventory at the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP). The recommendation from the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is that the solutions be treated thermally and stabilized as a solid for long term storage. For solutions which are not discardable, the baseline plan is to utilize a denitration process to stabilize the solutions prior to packaging for storage.

This document serves as a notice of construction pursuant to the requirements of Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 246-247-060 and as a request for approval to construct pursuant to 40 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) 61.96 for the removal of sludge from six storage tanks located inside the 340-A Building, which is located in the 300 Area of the Hanford Site.

The growing concerns for the environment and increasingly stringent standards for NO emission have presented a major challenge to control NO emmissions from electric utility plants and automobiles. Catalytic decomposition of NO is the most attractive approach for the control of NO emission for its simplicity. Successful development of an effective catalyst for NO decomposition will greatly decrease the equipment and operation cost of NO control. Due to lack of understanding of the mechanism of NO decomposition, efforts on the search of an effective catalyst have been unsuccesful. Scientific development of an effective catalyst requires fundamental understanding of the nature of active site, the rate-limiting step, and an approach to prolong the life of the catalyst. Research is proposed to study the reactivity of adsorbates for the direct NO decomposition and to investigate the feasibility of two novel approaches for improving catalyst activity and resistance to sintering. The first approach is the use of silanation to stabilize metal crystallites and supports for Cu-ZSM-5 and promoted Pt catalysts; the second is utilization of oxygen spillover and desorption to enhance NO decomposition activity. An innovative infrared reactor system will be used to observe and determine the dynamic behavior and the reactivity of …

Much of the work performed under this grant was devoted to using modern ideas in kinetics to understand atom movements in metallic alloys far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Kinetics arguments were based explicitly on the vacancy mechanism for atom movements. The emphasis was on how individual atom movements are influenced by the local chemical environment of the moving atom, and how atom movements cause changes in the local chemical environments. The author formulated a kinetic master equation method to treat atom movements on a crystal lattice with a vacancy mechanism. Some of these analyses [3,10,16] are as detailed as any treatment of the statistical kinetics of atom movements in crystalline alloys. Three results came from this work. Chronologically they were (1) A recognition that tracking time dependencies is not necessarily the best way to study kinetic phenomena. If multiple order parameters can be measured in a material, the ''kinetic path'' through the space spanned by these order parameters maybe just as informative about the chemical factors that affect atom movements [2,3,5-7,9-11,14-16,18,19,21,23,24,26,36,37]. (2) Kinetic paths need not follow the steepest gradient of the free energy function (this should be well-known), and for alloys far from equilibrium the free energy function can be …