The assay of nuclear material holdup in fuel manufacturing plants is a laborious but often necessary part of completing the material balance. A range of instruments, standards, and a methodology for assaying holdup has been developed. The objectives of holdup measurement are ascertaining the amount, distribution, and how firmly fixed the SNM is. The purposes are reconciliation of material unbalance during or after a manufacturing campaign or plant decommissioning, to decide security requirements, or whether further recovery efforts are justified.

The primary barrier to release of fission product from any of the fuel types into the primary circuit of the HTGR are the coatings on the fuel particles. Both pyrolytic carbon and silicon carbide coatings are very effective in retaining fission gases under normal operating conditions. One of the possible performance limitations which has been observed in irradiation tests of TRISO fuel is chemical interaction of the SiC layer with fission products. This reaction reduces the thickness of the SiC layer in TRISO particles and can lead to release of fission products from the particles if the SiC layer is completely penetrated. The experimental section of this report describes the results of work at General Atomic concerning the reaction of fission products with silicon carbide. The discussion section describes data obtained by various laboratories and includes (1) a description of the fission products which have been found to react with SiC; (2) a description of the kinetics of silicon carbide thinning caused by fission product reaction during out-of-pile thermal gradient heating and the application of these kinetics to in-pile irradiation; and (3) a comparison of silicon carbide thinning in LEU and HEU fuels.

Copper plates 90 mm in diameter, of thickness 0.25 mm and 0.5 mm, were accelerated by an adjacent 17 mm thick cylinder of RX-03-BB or PBX-9404-03. The explosive was initiated by impact of a thick flyer from the LLNL 102 mm gun, providing either a reactive or fully detonating wave, by appropriate choice of flyer velocities up to 1.30 mm/..mu..s. The free surface velocity of the plates were measured with a Fabry-Perot velocimeter. Excellent experimental free-surface velocity histories have been obtained. Calculations of this history employing beta-burn and nucleation and growth high explosives models are in good agreement with fully detonating experiments. For reacting RX-03-BB, adjustments in the parameter are needed. The experimental technique gives records whose agreement with calculation is sensitive to the model and is therefore a good way of testing new high explosive models. Also, this method allows one to infer information about the reaction zone length.

The high temperature diffusion technique for fuel filling of some future direct drive cryogenic ICF targets may be unacceptable. The following describes a technique of fitting a 1 mm diameter x 6 ..mu..m thick glass microsphere with an approx. 50 ..mu..m O.D. glass fill tube. The process of laser drilling a 50 ..mu..m diameter hole in the microsphere wall, technique for making the epoxy joint between the sphere and fill tube, as well as the assembly procedure are also discussed.