Current criteria for criticality safety for spent fuel shipping and storage casks are conservative because no credit is permitted for the effects of burnup of the fuel inside the cask. Cask designs that will transport and store large numbers of fuel assemblies (20 or more) must devote a substantial part of their payload to criticality control measures if they are to meet this criteria. The Department of Energy is developing the data necessary to support safety analyses that incorporate the effects of burnup for the next generation of spent fuel shipping casks. The efforts described here are devoted to the development of acceptance criteria that will be the basis for accepting safety analyses. Preliminary estimates of the uncertainties of the effects of burnup have been developed to provide a basis for the consideration of critically safety criteria. The criticality safety margins in a spent fuel shipping or storage cask are dominated by the portions of a fuel assembly that are in low power regions of a reactor core, and the reactor operating conditions are very different from spent fuel storage or transport cask conditions. Consequently, the experience that has been gathered during years of reactor operation does not apply directly …

This report presents a method for calculating containment test leakage rates of radionuclides from an example spent fuel cask. Three releasable radioactive sources are considered: residual contamination in the cask cavity, crud on the fuel elements, and the radionuclides within the fuel rods. The ANSI N14.5 standard is used to calculate the test leakage rates from the maximum permissible releases determined from 10 CFR 71 containment requirements. 6 refs., 2 tabs.

In this paper complex adaptive systems are defined by a self- referential loop in which objects encode functions that act back on these objects. A model for this loop is presented. It uses a simple recursive formal language, derived from the lambda-calculus, to provide a semantics that maps character strings into functions that manipulate symbols on strings. The interaction between two functions, or algorithms, is defined naturally within the language through function composition, and results in the production of a new function. An iterated map acting on sets of functions and a corresponding graph representation are defined. Their properties are useful to discuss the behavior of a fixed size ensemble of randomly interacting functions. This function gas'', or Turning gas'', is studied under various conditions, and evolves cooperative interaction patterns of considerable intricacy. These patterns adapt under the influence of perturbations consisting in the addition of new random functions to the system. Different organizations emerge depending on the availability of self-replicators.

We are designing a Bragg crystal polarimeter for the focal plane of the SODART telescope on the Spectrum-X-Gamma mission. A mosaic graphite crystal will be oriented at 45{degree} to the optic axis of the telescope, thereby preferentially reflecting those x-rays which satisfy the Bragg condition and have electric vectors that are perpendicular to the plane defined by the incident and reflected photons. The reflected x-rays will be detected by an imaging proportional counter with the image providing direct x-ray aspect information. The crystal will be {approx}50 {mu}m thick to allow x-rays with energies {ge}4 keV to be transmitted to a lithium block mounted below the graphite. The lithium is used to measure the polarization of these high energy x-rays by exploiting the polarization dependence of Thomson scattering. The development of thin mosaic graphite crystals is discussed and recent reflectivity, transmission, and uniformity measurements are presented. 8 refs., 11 figs., 1 tab.

We report on the current of our work on x-ray microcalorimeters for use as high resolution x-ray spectrometers. To maximize the x-ray collecting area and the signal to noise ratio, the total heat capacity of the device must be minimized. This is best achieved if the calorimeter is divided into two components, a thermal sensor and an x-ray absorber. The thermal sensor is a neutron transmutation doped (NTD) germanium resistor made as small as possible to minimize the heat capacity of the calorimeter. The thermistor can be attached to a thin x-ray absorber with large area and low heat capacity fabricated from superconducting materials such as niobium. We discuss results from our most recent studies of such superconducting absorbers and present the x-ray spectra obtained with these composite microcalorimeters at a temperature of 0.1 K. An energy resolution of 19 eV FWHM has been measured. 14 refs., 3 figs.

The initial development work on a dielectric microcalorimeter is presented. It focuses on the dielectric properties of the ferroelectric material KTa{sub 1-x}Nb{sub x}O{sub 3} (KTN). Measurements of the temperature dependent dielectric constant are given together with the first alpha particle detection results from a prototype composite microcalorimeter operating at 1.3 K. a non-thermal mechanism for detecting 6 MeV alpha particles in a monolithic KTN sample is also reported. 7 refs, 16 figs., 1 tab.

A kinetic inductance thermometer is applied to x-ray calorimetry, and its operation over a wide range of frequencies and geometries is discussed. Three amplifier configurations are described, one using a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) amplifier, another incorporating an FET amplifier in an amplitude modulated system, and the third, using a tunnel diode frequency modulated oscillator circuit. The predicted performance of each configuration is presented. 13 refs., 6 figs., 1 tab.