Radioactive wastes are generated at many DOE laboratories, military facilities, fuel fabrication and enrichment plants, reactors, hospitals, and university research facilities. At all of these sites, wastes must be separated, packaged, categorized, and packed into some sort of container--usually 208-L (55-gal) drums--for shipment to waste-storage sites. Prior to shipment, the containers must be labeled, assayed, and certified; the assay value determines the ultimate disposition of the waste containers. An accurate nondestructive assay (NDA) method would identify all the radioisotopes present and provide a quantitative measurement of their activity in the drum. In this way, waste containers could be routed in the most cost-effective manner and without having to reopen them. Currently, the most common gamma-ray method used to assay nuclear waste drums is segmented gamma-ray scanning (SGS) spectrometer that crudely measures only the amount of {sup 235}U or {sup 239}Pu present in the drum. This method uses a spatially-averaged, integrated, emitted gamma-ray-intensity value. The emitted intensity value is corrected by an assumed constant-attenuation value determined by a spatially-averaged, transmission (or active) measurement. Unfortunately, this typically results in an inaccurate determination of the radioactive activities within a waste drum because this measurement technique is valid only for homogeneous-attenuation or known drum …

An aluminum piston tank has been developed for applications requiring lightweight, low cost, low pressure, positive-expulsion liquid storage. The 3 liter (183 in{sup 3}) vessel is made primarily from aluminum sheet, using production forming and joining operations. The development process relied mainly on pressurizing prototype parts and assemblies to failure, as the primary source of decision making information for driving the tank design toward its optimum minimum-mass configuration. Critical issues addressed by development testing included piston operation, strength of thin-walled formed shells, alloy choice, and joining the end cap to the seamless deep drawn can. 9 refs., 8 figs.

We describe WARP, a new particle-in-cell code being developed and optimized for ion beam studies in true geometry. We seek to model transport around bends, axial compression with strong focusing, multiple beamlet interaction, and other inherently 3d processes that affect emittance growth. Constraints imposed by memory and running time are severe. Thus, we employ only two 3d field arrays ({rho} and {phi}), and difference {phi} directly on each particle to get E, rather than interpolating E from three meshes; use of a single 3d array is feasible. A new method for PIC simulation of bent beams follows the beam particles in a family of rotated laboratory frames, thus straightening'' the bends. We are also incorporating an envelope calculation, an (r, z) model, and 1d (axial) model within WARP. The BASIS development and run-time system is used, providing a powerful interactive environment in which the user has access to all variables in the code database. 10 refs., 3 figs.