In Ghana, radioactive waste is generated mainly from spent sealed sources, various nuclear applications--diagnostic and therapeutic procedures in medicine and measurement and processing techniques in industry. The radionuclide composition in the waste arising from industry, research and teaching includes 14C, 137Cs, 60Co, 241Am, 3H, 32P, 125I, 192Ir, 131I, 99m Tc, 35S and 90Sr. Ghana is strengthening its radioactive waste management infrastructure, which include the development of a legal framework by providing laws, regulations and guidelines and allocating responsibilities of waste generators, the National Radioactive Waste Management Centre (NRWMC), and the Radiation Protection Board (RPB). The radioactive waste management regulations which is in it's final stage of promulgation set up the basic technical and organizational requirements to be complied with by waste generators and operators of waste management facilities and make provisions for penalties for non-compliance with the regulations. With the installation of a 30 kW Research Reactor for neutron activation analysis, 185 TBq 60Co facility for the treatment of cancer at the Korle-bu teaching hospital, 1850 TBq 60Co facility for irradiation of medical and agricultural products and 192Ir sources for industrial radiography, radioactive waste is expected to increase in the near future. At present, waste management is limited exclusively to …

Mechanical surface treatments are known to be effective at improving the fatigue resistance of metallic alloys at elevated temperatures ({approx}550-600 C), even though the near-surface compressive residual stress fields have been annealed out. We have investigated the thermal stability of near-surface microstructures induced by deep rolling and laser-shock peening in an austentic stainless steel (AISI 304) and a titanium alloy (Ti-6Al-4V) using in situ hot-stage transmission electron microscopy. It is found that the improvements in fatigue resistance at elevated temperature are related to the high-temperature stability of the work-hardened near-surface microstructure in each case.

The purpose of the present electrical signal path study is to explore the various issues related to the deployment of highly-segmented low-background Ge detectors for the MAJORANA double-beta decay experiment. A significant challenge is to simultaneously satisfy competing requirements for the mechanical design, electrical readout performance, and radiopurity specifications from the MAJORANA project. Common to all rare search experiments, there is a very stringent limit on the acceptable radioactivity level of all the electronics components involved. Some of the findings are summarized in this report.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) intends to dispose of remote handled (RH) transuranic (TRU) waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) beginning in 2005. (1) Four principle regulatory agencies are involved in the process of approving the RH TRU waste activities. The DOE is responsible for operational activities. The U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approves the design and use of shipping containers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for assuring safe and environmentally effective long-term disposal of the radioactive component of the waste and operational environmental monitoring. The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) is responsible for the handling and the disposal of the non-radioactive hazardous component of the waste. The Environmental Evaluation Group (EEG) is responsible for performing independent technical oversight of all WIPP activities, and will comment on documents and practices for the various regulated RH TRU waste activities. The DOE has already obtained the necessary approvals from the NRC, and has submitted a Class 3 Modification request to the NMED. On December 16, 2002 the DOE Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) provided the EPA with a notice of proposed change, in accordance with 40 CFR 194.4 (b) (3), to receive and dispose of remote …

Abstract: We report the application of the new Monte Carlo method, Smoothed Particle Inference (SPI, described in a pair of companion papers), towards analysis and interpretation of X-ray observations of clusters of galaxies with the XMM-Newton satellite. Our sample consists of publicly available well-exposed observations of clusters at redshifts z > 0.069, totaling 101 objects. We determine the luminosity and temperature structure of the X-ray emitting gas, with the goal to quantify the scatter and the evolution of the L{sub X} - T relation, as well as to investigate the dependence on cluster substructure with redshift. This work is important for the establishment of the potential robustness of mass estimates from X-ray data which in turn is essential towards the use of clusters for measurements of cosmological parameters. We use the luminosity and temperature maps derived via the SPI technique to determine the presence of cooling cores, via measurements of luminosity and temperature contrast. The L{sub X}-T relation is investigated, and we confirm that L{sub X} {proportional_to} T{sup 3}. We find a weak redshift dependence ({proportional_to} (1 + z){sup {beta}{sub LT}}, {beta}{sub LT} = 0.50 {+-} 0.34), in contrast to some Chandra results. The level of dynamical activity is established …

The purpose of this design calculation is to estimate radiation doses received by personnel working in the Transportation Cask Receipt and Return Facility (TCRRF) of the repository including the personnel at the security gate and cask staging areas. This calculation is required to support the preclosure safety analysis (PCSA) to ensure that the predicted doses are within the regulatory limits prescribed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The Cask Receipt and Return Facility receives NRC licensed transportation casks loaded with spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW). The TCRRF operation starts with the receipt, inspection, and survey of the casks at the security gate and the staging areas, and proceeds to the process facilities. The transportation casks arrive at the site via rail cars or trucks under the guidance of the national transportation system. This calculation was developed by the Environmental and Nuclear Engineering organization and is intended solely for the use of Design and Engineering in work regarding facility design. Environmental and Nuclear Engineering personnel should be consulted before using this calculation for purposes other than those stated herein or for use by individuals other than authorized personnel in the Environmental and Nuclear Engineering organization.

Large quantities of mercury are generated as a by-product during the processing of gold ore following mining operations. Newmont Mining Corporation (NMC), which operates some of the world's largest gold mines, sought a method to permanently ''retire'' its mercury by-products, thereby avoiding potential environmental liability. Sulfur Polymer Stabilization-Solidification (SPSS) is an innovative technology developed at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) for treatment of mercury and mercury contaminated materials, such as soil, sludge and debris. BNL conducted a treatability study to determine the potential applicability of SPSS for treatment of Newmont mercury, and the treated product passed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) test for toxicity. The SPSS process has been shown to be effective on radioactive and nonradioactive mercury and mercury-contaminated materials with a pilot-scale batch system capable of producing 0.03 m{sup 3} (1 ft{sup 3}) per batch. Engineering scale-up issues are discussed and material property tests addressing these issues are described.

A motion involves large distortion if the ratios of principal stretches differ significantly from unity. A motion involves large deformation if the deformation gradient tensor is significantly different from the identity. Unfortunately, rigid rotation fits the definition of large deformation, and models that claim to be valid for large deformation are often inadequate for large distortion. An exact solution for the stress in an idealized fiber-reinforced composite is used to show that conventional large deformation representations for transverse isotropy give errant results. Possible alternative approaches are discussed.

The structure of the ownership and management of nuclear liabilities on civil sites in the United Kingdom is undergoing fundamental change. The UK Government will take responsibility for the liabilities on the UKAEA, BNFL Sellafield and Capenhurst sites and the Magnox Generation sites. When fully implemented the accountability for long term strategy will rest with the new Government Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), and contracts will be placed on M&O contractors to manage the site and implement the liabilities discharge plans. At Sellafield whilst the commercial reprocessing and MOX contracts continue, it is clear that the overall focus of the site has changed to remediation. Until the NDA is established the task of undertaking the planning is the responsibility of BNFL. To address this task the Site Remediation Team has been established. The production of the Sellafield Lifecycle Baseline Plan requires the existing long term decommissioning and waste management plans (primarily produced for provisioning purposes) together with several other specific strategies to be combined and developed into a coordinated and optimized plan for the remediation of the Sellafield Site, recognizing the ongoing reprocessing, MOX manufacture and long term fuel storage activities. An important principle within the plan is to achieve early …

If the cosmic dark matter consists of weakly-interacting massive particles, these particles should be produced in reactions at the next generation of high-energy accelerators. Measurements at these accelerators can then be used to determine the microscopic properties of the dark matter. From this, we can predict the cosmic density, the annihilation cross sections, and the cross sections relevant to direct detection. In this paper, we present studies in supersymmetry models with neutralino dark matter that give quantitative estimates of the accuracy that can be expected. We show that these are well matched to the requirements of anticipated astrophysical observations of dark matter. The capabilities of the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC) are expected to play a particularly important role in this study.

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The objective of the Clean Cast Steel Technology Program was to improve casting product quality by removing or minimizing oxide defects and to allow the production of higher integrity castings for high speed machining lines. Previous research has concentrated on macro-inclusions that break, chip, or crack machine tool cutters and drills and cause immediate shutdown of the machining lines. The overall goal of the project is to reduce the amount of surface macro-inclusions and improve the machinability of steel castings. Macro-inclusions and improve the machinability of steel castings. Macro-inclusions have been identified by industrial sponsors as a major barrier to improving the quality and marketability of steel castings.

This standard establishes requirements that, when coupled with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) Integrated Safety Management System (ISMS) methods and other Work Smart Standards for assuring worker safety, assure that the impacts of nonnuclear operations authorized in LLNL facilities are well understood and controlled in a manner that protects the health of workers, the public, and the environment. All LLNL facilities shall be classified based on potential for adverse impact of operations to the health of co-located (i.e., nearby) workers and the public in accordance with this standard, Title 10 Code of Federal Regulations (10 CFR) 830, Subpart B, and Department of Energy Order (DOE O) 420.2A. This standard provides information on: Objectives; Applicability; Safety analysis requirements; Control selection and maintenance; Documentation requirements; Safety basis review, approval, and renewal; and Safety basis implementation.

The performance attributes of the U. S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Site Office Low-level Radioactive Waste (LLW) disposal facilities located at the Nevada Test Site transcend those of any other LLW disposal site in the United States. Situated at the southern end of the Great Basin, 244 meters (800 feet) above the water table, the Area 5 Radioactive Waste Management Site (RWMS) has utilized a combination of engineered shallow land disposal cells and deep augured shafts to dispose a variety of waste streams. These include high volume low-activity waste, classified material, and high-specific activity special case waste. Fifteen miles north of Area 5 is the Area 3 RWMS. Here bulk LLW disposal takes place in subsidence craters formed from underground testing of nuclear weapons. Earliest records indicate that documented LLW disposal activities have occurred at the Area 5 and Area 3 RWMSs since 1961 and 1968, respectively. However, these activities have only been managed under a formal program since 1978. This paper describes the technical attributes of the facilities, present and future capacities and capabilities, and provides a description of the process from waste approval to final disposition. The paper also summarizes the current status of …

Layered earth models are well justified by experience, and provide a simple means of studying fairly general behavior of the elastic and poroelastic characteristics of seismic waves in the earth. Thomsen's anisotropy parameters for weak elastic and poroelastic anisotropy are now commonly used in exploration, and can be conveniently expressed in terms of the layer averages of Backus. Since our main interest is usually in the fluids underground, it would be helpful to have a set of general equations relating the Thomsen parameters as directly as possible to the fluid properties. This end can be achieved in a rather straightforward fashion for these layered earth models, and the present paper develops and then discusses these relations. Furthermore, it is found that, although there are five effective shear moduli for any layered VTI medium, one and only one effective shear modulus for the layered system contains all the dependence of pore fluids on the elastic or poroelastic constants that can be observed in vertically polarized shear waves in VTI media. The effects of the pore fluids on this effective shear modulus can be substantial - an increase of shear wave speed on the order of 10% is shown to be possible …

In a cooperative effort of the members of the South Texas Chapter of the Heath Physics Society (STC-HPS) and the Texas A&M University Nuclear Engineering Department, great efforts have been made to reach out and provide educational opportunities to members of the general public, school age children, and specifically teachers. These efforts have taken the form of Science Teacher Workshops (STW), visits to schools all over the state of Texas, public forums, and many other educational arenas. A major motivational factor for these most recent efforts can be directly tied to the attempt of the State of Texas to site a low-level radioactive waste facility near Sierra Blanca in West Texas. When the State of Texas first proposed to site a low level radioactive waste site after the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act of 1980 was passed, many years of political struggle ensued. Finally, a site at Sierra Blanca in far West Texas was selected for study and characterization for a disposal site for waste generated in the Texas Compact states of Maine, Vermont and Texas. During this process, the outreach to and education of the local public became a paramount issue.

The gauge-invariant three-gluon vertex obtained from the pinch technique is characterized by thirteen nonzero form factors, which are given in complete generality for unbroken gauge theory at one loop. The results are given in d dimensions using both dimensional regularization and dimensional reduction, including the effects of massless gluons and arbitrary representations of massive gauge bosons, fermions, and scalars. We find interesting relations between the functional forms of the contributions from gluons, quarks, and scalars. These relations hold only for the gauge-invariant pinch technique vertex and are d-dimensional incarnations of supersymmetric nonrenormalization theorems which include finite terms. The form factors are shown to simplify for N = 1, 2, and 4 supersymmetry in various dimensions. In four-dimensional non-supersymmetric theories, eight of the form factors have the same functional form for massless gluons, quarks, and scalars, when written in a physically motivated tensor basis. For QCD, these include the tree-level tensor structure which has prefactor {beta}{sub 0} = (11N{sub c}-2N{sub f})/3, another tensor with prefactor 4N{sub c} - N{sub f}, and six tensors with N{sub c} - N{sub f}. In perturbative calculations our results lead naturally to an effective coupling for the three-gluon vertex, {tilde {alpha}}(k{sub 1}{sup 2}, k{sub 2}{sup 2}, …

Deep geological disposal of long-lived radioactive waste is currently considered a major challenge. Until present, only three deep geological disposal facilities have worldwide been operated: the Asse experimental repository (1967-1978) and the Morsleben repository (1971-1998) in Germany as well as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in the USA (1999 to present). Recently, the licensing procedure for the fourth such facility, the German Konrad repository, ended with a positive ''Planfeststellung'' (plan approval). With its plan approval decision, the licensing authority, the Ministry of the Environment of the state of Lower Saxony, approved the single license needed pursuant to German law to construct, operate, and later close down this facility.

The number of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) shipments is expected to increase significantly during the time period that the United States' inventory of SNF is sent to a final disposal site. Prior work estimated that the highest accident risks of a SNF shipping campaign to the proposed geologic repository at Yucca Mountain were in the corridor states, such as Illinois. The largest potential human health impacts would be expected to occur in areas with high population densities such as urban settings. Thus, our current study examined the human health impacts from the most plausible severe SNF transportation accidents in the Chicago metropolitan area. The RISKIND 2.0 program was used to model site-specific data for an area where the largest impacts might occur. The results have shown that the radiological human health consequences of a severe SNF rail transportation accident on average might be similar to one year of exposure to natural background radiation for those persons living a nd working in the most affected areas downwind of the actual accident location. For maximally exposed individuals, an exposure similar to about two years of exposure to natural background radiation was estimated. In addition to the accident probabilities being very low (approximately …

With the operation of the RHIC heavy ion program, the theoretical understanding of QCD at finite temperature and density has become increasingly important. Though QCD at finite temperature has been extensively studied using lattice Monte-Carlo simulations over the past twenty years, most physical questions relevant for RHIC (and future) heavy ion experiments remain open. In lattice QCD at finite temperature and density there have been at least two major advances in recent years. First, for the first time calculations of real time quantities, like meson spectral functions have become available. Second, the lattice study of the QCD phase diagram and equation of state have been extended to finite baryon density by several groups. Both issues were extensively discussed in the course of the workshop. A real highlight was the study of the QCD phase diagram in (T, {mu})-plane by Z. Fodor and S. Katz and the determination of the critical end-point for the physical value of the pion mass. This was the first time such lattice calculations at, the physical pion mass have been performed. Results by Z Fodor and S. Katz were obtained using a multi-parameter re-weighting method. Other determinations of the critical end point were also presented, in …

Single crystal samples of micron dimensions oriented in the [001] direction were shortened 10 to 40% in uniaxial compression with superposed hydrostatic pressure to begin investigation of how the onset of yielding evolves with pressure. A testing machine based on opposed anvil geometry with precision pneumatic control of the applied force and capability to measure sub micron displacements was developed to produce shape changing deformation at pressure. The experiments extend observations of pressure dependent deformation to {approx}5Gpa at shortening rates of {approx}2*10{sup -4}. Samples have been recovered for post run characterization and analysis to determine if deformation mechanisms are altered by pressure. Experiments under hydrostatic pressure provide insight into the nature of materials under extreme conditions, and also provide a means for altering deformation behavior in a controlled fashion. The approach has a long history demonstrating that pressure enhances ductility in general, and produces enhanced hardening relative to that expected from normal cold work in the BCC metals Mo, Ta and Nb{sup 2}. The pressure hardening is in excess of that predicted from the measured increase in shear modulus at pressure, and therefore is likely due to a dislocation mechanism, such as suppression of kink pair formation or the interaction …

This article gives an overview of current plans and issues for polarimeters and energy spectrometers in the Beam Delivery System of the ILC. It is meant to serve as a useful reference for the Detector Letter of Intent documents currently being prepared. Concepts for high precision polarization and energy measurements exist. These concepts have resulted in detailed system layouts that are included in the RDR description for the Beam Delivery System. The RDR includes both upstream and downstream polarimeters and energy spectrometers for both beams. This provides needed complementarity and redundancy for achieving the precision required, with adequate control and demonstration of systematic errors. The BDS polarimeters and energy spectrometers need to be a joint effort of the ILC BDS team and the Detector collaborations, with collaboration members responsible for the performance and accuracy of the measurements. Details for this collaboration and assigning of responsibilities remain to be worked out. There is also a demonstrated need for Detector physicists to play an active role in the design and evaluation of accelerator components that impact beam polarization and beam energy capabilities, including the polarized source and spin rotator systems. A workshop was held in 2008 on ILC Polarization and Energy measurements, …

The Building 830 Gamma Irradiation Facility (GIF) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) was decommissioned because its design was not in compliance with current hazardous tank standards and because its cobalt-60 sources were approaching the end of their useful life. The facility contained 354 stainless steel encapsulated cobalt-60 sources in a pool, which provided shielding. Total cobalt-60 inventory amounted to 24,000 Curies (when the sources were shipped for disposal). The decommissioning project included packaging, transport and disposal of the sources and dismantling and disposing of all other equipment associated with the facility. Worker exposure was a major concern in planning for the packaging and disposal of the sources. These activities were planned carefully according to ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) principles. As a result, the actual doses experienced during the work were lower than anticipated. Because the sources were sealed, most of the remaining equipment was not contaminated; therefore disposal was straightforward, as scrap metal and construction debris. However, disposal of the pool water involved addressing environmental concerns, since the planned method was to discharge the slightly contaminated water to the BNL sewage treatment plant.

This paper describes two industrial-scaled processes now being used to treat two problematic mercury waste categories: elemental mercury contaminated with radionuclides and radioactive solid wastes containing greater than 260-ppm mercury. The stabilization processes were developed by ADA Technologies, Inc., an environmental control and process development company in Littleton, Colorado. Perma-Fix Environmental Services has licensed the liquid elemental mercury stabilization process to treat radioactive mercury from Los Alamos National Laboratory and other DOE sites. ADA and Perma-Fix also cooperated to apply the >260-ppm mercury treatment technology to a storm sewer sediment waste collected from the Y-12 complex in Oak Ridge, TN.