An examination of the process scheme for handling present and future 231 Building supernatant solutions is necessary to forecast the effects of placing one of the processing facilities (224B) in a standby status and to ascertain if rescheduling of any of the supernatant solutions to 202S will be necessary. The examination indicates the 231 Building process supernates and cell cleanouts together with the 221, 224T Buildings acid washes and the 234-5 Building returns can be processed through the 224 T Building as additions to regular runs or master recycle runs when T Plant is processing as much as 41.6 tons/month of 600 MWD/T material and S Plant is processing 120 tons/month of similar material. The processing rate through, 224 T Building to satisfy these conditions is seventy-six runs per month. This total is divided into 63 regular runs plus 13 meter master recycle runs. The number of master recycle runs are primarily dependent upon the T Plant rate in as much as only one master recycle is directly required for each 35 tons processed through S Plant.

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This is a progress report of the production reactors on the Hanford Reservation for the month of July 1952. This report takes each division (e.g., manufacturing, medical, accounting, occupational safety, security, reactor operations, etc.) of the site and summarizes its accomplishments and employee relations for that month.

The radioactive liquid wastes from a separations facility are customarily stored in underground waste storage tanks. The wastes from the proposed Purex Separations Plant will have a high concentration of the fission products and will result in a large evolution of heat. The possibility of these wastes boiling due to radio-disintegration of fission products has made a survey of the problem desirable. This report lists the results of this investigation.

Described herein are studies on pile control, shielding, process tube assembly, pile operating equipment, pile renovation, power recovery, pile piping and the 189-D test laboratory at Hanford.

The experimentally determined exponential dependence of spontaneous fission rate on Z{sup 2}/A has been used to derive an expression for the dependence of the fission activation energy on Z{sup 2}/A. This expression has been used to calculate the activation energy for slow neutron induced fission and photofission. The correlation with the experimental data on these types of fission seems to be quite good.

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A vacuum pump based on the properties of a magnetically collimated electric discharge is described. It has a speed in the range 3000 to 7000 liters a second and a base pressure in the order of 10{sup-6}mm.

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The amount of hydrogen normally present in zirconium and zirconium alloys suffices to reduce their ductility greatly in an impact test at room temperature, after slow cooling from 6OO deg F. Quenching from 6OO deg F or above gives high impact strength, as does removal of hydrogen by hightemperature vacuum aanealing. The evidence on hydrogen embrittlement, the diffusion, solid solubility, and equilbrium pressure of hydrogen in zirconium the microstructure, and the effects of hydrogen and heat treatment on the mechanical properties of zirconium are discussed. (auth)

After almost four months elapsed time since product introduction into the RMA Line, it was pertinent to evaluate both process and equipment performance and arrive at a program for future improvement. The suggestions and recommendations provided are those of the Technical Section. In those passages made to acknowledge the views of the appropriate groups.

An estimated minimum critical mass for each of the process vessels in the 231 Building has been calculated on the basis of critical mass data given in the P-11 Project Document HW-24514. The calculations are made assuming the plutonium to be a homogeneous mixture of precipitate and water with some slight neutron poisoning due to other elements. The precipitate is further assumed to have partially settled making an effectively infinite water reflector above the plutonium and hence reducing the critical mass.

This quarterly report details activities in analytical research by the Applied Research Unit of the Nucleonics Division during the months of April, May, and June 1952.

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Quarterly progress report of the unclassified sections at Brookhaven National Laboratory providing updates about research and findings.

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Progress is reported on the following projects: Th alloy development, mechanical properties of Th, tensile properties and preferred orientation of Th, triple-dip slug canning, texture studies, fundumental studies of alloying, static cerrosion tests with low melting point alloys, dynamic corrosion testing of fluoride materials, mass transfer, structures of liquid Pb and liquid Bi, fabrication of tubular laminates for fuel elements, creep of Th, cone-arc welding, Homogeneous Reactor Experiment metallurgy, a low-temperature specimen holder for use with the highangle x-ray spectrometers, metallography of Zr and its alloys, automatic polishing machine, a fuel element manufacturing process for the direct-cycle aircraft reactor, and fabrication of fuel and control rod elements for the MTR. (L.T.W.)

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In order to obtain data for the development and design of the Purex dissolvers and to demonstrate to Manufacturing and Technical personnel the feasibility of increasing the size of dissolver cuts at BiPO{sub 4} and Redox, a dissolver production test program in a BiPO{sub 4} dissolver is requested. These tests are expected to supplement the program already initiated on the 321 Bldg. dissolver, explaining dissolver behavior to the extent that existing dissolvers can be operated under more nearly optimum conditions and that new dissolvers can be designed with accuracy.