Chin

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Livermore, California 94551, U.S.A, 

The objective of this paper is to discuss the safety issues associated with the immobilization of excess weapons plutonium in ceramic form in the United States. The U.S. government has recommended a dual-track approach to dispose of excess weapons plutonium. According to this approach, about 33 metric tons of pure Pu will be fabricated into mixed oxide (MOX) fuels which will be burned in commercial nuclear light water reactors and up to 17 metric tons of impure Pu will be immobilized into ceramic form which will be permanently disposed of in a geologic repository. It should be noted that a portion of the 33 metric tons of pure Pu may also be immobilized into ceramic form depending on the future decision of the U.S. government. 

This paper first provides a brief description of the U.S. plutonium immobilization using ceramic processing. A systematic approach for identifying and solving possible technical safety issues is introduced in Section 3. Technical and other broad safety issues specifically associated with the ceramic processing for excess plutonium immobilization are summarized in Section 4. A brief conclusion is given in Section 5. It should be emphasized that the results are preliminary, since at this moment the details of the facility and equipment designs are not yet available. 

This section provides a brief description of the following three topics the proposed ceramic form to be used to immobilize the excess plutonium, the basic steps of 

Jardine and MM. Moshkov (eds.), Nuclear Materials Safety Management, Vol. II, 137-147. 

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Schoenlein R W, Leeman W P, Chin A H, Volfbein P, Glover T E, Balling P, Zolotorev M, Kim K-J, Chattopadhayay S and Shank C V 1996 Femtosecond x-ray pulses at 0.4 A generated by 90° Thomson scattering a tool for probing the structural dynamics of materials Science 274 236-8... 

R. C. Y. Chin, G. W. Hedstrom, and F. A. Howes. Considerations on Solving Problems with Multiple Scales. Academic Press, Orlando, Florida, 1985. 

The Protein Data Bank PDB ID 1A71 Colby T D Bahnson B J Chin J K Klinman J P Goldstein B M Active Site Modifications m a Double Mutant of Liver Alcohol Dehydrogenase Structural Studies of Two Enzyme Ligand Com plexes To be published... 

The latter is the source of the Chinese dmg Chin-Shih-Hu. Compared to the other families of bases discussed eadier, the numbers of alkaloids supposedly derived from famesyl pyrophosphate or a close relative is small. However, given the wide variety of plant families containing sesquiterpenes, it is most likely that the numbers of compounds to be found will dramatically increase. 

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