Determination of long-lived fission products and actinides in Savannah River site HLW sludge and glass for waste acceptance

Savannah River Site (SRS) is currently immobilizing the radioactive, caustic, high-level waste sludge in Tank 51 into a borosilicate glass for disposal in a geologic repository. A requirement for repository acceptance is that SRS report the concentrations of certain fission product and actinide radionuclides in the glass. This paper presents measurements of many of these concentrations in both Tank 51 sludge and the final glass. The radionuclides were measured by inductively coupled plasma - mass spectrometry and {alpha}, {beta}, and {gamma} counting methods. Examples of the radionuclides are Sr-90, Cs-137, U-238, Pu-239, and Cm-244. Concentrations in the glass are 3.1 times lower due to dilution of the sludge with a nonradioactive glass forming frit in the vitrification process. Results also indicated that in both the sludge and glass the relative concentrations of the long lived fission products insoluble in caustic area in proportion to their yields from the fission of U-235 in the SRS reactors. This allowed the calculation of a fission yield scaling factor. This factor in addition to the sludge dilution factor can be used to estimate concentrations of waste acceptance radionuclides that cannot be measured in the glass

Cesium determination for the DWPF off-gas system performance test

In an effort to determine the cesium decontamination factors (DF`s) of the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) melter off-gas system at the Savannah River Site, the system was verified during an off-gas performance test. The off-gas performance test occurred during the DWPF waste Qualification Campaigns, WP-16 and WP-17. The verification of the off-gas system, which eliminated the need for a startup test involving a radioactive cesium addition, was based on the analysis of nonradioactive cesium across the first and second stage High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters. The amount of cesium on the first and second stage HEPA filters was determined by leaching samples from each HEPA filter with nitric acid and analyzing the leachate using Inductively Coupled Plasma - Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS). The ICP-MS method has been demonstrated to be sufficiently sensitive to measure small quantities of cesium on filters. Based on the cesium results of the HEPA filter, cesium DF`s were calculated. The DF`s indicated that the DWPF HEPA filters performed better than the design basis. In addition to the HEPA filters, a determination of the cesium concentration in the melter feed, the canister glass and the off-gas condensate was made. These analyses provided information on cesium flow through the DWPF. This paper will focus on the methods used in the determination of nonradioactive cesium and the calculation of the DF`s for the DWPF melter off-gas system

Annual Research Review: Umbrella synthesis of meta-analyses on child maltreatment antecedents and interventions: differential susceptibility perspective on risk and resilience.

Child maltreatment in the family context is a prevalent and pervasive phenomenon in many modern societies. The global perpetration of child abuse and neglect stands in stark contrast to its almost universal condemnation as exemplified in the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of the Child. Much work has been devoted to the task of prevention, yet a grand synthesis of the literature is missing. Focusing on two core elements of prevention, that is, antecedents for maltreatment and the effectiveness of (preventative) interventions, we performed an umbrella review of meta-analyses published between January 1, 2014, and December 17, 2018. Meta-analyses were systematically collected, assessed, and integrated following a uniform approach to allow their comparison across domains. From this analysis of thousands of studies including almost 1.5 million participants, the following risk factors were derived: parental experience of maltreatment in his or her own childhood (d = .47), low socioeconomic status of the family (d = .34), dependent and aggressive parental personality (d = .45), intimate partner violence (d = .41), and higher baseline autonomic nervous system activity (d = .24). The effect size for autonomic stress reactivity was not significant (d = -.10). The umbrella review of interventions to prevent or reduce child maltreatment showed modest intervention effectiveness (d = .23 for interventions targeting child abuse potential or families with self-reported maltreatment and d = .27 for officially reported child maltreatment cases). Despite numerous studies on child maltreatment, some large gaps in our knowledge of antecedents exist. Neurobiological antecedents should receive more research investment. Differential susceptibility theory may shed more light on questions aimed at breaking the intergenerational transmission of maltreatment and on the modest (preventive) intervention effects. In combination with family-based interaction-focused interventions, large-scale socioeconomic experiments such as cash transfer trials and experiments with vouchers to move to a lower-poverty area might be tested to prevent or reduce child maltreatment. Prevalence, antecedents, and preventive interventions of prenatal maltreatment deserve continuing scientific, clinical, and policy attention

First sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope results. VI. Testing the black hole metric

Galaxie

Resolving the inner parsec of the blazar J1924-2914 with the event horizon telescope

Galaxie

A universal power-law prescription for variability from synthetic images of black hole accretion flows

Instrumentatio

First sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope results. IV. Variability, morphology, and black hole mass

Galaxie

Millimeter light curves of sagittarius A* observed during the 2017 Event Horizon Telescope campaign

Galaxie

First M87 Event Horizon Telescope results. IX.: detection of near-horizon circular polarization

Galaxie

Characterizing and mitigating intraday variability: reconstructing source structure in accreting black holes with mm-VLBI

Instrumentatio