DIRECT DISPOSAL OF A RADIOACTIVE ORGANIC WASTE IN A CEMENTITIOUS WASTE FORM

The disposition of {sup 137}Cs-containing tetraphenylborate (TPB) waste at the Savannah River Site (SRS) by immobilization in the cementitious waste form, or grout called ''saltstone'' was proposed as a straightforward, cost-effective method for disposal. Tests were performed to determine benzene release due to TPB decomposition in saltstone at several initial TPB concentrations and temperatures. The benzene release rates for simulants and radioactive samples were generally comparable at the same conditions. Saltstone monoliths with only the top surface exposed to air at 25 and 55 C at any tetraphenylborate concentration or at any temperature with 30 mg/L TPB gave insignificant releases of benzene. At higher TPB concentrations and 75 and 95 C, the benzene release could result in exceeding the Lower Flammable Limit in the saltstone vaults

LOCALIZED CORROSION OF AUSTENITIC STAINLESS STEELEXPOSED TO MIXTURES OF PLUTONIUM OXIDE AND CHLORIDE SALTS

Laboratory corrosion tests were conducted to investigate the corrosivity of moist plutonium oxide/chloride (PuO{sub 2}/Cl-) salt mixtures on 304L and 316L stainless steel coupons. The tests exposed flat coupons for pitting evaluation and 'teardrop' stressed coupons for stress corrosion cracking (SCC) evaluation at room temperature to various mixtures of PuO{sub 2} and chloride-bearing salts for periods up to 500 days. The two flat coupons were placed so that the solid oxide/salt mixture contacted about one half of the coupon surface. One teardrop coupon was placed in contact with solid mixture; the second teardrop was in contact with the headspace gas only. The mixtures were loaded with nominally 0.5 wt % water under a helium atmosphere. Observations of corrosion ranged from superficial staining to pitting and SCC. The extent of corrosion depended on the total salt concentration and on the composition of the salt. The most significant corrosion was found in coupons that were exposed to 98 wt % PuO{sub 2}, 2 wt % chloride salt mixtures that contained calcium chloride. SCC was observed in two 304L stainless steel teardrop coupons exposed in solid contact to a mixture of 98 wt % PuO{sub 2}, 0.9 wt % NaCl, 0.9 wt % KCl, and 0.2 wt % CaCl{sub 2}. The cracking was associated with the heat-affected zone of an autogenous weld that ran across the center of the coupon. Cracking was not observed in coupons exposed to the headspace gas, nor in coupons exposed to other mixtures with either 0.92 wt% CaCl{sub 2} or no CaCl{sub 2}. The corrosion results point to the significance of the interaction between water loading and the concentration of the hydrating salt CaCl{sub 2} in the susceptibility of austenitic stainless steels to corrosion

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

STRESS CORROSION CRACKING IN TEAR DROP SPECIMENS

Laboratory tests were conducted to investigate the stress corrosion cracking (SCC) of 304L stainless steel used to construct the containment vessels for the storage of plutonium-bearing materials. The tear drop corrosion specimens each with an autogenous weld in the center were placed in contact with moist plutonium oxide and chloride salt mixtures. Cracking was found in two of the specimens in the heat affected zone (HAZ) at the apex area. Finite element analysis was performed to simulate the specimen fabrication for determining the internal stress which caused SCC to occur. It was found that the tensile stress at the crack initiation site was about 30% lower than the highest stress which had been shifted to the shoulders of the specimen due to the specimen fabrication process. This finding appears to indicate that the SCC initiation took place in favor of the possibly weaker weld/base metal interface at a sufficiently high level of background stress. The base material, even subject to a higher tensile stress, was not cracked. The relieving of tensile stress due to SCC initiation and growth in the HAZ and the weld might have foreclosed the potential for cracking at the specimen shoulders where higher stress was found

Correlations between physical and chemical defences in plants: tradeoffs, syndromes, or just many different ways to skin a herbivorous cat?

� Most plant species have a range of traits that deter herbivores. However, understanding of how different defences are related to one another is surprisingly weak. Many authors argue that defence traits trade off against one another, while others argue that they form coordinated defence syndromes. � We collected a dataset of unprecedented taxonomic and geographic scope (261 species spanning 80 families, from 75 sites across the globe) to investigate relationships among four chemical and six physical defences. � Five of the 45 pairwise correlations between defence traits were significant and three of these were tradeoffs. The relationship between species’ overall chemical and physical defence levels was marginally nonsignificant (P = 0.08), and remained nonsignificant after accounting for phylogeny, growth form and abundance. Neither categorical principal component analysis (PCA) nor hierarchical cluster analysis supported the idea that species displayed defence syndromes. � Our results do not support arguments for tradeoffs or for coordinated defence syndromes. Rather, plants display a range of combinations of defence traits. We suggest this lack of consistent defence syndromes may be adaptive, resulting from selective pressure to deploy a different combination of defences to coexisting species

'Hepitopes': A Database of HLA Class I Epitopes in Hepatitis B Virus

This is a spreadsheet containing the results of a systematic literature review to identify and curate all known and putative HLA Class I epitopes in hepatitis B virus (HBV). <div> <p>We performed our literature review in January 2016, searching Medline and Embase via the OVID search interface made available by the University of Oxford. No date restrictions were imposed; Medline was searched from 1946-2016 and Embase from 1974-2016. The relevant subject headings for Epitopes, HLA Antigens, CD8 Antigens and Hepatitis B from the thesauri (MESH and EMTREE) were exploded and searched. In addition the terms epitope* (to pick up singular and plural) and Hepatitis B and HBV were searched in the title and abstract fields. We also identified additional references by searching the bibliographies of relevant articles. </p><p>As well as details of each citation, we recorded the HBV protein and sequence-numbered location of each epitope (based on a published reference strain; Liu WC, et al. Aligning to the sample-specific reference sequence to optimize the accuracy of next-generation sequencing analysis for hepatitis B virus. <i>Hepatol Int</i> 2016;10:147-157).</p> <p>Each citation was reviewed by a primary reviewer and then again by a second expert to ensure the records are as accurate as possible. </p><p>Over time, we aim to update and refine the dataset such that it becomes a growing resource for virologists, immunologists and those in the field of vaccine design.</p><p>A live interactive version can be viewed at http://www.expmedndm.ox.ac.uk/hepitopes.</p><p>The visualisation code can be viewed at <a href="https://github.com/ox-it/hepitopes" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://github.com/ox-it/hepitopes</a>. </p><p>As the database is updated and refined, we will submit updated versions to Figshare. In parallel, we have uploaded a static version to Oxford Research Archive (ORA) at the point of initial publication; DOI: 10.5287/bodleian:zr0VAr78q</p> </div