ddanon said:
Hello, anyone has any information about the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, about the productions? I searched on internet but google only show the titles and there is no description of any production in the laboratory of Tennessee.
A little searching using Google indicates that Oak Ridge is the depository of these "fixtures" and they are made elsewhere. Do these help answer your question?
"Throughout the DOE Complex there are holdings of highly enriched uranium (HEU) contaminated with plutonium and americium. Contaminated HEU cannot be sent to the Oak Ridge Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, the nation’s uranium disposition site, until its surface is cleaned to a smearable transuranic (TRU) alpha activity level of below 20 disintegrations per minute (dpm)/100 centimeters squared (cm2) or to an oxide contamination limit of 60–210 parts per billion (ppb) TRU. Together, the Plutonium Manufacturing Technology and Applied Engineering Technology Divisions at Los Alamos have developed and deployed advanced methods for the decontamination and conversion (D&C) of HEU. The ARIES HEU decontamination and conversion process is proven to generate Y-12 acceptable material."
http://arq.lanl.gov/source/orgs/nmt/nmtdo/AQarchive/1st_2ndQuarter08/page3.shtml
"ADVANCED RECOVERY AND INTEGRATED EXTRACTION
SYSTEM (ARIES): THE UNITED STATE'S DEMONSTRATION LINE
FOR PIT DISASSEMBLY AND CONVERSION"
"ABSTRACT"
"The Advanced Recovery and Integrated Extraction System (ARIES) is a pit disassembly and conversion demonstration line at Los Alamos National Laboratory's plutonium facility. Pits are the core of a nuclear weapon that contain the fissile material. With the end of the cold war, the United States began a program to dispose of the fissile material contained in surplus nuclear weapons. In January of 1997, the Department of Energy's Office of Fissile Material Disposition issued a Record of Decision (ROD) on the disposition of surplus plutonium. This decision contained a hybrid option for disposition of the plutonium, immobilization and mixed oxide fuel. ARIES is the cornerstone of the United States plutonium disposition program that supplies the pit demonstration plutonium feed material for either of these disposition pathways. Additionally, information from this demonstration is being used to design the United States Pit Disassembly and Conversion Facility.
All of the ARIES technologies were recently developed and incorporate waste minimization. The technologies include pit bisection, hydride/dehydride, metal to oxide conversion process, packaging, and nondestructive assay (NDA). The current schedule for the ARIES integrated Demonstration will begin in the Spring of 1998. The ARIES project involves a number of DOE sites including Los Alamos National Laboratory as the lead laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Sandia National Laboratories. Moreover, the ARIES team is heavily involved in working with Russia in their pit disassembly and conversion activities."
http://www.wmsym.org/archives/1998/html/sess34/34-01/34-01.htm
