[en] This paper reports that the Department of Energy, with direct support from Sandia National Laboratories, is developing new standards and systems for automated access control. The program, known as the Personnel Access-Control and Security-Enhancement System will be applied across the entire Department. The major goals are to afford increased protection for the Department's most valuable assets through use of compartmentalization and automated systems and meet certain minimum functional specifications, and to simplify handling of inter-site visit requests and approvals. Since the program's inception in 1988 accomplishments include development of minimum system requirements, specifications for a common badge and common data, a common biometric device, selection of early baseline hardware and software components for use in a testbed and demonstration system, and initiation of new installations and existing system modifications. These requirements have been issued with the most recent update to the Department's Safeguards and Security Standards and Criteria. Problems include agreement on standards between sites with widely varying characteristics, and integration of related health and safety procedures. A coalition of security people from the weapons laboratories met as a working group for a time to discuss and resolve some technical issues. More activity is needed in this area

[en] The materials characterization and analytical chemistry capabilities at the 11 DOE Nuclear Weapons Laboratories or Production Plants have been surveyed and compared. In general, all laboratories have similar capabilities and equipment. Facilities or capabilities that are unique or that exist at only a few laboratories are described in detail

[en] The article is a brief review of the Seventh International Symposium on the Packaging and Transportation of Radioactive Materials (PATRAM) held at New Orleans, La., May 15-20, 1983. This symposium was organized by the Transportation Technology Center of Sandia National Laboratories and by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, both of which are prime contractors to the Department of Energy. Major areas of interest were safety and regulatory aspects of transportation, transportation and storage systems, material properties and design, and testing and analysis of casks. The primary way to meet the challenge of the future, as expressed in the papers presented at PATRAM-83, is to achieve consistency in transportation regulations and in compliance with them. This could be aided significantly by establishing guidelines for designing and licensing packages, benchmarking analysis codes, developing facilities for repeatable testing, and establishing acceptable material properties

[en] The big three weapons laboratories - Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia - could face dramatic changes in the way they do business if a proposal made by Representative George Brown (D-CA) is enacted. Brown, chairman of the House Science Committee, introduced a bill last week that would consolidate nuclear weapons R ampersand D from several labs (without saying at which sites or how). Brown also wants to shift the focus of the labs work more toward civilian projects, and the bill would involve the White House more directly in managing their research agenda. The Brown bill (HR 1432), which has won the backing of Representatives Marilyn Lloyd (D-TN), Tim Valentine (D-NC), Rick Boucher (D-VA), and Ron Wyden (R-OR), asks the secretary of energy to make a comprehensive study of current lab activities and submit a plan to redirect one or more of these labs to civilian missions by 31 March 1994. Brown and other members of Congress had considered turning one of the nuclear weapons centers into a green lab, that is, dedicating it to R ampersand D on environmental technology. That idea seems to have been set aside in favor of a more general formula that would be administered by a new Federal Laboratory Mission Evaluation and Coordination Committee, reporting to the president's science adviser. This watchdog panel, according to the bill, would seek to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of all the federal laboratories and ensure that between 10% and 20% of their budgets are devoted to collaborative efforts with industry and state and local governments. Administratively, the bill would also create some new positions at the Dept. of Energy (DOE), including an undersecretary for science and technology who would manage the labs

[en] The proposed action for this EA for Sandia National Laboratories/New Mexico Technical Area IV, includes continuing existing operations, modification of an existing accelerator (Particle Beam Fusion Accelerator II) to support defnese-related Z-pinch experiments, and construction of two transformer oil storage tanks to support the expansion of the Advanced Pulsed Power Research Module, a single pulse accelerator. Based on the analyses in the EA, DOE believes that the proposed action is not a major federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment within the meaning of NEPA and CEQ NEPA implementing regulations in 40 CFR 1508.18 and 1508.27. Therefore, an environmental impact statement is not required, and a Finding of No Significant Impact is issued

[en] This document is intended to be a resource for preparers of safety documentation for Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico facilities. It provides standardized discussions of some topics that are generic to most, if not all, Sandia/NM facilities safety documents. The material provides a ''core'' upon which to develop facility-specific safety documentation. The use of the information in this document will reduce the cost of safety document preparation and improve consistency of information

[en] Code assessment is performed to obtain a judgement of the accuracy and validity of any given code over its range of applicability. To achieve this, the codes are exercised against a matrix of experiments, resulting in comparisons between code predictions and measured data. This far, conclusions on code accuracy drawn from previous independent assessment studies have appeared to be mostly phenomenological and/or qualitative. Therefore, there is an increasing emphasis within the NRC code assessment effort to formulate more coherent, quantitative conclusions on the capabilities and accuracies of the codes. This can be done by using statistically based methods to evaluate the overall accuracy of the codes with respect to particular key phenomena, based on the same code analyses of individual experiments. One possibility for a statistically-based code accuracy quantification methodology is presented in this report. This method yields three nested accuracy estimates for any given time period: the code accuracy bias, the average variation in accuracy for the overall behavior. Quantifying assessment results using a common method will allow the results of a number of independent code assessors to be combined to provide broad-based information on code accuracy for applications to regulatory needs and other power plant studies and to define further code development needs and priorities

[en] Research into two-dimensional phase unwrapping has uncovered interesting and troublesome inconsistencies that cause path-dependent results. Cellular automata, which are simple, discrete mathematical systems, offered promise of computation in nondirectional, parallel manner. A cellular automaton was discovered that can unwrap consistent phase data in n dimensions in a path-independent manner and can automatically accommodate noise-induced (pointlike) inconsistencies and arbitrary boundary conditions (region partitioning). For data with regional (nonpointlike) inconsistencies, no phase-unwrapping algorithm will converge, including the cellular-automata approach. However, the automata method permits more simple visualization of the regional inconsistencies. Examples of its behavior on one- and two-dimensional data are presented

[en] Sandia National Laboratories, as part of the DOE complex, is committed to full compliance with all applicable environmental laws and regulations. This Environmental Protection Implementation Plan (EPIP) is intended to ensure that the environmental program objectives of DOE Order 5400.1 are achieved at SNL, Livermore. The EPIP will serve as an aid to management and staff to implement these new programs in a timely manner. 23 refs., 4 figs., 1 tab

[en] SABIRS is an acronym for Sandia Abbreviated Bibliographic Information Retrieval System. This document is both a reference for users and system documentation which would permit a simple installation in a small or medium sized library on virtually any computer system