Management of radioactive waste

The safe management of the solid radioactive waste material generated by the various operations that make up the rapidly growing nuclear electric power industry, the nuclear reactors themselves, and the plants which provide new fuel for these reactors and process the spent fuel which results from reactor operations are discussed.     

Burial of vegetation by erosion debris near ski lifts on Cairngorm,Scotland

The extent of accelerated erosion from ground damaged near ski lifts was found to have reached a peak in about 1969, with a marked decline since then. This decline was attributable to reseeding of damaged ground, provision of drains and grading of dirt roads. Burial experiments showed that where erosion debris had covered vegetation, recovery at best took several years, and with depths above about 7 cm, was almost negligible.     

The relative-intensity method of x-ray fluorescence analysis and its application to soils and rocks

The relative-intensity X-ray fluorescence method of analysis of rock and soil samples has been investigated and compared with the net-intensity method. Strong, coherently scattered radiation originating from the X-ray tube is shown to be preferable to background radiation as an internal standard, and scattered radiation measured at one wavelength can usefully be applied in the determination of several elements. When the concentrations of an element in two soil samples of different composition (for example concretions and the soil adjacent to them) are compared, the ratio of the relative intensities may be different from the ratio of net intensities by a factor of about two. The concentrations of manganese in thirteen standard rock samples determined by the relative-intensity method are within or very close to the ranges of values reported previously.