Clinical practices surrounding the current Ebola epidemic have been center stage in discourse concerning research and practice of care. As the medical community becomes more sophisticated in understanding the many facets of treating and containing this virus, the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit Q6 has identified Ebola medical waste disposal as a key area of concern for U.S. hospitals. The requirem...

Performance assessment of the Yucca Mountain unsaturated zone (UZ) as the site for an underground repository of high-level radioactive waste relies on the crucial assumption that water percolation processes in the unsaturated zone can be approximated as a steadystate condition. Justification of such an assumption is based on temporal damping effects of several geological units within the unsatu...

Any activity involving radioactive materials, in industry, research, medical applications, and most notably nuclear power production, produces radioactive waste. The high level (life threatening doses of radiation) and long lived (radiation levels remaining intact up to 100.000 and even millions of years) wastes mainly from nuclear power plants, are thought to be too dangerous to keep forever w...

Detecting and quantitating alpha emitting radionuclides are routine tasks in nuclear energy and environmental monitoring. For this purpose, liquid scintillation counting (LSC) is an excellent method because alphas are counted with nearly 100% counting efficiency with low backgrounds, even with severe quenching. Quenching agents such as inorganic acids, organic acids, and extractive scintillator...

Swelling clays play a major role in current concepts for the underground disposal of high-level nuclear waste in deep geological formations. In one of the multi-barrier concepts for preventing the escape of radioactive substances from a high-level nuclear waste repository, the barrier consists of a copper container, compacted bentonite as buffer and backfill (the engineered barrier), and the re...

Detecting and quantitating alpha emitting radionuclides are routine tasks in nuclear energy and environmental monitoring. For this purpose, liquid scintillation counting (LSC) is an excellent method because alphas are counted with nearly 100% counting efficiency with low backgrounds, even with severe quenching. Quenching agents such as inorganic acids, organic acids, and extractive scintillator...

DL_POLY_3 is a general purpose molecular dynamics (MD) simulation package designed to simulate systems of the order of tens of millions of particles and beyond by efficiently harnessing the power of modern computer clusters. Here we discuss the package design, functionality and report on performance and capability limits. We then report the application of DL_POLY_3 to study radiation cascades i...

The high cost involved in the retrieval and repair of robotic manipulators used for remediating nuclear waste, processing hazardous chemicals, or for exploring space or the deep sea, places a premium on the reliability of the system as a whole. For such applications, kinematically redundant manipulators are inherently more reliable since the additional degrees of freedom (DOF) may compensate fo...

Modelling the groundwater contamination in the aquifer above a repository for high-level nuclear waste is a complex task. The usual procedure is based on modelling the transport of radionuclides in one or two dimensions only (NAGRA, 2002; Kosakowski, 2004; Keesmann et al., 2006; SKB, 2006; Nykyri et al., 2008). However, modern computing techniques allow to perform simulations in three dimension...