This publication contains information on the dosimetry and monitoring of tritium, the use of protective clothing for work with tritium, safe practices in tritium handling laboratories and details of tritium compatible materials. The information has been compiled from experience in the various applications of tritium and should represent valuable source material to all users of tritium, including those involved in fusion R&D.

This book focuses on tritium as a fuel for fusion reactors and a next-generation energy source. Following an introduction of tritium as a hydrogen radioisotope, important issues involved in establishing safe and economical tritium fuel cycles including breeding for a fusion reactor are summarized; these include the handling of large amounts of tritium: confinement, leakage, contamination, permeation, regulation and tritium accountancy, and impacts on surrounding areas. Targeting and encouraging the students and technicians who will design and operate fusion reactors in the near future, this book offers a valuable resource on tritium science and technology.

The dangers of a United States government plan to abandon its fifty-year policy of keeping civilian and military uses of nuclear technology separate. In December 1998, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced that the U.S. planned to begin producing tritium for its nuclear weapons in commercial nuclear power plants. This decision overturned a fifty-year policy of keeping civilian and military nuclear production processes separate. Tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, is needed to turn A-bombs into H-bombs, and the commercial nuclear power plants that are to be modified to produce tritium are called ice condensers. This book provides an insider's perspective on how Richardson's decision came about, and why it is dangerous. Kenneth Bergeron shows that the new policy is unwise not only because it undermines the U.S. commitment to curb nuclear weapons proliferation but also because it will exacerbate serious safety problems at these commercial power facilities, which are operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority and are among the most marginal in the United States. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's review of the TVA's request to modify its plants for the new nuclear weapons mission should attract significant attention and opposition. Tritium on Ice is part expose, part history, part science for the lay reader, and part political science. Bergeron's discussion of how the issues of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear reactor safety have become intertwined illuminates larger issues about how the federal government does or does not manage technology in the interests of its citizens and calls into question the integrity of government-funded safety assessments in a deregulated economy.

The field of nuclear magnetic resonance has experienced a number of spectacular developments during the last decade. Fourier transform methodology revolutionized signal acquisition capabilities. Superconducting magnets enhanced sensitivity and produced considerable improvement in spectral dispersion. In areas of new applicat ions, the life sciences particularly bene fited from these developments and probably saw the largest increase in usage. NMR imaging promises to offer a noninvasive alternative to X rays. High resolution is now achievable with solids, through magic angle spinning and cross polarization, so that the powers of NMR are applicable to previously intractable materials such as polymers, coal, and other geochemicals. The ease of obtaining relaxation times brought an important fourth variable, after the chemical shift, the coupling constant, and the rate constant, to the examination of structural and kinetic problems i~ all fields. Software development, particularly in the area of pulse sequences, created a host of useful tech niques, including difference decoupling and difference nuclear Overhauser effect spectra, multidimensional displays, signal enhancement (INEPT), coupling constant analysis for connectivity (INADEQUATE), and observation of specific structural classes such as only quaternary carbons. Finally, hardware development gave us access to the entire Periodic Table, to the particular advan tage of the inorganic and organometallic chemist. At the NATO Advanced Study Institute at Stirling, Scotland, the participants endeavored to examine all these advances, except imaging, from a multidisciplinary point of view.