Originally published in 1983, this book presents both the technical and political information necessary to evaluate the emerging threat to world security posed by recent advances in uranium enrichment technology. Uranium enrichment has played a relatively quiet but important role in the history of efforts by a number of nations to acquire nuclear weapons and by a number of others to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For many years the uranium enrichment industry was dominated by a single method, gaseous diffusion, which was technically complex, extremely capital-intensive, and highly inefficient in its use of energy. As long as this remained true, only the richest and most technically advanced nations could afford to pursue the enrichment route to weapon acquisition. But during the 1970s this situation changed dramatically. Several new and far more accessible enrichment techniques were developed, stimulated largely by the anticipation of a rapidly growing demand for enrichment services by the world-wide nuclear power industry. This proliferation of new techniques, coupled with the subsequent contraction of the commercial market for enriched uranium, has created a situation in which uranium enrichment technology might well become the most important contributor to further nuclear weapon proliferation. Some of the issues addressed in this book are: A technical analysis of the most important enrichment techniques in a form that is relevant to analysis of proliferation risks; A detailed projection of the world demand for uranium enrichment services; A summary and critique of present institutional non-proliferation arrangements in the world enrichment industry, and An identification of the states most likely to pursue the enrichment route to acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Thermodynamics of Certain Refractory Compounds, Volume II: Thermodynamic Tables, Bibliography, and Property File provides information pertinent to thermodynamics as a significant theoretical tool for predicting the chemical and physical behavior of materials under diverse environmental conditions. This book presents a compilation of thermodynamic tables generated on this project. Organized into three chapters, this volume begins with an overview of the wide range in quality of thermodynamic data. This text then presents a bibliography as well as property file, which is essentially a subject index for use with the bibliography. Other chapters consider the investigation of thermodynamic properties of the given compounds. This book also presents tables labeled with the initials of the responsible scientist and the approximate date of analysis. The final chapter deals with the property file code. This book is a valuable resource for scientists and engineers.