[en] The ENSA company is manufacturing the tubes of the steam generator in NP Asco 1. The improvements of fabrication and production are broken down into 3 chapters: - Mechanizing process - Welding process - Clean area activities

[en] The program developed by the Spanish Atomic Forum aimed at high school teachers' training to nuclear science information in schools and universities, is presented. The rationale of its development and its implementation is discussed: among various observations, it was found out that seminars where teachers from science and teachers from other disciplines were mixed, are of a better efficiency towards nuclear energy acceptance

[en] Information centres are nothing more, nor less, than a practical way of providing direct information with a view to dissipating the aura of mystery and mistrust that surrounds nuclear power plants in the mind of the average member of the public. Having said this, it should be made clear that the valuable and indispensable contribution made by such centres should always go hand in hand with a well organized visit to the accessible parts of the plant itself. Contact with the people working at the plant, even if only temporary, realization that theirs is a routine activity carried out within an atmosphere of normality, is a psychological factor achieved only through seeing with one's own eyes. With regard to Spain, the recent report by UNESA (association of electricity companies) on the operation of the country's nuclear plants during the first half of 1992 mentions the figure of 33000 visitors, to which should be added the increasing tendency among the members of spanish society to become 'nuclear visitors'

[en] The effect of gamma radiation from a cobalt 60 source in the 27000 Durolon polycarbonate irradiated with doses between 0,2 and 1000 kGy at 25⁰ C was analyzed. For this reason the samples was submitted to the mechanical assay of tension, deformation and hardness and optical assay of transmittance. The obtained results show a good mechanical stability of the polycarbonate, when it was submitted to gamma irradiation in doses up to 20 kGy. (C.G.C.). 05 refs., 04 figs

[en] ENSA is a well known manufacturer of multi-system primary components for the nuclear industry and is totally prepared to satisfy future market requirements in this industry. At the same time that ENSA has been gaining a reputation world wider for the supply of primary components, has been strengthening its commitment and experience in supplying spent fuel components, either pool racks or storage and transportation casks, and offers not only fabrication but also design capabilities for its products. ENSA has supplied Spent Fuel Pool Racks, in spain, Finland, Taiwan, Korea, China, and currently it is in the process of licensing its own rack design in the United States of America for the ESBWR along with Ge-Hitachi. ENSA has supplied racks for 20 pools and 22 different reactors and it has also manufactured racks under all available technologies and developed a design known as Interlock Cell Matrix whose main features are outlined in this article. Another ENSA achievement in rack technology is the use of remote control for re-racking activities instead of using divers, which improves the ALARA requirements. Regarding casks for storage and transportation, ENSA also has al leading worldwide position, with exports prevailing over the Spanish market where ENSA has supplied 16 storage and transportation casks to the Spanish nuclear power Trillo. In some cases, ENSA acts as subcontractor for other clients. Foreign markets are still a major challenge for ENSA. ENSA-is well known for its manufacturing capabilities in the nuclear industry, but has been always involved in design activities through its engineering division, which carries out different tasks: components Design; Tooling Design; Engineering and Documentation; Project Engineering; Calculations, Design and Development Engineering. (Author)

No abstract available

[en] The integrity of candidate waste package materials for the proposed Yucca Mountain (YM) repository may be compromised by the corrosive activities of microorganisms. Bacterial activities will be dependent on the abilities of deleterious bacteria to grow and multiply in the repository environment. Therefore, preliminary to assessing microbial induced corrosion, experiments were undertaken to determine the growth of native YM bacterial communities in modified YM pore water. Specifically, we sought to define nutrients that limit bacterial growth in Yucca Mountain and determine growth rates under aerobic, saturated conditions

[en] Published in summary form only

[en] The neutron and proton pairing gaps were recently found to have a global dependence on neutron excess. We investigate whether the couplings necessary to obtain this behaviour can be provided by a mean field associated with a Skyrme-type plus usual pairing effective interaction. The parameters of this effective interaction are constrained by nuclear-matter properties, such as binding energy, saturation density, effective mass and values of the second derivatives of the energy with respect to the four densities (neutron and proton with spin-up and spin-down), together with the surface energy. The pairing gaps are then calculated as a function of neutron excess for various parameter sets for very large systems and for finite nuclei in the local-density approximation. We find that the empirical results cannot be reproduced by this procedure. We put forward therefore the hypothesis that, to account for this failure, the usual phenomenology of effective interactions in nuclei ought to be modified; we propose a simple residual neutron-proton interaction that can do that, yet maintains all the previous successes. (orig.)

[en] Using the improved non-relativistic quark model for light baryons, we follow up an old suggestion due to S. L. Glashow that there might exist a relatively strong tensor mixing in the ground state of the nucleon. We find that, except for the ratio of the charge radii of the neutron and the proton, Glashow's proposal is consistent with the empirical values of a series of baryonic observables that could be sensitive to the mixing. The origin of the mixing itself remains obscure, in the framework of the model used in this paper. (orig.)