This paper reviews fission safety design principles and approaches for coupling inertial confinement fusion (ICF) to a subcritical fission blanket, in Laser ICF Fission Energy (LIFE) power plants. LIFE power plants use fuel derived from either spent fuel from fission reactors, or from natural uranium or thorium. By using fusion neutrons, LIFE plants can fission a large fraction of the heavy met...

A gene designated thnD, which is required for biodegradation of the organic solvent tetralin by Sphingomonas macrogoltabidus strain TFA, has been identified. Sequence comparison analysis indicated that thnD codes for a carbon-carbon bond serine hydrolase showing highest similarity to hydrolases involved in biodegradation of biphenyl. An insertion mutant defective in ThnD accumulates the ring fi...

We investigate the formation and the decay of heavy systems which are above the fission barrier. By using a microscopic simulation of constraint molecular dynamics (CoMD) on Au+Au collision, we observe composite states stay for very long time before decaying by fission. The typical reaction mechanisms of heavy-ion collisions at lower incident energy are, depending on the energy and impact param...

Size and copy number of organelles are influenced by an equilibrium of membrane fusion and fission. We studied this equilibrium on vacuoles-the lysosomes of yeast. Vacuole fusion can readily be reconstituted and quantified in vitro, but it had not been possible to study fission of the organelle in a similar way. Here we present a cell-free system that reconstitutes fragmentation of purified yea...

As a droplet moves, due to evaporation at the surface, the droplet size is gradually reduced. Due to decreasing the size of the droplets moving in the spray core, the surface charges become closer and the repulsive force between the charges increases. When the Coulombic force overcomes the surface tension force (Rayleigh instability) the droplet breaks into smaller droplets (Coulomb fission). T...

Nuclear transmutation has been reported by lots of experiments. The features of this phenomenon are the production of elements which shows fission-like distribution and their anomalous isotopic ratios or the selective Z and mass changes [1]. To analyze this phenomenon, the selective channel scission (SCS) model has been proposed and improved [2]. The SCS model is powerful and can predict the fi...

As a step toward the elucidation of mechanisms in vesicle budding, a cell-free assay that measures cytosol-induced vesicle generation from liposomes was established. This assay then was used to explore the role of phosphoinositides in vesicle formation. Liposomes incubated with brain cytosol in the presence of ATP and GTP massively generated small vesicles, as assessed both quantitatively and q...

The dissociation of 1, 2 and 4% 1,4-dioxane dilute in krypton was studied in a shock tube using laser schlieren densitometry, LS, for 1550-2100 K with 56 ± 4 and 123 ± 3 Torr. Products were identified by time-of-flight mass spectrometry, TOF-MS. 1,4-dioxane was found to initially dissociate via C-O bond fission followed by nearly equal contributions from pathways involving 2,6 H-atom transfers ...

The gene for the U6 small nuclear RNA (snRNA) in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe is interrupted by an intron whose structure is similar to those found in messenger RNA precursors (pre-mRNAs) (1). This is the only known example of a split snRNA gene from any organism--animal, plant, or yeast. To address the uniqueness of the S. pombe U6 gene, we have investigated the structures of th...