The experiments performed for this thesis were designed to define the primary process variables of time, temperature, and atmosphere for an engineering system that will produce metal powder from recycled nuclear fuel cladding. The proposed system will hydride and mill Zircaloy cladding tubes to produce fine hydride powder and then dehydride the powder to produce metal; this thesis is focused on the hydride formation reaction. These experiments were performed by hydriding nuclear grade Zircaloy-4 tubes under flowing argon-5% hydrogen for various times and temperatures. The result of these experiments is a correlation which relates the rate of zirconium hydride formation to the process temperature. This correlation may now be used to design a method to efficiently produce zirconium hydride powder. It was observed that it is much more effective to hydride the Zircaloy-4 tubes at temperatures below the a-B-d eutectoid temperature of 540°C. These samples tended to readily disassemble during the hydride formation reaction and were easily ground to powder. Hydrogen pickup was faster above this temperature but the samples were generally tougher and it was difficult to pulverize them into powder.

This MSc thesis reprocessed seismic data collected at a site near the Gota River in 2011, focusing on two lines. The two seismic lines ran through a landslide scar zone for a total length of 1 km, both of which used dynamite as the seismic source. The thesis used a standard seismic processing tool for this purpose, with the main processes including static corrections, bandpass filtering, velocity analysis, NMO corrections, stack, and migration. Analysis of the resulting images reveals a coarse-grained layer near the surface, which is in contact with the quick clays overlying them. Bedrock is close to the surface at high elevations and reaches a depth of 90 m under the landslide scar. The reflections are discontinuous at some locations. The first breaks were inverted using tomography methods and the resulting inversion models was correlated with the reflection images. Analysis of the subsurface topography suggests a situation where the quick-clay landslide hazard may be present, the specifics of which need to be combined with other geological and geotechnical investigations and scenario buildings. The high-resolution reflection seismic imaging method has a great promise for quick-clay landslide studies.