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We thank R. Konings et al. for their interest and their valuable critical discussion of our article regarding the fission product release from irradiated oxide fuel during thermal treatment and reply to their comments appearing in this issue. Their feedback stimulated us to give more details on the sampling procedure of investigated materials as well as the measurement procedure in order to exclude misunderstandings. The release curves for iodine and cesium are compared to blank profiles and reanalyzed to demonstrate the features of inductive heating approach applied in authors’ recent study on FP release under inert and oxidizing conditions.

Tungsten is the plasma-facing material of choice in several design studies for DEMOs and in development programs for advanced plasma facing components. Use of tungsten in ITER for the divertor and consideration of a full first wall of tungsten have increased the pace of research in fusion on tungsten. This paper characterizes the critical issues in making tungsten work as a plasma-facing material for a DEMO and cites past work as well as current experiments, modeling and materials and component development.

Heavy water, D 2 O, was used in the preceding paper by Dytlewski et al. in a leaching experiment of the Australian titanate waste ceramic Synroc. The results were compared to previous data with H 2 O of the present authors. The leaching experiment in H 2 O was now repeated confirming the previous results. The small differences in these two types of experiments and the relevant features of the elastic recoil detection analysis, ERDA, are discussed.

The use of D2O for leaching Synroc gives increased sensitivity relative to H2O in energy-recoil analysis of aqueous species in the leached surfaces. At 120 and 190°C the penetrations of D were found to be ∼ 30 nm after leaching for periods of 1 month.

We published a paper entitled `Experimental evaluation of oxygen solubility in UN, PuN and (U,Pu)N' authored by G.C. Jain and C. Ganguly in the Journal of Nuclear Materials 202 (1993) 245. Oxygen solubility limits were experimentally determined from lattice parameter and composition of the phases. The lattice parameter was determined from X-ray diffraction measurement and the composition was evaluated from chemical analysis results. Sood et al. have made some comments on a part of our data on the UNCO and PuNCO systems in the last two paragraphs in the chapter of Results and discussion on p. 299 of their above cited paper. In this context, the following comments are offered.