Commercial buildings account for over $85 billion per year in energy costs, which is far more energy than technically necessary. One of the primary reasons buildings do not perform as well as intended is that critical information is lost, through ineffective documentation and communication, leading to building systems that are often improperly installed and operated. A life-cycle perspective on the management of building information provides a framework for improving commercial building energy performance. This paper describes a project to develop strategies and techniques to provide decision-makers with information needed to assure the desired building performance across the complete life cycle of a building project. A key element in this effort is the development of explicit performance metrics that quantitatively represent performance objectives of interest to various building stakeholders. The paper begins with a discussion of key problems identified in current building industry practice, and ongoing work to address these problems. The paper then focuses on the concept of performance metrics and their use in improving building performance during design, commissioning, and on-going operations. The design of a Building Life-cycle Information System (BLISS) is presented. BLISS is intended to provide an information infrastructure capable of integrating a variety of building information …

India and Pakistan have engaged in a long-running military dispute in the Siachen Glacier region of the northern Kashmir since 1984. In recent years, several unsuccessful attempts have been made to end the conflict. Despite continuing hostilities, there remains a strong interest in resolving the dispute and eliminating the human and financial costs associated with maintaining troops on the highest battlefield in the world. One resolution to the problem could be the establishment of a scientific research center in the region. The military forces in the region would be replaced with scientists and engineers from both countries who would advance knowledge in science and engineering by operating a high-altitude research station for the study of basic sciences, engineering, and human physiology. The high altitude, remote location, and unique geology would provide an unprecedented opportunity for ground-breaking research. The paper discusses options for such research and precedents, such as the Antarctic Treaty, for research in other hostile environments. 7 figs.

In developing secure applications and systems, the designers often must incorporate secure user identification in the design specification. In this paper, the authors study secure off line authenticated user identification schemes based on a biometric system that can measure a user`s biometric accurately (up to some Hamming distance). The schemes presented here enhance identification and authorization in secure applications by binding a biometric template with authorization information on a token such as a magnetic strip. Also developed here are schemes specifically designed to minimize the compromise of a user`s private biometrics data, encapsulated in the authorization information, without requiring secure hardware tokens. In this paper the authors furthermore study the feasibility of biometrics performing as an enabling technology for secure system and application design. The authors investigate a new technology which allows a user`s biometrics to facilitate cryptographic mechanisms.

Over 40,000 frames of vertical historical photography from 1938 to 1996 and over 10,000 frames of oblique photography from 1981 to 1991 of the 777-square kilometer Savannah River Site in south central South Carolina were reviewed, cataloged, and referenced utilizing ARCView and associated ArcInfo tools. This allows environmental reviews of over 400 potential waste units on the SRS to be conducted in a rapid fashion to support preparation of work plans, characterization, risk assessments, and closure of the waste units in a more cost effective manner.

This white paper presents the initial requirements for developing a new computer model for simulating the effects of extreme acts of terrorism in the United States. General characteristics of the model are proposed and the level of effort to prepare a complete written description of the model, prior to coding, is detailed. The model would simulate the decision processes and interactions of complex U. S. systems engaged in responding to and recovering from four types of terrorist incidents. The incident scenarios span the space of extreme acts of terrorism that have the potential to affect not only the impacted area, but also the entire nation. The model would be useful to decision-makers in assessing and analyzing the vulnerability of the nation's complex infrastructures, in prioritizing resources to reduce risk, and in planning strategies for immediate response and for subsequent recovery from terrorist incidents.

Western Research Institute conducted a study to define the various parameters that need to be considered in the design and use of a downhole submersible photoionization detector (PID) probe to measure volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Detector response under various conditions, including saturated humidity environments, temperature, and analyte concentration was studied. The relative responses for several VOC analytes were measured. The partitioning of VOCs between water and air was studied as a function of analyte concentration and temperature. The Henry`s law constant governing this partitioning represents an ideal condition at infinite dilution for a particular temperature. The results show that this partitioning is not ideal. Conditions resulting in apparent, practical deviations from Henry`s law include temperature and VOC concentration. Studies with membranes show that membranes that allow passage of VOCs also allow some passage of water vapor. A membrane could play a useful role in protecting the sensor from direct contact with liquid water down hole. A porous poly(tetrafluoroethylene) (PTFE) membrane allows for a rapid passage of VOCs. The rate of diffusion to the sensor with or without a membrane might be a limiting factor for rapid measurements. Various means of mixing may need to be considered.

The Department of Energy (DOE) Fissile Disposition Program (FMDP) has announced that reactor irradiation of Mixed-Oxide (MOX) fuel is one of the preferred alternatives for disposal of surplus weapons-usable plutonium (Pu). MOX fuel has been utilized domestically in test reactors and on an experimental basis in a number of Commercial Light Water Reactors (CLWRs). Most of this experience has been with Pu derived from spent low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel, known as reactor grade (RG) Pu. The High-Power MOX fuel test will be irradiated in the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) to provide preliminary data to demonstrate that the unique properties of surplus weapons-derived or weapons-grade (WG) plutonium (Pu) do not compromise the applicability of this MOX experience base. The purpose of the high-power experiment, in conjunction with the currently ongoing average-power experiment at the ATR, is to contribute new information concerning the response of WG plutonium under more severe irradiation conditions typical of the peak power locations in commercial reactors. In addition, the high-power test will contribute experience with irradiation of gallium-containing fuel to the database required for resolution of generic CLWR fuel design issues. The distinction between "high-power" and "average-power" relates to the position within the nominal CLWR core. …

The Reproducing Kernel Particle Method (RKPM) has many attractive properties that make it ideal for treating a broad class of physical problems. RKPM may be implemented in a mesh-full or a mesh-free manner and provides the ability to tune the method, via the selection of a dilation parameter and window function, in order to achieve the requisite numerical performance. RKPM also provides a framework for performing hierarchical computations making it an ideal candidate for simulating multi-scale problems. Although RKPM has many appealing attributes, the method is quite new and its numerical performance is still being quantified with respect to more traditional discretization methods. In order to assess the numerical performance of RKPM, detailed studies of RKPM on a series of model partial differential equations has been undertaken. The results of von Neumann analyses for RKPM semi-discretizations of one and two-dimensional, first and second-order wave equations are presented in the form of phase and group errors. Excellent dispersion characteristics are found for the consistent mass matrix with the proper choice of dilation parameter. In contrast, the influence of row-sum lumping the mass matrix is shown to introduce severe lagging phase errors. A higher-order mass matrix improves the dispersion characteristics relative to …

The purpose of this project is to protect human health and the environment from risks associated with the contaminated surplus ATSR. The proposed action is needed because the ATSR, a former experimental reactor, contains residual radioactivity and hazardous materials.

This paper describes activities of the Center under the following topical sections: Electronic resource library; Environmental restoration and protection; Health and safety; Waste management; Communication program; Education program; Training; Analytical development; Materials science; Plutonium processing and handling; and Storage.

The implementation of the Business Management System (BMS) will replace a number of systems currently in use at Hanford. These systems will be retired when the replacement is complete and the data from the old systems adequately stored and/or converted to the new system. The replacement is due to a number of factors: (1) Year 2000 conversion: Most of the systems being retired are not year 2000 compliant. Estimates on making these systems compliant approach the costs of replacing with the enterprise system. (2) Many redundant custom-made systems: Maintenance costs on the aging custom developed systems is high. The systems also have overlapping functionality. Replacement with an enterprise system is expected to lower the maintenance costs. (3) Shift inefficient/complex work processes to commercial standards: Many business practices have been developed in isolation from competitive pressures and without a good business foundation. Replacement of the systems allows an opportunity to upgrade the business practices to conform to a market driven approach. (4) Questionable legacy data: Significant amount of data contained within the legacy systems is of questionable origin and value. Replacement of the systems allows for a new beginning with a clean slate and stronger data validation rules. A number of …

An analysis of meteorological data collected at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in 1997 shows that overall weather conditions for the year were relatively cool and wet. The average temperature for 1997 was 63.7 degree F which is about 1 degree F below the annual average for the 30-year period 1968-97. June 1997 had the lowest average temperature of any June in the 34 years for which temperature records are available at SRS ; moreover, the average temperature for the summer months (June, July, and August) was the third lowest for any summer on record. Conversely, the average temperature for March 1997 was the highest for any March in the 34-year record. Temperature extremes for 1997 ranged from a minimum of 18.6 degree F on January 18 to a maximum of 99.1 degree F on August 15.Wet weather during the last three months of the year was due to the development of a strong El Nino event (NOAA, 1998). Total rainfall for December 1997, 10.19 inches, was the highest for a December in the 46 year period of record for precipitation. Monthly rainfall was above average each month except March, May, and August. The greatest 24-hour rainfall during the year …

The purpose of the Tank Waste Remediation System (TWRS) Process Engineering Instruction Manual is to provide guidance and direction to TWRS Process Engineering staff regarding conduct of business. The objective is to establish a disciplined and consistent approach to business such that the work processes within TWRS Process Engineering are safe, high quality, disciplined, efficient, and consistent with Lockheed Martin Hanford Corporation Policies and Procedures. The sections within this manual are of two types: for compliance and for guidance. For compliance sections are intended to be followed per-the-letter until such time as they are formally changed per Section 2.0 of this manual. For guidance sections are intended to be used by the staff for guidance in the conduct of work where technical judgment and discernment are required. The guidance sections shall also be changed per Section 2.0 of this manual. The required header for each manual section is illustrated in Section 2.0, Manual Change Control procedure. It is intended that this manual be used as a training and indoctrination resource for employees of the TWRS Process Engineering organization. The manual shall be required reading for all TWRS Process Engineering staff, matrixed, and subcontracted employees.

According to the American Institute of Stress, job stress is estimated to cost American industry more than $200 billion a year. These costs are, in part, related to the estimated 1 million employees that will be absent on an average workday because of stress; 75 percent of visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related problems. California workers' compensation claims for stress cost $1 billion for medical and legal fees alone (Murphy, 1997). But, there is another dimension to stress that needs to be addressed. Job stress can be a precursor to job burnout. Burnout is a loss of motivation, and antidotes for job stress will not necessarily alleviate or stop job burnout. Job burnout is experienced as exhaustion on physical, emotional, and cognitive levels. Burnout can include withdrawal and decreasing involvement on the job, seriously affecting job satisfaction, turnover, absenteeism, and productivity (Dwyer & Ganster, 1991; Erickson & Gunderson, 1972; Spector & Jex, 1991). The research project described in this paper examined whether job burnout exists in the technical writer and technical illustrator/designer occupations in the Technical Information Department at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This study also determined at what age and after how many years of service these …

In a matter of minutes, a natural disaster completely changes people`s lives. For example, 9,750 lives were lost in the 1993 Latur, India earthquake, 106,000 homes were destroyed in the 1995 Hanshin-Awajii (Kobe) Japan earthquake, and over 8000 jobs/businesses were either disrupted or terminated during Hurricane Andrew. Worldwide, economic disaster damages have tripled in the past 30 years - rising from $40 billion in the 1960`s to $120 billion in the 1980`s. Potential losses and recovery costs continue to rise because of rapid population growth, urban expansion, and increased new construction concentrated in high-risk areas. In the U.S., economic losses from 1989 to 1994 resulting from hurricanes and earthquakes exceeded more than $100 billion. With the exception of floods, severe windstorms annually cause more damage than earthquakes because they occur more frequently. On average, 350 lives are lost every year as a result of windstorms. Over the last decade, nearly 90% of the property losses have resulted from windstorms and about 4% from earthquakes. The unexpected vulnerability of many homes, the high number of pay-outs by insurance companies, and the resulting difficulties of getting affordable insurance coverage following Hurricane Andrew in Florida further emphasized the need for the United States …

Water samples from 54 wells and 6 surface-water sites at or near the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory were analyzed for 63 purgeable organic compounds during 1992-95. The samples were collected and analyzed as a continuation of water-quality studies initiated in 1987 and conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy. Water from 53 of the wells comes from the Snake River Plain aquifer. The remaining well was completed in a perched water zone above the Snake River Plain aquifer. Water samples from 23 wells completed in the Snake River Plain aquifer contained detectable concentrations of at least 1 of 14 selected purgeable organic compounds. The most commonly detected compounds were carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, 1,1,1-trichloroethane, and trichloroethylene. The concentrations of most compounds were less than the laboratory reporting levels. The water sample from the perched zone contained detectable concentrations of 18 purgeable organic compounds. This report summarizes concentrations of purgeable organic compounds concentrations of purgeable organic compounds detected in water samples collected during 1992-95. A total of 270 water samples were collected from 54 wells and 6 surface-water sites.

Aging of the containment pressure boundary in light water reactor plants is being addressed to understand the significant factors relating occurrence of corrosion efficacy of inspection and structural capacity reduction of steel containments and liners of concrete containments. and to make recommendations on use of risk models in regulatory decisions. Current regulatory in-service inspection requirements are reviewed and a summary of containment related degradation experience is presented. Current and emerging nondestructive examination techniques and a degradation assessment methodology for characterizing and quantifying the amount of damage present are described. Quantitative tools for condition assessment of aging structures using time dependent structural reliability analysis methods are summarized. Such methods provide a framework for addressing the uncertainties attendant to aging in the decision process. Results of this research provide a means for establishing current and estimating future structural capacity margins of containments, and to address the significance of incidences of reported containment degradation.

This annual report discusses environmental monitoring at two manufacturing and test sites operated in the Los Angeles area by Rocketdyne Propulsion and Power of Boeing North American, Inc. These are identified as Area 4 of the SSFL and the De Soto site. These sites have been used for research and development (R and D), engineering, and testing in a broad range of technical fields primarily in energy research and nuclear reactor technology. The De Soto site had research and development laboratories involved with nuclear research. This work was terminated in 1995 and only D and D activities will have potential for impact on the environment. Since 1956, Area 4 has been used for work with nuclear materials, including fabricating nuclear reactor fuels, testing nuclear reactors, and dissembling used fuel elements. This work ended in 1988 and subsequent efforts have been directed toward decommissioning and decontamination of the former nuclear facilities. The primary purpose of this report is to present information on environmental and effluent monitoring of DOE-sponsored activities to the regulatory agencies responsible for oversight. Information presented here concentrates on Area 4 at SSFL, which is the only area at SSFL where DOE operations were performed.

The Field Command, Defense Special Weapons Agency (FCDSWA) (formerly FCDNA) contracted Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Environmental Technology Section (ETS) to conduct an independent verification (IV) of the Johnston Atoll (JA) Plutonium Decontamination Project by an interagency agreement with the US Department of Energy in 1992. The main island is contaminated with the transuranic elements plutonium and americium, and soil decontamination activities have been ongoing since 1984. FCDSWA has selected a remedy that employs a system of sorting contaminated particles from the coral/soil matrix, allowing uncontaminated soil to be reused. The objective of IV is to evaluate the effectiveness of remedial action. The IV contractor`s task is to determine whether the remedial action contractor has effectively reduced contamination to levels within established criteria and whether the supporting documentation describing the remedial action is adequate. ORNL conducted four interrelated tasks from 1992 through 1996 to accomplish the IV mission. This document is a compilation and summary of those activities, in addition to a comprehensive review of the history of the project.

The availability of information and data on the renewable energy resources (solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, and hydro) for renewable energy technologies is a critical element in the successful implementation of these technologies. This paper presents a comprehensive summary of published information on these resources for each of 1 8 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies. In the introductory sections, a discussion of the quality and completeness of this information is presented, along with recommendations on steps that need to be taken to facilitate the further development and deployment of renewable energy technologies throughout the APEC region. These sections are then followed by economy-specific reviews, and a complete bibliography and summary description for each citation. The major results of this survey are that a basis for understanding renewable energy resources is currently available for essentially all the economies, although there is a significant need to apply improved and updated resource assessment techniques in most. For example, most wind resource assessments rely on data collected at national weather stations, which often results in underestimates of the true potential wind resource within an economy. As a second example, solar resource assessments in most economies rely on an analysis of very simple sunshine record data, …

In the central and eastern U.S. (CEUS) the assessment of seismic hazard is problematic because the active tectonic features are generally not identified. Many ideas have been proposed to explain why earthquakes occur in the CEUS and which geologic structures are associated with the earthquakes. Earthquakes in the CEUS have been attributed to postglacial rebound, the reactivation of preexisting zones of weakness in the continental crust near extensions of oceanic fracture zones, stress concentrations associated with mafic/ultramafic plutonic masses, intersections of major structural features in the crust, reactivation of previously rifted crust, present-day faulting along lapetan margin faults, and hydroseismicity. It is possible that many, if not all, of these hypotheses proposed to explain the spatial distribution of earthquakes in the CEUS and to identify potentially active geologic features has some merit, and it is possible that many or all of them are operative in some way in the CEUS. In this study we constructed a GIS database of earthquake, geological and geophysical data, and we used that database to study the correlation of the seismicity with the geology and tectonics of the CEUS. Using earthquake, geological and geophysical parameters derived from this GIS database, we carried out statistical analyses …

A parametric study of the Spent Nuclear Fuel Project system capacity is presented. The study was completed using a commercially available software package to develop a summary level model of the major project systems. A base case, reflecting the Fiscal Year 1998 process configuration, is evaluated. Parametric evaluations are also considered, investigating the impact of higher fuel retrieval system productivity and reduced shift operations at the canister storage building on total project duration.

The U.S. Geological Survey and the Idaho Department of Water Resources, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy, sampled 18 sites as part of the fourth round of a long-term project to monitor water quality of the Snake River Plain aquifer from the southern boundary of the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory to the Hagerman area. Water samples were collected and analyzed for selected radiochemical and chemical constituents. The samples were collected from seven domestic wells, six irrigation wells, two springs, one dairy well, one observation well, and one stock well. Two quality-assurance samples also were collected and analyzed. None of the radiochemical or chemical constituents exceeded the established maximum contaminant levels for drinking water. Many of the radionuclide- and inorganic-constituent concentrations were greater than their respective reporting levels.

Safety-related nuclear power plant (NPP) structures are designed to withstand loadings from a number of low-probability external and interval events, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and loss-of-coolant accidents. Loadings incurred during normal plant operation therefore generally are not significant enough to cause appreciable degradation. However, these structures are susceptible to aging by various processes depending on the operating environment and service conditions. The effects of these processes may accumulate within these structures over time to cause failure under design conditions, or lead to costly repair. In the late 1980s and early 1990s several occurrences of degradation of NPP structures were discovered at various facilities (e.g., corrosion of pressure boundary components, freeze- thaw damage of concrete, and larger than anticipated loss of prestressing force). Despite these degradation occurrences and a trend for an increasing rate of occurrence, in-service inspection of the safety-related structures continued to be performed in a somewhat cursory manner. Starting in 1991, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) published the first of several new requirements to help ensure that adequate in-service inspection of these structures is performed. Current regulatory in-service inspection requirements are reviewed and a summary of degradation experience presented. Nondestructive examination techniques commonly used to inspect the …