Advocating for the good of the SLAC Archives and History Office (AHO) has not been a one-time affair, nor has it been a one-method procedure. It has required taking time to ascertain the current and perhaps predict the future climate of the Laboratory, and it has required developing and implementing a portfolio of approaches to the goal of building a stronger archive program by strengthening and appropriately expanding its resources. Among the successful tools in the AHO advocacy portfolio, the Archives Program Review Committee has been the most visible. The Committee and the role it serves as well as other formal and informal advocacy efforts are the focus of this case study My remarks today will begin with a brief introduction to advocacy and outreach as I understand them, and with a description of the Archives and History Office's efforts to understand and work within the corporate culture of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. I will then share with you some of the tools we have employed to advocate for the Archives and History Office programs and activities; and finally, I will talk about how well - or badly - those tools have served us over the past decade.

Coal gasifier is one of the most promising solutions for clean fossil energy. Refractory thickness monitoring and online real-time temperature measurement is needed for improved reliability and advanced process control for current and future generation power plants. The objective of this program is to design and implement an optical fiber based sensing system that could potentially be used to monitor refractory wall thickness and temperature inside a coal gasifier. For the thickness monitoring, the system should be able to operate at temperatures up to 1000 C. For this temperature range, silica fiber can still work so it is chosen for the sensor design. The measurement is based on a photon counting optical time domain reflectometer. A narrow light pulse is launched into a silica fiber which could be embedded into the gasifier refractory wall, and is partially reflected by the far end of the fiber. The time of flight of the light pulse in the fiber then gives an indication of the position of the fiber end, which is a function of the wall thickness when the fiber is embedded. Results obtained show a measurement accuracy of {+-}2cm in environment of 1000 C with a saw cut fiber end. When …

This project involves the development of an optimized, bench-scale processing circuit capable of efficiently removing trace elements from, run-of-mine coals. The optimized circuit will be developed using characterization data obtained from detailed washability studies and release analyses tests conducted with several eastern U.S. coals. The optimized circuit will incorporate a variety of conventional and advanced coal cleaning processes which are believed to be the most cost-effective and commercially viable. The coal products from the optimized circuit will be further treated with complexing agents specifically designed to extract organometallic trace elements that are difficult to remove by physical cleaning operations. Finally, innovative bioremediation schemes will be investigated as a means of controlling the release of trace elements from the process waste streams. Emphasis has been placed on the development of a processing circuit which (1) maximizes the rejection of trace elements, (2) minimizes the production of coal fines which are costly to process and less marketable, and (3) minimizes the downstream impacts of the process waste streams on the environment. During the past quarter, the project work plan and all associated technical/management reports were successfully completed. In addition, three coal samples have been selected for use in the proposed test program …

This project involves the development of an optimized, bench-scale processing circuit capable of efficiently removing trace elements from run-of-mine coals. The optimized circuit will be developed using characterization data obtained from detailed washability studies and release analyses tests conducted with several eastern US coals. The optimized circuit will incorporate a variety of conventional and advanced coal cleaning processes which are believed to be the most cost-effective and commercially viable. The coal products from the optimized circuit will be further treated with complexing agents specifically designed to extract organometallic trace elements that are difficult to remove by physical cleaning operations. Finally, innovative bioremediation schemes will be investigated as a means of controlling the release of trace elements from the process waste streams. Emphasis has been placed on the development of a processing circuit which maximizes the rejection of trace elements, minimizes the production of coal fines which are costly to process and less marketable, and minimizes the downstream impacts of the process waste streams on the environment. During the past quarter, the project work plan and all associated technical/management reports were successfully approved. Activities associated with the selection and acquisition of all three base coal samples have also been completed. Characterization …

This project involves the development of an optimized, bench-scale processing circuit capable of efficiently removing trace elements from run-of-mine coals. The optimized circuit will be developed using characterization data obtained from detailed washability studies and release analyses tests conducted with several eastern U.S. coals. The optimized circuit will incorporate a variety of conventional and advanced coal cleaning processes. The coal products from the optimized circuit will be further treated with complexing agents specifically designed to extract organometallic trace elements that are difficult to remove by physical cleaning operations. Finally, innovative bioremediation schemes will be investigated as a means of controlling the release of trace elements from the process waste streams. Emphasis has been placed on the development of a processing circuit which (i) maximizes the rejection of trace elements, (ii) minimizes the production of coal fines which are costly to process and less marketable, and (iii) minimizes the downstream impacts of the process waste on the environment. During the past quarter, several key subtasks were completed. Most of the characterization tests for the Pittsburgh No. 8 coal have now been concluded. These include all activities associated with Subtasks 3.2 washability analysis, 3.3 flotation release analysis, and 3.4 SEM/image analysis. A …

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Order 450.1, Environmental Protection Program, requires each DOE site to conduct environmental monitoring. Environmental monitoring at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is conducted in order to: (a) Verify and support compliance with applicable federal, state, and local environmental laws, regulations, permits, and orders; (b) Establish baselines and characterize trends in the physical, chemical, and biological condition of effluent and environmental media; (c) Identify potential environmental problems and evaluate the need for remedial actions or measures to mitigate the problem; (d) Detect, characterize, and report unplanned releases; (e) Evaluate the effectiveness of effluent treatment and control, and pollution abatement programs; and (f) Determine compliance with commitments made in environmental impact statements, environmental assessments, safety analysis reports, or other official DOE documents. This Environmental Monitoring Plan (EMP) has been written to contain the rationale and design criteria for the monitoring program, extent and frequency of monitoring and measurements, procedures for laboratory analyses, quality assurance (QA) requirements, program implementation procedures, and direction for the preparation and disposition of reports. Changes to the environmental monitoring program may be necessary to allow the use of advanced technology and new data collection techniques. This EMP will document any proposed changes …

The health concerns of several substances likely to be encountered in the non-industrial indoor environment are discussed. Monitoring data and information on the health effects of CO, NO/sub 2/, formaldehyde, and radon are included. (JGB)

The Controlled, Clean, and Stable (CCS) Design Requirements Document (DRD) contains the technically defensible and traceable functions and requirements for maintaining the Single-Shell Tank Farms in a cost effective and safe interim end state. The CCSDRD functions and requirements constitute the project characteristics that are minimally sufficient to meet the CCS mission goals.

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The Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) is a single, highly integrated technical program for maintaining the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The SSP uses past nuclear test data along with future non-nuclear test data, computational modeling and simulation, and experimental facilities to advance understanding of nuclear weapons. It includes stockpile surveillance, experimental research, development and engineering programs, and an appropriately scaled production capability to support stockpile requirements. This integrated national program will require the continued use of current facilities and programs along with new experimental facilities and computational enhancements to support these programs. The Advanced Simulation and Computing program (ASC) is a cornerstone of the SSP, providing simulation capabilities and computational resources to support the annual stockpile assessment and certification, to study advanced nuclear weapon design and manufacturing processes, to analyze accident scenarios and weapons aging, and to provide the tools to enable stockpile life extension programs and the resolution of significant finding investigations (SFIs). This requires a balanced system of technical staff, hardware, simulation software, and computer science solutions.

This is the final report for DOE grant DE-FG02-07ER64434 to Eric DeWeaver at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The overall goal of work performed under this grant is to enhance understanding of simulations of present-day climate and greenhouse gas-induced climate change. Enhanced understanding is desirable 1) as a prerequisite for improving simulations; 2) for assessing the credibility of model simulations and their usefulness as tools for decision support; and 3) as a means to identify robust behaviors which commonly occur over a wide range of models, and may yield insights regarding the dominant physical mechanisms which determine mean climate and produce climate change. A furthe objective is to investigate the use of data assimilation as a means for examining and correcting model biases. Our primary focus is on the Arctic, but the scope of the work was expanded to include the global climate system to the extent that research targets of opportunity present themselves. Research performed under the grant falls into five main research areas: 1) a study of data assimilation using an ensemble filter with the atmospheric circulation model of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in which both conventional observations and observations of the refraction of radio waves from …

We conducted an airgun survey in the waters of Ascension Island in May 1999 to determine new locations and depths for three Missile Impact Location System (MILS) hydrophones (ASC23, ASC24, and ASC26) currently in use by the Prototype International Data Center (PIDC) and the National Data Center (NDC). The nominal and new locations are summarized in Table 1. Although not rigorous, errors in the new locations and depths are conservatively estimated to be less than 100 m. The hydrophones are either on or near the ocean bottom in all three cases. The new depths are consistent with the following: Direct-phase airgun arrivals; Bathymetry determined along the track of the ship used for this airgun survey; Reflected phases from the airgun data; and Depths given in the original hydrophone installation report.

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We have developed a security model that facilitates control of resources by autonomous peers who act on behalf of collaborating users. This model allows a gradual build-up of trust. It enables secure interactions among users that do not necessarily know each other and allows them to build trust over the course of their collaboration. This paper describes various aspects of our security model and describes an architecture that implements this model to provide security in pure peer-to-peer environments.

This paper describes the sample selection, sample preparation, environmental, and regulatory considerations for shipment of Hanford radioactive waste samples for treatability studies of the FBSR process at the Savannah River National Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Hanford tank farms contain approximately 57 million gallons of wastes, most of which originated during the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel to produce plutonium for defense purposes. DOE intends to pre-treat the tank waste to separate the waste into a high level fraction, that will be vitrified and disposed of in a national repository as high-level waste (HLW), and a low-activity waste (LAW) fraction that will be immobilized for on-site disposal at Hanford. The Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) is the focal point for the treatment of Hanford tank waste. However, the WTP lacks the capacity to process all of the LAW within the regulatory required timeframe. Consequently, a supplemental LAW immobilization process will be required to immobilize the remainder of the LAW. One promising supplemental technology is Fluidized Bed Steam Reforming (FBSR) to produce a sodium-alumino-silicate (NAS) waste form. The NAS waste form is primarily composed of nepheline (NaAlSiO{sub 4}), sodalite (Nas[AlSiO{sub 4}]{sub …

In August 2004, two sealed canisters containing spent nuclear fuel were opened for processing at the Hanford Site's K West fuel storage basin. The fuel was to be processed through cleaning and sorting stations, repackaged into special baskets, placed into a cask, and removed from the basin for further processing and eventual dry storage. The canisters were expected to contain fuel from the old Hanford C Reactor, a graphite-moderated reactor fueled by very low-enriched uranium metal. The expected fuel type was an aluminum-clad slug about eight inches in length and with a weight of about eight pounds. Instead of the expected fuel, the two canisters contained several pieces of thin tubes, some with wire wraps. The material was placed into unsealed canisters for storage and to await further evaluation. Videotapes and still photographs of the items were examined in consultation with available retired Hanford employees. It was determined that the items had a fair probability of being cut-up pieces of fuel rods from the retired Hanford Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor (PRTR). Because the items had been safely handled several times, it was apparent that a criticality safety hazard did not exist when handling the material by itself, but it was …

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The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, located along the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, is the most visited national park in the United States. This rugged, mountainous area presents many transportation challenges. The immense popularity of the Smokies and the fact that the primary mode of transportation within the park is the personal vehicle have resulted in congestion, damage to the environment, impacts on safety, and a degraded visitor experience. Access to some of the Smokies historical, cultural, and recreational attractions via a mass transit system could alleviate many of the transportation issues. Although quite a few organizations are proponents of a mass transit system for the Smokies, there is a lack of coordination among all parties. In addition, many local residents are not completely comfortable with the idea of transit in the Smokies. This document provides a brief overview of the current transportation needs and limitations in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, identifies agencies and groups with particular interests in the Smokies, and offers insights into the benefits of using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies in the Smokies. Recommendations for the use of rural ITS transit to solve two major transportation issues are presented.

Recent studies have identified disk storage systems as one of the major consumers of power in data centers. Many disk power management (DPM) schemes were suggested where the power consumed by disks is reduced by spinning them down during long idle periods. Spinning the disks down and up results in additional energy and response time costs. For that reason, DPM schemes are effective only if the disks experience relatively long idle periods and the scheme does not introduce a severe response time penalty. In this paper we introduce a dynamic block exchange algorithm which switches data between disks based on the observed workload such that frequently accessed blocks end up residing on a few"hot" disks thus allowing the majority of disks to experience longer idle periods. We validate the effectiveness of the algorithm with trace-driven simulations showing power savings of up to 60percent with very small response time penalties.

Ferrochelatase (EC 4.99.1.1), the terminal enzyme of the heme biosynthetic pathway, catalyzes Fe²⁺ chelation into protoporphyrin IX. Resonance Raman and W-visible absorbance spectroscopes of wild type and engineered variants of murine ferrochelatase were used to examine the proposed structural mechanism for iron insertion into protoporphyrin by ferrochelatase. The recombinant variants (i.e., H207N and E287Q) are enzymes in which the conserved amino acids histidine-207 and glutamate-287 of murine ferrochelatase were substituted with asparagine and glutamine, respectively. Both of these residues are at the active site of the enzyme as deduced from the Bacillus subtilis ferrochelatase three-dimensional structure. Addition of free base or metalated porphyrins to wild type ferrochelatase and H207N variant yields a quasi 1:1 complex, possibly a monomeric protein-bound species. In contrast, the addition of porphyrin (either free base or metalated) to E287Q is sub-stoichiometric, as this variant retains bound porphyrin in the active site during isolation and purification. The specificity of porphyrin binding is confirmed by the narrowing of the structure-sensitive resonance Raman lines and the vinyl vibrational mode. Resonance Raman spectra of free base and metalated porphyrins bound to the wild type ferrochelatase indicate a nonplanar distortion of the porphyrin macrocycle, although the magnitude of the distortion cannot …

Despite continual improvements in the performance and reliability of large scale file systems, the management of user-defined file system metadata has changed little in the past decade. The mismatch between the size and complexity of large scale data stores and their ability to organize and query their metadata has led to a de facto standard in which raw data is stored in traditional file systems, while related, application-specific metadata is stored in relational databases. This separation of data and semantic metadata requires considerable effort to maintain consistency and can result in complex, slow, and inflexible system operation. To address these problems, we have developed the Quasar File System (QFS), a metadata-rich file system in which files, user-defined attributes, and file relationships are all first class objects. In contrast to hierarchical file systems and relational databases, QFS defines a graph data model composed of files and their relationships. QFS incorporates Quasar, an XPATH-extended query language for searching the file system. Results from our QFS prototype show the effectiveness of this approach. Compared to the de facto standard, the QFS prototype shows superior ingest performance and comparable query performance on user metadata-intensive operations and superior performance on normal file metadata operations.

The mission of the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is to provide the worldwide climate-research community with access to the data, information, model codes, analysis tools, and intercomparison capabilities required to make sense of enormous climate data sets. Its specific goals are to (1) provide an easy-to-use and secure web-based data access environment for data sets; (2) add value to individual data sets by presenting them in the context of other data sets and tools for comparative analysis; (3) address the specific requirements of participating organizations with respect to bandwidth, access restrictions, and replication; (4) ensure that the data are readily accessible through the analysis and visualization tools used by the climate research community; and (5) transfer infrastructure advances to other domain areas. For the ESGF, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET) team has led international development and delivered a production environment for managing and accessing ultra-scale climate data. This production environment includes multiple national and international climate projects (such as the Community Earth System Model and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project), ocean model data (such as the Parallel Ocean Program), observation data (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Best Estimate, Carbon Dioxide Information and …

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2005 annual report of research conducted by the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, a research unit of The University of Georgia operating on the Savannah River Site, Aiken, South Carolina