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Spent fuel radioactive sludge present in the K East and K West spent nuclear fuel storage basins now resides in the KW Basin in six large underwater engineered containers. The sludge will be dispositioned in two phases under the Sludge Treatment Project: (1) hydraulic retrieval into sludge transport and storage containers (STSCs) and transport to interim storage in Central Plateau and (2) retrieval from the STSCs, treatment, and packaging for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In the years the STSCs are stored, sludge strength is expected to increase through chemical reaction, intergrowth of sludge crystals, and compaction and dewatering by settling. Increased sludge strength can impact the type and operation of the retrieval equipment needed prior to final sludge treatment and packaging. It is important to determine whether water jetting, planned for sludge retrieval from STSCs, will be effective. Shear strength is a property known to correlate with the effectiveness of water jetting. Accordingly, the unconfined compressive strengths (UCS) of archive K Basin sludge samples and sludge blends were measured using a pocket penetrometer modified for hot cell use. Based on known correlations, UCS values can be converted to shear strengths. Twenty-six sludge samples, stored in hot cells …

We report on the acceleration of annual daylighting simulations for fenestration systems in the Radiance ray-tracing program. The algorithm was optimized to reduce both the redundant data input/output operations and the floating-point operations. To further accelerate the simulation speed, the calculation for matrix multiplications was implemented using parallel computing on a graphics processing unit. We used OpenCL, which is a cross-platform parallel programming language. Numerical experiments show that the combination of the above measures can speed up the annual daylighting simulations 101.7 times or 28.6 times when the sky vector has 146 or 2306 elements, respectively.

The P Reactor at the Savannah River Site is one of the first reactor facilities in the US DOE complex that has been placed in its end state through in situ decommissioning (ISD). The ISD end state consists of a grout-filled concrete civil structure within the concrete frame of the original building. To evaluate the feasibility and utility of remote sensors to provide verification of ISD system conditions and performance characteristics, an ISD Sensor Network Test Bed has been designed and deployed at the Savannah River National Laboratory. The test bed addresses the DOE-EM Technology Need to develop a remote monitoring system to determine and verify ISD system performance. Commercial off-the-shelf sensors have been installed on concrete blocks taken from walls of the P Reactor Building. Deployment of this low-cost structural monitoring system provides hands-on experience with sensor networks. The initial sensor system consists of: (1) Groutable thermistors for temperature and moisture monitoring; (2) Strain gauges for crack growth monitoring; (3) Tiltmeters for settlement monitoring; and (4) A communication system for data collection. Preliminary baseline data and lessons learned from system design and installation and initial field testing will be utilized for future ISD sensor network development and deployment.

Predictions of alpha heating in L-mode and H-mode DT plasmas in ITER are generated using the PTRANSP code. The baseline toroidal field of 5.3 T, plasma current ramped to 15 MA and a flat electron density profile ramped to Greenwald fraction 0.85 are assumed. Various combinations of external heating by negative ion neutral beam injection, ion cyclotron resonance, and electron cyclotron resonance are assumed to start half-way up the density ramp. The time evolution of plasma temperatures and, for some cases, toroidal rotation are predicted assuming GLF23 and boundary parameters. Significant toroidal rotation and flow-shearing rates are predicted by GLF23 even in the L-mode phase with low boundary temperatures, and the alpha heating power is predicted to be significant if the power threshold for the transition to H-mode is higher than the planned total heating power. The alpha heating is predicted to be 8-76 MW in L-mode at full density. External heating mixes with higher beam injection power have higher alpha heating power. Alternatively if the toroidal rotation is predicted assuming that the ratio of the momentum to thermal ion energy conductivity is 0.5, the flow-shearing rate is predicted to have insignificant effects on the GLF23- predicted temperatures, and alpha …

Resonance Ionization Mass Spectrometry (RIMS) has been developed as a method to measure relative uranium isotope abundances. In this approach, RIMS is used as an element-selective ionization process to provide a distinction between uranium atoms and potential isobars without the aid of chemical purification and separation. We explore the laser parameters critical to the ionization process and their effects on the measured isotope ratio. Specifically, the use of broad bandwidth lasers with automated feedback control of wavelength was applied to the measurement of {sup 235}U/{sup 238}U ratios to decrease laser-induced isotopic fractionation. By broadening the bandwidth of the first laser in a 3-color, 3-photon ionization process from a bandwidth of 1.8 GHz to about 10 GHz, the variation in sequential relative isotope abundance measurements decreased from >10% to less than 0.5%. This procedure was demonstrated for the direct interrogation of uranium oxide targets with essentially no sample preparation. A rate equation model for predicting the relative ionization probability has been developed to study the effect of variation in laser parameters on the measured isotope ratio. This work demonstrates that RIMS can be used for the robust measurement of uranium isotope ratios.

The Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has a specialized need for analyzing low mass gas species at very high resolutions. The currently preferred analytical method is electromagnetic sector mass spectrometry. This method allows the NNSA Nuclear Security Enterprise (NSE) to resolve species of similar masses down to acceptable minimum detection limits (MDLs). Some examples of these similar masses are helium-4/deuterium and carbon monoxide/nitrogen. Through the 1980s and 1990s, there were two vendors who supplied and supported these instruments. However, with declining procurements and down turns in the economy, the supply of instruments, service and spare parts from these vendors has become less available, and in some cases, nonexistent. The largest NSE user of this capability is the Savannah River Site (SRS), located near Aiken, South Carolina. The Research and Development Engineering (R&DE) Group in the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) investigated the areas of instrument support that were needed to extend the life cycle of these aging instruments. Their conclusions, as to the focus areas of electromagnetic sector mass spectrometers to address, in order of priority, were electronics, software and hardware. Over the past 3-5 years, the R&DE Group has designed state of the art electronics …

The synthesis of composite Pd membranes has been modified by the addition of a Al(OH){sub 3} graded layer and sequential annealing at high temperatures to obtain membranes with high permeance and outstanding selectivity stability for over 4000 hours at 450°C. Most of the membranes achieved in this work showed H{sub 2} flux well above 2010 DOE targets and in some case, also above 2015 DOE targets. Similar composite membranes were tested in water gas shift reaction atmospheres and showed to be stable with high CO conversion and high hydrogen recovery for over 1000 hours. The H{sub 2} permeance of composite Pd-Au membranes was studied as well as its resistance in H{sub 2}S containing atmospheres. H{sub 2}S poisoning of Pd-based membranes was reduced by the addition of Au and the loss undergone by membranes was found to be almost totally recoverable with 10-30 wt%Au. PSA technique was studied to test the possibility of H{sub 2}S and COS removal from feed stream with limited success since the removal of H{sub 2}S also led to the removal of a large fraction of the CO{sub 2}. The economics of a WGS bundle reactor, using the information of the membranes fabricated under this project and …

Together with OSIsoft LLC as its private sector partner and matching sponsor, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) won an FY09 Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. The goal of the project is to commercialize Berkeley Lab's optimizing program, the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM) using a software as a service (SaaS) model with OSIsoft as its first non-scientific user. OSIsoft could in turn provide optimization capability to its software clients. In this way, energy efficiency and/or carbon minimizing strategies could be made readily available to commercial and industrial facilities. Specialized versions of DER-CAM dedicated to solving OSIsoft's customer problems have been set up on a server at Berkeley Lab. The objective of DER-CAM is to minimize the cost of technology adoption and operation or carbon emissions, or combinations thereof. DER-CAM determines which technologies should be installed and operated based on specific site load, price information, and performance data for available equipment options. An established user of OSIsoft's PI software suite, the University of California, Davis (UCD), was selected as a demonstration site for this project. UCD's participation in the project is driven by its motivation to reduce its carbon emissions. The …

This report describes LIP, the Livermore Interpolation Package. Because LIP is a stand-alone version of the interpolation package in the Livermore Equation of State (LEOS) access library, the initials LIP alternatively stand for the 'LEOS Interpolation Package'. LIP was totally rewritten from the package described in [1]. In particular, the independent variables are now referred to as x and y, since the package need not be restricted to equation of state data, which uses variables {rho} (density) and T (temperature). LIP is primarily concerned with the interpolation of two-dimensional data on a rectangular mesh. The interpolation methods provided include piecewise bilinear, reduced (12-term) bicubic, and bicubic Hermite (biherm). There is a monotonicity-preserving variant of the latter, known as bimond. For historical reasons, there is also a biquadratic interpolator, but this option is not recommended for general use. A birational method was added at version 1.3. In addition to direct interpolation of two-dimensional data, LIP includes a facility for inverse interpolation (at present, only in the second independent variable). For completeness, however, the package also supports a compatible one-dimensional interpolation capability. Parametric interpolation of points on a two-dimensional curve can be accomplished by treating the components as a pair of one-dimensional …

Wind power forecasting (WPF) provides important inputs to power system operators and electricity market participants. It is therefore not surprising that WPF has attracted increasing interest within the electric power industry. In this report, we document our research on improving statistical WPF algorithms for point, uncertainty, and ramp forecasting. Below, we provide a brief introduction to the research presented in the following chapters. For a detailed overview of the state-of-the-art in wind power forecasting, we refer to [1]. Our related work on the application of WPF in operational decisions is documented in [2]. Point forecasts of wind power are highly dependent on the training criteria used in the statistical algorithms that are used to convert weather forecasts and observational data to a power forecast. In Chapter 2, we explore the application of information theoretic learning (ITL) as opposed to the classical minimum square error (MSE) criterion for point forecasting. In contrast to the MSE criterion, ITL criteria do not assume a Gaussian distribution of the forecasting errors. We investigate to what extent ITL criteria yield better results. In addition, we analyze time-adaptive training algorithms and how they enable WPF algorithms to cope with non-stationary data and, thus, to adapt to …

"This report presents the results from a research on the occurrence and distribution of hazardous materials spills along Texas highway during the period of record from 2002-2006."

Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii.

This report discusses the criteria that foreign nationals must meet before admission to the United States, including the reasons why a foreign national might be denied admission, most particularly on health-related grounds. This report discusses such issues in relation to the recent outbreak of the 2009 H1N1 ("swine flu") virus, and how the outbreak has affected various government agencies, such as the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This report also discusses efforts to confront and address such issues on a legislative front.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In a letter dated July 22, 2010, Congress requested that we conduct an audit of the Senate Stationery Room's cash receipts and cash disbursements recorded in the Senate Stationery Room Revolving Fund for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2010. In the letter, Congress also requested that we review the inventory accounting procedures of the Stationery Room. The Senate Stationery Room provides for the sale of stationery to members of the Senate, Senate offices, and other Senate committees and authorized organizations. This includes the sale of office and administrative supplies, personalized stationery, flags, and special order items such as business cards. All sales receipts are taken to the Senate Disbursing Office for deposit into the Senate Stationery Room Revolving Fund in the U.S. Treasury. The Stationery Room then uses the cash receipts to purchase inventory items and emergency supplies for resale, and to pay for other services expenses. The Senate Disbursing Office maintains the money and makes payments on behalf of the Senate Stationery Room Revolving Fund. Salaries and benefits of Senate employees who work in the Stationery Room are not paid from the revolving fund; rather, they …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The USCG is making progress toward becoming a model equal employment opportunity (EEO) program, as defined by EEOC. In fiscal year 2008, the USCG established a cross-functional task force, including many divisions of Coast Guard and co-led by the Civil Rights Director and the Assistant Commandant for Human Resources, to identify EEO problems, review data, as well as develop and implement plans to address barriers to EEO. EEOC officials commended the USCG's cross-functional approach, noting that it could strengthen the USCG's ability to bring together different divisions of the USCG toward a common goal of identifying and eliminating barriers to EEO. According to EEOC, progress has been most noticeable with the commitment of USCG's leadership to equality for all employees and applicants and its focus on resolving complaints in a quick and cost effective manner. However, EEOC noted that USCG could improve the way it conducts analyses of its barriers to equal employment. To attract and retain top talent, EEOC's MD-715 states that federal agencies are to identify barriers to EEO in the workplace, execute plans to eliminate barriers, and report annually to EEOC. USCG has …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The FBI has spent over $900 million on the Trilogy and Sentinel information technology (IT) projects intended to provide FBI with an upgraded IT infrastructure and an automated case management system to support FBI agents and analysts. In February 2006 and July 2008, GAO reported on significant internal control weaknesses related to FBI's contract administration, processing of contractor invoices, and accountability for equipment acquired for these projects. GAO made 27 recommendations to the FBI to address these deficiencies. The FBI concurred with all 27 recommendations. This report provides an assessment of (1) the FBI's corrective actions to address GAO's 27 recommendations and (2) whether there were any indications of implementation issues related to the policies and procedures the FBI developed to address 17 of the 27 recommendations. GAO reviewed FBI policies and procedures, performed walk-throughs, and conducted detailed tests on statistically and nonstatistically selected samples of transactions."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In a letter dated July 22, 2010, Congress requested that we conduct an audit of the Senate Gift Shop's cash receipts and cash disbursements recorded in the Senate Gift Shop Revolving Fund for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2010. In the letter, Congress also requested that we review the inventory accounting procedures of the Gift Shop. The Senate Gift Shop was established on October 6, 1992, to sell gift items to members of the Senate, Senate staff, and the general public. All sales receipts are taken to the Senate Disbursing Office for deposit into the Senate Gift Shop Revolving Fund in the U.S. Treasury. The Gift Shop then uses the cash receipts to purchase inventory items for resale, supplies, shipping, and other related services expenses. The Senate Disbursing Office maintains the money and makes payments on behalf of the Senate Gift Shop Revolving Fund. Salaries and benefits of Senate employees who work in the Gift Shop are not paid from the revolving fund; rather, they are paid from the "Salaries, Officers, and Employees" appropriation account of the Senate. Additional costs of the Gift Shop such as rent …

Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii.

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A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2009, GAO reported on doctor shopping in Medicaid, where individuals see several doctors and pharmacies, receiving more of a drug than was intended by any single physician. Questions have been raised about whether similar activity exists in Medicare Part D. GAO was asked to (1) determine the extent to which Medicare beneficiaries obtained frequently abused drugs from multiple prescribers, (2) identify examples of doctor shopping activity, and (3) determine the actions taken by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to limit access to drugs for known abusers. To meet the objectives, GAO analyzed Medicare Part D claims for calendar year 2008 to identify potential doctor shoppers. To identify examples, GAO chose a nonrepresentative selection of 10 beneficiaries based on a number of factors, including the number of prescribers. GAO also interviewed policy officials from CMS and from prescription drug plans that administer the drug benefit program."

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