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A Habitat Evaluation Procedure (HEP) study was conducted on lands acquired and/or managed (4,568 acres total) by the Hellsgate Big Game Winter Range Wildlife Mitigation Project (Hellsgate project) to mitigate some of the losses associated with the original construction and operation of Grand Coulee Dam and inundation of habitats behind the dams. Three separate properties, totaling 2,224 acres were purchased in 1998. One property composed of two separate parcels, mostly grassland lies southeast of the town of Nespelem in Okanogan County (770 acres) and was formerly called the Hinman property. The former Hinman property lies within an area the Tribes have set aside for the protection and preservation of the sharp-tailed grouse (Agency Butte unit). This special management area minus the Hinman acquisition contains 2,388 acres in a long-term lease with the Tribes. The second property lies just south of the Silver Creek turnoff (Ferry County) and is bisected by the Hellsgate Road (part of the Friedlander unit). This parcel contains 60 acres of riparian and conifer forest cover. The third property (now named the Sand Hills unit) acquired for mitigation (1,394 acres) lies within the Hellsgate Reserve in Ferry County. This new acquisition links two existing mitigation parcels (the …

Water use in the pulp and paper industry is very significant, and the U.S. pulp and paper industries as well as other processing industries are actively pursuing water conservation and pollution prevention by in-process recycling of water. Bleach plant effluent is a large portion of the water discharged from a typical bleached kraft pulp mill. The recycling of bleach plant effluents to the kraft recovery cycle is widely regarded as an approach to low effluent bleached kraft pulp production. The focus of this work has been on developing an electrodialysis process for recycling the acidic bleach plant effluent of bleached Kraft pulp mills. Electrodialysis is uniquely suited as a selective kidney to remove non-process elements (NPEs) from bleach plant effluent before they reach the chemical recovery cycle. Using electrodialysis for selective NPE removal can prevent the problems caused by accumulation of inorganic NPEs in the pulping cycle and recovery boiler. In this work, acidic bleach plant filtrates from three mills using different bleaching sequences based on chlorine dioxide were characterized. The analyses showed no fundamental differences in the inorganic NPE composition or other characteristics among these filtrates. The majority of total dissolved solids in the effluents were found to be …

Accurate and efficient simulation of chemical transport processes in the unsaturated zone of Yucca Mountain is important to evaluate the performance of the potential repository. The scale of the unsaturated zone model domain for Yucca Mountain (50 km{sup 2} area with a 600 meter depth to the water table) requires a large gridblock approach to efficiently analyze complex flow & transport processes. The conventional schemes based on finite element or finite difference methods perform well for dispersion-dominated transport, but are subject to considerable numerical dilution/dispersion for advection-dominated transport, especially when a large gridblock size is used. Numerical dispersion is an artificial, grid-dependent chemical spreading, especially for otherwise steep concentration fronts. One effective scheme to deal with numerical dispersion is the random walk particle method (RWPM). While significant progress has been made in developing RWPM algorithms and codes for single continuum systems, a random walk particle tracker, which can handle chemical transport in dual-continua (fractured porous media) associated with irregular grid systems, is still absent (to our knowledge) in the public domain. This is largely due to the lacking of rigorous schemes to deal with particle transfer between the continua, and efficient schemes to track particles in irregular grid systems. The …

A fundamental part of geophysics is to make inferences about the interior of the earth on the basis of data collected at or near the surface of the earth. In almost all cases these measured data are only indirectly related to the properties of the earth that are of interest, so an inverse problem must be solved in order to obtain estimates of the physical properties within the earth. In February of 1999 the U.S. Department of Energy sponsored a workshop that was intended to examine the methods currently being used to solve geophysical inverse problems and to consider what new approaches should be explored in the future. The interdisciplinary area between inverse problems in geophysics and optimization methods in mathematics was specifically targeted as one where an interchange of ideas was likely to be fruitful. Thus about half of the participants were actively involved in solving geophysical inverse problems and about half were actively involved in research on general optimization methods. This report presents some of the topics that were explored at the workshop and the conclusions that were reached. In general, the objective of a geophysical inverse problem is to find an earth model, described by a set …

The overall objective of our studies was to specify an index describing the hydraulic force that fish experience when subjected to a shear environment. Fluid shear is a phenomenon that is important to fish. However, elevated levels of shear may result in strain rates that injure or kill fish. At hydroelectric generating facilities, concerns have been expressed that strain rates associated with passage through turbines, spillways, and fish bypass systems may adversely affect migrating fish. Development of fish friendly hydroelectric turbines requires knowledge of the physical forces (injury mechanisms) that impact entrained fish and the fish's tolerance to these forces. It requires up-front, pre-design specifications for the environmental conditions that occur within the turbine system, in other words, determining or assuming that those conditions known to injure fish will provide the descriptions of conditions that engineers must consider in the design of a turbine system. These biological specifications must be carefully and thoroughly documented throughout the design of a fish friendly turbine. To address the development of biological specifications, we designed and built a test facility where juvenile fish could be subjected to a range of shear environments and quantified their biological response.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory was tasked by the U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center (Huntsville, AL) to evaluate the mathematical basis of existing software tools used to assist the Army with the characterization of sites potentially contaminated with unexploded ordnance (UXO). These software tools are collectively known as SiteStats/GridStats. The first purpose of the software is to guide sampling of underground anomalies to estimate a site's UXO density. The second purpose is to delineate areas of homogeneous UXO density that can be used in the formulation of response actions. It was found that SiteStats/GridStats does adequately guide the sampling so that the UXO density estimator for a sector is unbiased. However, the software's techniques for delineation of homogeneous areas perform less well than visual inspection, which is frequently used to override the software in the overall sectorization methodology. The main problems with the software lie in the criteria used to detect nonhomogeneity and those used to recommend the number of homogeneous subareas. SiteStats/GridStats is not a decision-making tool in the classical sense. Although it does provide information to decision makers, it does not require a decision based on that information. SiteStats/GridStats provides information that is supplemented by visual inspections, land-use …

Through this funded project, our research group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has pioneered and been successful in preparing and evaluating the performance of prototypes of neutron, alpha, and gamma-ray detectors based on various types of nanoparticles. These include organic fluors [2,5-diphenyloxazole (PPO) and 1,4-bis-2-(5-phenyloxazolyl)-benzene (POPOP)]-doped polystyrene and polyvinyltoluene nanoparticles, highly crystalline inorganic ZnS-capped CdSe, ZnS, three-component CdSxSe1-x, Ce3+-doped Y2O3, and Ce3+-doped LaPO4 (LaPO4:Ce) nanocrystals (NCs) in polystyrene (PS) or polyvinyltoluene (PVT). Previously, this effort identified two strong candidate nanoparticles for neutron and gamma detection applications. These two NCs are LaPO4:Ce and CdSxSe1-x (Dai, S. et. al. manuscript in preparation; see Figures 1 and 2). Another key accomplishment of the previously funded project is the development of 6Li3PO4 nanoparticles as a neutron-absorbing material (Dai, S. et. al. manuscript in preparation). Because the size of these nanoparticles is well under the diffraction limit for visible light, the 6Li3PO4 nanoparticles can be utilized as a vehicle for doping large percentages of Li-6 into plastic scintillators for detection of thermal neutrons. Our preliminary results indicate that a transparent polymer composite containing as high as 16 wt% of the 6Li3PO4 nanoparticles can be fabricated. Figure 3 shows the pulse height spectra from thermal …

This report summarizes the research performed in the past year in the Argonne Physics Division. The Division's programs include operation of ATLAS as a national heavy-ion user facility, nuclear structure and reaction research with beams of heavy ions, accelerator research and development especially in superconducting radio frequency technology, nuclear theory and medium energy nuclear physics. The Division took significant strides forward in its science and its initiatives for the future in the past year. Major progress was made in developing the concept and the technology for the future advanced facility of beams of short-lived nuclei, the Rare Isotope Accelerator. The scientific program capitalized on important instrumentation initiatives with key advances in nuclear science. In 1999, the nuclear science community adopted the Argonne concept for a multi-beam superconducting linear accelerator driver as the design of choice for the next major facility in the field a Rare Isotope Accelerator (WA) as recommended by the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee's 1996 Long Range Plan. Argonne has made significant R&D progress on almost all aspects of the design concept including the fast gas catcher (to allow fast fragmentation beams to be stopped and reaccelerated) that in large part defined the RIA concept the superconducting rf …

Five commercial reactor criticals (CRCs) for the LaSalle Unit 1 boiling-water reactor have been analyzed using KENO V.a, the Monte Carlo criticality code of the SCALE 4 code system. The irradiated fuel assembly isotopics for the criticality analyses were provided by the Waste Package Design team at the Yucca Mountain Project in the United States, who performed the depletion calculations using the SAS2H sequence of SCALE 4. The reactor critical measurements involved two beginning-of-cycle and three middle-of-cycle configurations. The CRCs involved relatively low-cycle burnups, and therefore contained a relatively high gadolinium poison content in the reactor assemblies. This report summarizes the data and methods used in analyzing the critical configurations and assesses the sensitivity of the results to some of the modeling approximations used to represent the gadolinium poison distribution within the assemblies. The KENO V.a calculations, performed using the SCALE 44GROUPNDF5 ENDF/B-V cross-section library, yield predicted k{sub eff} values within about 1% {Delta}k/k relative to reactor measurements for the five CRCs using general 8-pin and 9-pin heterogeneous gadolinium poison pin assembly models.

The monitoring of chemical constituents in manufacturing processes is of economic importance to most industries. The monitoring and control of chemical constituents may be of importance for product quality control or, in the case of process effluents, of environmental concern. The most common approach now employed for chemical process control is to collect samples which are returned to a conventional chemical analysis laboratory. This project attempts to demonstrate the use of microfabricated structures, referred to as 'lab-on-a-chip' devices, that accomplish chemical measurement tasks that emulate those performed in the conventional laboratory. The devices envisioned could be used as hand portable chemical analysis instruments where samples are analyzed in the field or as emplaced sensors for continuous 'real-time' monitoring. This project focuses on the development of filtration elements and solid phase extraction elements that can be monolithically integrated onto electrophoresis and chromatographic structures pioneered in the laboratory. Successful demonstration of these additional functional elements on integrated microfabricated devices allows lab-on-a-chip technologies to address real world samples that would be encountered in process control environments. The resultant technology has a broad application to industrial environmental monitoring problems. such as monitoring municipal water supplies, waste water effluent from industrial facilities, or monitoring of …

Precise determination of the specimen position relative to the sampling volume for texture and stress measurements by neutron diffraction is difficult or sometimes impossible using only optical devices due to large or irregular sample dimensions and/or complicated shape of the sampling volume. The knowledge of the shape and size of the sampling volume allows development of a general mathematical model for the intensity variation with a parallelogram-shape sampling volume moving from outside to inside the specimen for both transmission and reflection geometric set-ups. Both fixed slits and radial collimators are options in defining the geometrical setup. The attenuation by the sample also has been taken into account in this model. Experimental results agree well with the model calculations. The program SURFING is based on the model calculation and was written in Labwindows/CVI{copyright}.

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This effort represents a contribution to the wider distributed energy resources (DER) research of the Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions (CERTS, http://certs.lbl.gov) that is intended to attack and, hopefully, resolve the technical barriers to DER adoption, particularly those that are unlikely to be of high priority to individual equipment vendors. The longer term goal of the Berkeley Lab effort is to guide the wider technical research towards the key technical problems by forecasting some likely patterns of DER adoption. In sharp contrast to traditional electricity utility planning, this work takes a customer-centric approach and focuses on DER adoption decision making at, what we currently think of as, the customer level. This study reports on Berkeley Lab's second year effort (completed in Federal fiscal year 2000, FY00) of a project aimed to anticipate patterns of customer adoption of distributed energy resources (DER). Marnay, et al., 2000 describes the earlier FY99 Berkeley Lab work. The results presented herein are not intended to represent definitive economic analyses of possible DER projects by any means. The paucity of data available and the importance of excluded factors, such as environmental implications, are simply too important to make such an analysis possible at this time. …

The objective of the Gypsy Project was to properly calculate seismic attributes and integrate these into a reservoir characterization project. Significant progress was made on the project in four areas. (1) Attenuation: In order for seismic inversion for rock properties or calculation of seismic attributes used to estimate rock properties to be performed validly, it is necessary to deal with seismic data that has had true amplitude and frequency content restored to account for earth filtering effects that are generally not included in seismic reservoir characterization methodologies. This requires the accurate measurement of seismic attenuation, something that is rarely achieved in practice. It is hoped that such measurements may also provide additional independent seismic attributes for use in reservoir characterization studies. In 2000, we were concerned with the ground truthing of attenuation measurements in the vicinity of wells. Our approach to the problem is one of extracting as time varying wavelet and relating temporal variations in the wavelet to an attenuation model of the earth. This method has the advantage of correcting for temporal variations in the reflectivity spectrum of the earth which confound the spectral ratio methodology which is the most commonly applied means of measuring attenuation from surface …

Over one thousand gallons of tritiated oil, at various contamination levels, are stored in the Main Hill Tritium Facility at the Miamisburg Environmental Management Project (MEMP), commonly referred to as Mound Site. This tritiated oil is to be characterized for hazardous materials and radioactive contamination. Most of the hazardous materials are expected to be in the form of heavy metals, i.e., mercury, silver, lead, chromium, etc, but transuranic materials and PCBs could also be in some oils. Waste oils, found to contain heavy metals as well as being radioactively contaminated, are considered as mixed wastes and are controlled by Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) regulations. The SAMMS (Self-Assembled Mercaptan on Mesoporous Silica) technology was developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for removal and stabilization of RCRA metals (i.e., lead, mercury, cadmium, silver, etc.) and for removal of mercury from organic solvents. The SAMMS material is based on self-assembly of functionalized monolayers on mesoporous oxide surfaces. The unique mesoporous oxide supports provide a high surface area, thereby enhancing the metal-loading capacity. SAMMS material has high flexibility in that it binds with different forms of mercury, including metallic, inorganic, organic, charged, and neutral compounds. The material removes mercury from …

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During the 1990s, sport utility vehicles (SUVs) became the fastest growing segment of the auto industry, especially those in the medium-size category. In 1999, SUV sales reached almost 19% of the total light vehicle market and the mix of SUVs on the road, as measured by registration data, was about 8.7%. This immense popularity has been called by some a passing fad--vehicle purchases based on the SUV ''image''. But the continued yearly increases in SUV sales seem to indicate a more permanent trend. Additional explanations for SUV popularity include the general economic well being in the United States, a perception of safety, and ''utility''. Generally larger and heavier than the typical automobile, SUVs require more fuel per mile to operate and produce greater amounts of pollutants. They are also driven further annually than are automobiles of the same vintage, a fact that exacerbates the fuel-use and emission problems. Although buyers believe that SUVs are safer than automobiles which they are in some cases, SUVs are more prone to roll-overs than are automobiles. In addition, SUVs, with their higher bumpers and greater weight, may be a threat to other vehicles on the highway, especially in side-impact crashes. With sales projected to …

Waste retrieval and transfer operations at the Gunite{trademark} and Associated Tanks (GAATs) Remediation Project have been successfully accomplished using the Tank Waste Retrieval System. This system is composed of the Modified Light-Duty Utility Arm, Houdini Vehicle, Waste Dislodging and Conveyance System, Hose Management Arm, and Sludge Conditioning System. GAAT W-9 has been used as a waste-consolidation and batch-transfer tank during the retrieval of sludges and supernatants from the seven Gunite tanks in the North and South tank farms at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Tank W-9 was used as a staging tank for the transfers to the Melton Valley Storage Tanks (MVSTs). A total of 18 waste transfers from W-9 occurred between May 25, 1999, and March 30, 2000. Most of these transfers were accomplished using the PulsAir Mixer to mobilize and mix the slurry and a submersible retrieval-transfer pump to transfer the slurry through the Sludge Conditioning System and the {approx}1-mile long, 2-in.-diam waste-transfer line to the MVSTs. The transfers from W-9 have consisted of low-solids-content slurries with solids contents ranging from {approx}2.8 to 6.8 mg/L. Of the initial {approx}88,000 gal of wet sludge estimated in the GAATs, a total of {approx}60,451 gal have been transferred to the MVSTs via …

In the early 1980s, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) developed two transportation routing models: HIGHWAY, which predicts truck transportation routes, and INTERLINE, which predicts rail transportation routes. Both of these models have been used by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) community for a variety of routing needs over the years. One of the primary uses of the models has been to determine population-density information, which is used as input for risk assessment with the RADTRAN model, which is available on the TRANSNET computer system. During the recent years, advances in the development of geographic information systems (GISs) have resulted in increased demands from the user community for a GIS version of the ORNL routing models. In April 1994, the DOE Transportation Management Division (EM-261) held a Baseline Requirements Assessment Session with transportation routing experts and users of the HIGHWAY and INTERLINE models. As a result of the session, the development of a new GIS routing model, Transportation Routing Analysis GIS (TRAGIS), was initiated. TRAGIS is a user-friendly, GIS-based transportation and analysis computer model. The older HIGHWAY and INTERLINE models are useful to calculate routes, but they cannot display a graphic of the calculated route. Consequently, many users have experienced …

In this paper a method is developed, using higher order statistics, to identify the type and degree of neutron and gamma ray cross talk between detectors that are placed in proximity to one another. A set of measurements was performed using the Nuclear Materials Identification System (NMIS) to acquire the time-dependent bicovariance of the pulses in fast plastic scintillating detectors. These signatures were analyzed to infer the degree and type of false coincidences (cross talk) in relation to true coincidences.

This unique collaborative project has taken a very fundamental look at the origin of structure, and combustion reactivity of coal chars. It was a combined experimental and theoretical effort involving three universities and collaborators from universities outside the U.S. and from U.S. National Laboratories and contract research companies. The project goal was to improve our understanding of char structure and behavior by examining the fundamental chemistry of its polyaromatic building blocks. The project team investigated the elementary oxidative attack on polyaromatic systems, and coupled with a study of the assembly processes that convert these polyaromatic clusters to mature carbon materials (or chars). We believe that the work done in this project has defined a powerful new science-based approach to the understanding of char behavior. The work on aromatic oxidation pathways made extensive use of computational chemistry, and was led by Professor Christopher Hadad in the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State University. Laboratory experiments on char structure, properties, and combustion reactivity were carried out at both OSU and Brown, led by Principle Investigators Joseph Calo, Robert Essenhigh, and Robert Hurt. Modeling activities were divided into two parts: first unique models of crystal structure development were formulated by the team at …

Collapse surfaces are developed for thick perforated plates containing a triangular penetration pattern with ligament efficiencies of 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.5 using elastic-perfectly plastic FEA analysis. The FEA data was fit to a fourth-order collapse function which is appropriate for the development of an equivalent solid elastic-perfectly plastic plasticity model for perforated plates with triangular penetration patterns. This type of model can be conveniently used to develop a limit load capability for perforated plate analysis. It was shown that the fourth-order function is reasonable for ligament efficiencies between 0.15 to 0.5. Comparing the fourth-order collapse function to FEA data suggests that an alternate collapse function is needed for ligament efficiencies less than 0.15. A linear interpolation method was shown to be appropriate for ligament efficiencies between 0.15 and 0.5.