Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy project sheet summarizing general information about the 13 projects that are a part of the Electrofuels program including project goals, innovation needs, and potential impacts.

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Significant progress has been made on the development of a control strategy for the supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO{sub 2}) Brayton cycle enabling removal of power from an autonomous load following Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor (SFR) down to decay heat levels such that the S-CO{sub 2} cycle can be used to cool the reactor until decay heat can be removed by the normal shutdown heat removal system or a passive decay heat removal system such as Direct Reactor Auxiliary Cooling System (DRACS) loops with DRACS in-vessel heat exchangers. This capability of the new control strategy eliminates the need for use of a separate shutdown heat removal system which might also use supercritical CO{sub 2}. It has been found that this capability can be achieved by introducing a new control mechanism involving shaft speed control for the common shaft joining the turbine and two compressors following reduction of the load demand from the electrical grid to zero. Following disconnection of the generator from the electrical grid, heat is removed from the intermediate sodium circuit through the sodium-to-CO{sub 2} heat exchanger, the turbine solely drives the two compressors, and heat is rejected from the cycle through the CO{sub 2}-to-water cooler. To investigate the effectiveness …

Glycolic acid (GA) is being studied as an alternate reductant in the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) feed preparation process. It will either be a total or partial replacement for the formic acid that is currently used. A literature review has been conducted on the impact of glycolate on two post-DWPF downstream systems - the 2H Evaporator system and the Effluent Treatment Facility (ETF). The DWPF recycle stream serves as a portion of the feed to the 2H Evaporator. Glycolate enters the evaporator system from the glycolate in the recycle stream. The overhead (i.e., condensed phase) from the 2H Evaporator serves as a portion of the feed to the ETF. The literature search revealed that virtually no impact is anticipated for the 2H Evaporator. Glycolate may help reduce scale formation in the evaporator due to its high complexing ability. The drawback of the solubilizing ability is the potential impact on the criticality analysis of the 2H Evaporator system. It is recommended that at least a theoretical evaluation to confirm the finding that no self-propagating violent reactions with nitrate/nitrites will occur should be performed. Similarly, identification of sources of ignition relevant to glycolate and/or update of the composite flammability analysis to …

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Historically the Black Colleges and Universities wing of the US Department of Energy (DOE) provided funds to Claflin College, Orangeburg, S.C. to conduct a student Science Enrichment Training Program for a period of six weeks during 1990 summer. Fifty participants were selected from a pool of 130 applicants, generated by the High School Seniors and Juniors and the Freshmen class of 1989--90 at Claflin College. The program primarily focused on high ability students, with potential for Science, Mathematics and Engineering Careers. The major objectives of the program were (1) to increase the pool of well qualified college-entering minority students who will elect to go in Physical Science and Engineering and (2) to increase the enrollment in Chemistry and Preprofessional -- Pre-Med, Pre-Dent. etc -- majors at Claflin College by including the Claflin students to participate in summer academic program. The summer academic program consisted of Chemistry and Computer Science training. The program placed emphasis upon laboratory experience and research. Visits to Scientific and Industrial laboratories were arranged. Guest speakers drawn from academia, industry and several federal agencies, addressed the participants on the future role of Science in the industrial growth of United States of America. The guest speakers also acted …

It is necessary to provide accountability tables and equations for use in routine product buildup predictions for the duration of the E-N and blanket loads charged under PT-IP-350-C. Recommended values are given.

During April the N-Reactor operated with a time operated efficiency of 70.8%; and a production availability and steam availability to Washington Public Power Supply System of 68.5%. No fuel element failures occurred. A scheduled outage (April 18 to 25) was used to complete planned maintenance, accomplish the modifications required for the 4,800 Mw power level probe, and for charging the fourth increment of the coproduct demonstration load. Fuel element input production was 100% of forecast. Output production was 110% of forecast, significantly improving finished-fuel inventories and reducing in-process material levels. Calendar-year-to-date output is 102% of forecast. There are now 844 columns of coproduct fuel in the reactor. Two columns of high exposure, 1.96% enriched, coproduct fuel (discharged during March) were examined. These fuels had attained a tube average exposure of 4,094 Mwd/t and operated at uranium temperatures of 550 C to 475 C (temperature range predicted for Mark 5 fuel). Cladding buckling was minimal. The superior performance is attributed to the 800 ppm Al plus 400 ppm Fe uranium alloy. Flow testing of the prototypic Mark 4 fuel continued during the month. Flow split data are being used to redesign the support system to balance the flow in the coolant …

The electron beam technology demonstration at SRS has potential benefit to some groundwater remediation projects at SR and other DOE facilities. At SRS, organic contaminants are the most commonly found contaminants in groundwaters, consequently, this technology has the potential to remove the contaminants fro the groundwaters effectively. The primary objective is to provide site-specific data to support SRS remediation actions. The secondary objective for the technology demonstration will be to obtain necessary information for a full-scale remediation treatment system. The information will include operating and construction costs, removal efficiency, potential operating problems, and process chemical dosages if applied.

Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) is developing a borosilicate glass as a solid, stable medium for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste at the Hanford site. They are optimizing the glass forming region and developing process models to be used in the Hanford Waste Verification Project (HWVP). Their experimentally-based statistical approach for optimizing the glass composition for HWVP has been designated the Composition Variability Study (CVS). In Part 1 of the CVS study PNL tested wide ranges of composition developed first-order empirical models, and provided input for planning CVS-2. In part 2, they are generating glass property data for a number of compositions in order to develop second-order empirical models which will be used to identify the composition region that simultaneously satisfies all quality and processability requirements of HWVP.

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The NERSC flagship computer Cray XT4 system"Franklin" has gone through three major upgrades: quad core upgrade, CLE 2.1 upgrade, and IO upgrade, during the past year. In this paper, we will discuss the various aspects of the user impacts such as user access, user environment, and user issues etc from these upgrades. The performance impacts on the kernel benchmarks and selected application benchmarks will also be presented.

The development of metallic glasses in bulk form has led to a resurgence of interest into the utilization of these materials for a variety of applications. A potentially exciting application for these bulk metallic glass (BMG) materials is their use as composite membranes to replace high cost Pd/Pd-alloy membranes for enhanced gas separation processes. One of the major drawbacks to the industrial use of Pd/Pd-alloy membranes is that during cycling above and below a critical temperature an irreversible change takes place in the palladium lattice structure which can result in significant damage to the membrane. Furthermore, the cost associated with Pd-based membranes is a potential detractor for their continued use and BMG alloys offer a potentially attractive alternative. Several BMG alloys have been shown to possess high permeation rates, comparable to those measured for pure Pd metal. In addition, high strength and toughness when either in-situ or ex-situ second phase dispersoids are present. Both of these properties, high permeation and high strength/toughness, potentially make these materials attractive for gas separation membranes that could resist hydrogen 'embrittlement'. However, a fundamental understanding of the relationship between partially crystalline 'structure'/devitrification and permeation/embrittlement in these BMG materials is required in order to determine the …

The feasibility of using 'grain-boundary engineering' techniques to reduce the susceptibility of a metallic material to intergranular embrittlement in the presence of hydrogen is examined. Using thermomechanical processing, the fraction of 'special' grain boundaries was increased from 46% to 75% (by length) in commercially pure nickel samples. In the presence of hydrogen concentrations between 1200 and 3400 appm, the high special fraction microstructure showed almost double the tensile ductility; also, the proportion of intergranular fracture was significantly lower and the J{sub c} fracture toughness values were some 20-30% higher in comparison with the low special fraction microstructure. We attribute the reduction in the severity of hydrogen-induced intergranular embrittlement to the higher fraction of special grain boundaries, where the degree of hydrogen segregation at these boundaries is reduced.

Extensive electrolyzer testing was performed at the University of South Carolina (USC). Emphasis was given to understanding water transport under various operating (i.e., temperature, membrane pressure differential and current density) and design (i.e., membrane thickness) conditions when it became apparent that water transport plays a deciding role in cell voltage. A mathematical model was developed to further understand the mechanisms of water and SO2 transport, and to predict the effect of operating and design parameters on electrolyzer performance.

Quarterly highlights are: (1) The integration of Denovo and AMP was demonstrated in an AMP simulation of the thermo-mechanics of a complete fuel assembly; (2) Bison was enhanced with a mechanistic fuel cracking model; (3) Mechanistic algorithms were incorporated into various lower-length-scale models to represent fission gases and dislocations in UO2 fuels; (4) Marmot was improved to allow faster testing of mesoscale models using larger problem domains; (5) Component models of reactor piping were developed for use in Relap-7; (6) The mesh generator of Proteus was updated to accept a mesh specification from Moose and equations were formulated for the intermediate-fidelity Proteus-2D1D module; (7) A new pressure solver was implemented in Nek5000 and demonstrated to work 2.5 times faster than the previous solver; (8) Work continued on volume-holdup models for two fuel reprocessing operations: voloxidation and dissolution; (9) Progress was made on a pyroprocessing model and the characterization of pyroprocessing emission signatures; (10) A new 1D groundwater waste transport code was delivered to the used fuel disposition (UFD) campaign; (11) Efforts on waste form modeling included empirical simulation of sodium-borosilicate glass compositions; (12) The Waste team developed three prototypes for modeling hydride reorientation in fuel cladding during very long-term fuel …

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In July, 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and Department of Energy (DOE) asked the National Research Council’s Board on Life Sciences to convene a committee to examine the current state of biological research in the United States and recommend how best to capitalize on recent technological and scientific advances that have allowed biologists to integrate biological research findings, collect and interpret vastly increased amounts of data, and predict the behavior of complex biological systems. From September 2008 through July of 2009, a committee of 16 experts from the fields of biology, engineering and computational science undertook to delineate those scientific and technological advances and come to a consensus on how the U.S. might best capitalize on them. This report, authored by the Committee on a New Biology for the 21st Century, describes the committee’s work and conclusions.

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This report addresses the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) organization’s desire to minimize the learning time required to understand the implications of smart-grid concepts so APEC members can advance their thinking in a timely manner and advance strategies regarding smart approaches that can help meet their environmental-sustainability and energy-efficiency policy goals. As significant investments are needed to grow and maintain the electricity infrastructure, consideration needs to be given to how information and communications technologies can be applied to electricity infrastructure decisions that not only meet traditional needs for basic service and reliability, but also provide the flexibility for a changing the mix of generation sources with sensitivity to environmental and societal impacts.

This paper discusses the need for higher energy accelerators to probe the mysteries of the subatomic universe. Intermediate vector bosons are discussed as well as symmetry breaking and the standard model. (LSP)

The Department of Energy (DOE) selected Caustic-Side Solvent Extraction (CSSX) as the preferred technology for the removal of radioactive cesium from High-Level Waste (HLW) at the Savannah River Site (SRS). The CSSX process is a continuous process that uses a novel solvent to extract cesium from highly radioactive waste and concentrate it in dilute nitric acid. In-line analyses are performed with gamma-ray monitors to measure the C-137 concentration in the decontaminated salt solution (DSS) and in the strip effluent (SE). Sodium iodide (NaI) monitors are used to measure the Cs-137 concentration before the DSS Hold Tank, while Geiger-Mueller (GM) monitors are used for Cs-137 measurements before the SE hold tank. Tungsten shields were designed using Monte Carlo calculations and fabricated to provide the needed reduction of the process background radiation at the detector positions. A one-inch tungsten cylindrical shield reduced the background radiation by a factor of fifty that was adequate for the GM detectors, while a three-and-one-half-inch tungsten cylindrical shield was required for the NaI detectors. Testing of the NaI shield was performed at the SRS Instrument Calibration Facility. Based on this testing, the as-built shield is predicted to be able to detect the MCU DSS stream at concentrations …

A suite of test problems has been developed to examine contact behavior within the nonlinear, three-dimensional, explicit finite element analysis (FEA) code DYNA3D (Lin, 2005). The test problems use multiple interfaces and a combination of enforcement methods to assess the basic functionality of the contact algorithms. The results from the DYNA3D analyses are compared to closed form solutions to verify the contact behavior. This work was performed as part of the Verification and Validation efforts of LLNL W Program within the NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program. DYNA3D models the transient dynamic response of solids and structures including the interactions between disjoint bodies (parts). A wide variety of contact surfaces are available to represent the diverse interactions possible during an analysis, including relative motion (sliding), separation and gap closure (voids), and fixed relative position (tied). The problem geometry may be defined using a combination of element formulations, including one-dimensional beam and truss elements, two-dimensional shell elements, and three-dimensional solid elements. Consequently, it is necessary to consider various element interactions during contact. This report and associated test problems examine the scenario where multiple bodies interact with each other via multiple interfaces. The test problems focus on whether any ordering issues …

The increasing gap between processor performance and memory access time warrants the re-examination of data movement in iterative linear solver algorithms. For this reason, we explore and establish the feasibility of modifying a standard iterative linear solver algorithm in a manner that reduces the movement of data through memory. In particular, we present an alternative to the restarted GMRES algorithm for solving a single right-hand side linear system Ax = b based on solving the block linear system AX = B. Algorithm performance, i.e. time to solution, is improved by using the matrix A in operations on groups of vectors. Experimental results demonstrate the importance of implementation choices on data movement as well as the effectiveness of the new method on a variety of problems from different application areas.