An external gelation process was developed to produce spherical granules that contain metal hydride particles in a sol-gel matrix. Dimensionally stable granules containing metal hydrides are needed for applications such as hydrogen separation and hydrogen purification that require columns containing metal hydrides. Gases must readily flow through the metal hydride beds in the columns. Metal hydrides reversibly absorb and desorb hydrogen and hydrogen isotopes. This is accompanied by significant volume changes that cause the metal hydride to break apart or decrepitate. Repeated cycling results in very fine metal hydride particles that are difficult to handle and contain. Fine particles tend to settle and pack making it more difficult to flow gases through a metal hydride bed. Furthermore, the metal hydrides can exert a significant force on the containment vessel as they expand. These problems associated with metal hydrides can be eliminated with the granulation process described in this report. Small agglomerates of metal hydride particles and abietic acid (a pore former) were produced and dispersed in a colloidal silica/water suspension to form the feed slurry. Fumed silica was added to increase the viscosity of the feed slurry which helped to keep the agglomerates in suspension. Drops of the feed slurry …

We review the recent proposal that neutrinos are light because their masses are proportional to a low scale, f, of lepton flavor symmetry breaking. This mechanism is testable because the resulting pseudo-Goldstone bosons, of mass m_G, couple strongly with the neutrinos, affecting the acoustic oscillations during the eV era of the early universe that generate the peaks in the CMB radiation. Characteristic signals result over a very wide range of (f, m_G) because of a change in the total relativistic energy density and because the neutrinos scatter rather than free-stream. Thermodynamics allows a precise calculation of the signal, so that observations would not only confirm the late-time neutrino mass mechanism, but could also determine whether the neutrino spectrum is degenerate, inverted or hierarchical and whether the neutrinos are Dirac or Majorana. The flavor symmetries could also give light sterile states. If the masses of the sterile neutrinos turn on after the MeV era, the LSND oscillations can be explained without upsetting big bang nucleosynthesis, and, since the sterile states decay to lighter neutrinos and pseudo-Goldstones, without giving too much hot dark matter.

Oxidative alkaline leaching has been proposed to pre-treat the high-level nuclear waste sludges to remove some of the problematic (e.g., Cr) and/or non-radioactive (e.g., Na, Al) constituents before vitrification. It is critical to understand the behavior of actinides, americium and plutonium in particular, in oxidative alkaline leaching. We have studied the leaching behavior of americium from four different sludge simulants (BiPO{sub 4}, BiPO{sub 4 modified}, Redox, PUREX) using potassium permanganate and potassium persulfate in alkaline solutions. Up to 60% of americium sorbed onto the simulants is leached from the sludges by alkaline persulfate and permanganate. The percentage of americium leached increases with [NaOH] (between 1.0 and 5.0 M). The initial rate of americium leaching by potassium persulfate increases in the order BiPO{sub 4} sludge < Redox sludge < PUREX sludge. The data are most consistent with oxidation of Am{sup 3+} in the sludge to either AmO{sub 2}{sup +} or AmO{sub 2}{sup 2+} in solution. Though neither of these species is expected to exhibit long-term stability in solution, the potential for mobilization of americium from sludge samples would have to be accommodated in the design of any oxidative leaching process for real sludge samples.

The potential energy surface corresponding the complex resonance energy of the 2B1 Feshbach resonance state of the water anion is constructed in its full dimensionality. Complex Kohn variational scattering calculations are used to compute the resonance width, while large-scale Configuration Interaction calculations are used to compute the resonance energy. Near the equilibrium geometry, an accompanying ground state potential surface is constructed from Configuration Interaction calculations that treat correlation at a level similar to that used in the calculations on the anion.

The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN is preparing for the data taking and analysis at the LHC that will start in 2007. Therefore, a series of Data Challenges was started in 2002 whose goals are the validation of the Computing Model, of the complete software suite, of the data model, and to ensure the correctness of the technical choices to be made. A major feature of the first Data Challenge was the preparation and the deployment of the software required for the production of large event samples as a worldwide-distributed activity. It should be noted that it was not an option to ''run everything at CERN'' even if we had wanted to; the resources were not available at CERN to carry out the production on a reasonable time-scale. The great challenge of organizing and then carrying out this large-scale production at a significant number of sites around the world had the refore to be faced. However, the benefits of this are manifold: apart from realizing the required computing resources, this exercise created worldwide momentum for ATLAS computing as a whole. This report describes in detail the main steps carried out in DC1 and what has been learned from them as a …

In the favored progenitor scenario, Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) arise from a white dwarf accreting material from a non-degenerate companion star. Soon after the white dwarf explodes, the ejected supernova material engulfs the companion star; two-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations by Marietta et al. (2001) show that, in the interaction, the companion star carves out a conical hole of opening angle 30-40 degrees in the supernova ejecta. In this paper we use multi-dimensional Monte Carlo radiative transfer calculations to explore the observable consequences of an ejecta-hole asymmetry. We calculate the variation of the spectrum, luminosity, and polarization with viewing angle for the aspherical supernova near maximum light. We find that the supernova looks normal from almost all viewing angles except when one looks almost directly down the hole. In the latter case, one sees into the deeper, hotter layers of ejecta. The supernova is relatively brighter and has a peculiar spectrum characterized by more highly ionized species, weaker absorption features, and lower absorption velocities. The spectrum viewed down the hole is comparable to the class of SN 1991T-like supernovae. We consider how the ejecta-hole asymmetry may explain the current spectropolarimetric observations of SNe Ia, and suggest a few observational signatures of …

Femtosecond laser ablation of silicon in air was studied and compared with nanosecond laser ablation at ultraviolet wavelength (266 nm). Laser ablation efficiency was studied by measuring crater depth as a function of pulse number. For the same number of laser pulses, the fs-ablated crater was about two times deeper than the ns-crater. The temperature and electron number density of the pulsed laser-induced plasma were determined from spectroscopic measurements. The electron number density and temperature of fs-pulse plasmas decreased faster than ns-pulse plasmas due to different energy deposition mechanisms. Images of the laser-induced plasma were obtained with femtosecond time-resolved laser shadowgraph imaging. Plasma expansion in both the perpendicular and the lateral directions to the laser beam were compared for femtosecond and nanosecond laser ablation.

Efforts at Siemens Westinghouse Power Corporation (SWPC) have been focused on development of hot gas filter systems as an enabling technology for advanced coal and biomass-based gas turbine power generation applications. SWPC has been actively involved in the development of advanced filter materials and component configuration, has participated in numerous surveillance programs characterizing the material properties and microstructure of field tested filter elements, and has undertaken extended, accelerated filter life testing programs. This report summarizes the results of SWPC's filter component assessment efforts, identifying the performance and stability of porous monolithic, fiber reinforced, and filament wound ceramic hot gas candle filters, potentially for {ge}3 years of viable pressurized fluidized-bed combustion (PFBC) service operating life.

The Pennsylvania State University, under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory will establish, promote, and manage a national industry-driven Stripper Well Consortium (SWC) that will be focused on improving the production performance of domestic petroleum and/or natural gas stripper wells. The consortium creates a partnership with the U.S. petroleum and natural gas industries and trade associations, state funding agencies, academia, and the National Energy Technology Laboratory. This report serves as the fifteenth quarterly technical progress report for the SWC. Key activities for this reporting period include: (1) hosting the SWC spring proposal meeting in Golden Colorado, (2) planning of the upcoming SWC fall technology transfer meetings, and (3) recruiting the SWC base membership.

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This calculation is intended to support the License Application (LA) submittal of December 2004, in accordance with the directive given by DOE correspondence received on the 27th of January 2004 entitled: ''Authorization for Bechtel SAX Company L.L. C. to Include a Bare Fuel Handling Facility and Increased Aging Capacity in the License Application, Contract Number DE-AC28-01R W12101'' (Arthur, W.J., I11 2004). This correspondence was appended by further Correspondence received on the 19th of February 2004 entitled: ''Technical Direction to Bechtel SAIC Company L.L. C. for Surface Facility Improvements, Contract Number DE-AC28-OIRW12101; TDL No. 04-024'' (BSC 2004a). These documents give the authorization for a Fuel Handling Facility to be included in the baseline. The purpose of this calculation is to establish preliminary bounding equipment envelopes and weights for the Fuel Handling Facility (FHF) transfer areas equipment. This calculation provides preliminary information only to support development of facility layouts and preliminary load calculations. The limitations of this preliminary calculation lie within the assumptions of section 5 , as this calculation is part of an evolutionary design process. It is intended that this calculation is superseded as the design advances to reflect information necessary to support License Application. The design choices outlined within …

The authors introduce a class of damage models on regular lattices with isotropic interactions between the broken cells of the lattice. Quasistatic fiber bundles are an example. The interactions are assumed to be weak, in the sense that the stress perturbation from a broken cell is much smaller than the mean stress in the system. The system starts intact with a surface-energy threshold required to break any cell sampled from an uncorrelated quenched-disorder distribution. The evolution of this heterogeneous system is ruled by Griffith's principle which states that a cell breaks when the release in potential (elastic) energy in the system exceeds the surface-energy barrier necessary to break the cell. By direct integration over all possible realizations of the quenched disorder, they obtain the probability distribution of each damage configuration at any level of the imposed external deformation. They demonstrate an isomorphism between the distributions so obtained and standard generalized Ising models, in which the coupling constants and effective temperature in the Ising model are functions of the nature of the quenched-disorder distribution and the extent of accumulated damage. In particular, they show that damage models with global load sharing are isomorphic to standard percolation theory, that damage models with …

DOE Order 420.1A, Facility Safety , requires the installation of Criticality Accident Alarm System (CAAS) to detect the radiation from an unplanned and uncontrolled nuclear reaction and to notify building occupants of such an event if the expected dose exceeds 12 rads in free air. DOE Order 420.1A requires that the Nuclear Criticality Safety Program be based on the requirements in ANSI/ANS-8.3-1997 . This standard permits the use of portable criticality detection instruments ''in areas that are not normally occupied.'' This paper provides a basis for a working definition of the term ''not normally occupied'' for the application of APCDs at the Savannah River Site (SRS).

This paper discusses the use of a reference streak camera (SC) to diagnose laser performance and guide modifications to remove high frequency noise from Bechtel Nevada's long-pulse laser. The upgraded laser exhibits less than 0.1% high frequency noise in cumulative spectra, exceeding National Ignition Facility (NIF) calibration specifications. Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) experiments require full characterization of streak cameras over a wide range of sweep speeds (10 ns to 480 ns). This paradigm of metrology poses stringent spectral requirements on the laser source for streak camera calibration. Recently, Bechtel Nevada worked with a laser vendor to develop a high performance, multi-wavelength Nd:YAG laser to meet NIF calibration requirements. For a typical NIF streak camera with a 4096 x 4096 pixel CCD, the flat field calibration at 30 ns requires a smooth laser spectrum over 33 MHz to 68 GHz. Streak cameras are the appropriate instrumentation for measuring laser amplitude noise at these very high frequencies since the upper end spectral content is beyond the frequency response of typical optoelectronic detectors for a single shot pulse. The SC was used to measure a similar laser at its second harmonic wavelength (532 nm), to establish baseline spectra for testing signal analysis algorithms. …

The chloride-mass-balance (CMB) method has been used extensively to estimate recharge in arid and semi-arid environments. Required data include estimates of annual precipitation, total chloride input (from dry fallout and precipitation), and pore-water chloride concentrations. Typically, CMB has been used to estimate ancient recharge but recharge from recent land-use change has also been documented. Recharge rates below a few mm/yr are reliably detected with CMB; however, estimates above a few mm/yr appear to be less reliable. We tested the CMB method against 26 years of drainage from a 7.6-m-deep lysimeter at a simulated waste-burial ground, located on the Department of Energy s Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State, USA where land-use change has increased recharge rates. Measured drainage from the lysimeter for the past 26 years averaged 62 mm/yr. Precipitation averaged 190 mm/yr with an estimated chloride input of 0.225 mg/L. Initial pore-water chloride concentration was 88 mg/L and decreased to about 6 mg/L after 26 years, while the drainage water decreased to less than 1 mg/L. A recharge estimate made using chloride concentrations in drain water was within 20 percent of the measured drainage rate. In contrast, recharge estimates using 1:1 (water: soil) extracts were lower than actual by …

Cloud and radiation data from two distinctly different Arctic areas are analyzed to study the differences between coastal Alaskan and open Arctic Ocean region clouds and their respective influence on the surface radiation budget. The cloud and radiation datasets were obtained from 1) the DOE North Slope of Alaska (NSA) facility in the coastal town of Barrow, Alaska, and 2) the SHEBA field program, which was conducted from an icebreaker frozen in, and drifting with, the sea-ice for one year in the Western Arctic Ocean. Radar, lidar, radiometer, and sounding measurements from both locations were used to produce annual cycles of cloud occurrence and height, atmospheric temperature and humidity, surface longwave and shortwave broadband fluxes, surface albedo, and cloud radiative forcing. In general, both regions revealed a similar annual trend of cloud occurrence fraction with minimum values in winter (60-75%) and maximum values during spring, summer and fall (80-90%). However, the annual average cloud occurrence fraction for SHEBA (76%) was lower than the 6-year average cloud occurrence at NSA (92%). Both Arctic areas also showed similar annual cycle trends of cloud forcing with clouds warming the surface through most of the year and a period of surface cooling during the …

The generalized Radon (or Hough) transform is a well-known tool for detecting parameterized shapes in an image. The Radon transform is a mapping between the image space and a parameter space. The coordinates of a point in the latter correspond to the parameters of a shape in the image. The amplitude at that point corresponds to the amount of evidence for that shape. In this paper we discuss three important aspects of the Radon transform. The first aspect is discretization. Using concepts from sampling theory we derive a set of sampling criteria for the generalized Radon transform. The second aspect is accuracy. For the specific case of the Radon transform for spheres, we examine how well the location of the maxima matches the true parameters. We derive a correction term to reduce the bias in the estimated radii. The third aspect concerns a projection-based algorithm to reduce memory requirements.

We have measured cross sections for the 63Cu(alpha,gamma)67Ga reaction in the 5.9-8.7 MeV energy range using an activation technique. Natural Cu foils were bombarded with alpha beams from the 88 Cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Activated foils were counted using gamma spectrometry system at LBNL's Low Background Facility. The 63Cu(alpha,gamma)67Ga cross-sections were determined and compared with the latest NON-SMOKER theoretical values. Experimental cross sections were found to be in agreement with theoretical values.

To illustrate the campaign to understand heavy quarkonium systems, the author focuses on a puzzling new state, X(3872) {yields} {pi}{sup +}{pi}{sup -} J/{psi}. Studying the influence of open-charm channels on charmonium properties leads us to propose a new charmonium spectroscopy: additional discrete charmonium levels that can be discovered as narrow resonances of charmed and anticharmed mesons. I recall some expectations for a new spectroscopy of mesons with beauty and charm, the B{sub c} (b{bar c}) system. Throughout, I call attention to open issues for theory and experiment.

We study the effect on neoclassical transport of applying a fluctuating electrostatic spectrum, such as produced either by plasma turbulence, or imposed externally. For tokamaks, it is usually assumed that the neoclassical and ''anomalous'' contributions to the transport roughly superpose, D = D{sub nc} + D{sub an}, an intuition also used in modeling stellarators. An alternate intuition, however, is one where it is the collisional and anomalous scattering frequencies which superpose, {nu}{sub ef} = {nu} + {nu}{sub an}. For nonaxisymmetric systems, in regimes where {partial_derivative}D/{partial_derivative}{nu} < 0, this ''{nu}{sub ef} picture'' implies that turning on the fluctuations can decrease the total radial transport. Using numerical and analytic means, it is found that the total transport has contributions conforming to each of these intuitions, either of which can dominate. In particular, for stellarators, the {nu}{sub ef} picture is often valid, producing transport behavior differing from tokamaks.

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The production of stable, high power, coherent synchrotron radiation at sub-terahertz frequency at the electron storage ring BESSY opens a new region in the electromagnetic spectrum to explore physical properties of materials. Just as conventional synchrotron radiation has been a boon to x-ray science, coherent synchrotron radiation may lead to many new innovations and discoveries in THz physics. With this new accelerator-based radiation source we have been able to extend traditional infrared measurements down into the experimentally poorly accessible sub-THz frequency range. The feasibility of using the coherent synchrotron radiation in scientific applications was demonstrated in a series of experiments: We investigated shallow single acceptor transitions in stressed and unstressed Ge:Ga by means of photoconductance measurements below 1 THz. We have directly measured the Josephson plasma resonance in optimally doped Bi{sub 2}Sr{sub 2}CaCu{sub 2}O{sub 8} for the first time and finally we succeeded to confine the sub-THz radiation for spectral near-field imaging on biological samples such as leaves and human teeth.

This document reviews radioactive and simulant rheology data on SRS waste slurries. Simulant sludge slurries have been prepared at Optima: Tank 51 for Sludge Batch 1A (SB1A) and trimmed for Sludge Batch 1B (SB1B), at USC-Columbia: Tank 8 and Tank 40 for Sludge Batch 2 (SB2), and at Clemson Environmental Technology Laboratory (CETL): SB2, Sludge Batch 3 (SB3), and several generic simulants. Various radioactive waste tank slurry samples have been analyzed for rheology in the SRTC Shielded Cells during the past 25 years. More recently, some rheological measurements have been made on the DWPF qualification samples for new sludge batches or on special samples pulled to help with resolution of processing issues. This document attempts to make comparisons of rheological data for systems where there were both some radioactive slurry data and some potentially similar simulant slurry data. The Approach section describes the basic data types encountered, e.g. sludges, Sludge Receipt and Adjustment Tank (SRAT) products, and Slurry Mix Evaporator (SME) products. The last are equivalent to melter feeds. This is followed by a discussion of rheometry and the Bingham Plastic fluid model. This model has been used to reduce rheological data on SRS waste slurries over the past twenty …