The US Department of Energy (DOE) has initiated remediation for stored high-level radioactive wastes. At the DOE Hanford site in southeastern Washington, 149 large underground tanks contain such wastes, generated by various chemical processes during the manufacture of plutonium for nuclear weapons. One of the key steps in this remediation effort is to characterize the waste stored in these tanks so that it can be treated properly and safely. A number of samples have been extracted from a subset of the tanks and analyzed for various chemical and radiological constituents. The analytical results were used to cluster tanks into groups with similar waste compositions. The tank groups determined by clustering of the analytical data are compared to tank groups determined using process-based historical models. Agreement between the two grouping strategies may reduce the number of samples required to characterize the waste in a tank, and perhaps support the use of the historical models to characterize tanks that have not been sampled. A successful implementation of this approach with one tank group is described here. This particular case yielded DOE significant savings of characterization resources.

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The scales that grow from oxidation often develop a convoluted morphology or interface pores. High thermal stresses can develop locally and are potentially detrimental to the scale or interface integrity. Finite element simulations are used to examine residual thermal stresses and strains that result when these deviations from a flat interface have formed, and the resulting geometry is subsequently cooled to room temperature. A variety of geometries will be considered for alumina scales on a FeCrAl substrate.

The genome of Methanococcus jannaschii has been sequenced completely and has been found to contain approximately 1,770 predicted protein-coding regions. When these coding regions are expressed and how their expression is regulated, however, remain open questions. In this work, mass spectrometry was combined with two-dimensional gel electrophoresis to identify which proteins the genes produce under different growth conditions, and thus investigate the regulation of genes responsible for functions characteristic of this thermophilic representative of the methanogenic Archaea.

The demanding energy, power, pulse shape, focusability, pointing, and availability requirements placed on the 192 National Ignition Facility (NIF) beams lead to the need for an automatic operation capability that is well beyond that of previous inertial confinement fusion (ICF) lasers. Alignment, diagnostic, and wavefront correction subsystems are integrated in an approach that, by permitting maximal sharing of instrumentation between subsystems, meets performance requirements at a reasonable cost.

Expressions are presented for various magneto-optical Kerr effects in the ultrathin film limit with arbitrary magnetization direction by considering the multiple reflections within an optically thin film. The Kerr effect of p- and s-polarization consists of products of two factors: the prefactor, dependent only on the optical parameters of the system, and the main factor of the polar Kerr effect for normal incidence in the ultrathin limit.

The world's largest environmental cleanup effort continues to be focused on the Department of Energy (DOE) complex. The significant technical and economic concerns associated with this effort underscore the need for crucial cost-effective technologies and management approaches.