Since its beginning, the Atmospheric Release Advisory Capability (ARAC), an emergency radiological dose assessment service of the US Government, has been called on to do consequence assessments for releases into the atmosphere of radionuclides and a variety of other substances. Some of the more noteworthy emergency responses have been for the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear power reactor accidents, and more recently, for a cloud of gases from a rail-car spill into the Sacramento river of the herbicide metam sodium, smoke from hundreds of burning oil wells in Kuwait, and ash clouds from the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. The spatial scales of these responses range from local, to regional, to global, and the response periods from hours, to weeks, to months. Because of the variety of requirements of each unique assessment, ARAC has developed and maintains a flexible system of people, computer software and hardware.

The Estimating Services Department of the Fernald Environmental Restoration Management Corporation (FERMCO) is formalizing the process of life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) for the Fernald Environmental Management Project (FEMP). The LCCA process is based on the concepts, principles, and guidelines described by applicable Department of Energy`s (DOE) orders, pertinent published literature, and the National Bureau of Standards handbook 135. LCC analyses will be performed following a ten-step process on the FEMP at the earliest possible decision point to support the selection of the least-cost alternatives for achieving the FERMCO mission.

Fully coupled thermomechanical analysis solves the thermal problem on the deforming geometry and incorporates thermal loads into the mechanical problem. In contrast, traditional thermal stress analysis is based on an uncoupled approach in which the thermal problem is solved on a fixed geometry, and the resulting temperatures are then used to load a mechanical problem. Thermal contact, in which heat flow paths depend on the mechanical deformations of adjacent surfaces, is a major component of many fully coupled thermomechanical analyses. This paper presents the development of a thermomechanical finite element formulation, including contact. The proposed approach accommodates arbitrarily large relative motions of contact surfaces, fully unstructured meshes, pressure-dependent contact resistance, conduction across small gaps, and approximate models for convection and radiation. The theory described herein has been implemented in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory public code PALM2D and has been used to solve a diverse set of thermomechanical problems. Examples illustrating the performance of this code on large deformation thermomechanical problems are presented and discussed.

The Atmospheric Release Advisory Capability (ARAC) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) uses a modeling system to calculate the impact of accidental radiological or toxic releases to the atmosphere anywhere in the world. Operated for the US Departments of Energy and Defense, ARAC has responded to over 60 incidents in the past 18 years, and conducts over 100 exercises each year. Explosions are one of the most common mechanisms by which toxic particulates are injected into the atmosphere during accidents. Automated algorithms with default assumptions have been developed to estimate the source geometry and the amount of toxic material aerosolized. The paper examines the sensitivity of ARAC`s dispersion model to the range of input values for explosive sources, and analyzes the model`s accuracy using two field measurement programs.