The question of what to do with radioactive wastes is discussed. The need to resolve this issue promptly is pointed out. Two significant events which have occurred during the Carter administration are discussed. An Interagency Review Group (IRG) on waste management was formed to formulate recommendations leading to the establishment of a National policy for managing radioactive wastes. The technical findings in the IRG report are listed. The author points out some issues not addressed by the report. President Carter issued a national policy statement on Radioactive Waste Management in February 1980. The most significant elements of this statement are summarized. The cancellation of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is currently meeting opposition in Congress. This and other items in the National Policy Statement are discussed.

Coupons of eight different carbon and chrome-moly alloy steels were exposed to high temperature, high salinity wellhead brine flow at a geothermal well in the Salton Sea Geothermal Field for periods of up to six months. The corrosion rate and corrosion attack morphology of each coupon was determined. Exposure time was a test variable and ranged from one month to six months. Test results indicate that carbon steels generally suffer high corrosion rates and are susceptible to severe localized attack which shows a mesa-canyon pattern. Chrome-moly alloy steels corrode at much lower rates and show an attack pattern of small shallow pits. With time, these pits grow mostly in the lateral direction. These results suggest that chrome-moly alloy steels offer significant improvement over carbon steels and that the disk-shaped pits are not likely to lead to rapid perforation.

Solid earth tidal strain and surface loading due to fluctuations in barometric pressure have the effect, although extremely minute, of dilating or contracting the effective pore volume in a porous reservoir. If a well intersects the formation, the change in pore pressure can be measured with sensitive quartz pressure gauges. Mathematical models of the relevant fluid dynamics of the well-reservoir system have been generated and tested against conventional well pumping results or core data at the Salton Sea Geothermal Field (SSGF), California and at the Raft River, Geothermal Field (RRGF), Idaho. Porosity-total compressibility product evaluation based on tidal strain response compares favorably with results based on conventional pumping techniques. Analysis of reservoir response to barometric loading using Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) stochastic modeling appears also to have potential use for the evaluation of reservoir parameters.

Progress in the last two years toward identification of gluonic states is reviewed. Discovery of additional pseudoscalars tends to confirm the glueball interpretation of iota(1460). A variety of evidence indicates new physics in the J = 1 channel in the E mass region. 65 refs., 1 tab.

Recently, much research has been directed towards finding a replacement cathode material for LiCoO{sub 2} combining high performance with lower cost and toxicity. One promising candidate material is the mixed transition metal oxide LiNi{sub 0.4}Co{sub 0.2}Mn{sub 0.4}O{sub 2}, which delivers 180 mAh/g below 4.4 V versus Li/Li{sup +} (1, 2). However, in this material, there is 4% anti-site cation mixing, which hinders the mobility of lithium within the lattice, adversely affecting its rate performance in lithium batteries. Ongoing work in our lab has shown that partial or full substitution of cobalt with aluminum, LiNi{sub 0.4}Co{sub 0.2}Mn{sub 0.4}O{sub 2} (0 < y {le} 0.2), can lead to significant improvements in rate performance (3). In particular, LiNi{sub 0.4}Co{sub 0.2}Mn{sub 0.4}O{sub 2} shows greatly improved rate capability with almost no sacrifice in the overall capacity delivered at low rates between 2.0 and 4.3V (Figure 1). The smaller ionic radius of Al{sup 3+} in octahedral coordination (0.535 {angstrom}) compared to Li{sup +} (0.76 {angstrom}) creates a strong driving force for the formation of a more lamellar structure in the aluminum containing materials (4, 5). XRD experiments and subsequent Rietveld refinement (Figure 2) reveal a significant decrease in anti-site defect concentration upon aluminum substitution, dropping …

By combining the method of images with calculus of complex variables, we provide a simple expression for the electric field of a two-dimensional (2D) static elliptical charge distribution inside a perfectly conducting cylinder. The charge distribution need not be concentric with the cylinder.

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Most quantum states have wavefunctions that are widely spread over the accessible Hilbert space and hence do not have a good description in terms of a single classical geometry. In order to understand when geometric descriptions are possible, we exploit the AdS/CFT correspondence in the half-BPS sector of asymptotically AdS_5 x S5 universes. In this sector we devise a"coarse-grained metric operator" whose eigenstates are well described by a single spacetime topology and geometry. We show that such half-BPS universes have a non-vanishing entropy if and only if the metric is singular, and that the entropy arises from coarse-graining the geometry. Finally, we use our entropy formula to find the most entropic spacetimes with fixed asymptotic moments beyond the global charges.

In recent years, semiconductor quantum dots have beenapplied with great advantage in a wide range of biological imagingapplications. The continuing developments in the synthesis of nanoscalematerials and specifically in the area of colloidal semiconductornanocrystals have created an opportunity to generate a next generation ofbiological labels with complementary or in some cases enhanced propertiescompared to colloidal quantum dots. In this paper, we report thedevelopment of rod shaped semiconductor nanocrystals (quantum rods) asnew fluorescent biological labels. We have engineered biocompatiblequantum rods by surface silanization and have applied them fornon-specific cell tracking as well as specific cellular targeting. Theproperties of quantum rods as demonstrated here are enhanced sensitivityand greater resistance for degradation as compared to quantum dots.Quantum rods have many potential applications as biological labels insituations where their properties offer advantages over quantumdots.

Triton induced reactions, such as the (t,p) reaction, can be used for in-beam gamma-ray and conversion-electron studies of nuclei that are somewhat neutron rich. We have developed systems for both conversion-electron and gamma-ray spectroscopy in coincidence with the outgoing energetic proton to identify the (t,p) reaction channel. Data from the /sup 142/Nd(t,p..gamma..) reaction illustrate several of the characteristics of this reaction for studying nuclear structure. Preliminary results from the study of /sup 96/Zr by conversion-electron spectroscopy, and /sup 240/U by gamma-ray spectroscopy, are reported. 4 refs., 4 figs.

The Procyon system in the Los Alamos Trailmaster foil implosion project is intended to produce soft x-ray radiation by delivering about 1 MJ of kinetic energy to an imploding plasma liner. The final switching stage of this system will be a Plasma Flow Switch (PFS) which delivers current to the cylindrical foil load. 1-D and 2-D simulations are now being conducted to examine: the initiation of the PFS plasma: the dynamics of the PFS and its switching efficiency; the load implosion and resulting radiation output. Considered here, for the PFS and imploding load, are the effects of electrode walls, perturbations, and radiation. Comparisons with experiments (using the 1.5 MJ Pegasus capacitor bank) are also described. 5 refs., 6 figs.

Application of time domain reflectometry (TDR) in soil hydrology often involves the conversion of TDR-measured dielectric permittivity to water content using universal calibration equations (empirical or physically based). Deviations of soil-specific calibrations from the universal calibrations have been noted and are usually attributed to peculiar composition of soil constituents, such as high content of clay and/or organic matter. Although it is recognized that soil disturbance by TDR waveguides may have impact on measurement errors, to our knowledge, there has not been any quantification of this effect. In this paper, we introduce a method that estimates this error by combining two models: one that describes soil compaction around cylindrical objects and another that translates change in bulk density to evolution of soil water retention characteristics. Our analysis indicates that the compaction pattern depends on the mechanical properties of the soil at the time of installation. The relative error in water content measurement depends on the compaction pattern as well as the water content and water retention properties of the soil. Illustrative calculations based on measured soil mechanical and hydrologic properties from the literature indicate that the measurement errors of using a standard three-prong TDR waveguide could be up to 10%. We …

A code, CACECO, has been written to assist in the analysis of containment situations peculiar to sodium cooled reactors. Typically, these situations involve relatively slow energy release processes and chemical reaction heat. Two examples are given to illustrate some of the code's features. These particular cases illustrate the potential for hydrogen formation in the containment building, but show that time is available to take corrective action. The code is suitable for other problems involving passive heat absorption in massive structures over long periods of time.

The main goal of this program is the development and application of computational methods for studying chemical reaction dynamics and molecular spectroscopy in the gas phase. We are interested in developing rigorous quantum dynamics algorithms for small polyatomic systems and in implementing approximate approaches for complex ones. Particular focus is on the dynamics and kinetics of chemical reactions and on the rovibrational spectra of species involved in combustion processes. This research also explores the potential energy surfaces of these systems of interest using state-of-the-art quantum chemistry methods, and extends them to understand some important properties of materials in condensed phases and interstellar medium as well as in combustion environments.

This research is carried out as part of the Gas-Phase Molecular Dynamics program in the Chemistry Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Chemical intermediates in the elementary gas-phase reactions involved in combustion chemistry are investigated by high resolution spectroscopic tools. Production, reaction, and energy transfer processes are investigated by transient, double resonance, polarization and saturation spectroscopies, with an emphasis on technique development and connection with theory, as well as specific molecular properties.

In this paper we extend our previous analysis of cold beam tube vacuum in a superconducting proton collider to include ion desorption in addition to thermal desorption and synchrotron radiation induced photodesorption. The new ion desorption terms introduce the possibility of vacuum instability. This is similar to the classical room temperature case but now modified by the inclusion of ion desorption coefficients for cryosorbed (physisorbed) molecules which can greatly exceed the coefficients for tightly bound molecules. The sojourn time concept for physisorbed H{sub 2} is generalized to include photodesorption and ion desorption as well as the usually considered thermal desorption. The ion desorption rate is density dependent and divergent so at the onset of instability the sojourn time goes to zero. Experimental data are used to evaluate the H{sub 2} sojourn time for the conditions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the situation is found to be stable. The sojourn time is dominated by photodesorption for surface density s(H{sub 2}) less than a monolayer and by thermal deposition for s(H{sub 2}) greater than a monolayer. For a few percent of a monolayer, characteristic of a beam screen, the photodesorption rate exceeds ion desorption rate by more than two orders …

The Genome-Linked Application for Metabolic Maps (GLAMM) is a unified web interface for visualizing metabolic networks, reconstructing metabolic networks from annotated genome data, visualizing experimental data in the context of metabolic networks, and investigating the construction of novel, transgenic pathways. This simple, user-friendly interface is tightly integrated with the comparative genomics tools of MicrobesOnline. GLAMM is available for free to the scientific community at glamm.lbl.gov.

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We study the semi-inclusive hadron production in deep inelastic scattering at small-x.A transverse momentum dependent factorization is found consistent with the resultscalculated in the color-dipole framework in the appropriate kinematic region. The transverse momentum dependent quark distribution can be studied in this processas a probe for the small-x saturation physics. Especially, the ratio of the quark distributions as functions of transverse momentum at different x demonstrates strong dependence on the saturation scale. The Q2 dependence of the same ratio is also studied by applying the Collins-Soper-Sterman resummation method.

Plastic behavior has previously been observed in metallic interconnects undergoing high current density electromigration (EM) loading. In this study of Cu interconnects, using the synchrotron technique of white beam X-ray microdiffraction, we have further found preliminary evidence of a texture correlation. In lines with strong (111) textures, the extent of plastic deformation is found to be relatively large compared to that of weaker textures. We suggest that this strong (111) texture may lead to an extra path of mass transport in addition to the dominant interface diffusion in Cu EM. When this extra mass transport begins to affect the overall transport process, then the effective diffusivity, D{sub eff}, of the EM process is expected to deviate from that of interface diffusion only. This would have fundamental implications. We have some preliminary observations that this might be the case, and we report its implications for EM lifetime assessment in this manuscript.