The management practices, procedures, and processes that are suited to managing Management and Operation (M&O) type of contracts at Department of Energy (DOE) sites, which were cost reimbursement with award fee, are not well suited to managing contracts where fee is determined by performance metrics. Thus a different style of management, requiring substantial revamping of the management process, is needed. This shift in philosophy also requires a dramatic shift in culture. This paper will describe how these changes are being managed at the River Protection Project (RPP), located at the DOE's Hanford Site in Washington State, one of DOE's largest and highest risk environmental clean-up project.

The primary approach to the effort was to form a multi-organizational team comprised of federal and contractor staff to develop and implement the necessary tools and systems to manage the project. In late 1999 the DOE Manager of the Office of River Protection formed the Project Integration Office to achieve the objective of managing the efforts as a single project. The first major task, and the foundation upon which to base the development of all other tools, was the establishment of a single baseline of activities. However, defining a single scope schedule and cost was a difficult matter indeed. Work scopes were available throughout the project, but the level of detail and the integration of the activities existed primarily between working groups and individuals and not on a project-wide basis. This creates a situation where technical needs, logic flaws, resource balancing, and other similar integration needs are not elevated for management attention and resolution. It should be noted that probably 90% of the interface issues were known and being addressed. The key is simplifying the process and providing tangible assurance that the other 10% does not contain issues that can delay the project. Fortunately all of the contractors employed a …

Investigators at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) are developing technologies that will enhance the feasibility of generating electrical power from a hydrothermal resource. One of the concepts investigated is the use of modified inlet conditions in geothermal binary power plant turbines to increase the power generation. An inlet condition of interest allows the expanding vapor to enter the two-phase region, a mode of operation typically avoided because of concern that condensate would form and damage the turbine, degrading performance. INEEL investigators postulated that initially a supersaturated vapor would be supported, and that no turbine damage would occur. This paper summarizes the investigation of these expansions that began with testing of their condensation behavior, and culminated with the incorporation of these expansions into the operation of several commercial binary plant turbines.

It is well known that a neutral atom interacting with a strong laser field will ionize at sufficiently high intensity even for photon energies well below the ionization threshold. When the required number of photons becomes very large, this process is best described by the suppression of the Coulomb barrier by the laser's oscillating electric field, allowing the electron to tunnel into the continuum. As the laser intensity is increased, more tightly bound electrons may be successively liberated by this mechanism. Such a sequential multiple ionization, long accepted as a reasonable approach to the formidable problem of a multielectron atom interacting nonperturbatively with an intense electromagnetic field, provides fair estimates of the various charge state appearance intensities while the tunneling rates are in excellent agreement with single ionization yields. However, more accurate measurements revealed systematic and very large deviations from the tunneling rates: near appearance intensity under standard experimental conditions, the observed double ion yield is several orders of magnitude larger than predicted by the sequential rate. It soon became clear that electrons could not be considered as independent and that electron-electron correlation had to be taken into account. Dynamic correlations have been considered in several theories. First qualitatively in …

It is well known that a neutral atom interacting with a strong laser field will ionize at sufficiently high intensity even for photon energies well below the ionization threshold. When the required number of photons becomes very large, this process is best described by the suppression of the Coulomb barrier by the laser's oscillating electric field, allowing the electron to tunnel into the continuum. As the laser intensity is increased, more tightly bound electrons may be successively liberated by this mechanism. Such a sequential multiple ionization, long accepted as a reasonable approach to the formidable problem of a multielectron atom interacting nonperturbatively with an intense electromagnetic field, provides fair estimates of the various charge state appearance intensities while the tunneling rates are in excellent agreement with single ionization yields. However, more accurate measurements revealed systematic and very large deviations from the tunneling rates: near appearance intensity under standard experimental conditions, the observed double ion yield is several orders of magnitude larger than predicted by the sequential rate. It soon became clear that electrons could not be considered as independent and that electron-electron correlation had to be taken into account. Dynamic correlations have been considered in several theories. First qualitatively in …