In 2006, the Public Interest Energy Research Program (PIER) Demand Response Research Center (DRRC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory initiated research into Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) applications in California industry. The goal is to improve electric grid reliability and lower electricity use during periods of peak demand. The purpose of this research is to begin to define the relationship among a portfolio of actions that industrial facilities can undertake relative to their electricity use. This ?electricity value chain? defines energy management and demand response (DR) at six levels of service, distinguished by the magnitude, type, and rapidity of response. One element in the electricity supply chain is OpenADR, an open-standards based communications system to send signals to customers to allow them to manage their electric demand in response to supply conditions, such as prices or reliability, through a set of standard, open communications. Initial DRRC research suggests that industrial facilities that have undertaken energy efficiency measures are probably more, not less, likely to initiate other actions within this value chain such as daily load management and demand response. Moreover, OpenADR appears to afford some facilities the opportunity to develop the supporting control structure and to"demo" potential reductions in energy use …

Four conventional damage plasticity models for concrete, the Karagozian and Case model (K&C), the Riedel-Hiermaier-Thoma model (RHT), the Brannon-Fossum model (BF1), and the Continuous Surface Cap Model (CSCM) are compared. The K&C and RHT models have been used in commercial finite element programs many years, whereas the BF1 and CSCM models are relatively new. All four models are essentially isotropic plasticity models for which 'plasticity' is regarded as any form of inelasticity. All of the models support nonlinear elasticity, but with different formulations. All four models employ three shear strength surfaces. The 'yield surface' bounds an evolving set of elastically obtainable stress states. The 'limit surface' bounds stress states that can be reached by any means (elastic or plastic). To model softening, it is recognized that some stress states might be reached once, but, because of irreversible damage, might not be achievable again. In other words, softening is the process of collapse of the limit surface, ultimately down to a final 'residual surface' for fully failed material. The four models being compared differ in their softening evolution equations, as well as in their equations used to degrade the elastic stiffness. For all four models, the strength surfaces are cast in …

Bubble chambers are promising devices for the detection of WIMP dark matter, due to their easy scalability to large target masses and insensitivity to background {gamma} and {beta} radiation. The COUPP collaboration has constructed small chambers which have achieved competitive sensitivity for spin-dependent WIMP-nucleon scattering. A new chamber, COUPP-60, containing 60-kg of CF{sub 3}I target liquid, has been built and is being commissioned at Fermilab. We propose to move this detector to SNOLAB after completing tests in a shallow underground site at Fermilab. At SNOLAB, we expect the sensitivity of the experiment to be determined by the level of {alpha}emitting contamination in the target liquid. If we achieve state-of-the-art levels of {alpha} emitting contamination, we will improve current sensitivity by approximately four orders of magnitude beyond our published limits, to the region of 10{sup -4} pb for a 30 GeV WIMP interacting by spin-dependent couplings to the proton. This will allow a first exploration of the phase space favored by supersymmetric models in this regime.

Industry utilizes very complex systems, consisting of equipment and their human interface, which are organized to meet the production needs of the business. Effective and sustainable energy efficiency programs in an industrial setting require a systems approach to optimize the integrated whole while meeting primary business requirements. Companies that treat energy as a manageable resource and integrate their energy program into their management practices have an organizational context to continually seek opportunities for optimizing their energy use. The purpose of an energy management system standard is to provide guidance for industrial and commercial facilities to integrate energy efficiency into their management practices, including fine-tuning production processes and improving the energy efficiency of industrial systems. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has identified energy management as one of its top five priorities for standards development. The new ISO 50001 will establish an international framework for industrial, commercial, or institutional facilities, or entire companies, to manage their energy, including procurement and use. This standard is expected to achieve major, long-term increases in energy efficiency (20percent or more) in industrial, commercial, and institutional facilities and to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide.This paper describes the impetus for the international standard, its purpose, scope …

Improved efficiency of industrial systems (e.g., compressed air or steam) contributes to a manufacturing facility?s bottom line, improves reliability, and better utilizes assets. Despite these advantages, many industrial facilities continue to have unrealized system optimization potential. A barrier to realizing this potential is the lack of market definition for system energy efficiency assessment services, creating problems for both service providers in establishing market value for their services and for consumers in determining the relative quality of these system assessment services. On August 19, 2008, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) issued four new draft Standards for trial use that are designed to raise the bar and define the market for these services. These draft Standards set the requirements for conducting an energy assessment at an industrial facility for four different system types: compressed air, process heating, pumping, and steam. The Standards address topics such as organizing and conducting assessments; analyzing the data collected; and reporting and documentation. This paper addresses both the issues and challenges in developing the Standards and the accompanying Guidance Documents, as well as the result of field testing by industrial facilities, consultants, and utilities during the trial use period that ended in January, 2009. These …

A new method is introduced for real-time detection of transient change in scenes observed by staring sensors that are subject to platform jitter, pixel defects, variable focus, and other real-world challenges. The approach uses flexible statistical models for the scene background and its variability, which are continually updated to track gradual drift in the sensor's performance and the scene under observation. Two separate models represent temporal and spatial variations in pixel intensity. For the temporal model, each new frame is projected into a low-dimensional subspace designed to capture the behavior of the frame data over a recent observation window. Per-pixel temporal standard deviation estimates are based on projection residuals. The second approach employs a simple representation of jitter to generate pixelwise moment estimates from a single frame. These estimates rely on spatial characteristics of the scene, and are used gauge each pixel's susceptibility to jitter. The temporal model handles pixels that are naturally variable due to sensor noise or moving scene elements, along with jitter displacements comparable to those observed in the recent past. The spatial model captures jitter-induced changes that may not have been seen previously. Change is declared in pixels whose current values are inconsistent with both models.

The radiological transportation risk & consequence program, RADTRAN, has recently added an updated loss of lead shielding (LOS) model to it most recent version, RADTRAN 6.0. The LOS model was used to determine dose estimates to first-responders during a spent nuclear fuel transportation accident. Results varied according to the following: type of accident scenario, percent of lead slump, distance to shipment, and time spent in the area. This document presents a method of creating dose estimates for first-responders using RADTRAN with potential accident scenarios. This may be of particular interest in the event of high speed accidents or fires involving cask punctures.

Computation of soil moisture content from thermalized neutron counts for the T-Farm Interim cover requires a calibration relationship but none exists for 2-in tubes. A number of calibration options are available for the neutron probe, including vendor calibration, field calibration, but none of these methods were deemed appropriate for the configuration of interest. The objective of this work was to develop a calibration relation for converting neutron counts measured in 2-in access tubes to soil water content. The calibration method chosen for this study was a computational approach using the Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport Code (MCNP). Model calibration was performed using field measurements in the Hanford calibration models with 6-in access tubes, in air and in the probe shield. The bet-fit model relating known water content to measured neutron counts was an exponential model that was essentially equivalent to that currently being used for 6-in steel cased wells. The MCNP simulations successfully predicted the neutron count rate for the neutron shield and the three calibration models for which data were collected in the field. However, predictions for air were about 65% lower than the measured counts . This discrepancy can be attributed to uncertainties in the configuration used for the …

A complex fracture model employing two populations for diffusion and sorption is proposed to analyze three representative single-well injection-withdrawal (SWIW) tracer tests from Forsmark and Laxemar, the two sites under investigation by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB). One population represents the semi-infinite rock matrix and the other represents finite blocks that can become saturated, thereafter accepting no further diffusion or sorption. The diffusion and sorption parameters of the models are inferred by matching tracer breakthrough curves (BTCs). Three tracers are simultaneously injected, uranine (Ur), which is conservative, and rubidium (Rb) and cesium (Cs), which are non-conservative. For non-sorbing tracer uranine, the finite blocks become saturated with test duration of the order of 10 hours, and both the finite and the semi-infinite populations play a distinct role in controlling BTCs. For sorbing tracers Rb and Cs, finite blocks do not saturate, but act essentially as semi-infinite, and thus BTC behavior is comparable to that obtained for a model containing only a semi-infinite rock matrix. The ability to obtain good matches to BTCs for both sorbing and non-sorbing tracers for these three different SWIW data sets demonstrates that the two-population complex fracture model may be a useful conceptual …

Job generation has been a part of the national dialogue surrounding energy policy and renewable energy (RE) for many years. RE advocates tout the ability of renewable energy to support new job opportunities in rural America and the manufacturing sector. Others argue that spending on renewable energy is an inefficient allocation of resources and can result in job losses in the broader economy. The report, Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources, from King Juan Carlos University in Spain, is one recent addition to this debate. This report asserts that, on average, every renewable energy job in Spain 'destroyed' 2.2 jobs in the broader Spanish economy. The authors also apply this ratio to the U.S. context to estimate expected job loss from renewable energy development and policy in the United States. This memo discusses fundamental and technical limitations of the analysis by King Juan Carlos University and notes critical assumptions implicit in the ultimate conclusions of their work. The memo also includes a review of traditional employment impact analyses that rely on accepted, peer-reviewed methodologies, and it highlights specific variables that can significantly influence the results of traditional employment impact analysis.

The goal of this study is to examine the marginal lands in Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies and evaluate their biomass productivity potential. Twelve categories of marginal lands are identified using the Global Agro-Ecological Zones system of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

The Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) Project is tasked with selecting a high temperature gas reactor technology that will be capable of generating electricity and supplying large amounts of process heat. The NGNP is presently being designed as a helium-cooled high temperature gas reactor (HTGR) with a large graphite core. The graphite baseline characterization project is conducting the research and development (R&D) activities deemed necessary to fully qualify nuclear-grade graphite for use in the NGNP reactor. Establishing nonirradiated thermomechanical and thermophysical properties by characterizing lot-to-lot and billet-to-billet variations (for probabilistic baseline data needs) through extensive data collection and statistical analysis is one of the major fundamental objectives of the project. The reactor core will be made up of stacks of graphite moderator blocks. In order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the varying characteristics in a wide range of suitable graphites, any of which can be classified as “nuclear grade,” an experimental program has been initiated to develop an extensive database of the baseline characteristics of numerous candidate graphites. Various factors known to affect the properties of graphite will be investigated, including specimen size, spatial location within a graphite billet, specimen orientation within a billet (either parallel to [P] …

Life cycle inventory data are the primary inputs for conducting life cycle assessment studies. Studies based on high-quality data that are consistent, accurate, and relevant allow for robust, defensible, and meaningful results.

FEMP Water Efficiency Best Management Practice #14 Case Study: Overview of the water reclamation and reuse program at the U.S. Army's Fort Carson.

Projects for the very-high-temperature reactor (VHTR) program provide data in support of Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing of the VHTR. Fuel and materials to be used in the reactor are tested and characterized to quantify performance in high temperature and high fluence environments. The VHTR Program has established the NGNP Data Management and Analysis System (NDMAS) to ensure that VHTR data are (1) qualified for use, (2) stored in a readily accessible electronic form, and (3) analyzed to extract useful results. This document focuses on the first NDMAS objective. It describes the data streams associated with the first Advanced Gas Reactor (AGR-1) experiment, the processing of these data within NDMAS, and reports the interim FY09 qualification status of the AGR-1 data to date. Data qualification activities within NDMAS for specific types of data are determined by the data qualification category, which is assigned by the data generator, and include: (1) capture testing, to confirm that the data stored within NDMAS are identical to the raw data supplied, (2) accuracy testing, to confirm that the data are an accurate representation of the system or object being measured, and (3) documentation that the data were collected under an NQA-1 or equivalent QA program. …

FEMP Water Efficiency Best Management Practices #4 and #5 Case Study: Overview of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory grounds maintenance program and results.

The location of a radiating source can be determined by time-tagging the arrival of the radiated signal at a network of spatially distributed sensors. The accuracy of this approach depends strongly on the particular time-tagging algorithm employed at each of the sensors. If different techniques are used across the network, then the time tags must be referenced to a common fiducial for maximum location accuracy. In this report we derive the time corrections needed to temporally align leading-edge, time-tagging techniques with peak-picking algorithms. We focus on broadband radio frequency (RF) sources, an ionospheric propagation channel, and narrowband receivers, but the final results can be generalized to apply to any source, propagation environment, and sensor. Our analytic results are checked against numerical simulations for a number of representative cases and agree with the specific leading-edge algorithm studied independently by Kim and Eng (1995) and Pongratz (2005 and 2007).

An update to the FY 2007 assessment of the state of technical research progress toward biochemical process goals, quantified in terms of Minimum Ethanol Selling Price.

Multiple small-scale projects have been undertaken to investigate advanced instrumentation solutions for safeguard measurement challenges associated with advanced fuel cycle facilities and next-generation fuel reprocessing installations. These activities are in support of the U.S. Department of Energy's Fuel Cycle Research and Development program and its Materials Protection, Accounting, and Control for Transmutation (MPACT) campaign. 1) Work was performed in a collaboration with the University of Michigan (Prof. Sara Pozzi, co-PI) to investigate the use of liquid-scintillator radiation detectors for assaying mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel, to characterize its composition and to develop advanced digital pulse-shape discrimination algorithms for performing time-correlation measurements in the MOX fuel environment. This work included both simulations and experiments and has shown that these techniques may provide a valuable approach for use within advanced safeguard measurement scenarios. 2) Work was conducted in a collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Dr. Paul Hausladen, co-PI) to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the fast-neutron coded-aperture imaging technique for locating and characterizing fissile material, and as a tool for performing hold-up measurements in fissile material handling facilities. This work involved experiments at Idaho National Laboratory, using MOX fuel and uranium metal, in both passive and active interrogation configurations. A complete analysis …

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has been researching the application of solid-oxide electrolysis cell for large-scale hydrogen production from steam over a temperature range of 800 to 900ºC. The INL has been testing various solid oxide cell designs to characterize their electrolytic performance operating in the electrolysis mode for hydrogen production. Some results presented in this report were obtained from cells, with an active area of 16 cm2 per cell. The electrolysis cells are electrode-supported, with ~10 µm thick yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolytes, ~1400 µm thick nickel-YSZ steam-hydrogen electrodes, and manganite (LSM) air-oxygen electrodes. The experiments were performed over a range of steam inlet mole fractions (0.1 to 0.6), gas flow rates, and current densities (0 to 0.6 A/cm2). Steam consumption rates associated with electrolysis were measured directly using inlet and outlet dewpoint instrumentation. On a molar basis, the steam consumption rate is equal to the hydrogen production rate. Cell performance was evaluated by performing DC potential sweeps at 800, 850, and 900°C. The voltage-current characteristics are presented, along with values of area-specific resistance as a function of current density. Long-term cell performance is also assessed to evaluate cell degradation. Details of the custom single-cell test apparatus developed for these …

The Doppler feedback mechanism is a major contributor to the passive safety of gas-cooled, graphite-moderated high temperature reactors that use fuel based on Tristructural-Isotropic coated particles. It follows that the correct prediction of the magnitude and time-dependence of this feedback effect is essential to the conduct of safety analyses for these reactors. We present a fuel conduction model for obtaining better estimates of the temperature feedback during moderate and fast transients. The fuel model has been incorporated in the CYNOD-THERMIX-KONVEK suite of coupled codes as a single TRISO particle within each calculation cell. The heat generation rate is scaled down from the neutronic solution and a Dirichlet boundary condition is imposed as the bulk graphite temperature from the thermal-hydraulic solution. This simplified approach yields similar results to those obtained with more complex methods, requiring multi-TRISO calculations within one control volume, but with much less computational effort. An analysis of the hypothetical total control ejection in the PBMR-400 design verifies the performance of the code during fast transients. In addition, the analysis of the earthquake-initiated event in the PBMR-400 design verifies the performance of the code during slow transients. These events clearly depict the improvement in the predictions of the fuel …

This report documents the evaluation of the information and data available on the unclassified source term and radionuclide contamination for CAU 97: Yucca Flat/Climax Mine. The total residual inventory of radionuclides associated with one or more tests is known as the radiologic source term (RST). The RST is comprised of radionuclides in water, glass, or other phases or mineralogic forms. The hydrologic source term (HST) of an underground nuclear test is the portion of the total RST that is released into the groundwater over time following the test. In this report, the HST represents radionuclide release some time after the explosion and does not include the rapidly evolving mechanical, thermal, and chemical processes during the explosion. The CAU 97: Yucca Flat/Climax Mine has many more detonations and a wider variety of settings to consider compared to other CAUs. For instance, the source term analysis and evaluation performed for CAUs 101 and 102: Central and Western Pahute Mesa and CAU 98: Frenchman Flat did not consider vadose zone attenuation because many detonations were located near or below the water table. However, the large number of Yucca Flat/Climax Mine tests and the location of many tests above the water table warrant a …

The purpose of this document is to provide a guide for using the current version of the Verifiable Fuel Cycle Simulation (VISION) model. This is a complex model with many parameters; the user is strongly encouraged to read this user guide before attempting to run the model. This model is an R&D work in progress and may contain errors and omissions. It is based upon numerous assumptions. This model is intended to assist in evaluating “what if” scenarios and in comparing fuel, reactor, and fuel processing alternatives at a systems level for U.S. nuclear power. The model is not intended as a tool for process flow and design modeling of specific facilities nor for tracking individual units of fuel or other material through the system. The model is intended to examine the interactions among the components of a fuel system as a function of time varying system parameters; this model represents a dynamic rather than steady-state approximation of the nuclear fuel system. VISION models the nuclear cycle at the system level, not individual facilities, e.g., “reactor types” not individual reactors and “separation types” not individual separation plants. Natural uranium can be enriched, which produces enriched uranium, which goes into fuel …

This document presents the NGNP Critical PASSCs and defines their technical maturation path through Technology Development Roadmaps (TDRMs) and their associated Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs). As the critical PASSCs advance through increasing levels of technical maturity, project risk is reduced and the likelihood of within-budget and on-schedule completion is enhanced. The current supplier-generated TRLs and TDRMs for a 750–800°C reactor outlet temperature (ROT) specific to each supplier are collected in Appendix A.