This document constitutes an addendum to the September 1998, Closure Report for Corrective Action Unit 404: Roller Coaster Lagoons and Trench, Tonopah Test Range, Nevada as described in the document Recommendations and Justifications for Modifications for Use Restrictions Established under the U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Site Office Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order (UR Modification document) dated February 2008. The UR Modification document was approved by NDEP on February 26, 2008. The approval of the UR Modification document constituted approval of each of the recommended UR modifications. In conformance with the UR Modification document, this addendum consists of: • This cover page that refers the reader to the UR Modification document for additional information • The cover and signature pages of the UR Modification document • The NDEP approval letter • The corresponding section of the UR Modification document This addendum provides the documentation justifying the modification of the UR for CAS TA-03-001-TARC Roller Coaster Lagoons. This UR was established as part of Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order (FFACO) corrective actions and was based on the presence of contaminants at concentrations greater than the action levels established at the time of the initial investigation …

This paper delivers a brief survey of renewable energy technologies applicable to Alaska's climate, latitude, geography, and geology. We first identify Alaska's natural renewable energy resources and which renewable energy technologies would be most productive. e survey the current state of renewable energy technologies and research efforts within the U.S. and, where appropriate, internationally. We also present information on the current state of Alaska's renewable energy assets, incentives, and commercial enterprises. Finally, we escribe places where research efforts at Sandia National Laboratories could assist the state of Alaska with its renewable energy technology investment efforts.

A small-column ion exchange (SCIX) system has been proposed for removing cesium from the supernate and dissolved salt solutions in the high-level-waste tanks at the Savannah River Site (SRS). The SCIX system could use either crystalline silicotitanate (CST), an inorganic, non-regenerable sorbent, or spherical resorcinol-formaldehyde (RF), a new regenerable resin, to remove cesium from the waste solutions. The baseline method for eluting the cesium from the RF resin uses 15 bed volumes (BV) of 0.5 M nitric acid (HNO{sub 3}). The nitric acid eluate, containing the radioactive cesium, would be combined with the sludge from the waste tanks and would be converted into glass at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) at SRS. The amount of nitric acid that would be used to elute the RF resin, using the current elution protocol, exceeds the capacity of DWPF to destroy the nitrate ions and maintain the required chemical reducing environment in the glass melt. Installing a denitration evaporator at SRS is technically feasible but would add considerable cost to the project. Alternate methods for eluting the resin have been tested, including using lower concentrations of nitric acid, other acids, and changing the flow regimes. About 4 BV of 0.5 M HNO{sub …

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The purpose of this study was to examine alternative biomass-to-ethanol conversion process assumptions and configuration options to determine their relative effects on overall process economics. A process-flow-sheet computer model was used to determine the heat and material balance for each configuration that was studied. The heat and material balance was then fed to a costing spreadsheet to determine the impact on the ethanol selling price. By examining a number of operational and configuration alternatives and comparing the results to the base flow sheet, alternatives having the greatest impact the performance and cost of the overall system were identified and used to make decisions on research priorities. This report, which was originally published in December 2008, has been revised primarily to correct information presented in Appendix B -- Base Case Flow Sheets and Model Results. The corrections to Appendix B include replacement of several pages in Table B.1 that duplicated previous pages of the table. Other changes were made in Appendix B to correct inconsistencies between stream labels presented in the tables and the stream labels in the figures.

This report provides an analysis of the factors involved in the reuse of uranium recovered from commercial light-water-reactor (LWR) spent fuels (1) by reenrichment and recycling as fuel to LWRs and/or (2) by recycling directly as fuel to heavy-water-reactors (HWRs), such as the CANDU (registered trade name for the Canadian Deuterium Uranium Reactor). Reuse is an attractive alternative to the current Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) baseline plan, which stores the reprocessed uranium (RU) for an uncertain future or attempts to dispose of it as 'greater-than-Class C' waste. Considering that the open fuel cycle currently deployed in the United States already creates a huge excess quantity of depleted uranium, the closed fuel cycle should enable the recycle of the major components of spent fuel, such as the uranium and the hazardous, long-lived transuranic (TRU) actinides, as well as the managed disposal of fission product wastes. Compared with the GNEP baseline scenario, the reuse of RU in the uranium fuel cycle has a number of potential advantages: (1) avoidance of purchase costs of 11-20% of the natural uranium feed; (2) avoidance of disposal costs for a large majority of the volume of spent fuel that is …

In February 1997, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Nevada Operations Office (now known as the Nevada Site Office) issued the Mitigation Action Plan which addressed potential impacts described in the “Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Nevada Test Site and Off-Site Locations in the State of Nevada” (DOE/EIS 0243). The U.S. Department of Energy, Nevada Operations Office committed to several actions, including the preparation of an annual report, which summarizes waste shipments to and from the Nevada Test Site (NTS) Radioactive Waste Management Site (RWMS) at Area 5 and Area 3. No shipments were disposed of at Area 3 in fiscal year (FY) 2008. This document satisfies requirements regarding low-level radioactive waste (LLW) and mixed low-level radioactive waste (MLLW) transported to or from the NTS during FY 2008. No transuranic (TRU) waste shipments were made from or to the NTS during FY 2008.

This report summarizes the waste minimization efforts undertaken by National Security Technologies, LLC (NSTec), for the U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Site Office (NNSA/NSO), during calendar year 2008.

The Radiochemical Development Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been storing solid materials containing 233U for decades. Preparations are under way to process these materials into a form that is inherently safe from a nuclear criticality safety perspective. This will be accomplished by down-blending the {sup 233}U materials with depleted or natural uranium. At the request of the U.S. Department of Energy, a study has been performed using the SCALE sensitivity and uncertainty analysis tools to demonstrate how these tools could be used to validate nuclear criticality safety calculations of selected process and storage configurations. ISOTEK nuclear criticality safety staff provided four models that are representative of the criticality safety calculations for which validation will be needed. The SCALE TSUNAMI-1D and TSUNAMI-3D sequences were used to generate energy-dependent k{sub eff} sensitivity profiles for each nuclide and reaction present in the four safety analysis models, also referred to as the applications, and in a large set of critical experiments. The SCALE TSUNAMI-IP module was used together with the sensitivity profiles and the cross-section uncertainty data contained in the SCALE covariance data files to propagate the cross-section uncertainties ({Delta}{sigma}/{sigma}) to k{sub eff} uncertainties ({Delta}k/k) for each application model. The SCALE TSUNAMI-IP …

We assessed the feasibility of developing an aerial Distant Observer optical characterization tool for collector fields in concentrating solar power plants.

The objective if to determine whether the Department of Energy (Department) was adequately managing its nuclear materials provided to domestic licensees. The audit was performed from February 2007 to September 2008 at Department Headquarters in Washington, DC, and Germantown, MD; the Oak Ridge Office and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN. In addition, we visited or obtained data from 40 different non-Departmental facilities in various states. To accomplish the audit objective, we: (1) Reviewed Departmental and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requirements for the control and accountability of nuclear materials; (2) Analyzed a Nuclear Materials Management and Safeguards System (NMMSS) report with ending inventory balances for Department-owned nuclear materials dated September 30, 2007, to determine the amount and types of nuclear materials located at non-Department domestic facilities; (3) Held discussions with Department and NRC personnel that used NMMSS information to determine their roles and responsibilities related to the control and accountability over nuclear materials; (4) Selected a judgmental sample of 40 non-Department domestic facilities; (5) Met with licensee officials and sent confirmations to determine whether their actual inventories of Department-owned nuclear materials were consistent with inventories reported in the NMMSS; and, (6) Analyzed historical information related to the …

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorized the Department of Energy to guarantee loans for new or significantly improved energy production technologies that avoid, reduce, or sequester air pollutants and other greenhouse gases. As of December 2008, Congress authorized the Department to make $42.5 billion in loan guarantees to support innovative energy projects. These guarantees were authorized for up to 80% of the total project costs and were designed to promote the commercial use of innovative technologies. Under the terms of the Act, the loan guarantees are contingent upon reasonable prospect of repayment by the borrower. Consistent with the Energy Policy Act, the Department is responsible for soliciting and evaluating loan applications, approving loan guarantees, and monitoring project and loan guarantee performance. through December 2008, the Department had issued five solicitations for projects that support innovative clean coal technologies, energy efficiency, renewable energy, advanced electricity transmission and distribution, and nuclear and fossil energy projects. These solicitations were issued in three phases with the first in August 2006, and the final in September 2008. Eleven substantially complete applications requesting approximately $8.2 billion in loan guarantees had been received by the Department in response to the first solicitation. The Department had begun …

Various wireless technologies were field-tested in a six-story laboratory building to identify wireless technologies that can scale for future DR applications through very low node density power consumption, and unit cost. Data analysis included analysis of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), packet loss, and link quality at varying power levels and node densities. The narrowband technologies performed well, penetrating the floors of the building with little loss and exhibiting better range than the wideband technology. 900 MHz provided full coverage at 1 watt and substantially complete coverage at 500 mW at the test site. 900 MHz was able to provide full coverage at 100 mW with only one additional relay transmitter, and was the highest-performing technology in the study. 2.4 GHz could not provide full coverage with only a single transmitter at the highest power level tested (63 mW). However, substantially complete coverage was provided at 2.4 GHz at 63 mW with the addition of one repeater node.

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A model is presented to represent changes in the mechanical and transport characteristics of fractured rock that result from coupled mechanical and chemical effects. The specific influence is the elevation of dissolution rates on contacting asperities, which results in a stress- and temperature-dependent permanent closure. A model representing this pressure-dissolution-like behavior is adapted to define the threshold and resulting response in terms of fundamental thermodynamic properties of a contacting fracture. These relations are incorporated in a stress-stiffening model of fracture closure to define the stress- and temperature-dependency of aperture loss and behavior during stress and temperature cycling. These models compare well with laboratory and field experiments, representing both decoupled isobaric and isothermal responses. The model was applied to explore the impact of these responses on heated structures in rock. The result showed a reduction in ultimate induced stresses over the case where chemical effects were not incorporated, with permanent reduction in final stresses after cooling to ambient conditions. Similarly, permeabilities may be lower than they were in the case where chemical effects were not considered, with a net reduction apparent even after cooling to ambient temperature. These heretofore-neglected effects may have a correspondingly significant impact on the performance of heated …

A major yet unresolved quest in decoding the human genome is the identification of the regulatory sequences that control the spatial and temporal expression of genes. Distant-acting transcriptional enhancers are particularly challenging to uncover since they are scattered amongst the vast non-coding portion of the genome. Evolutionary sequence constraint can facilitate the discovery of enhancers, but fails to predict when and where they are active in vivo. Here, we performed chromatin immunoprecipitation with the enhancer-associated protein p300, followed by massively-parallel sequencing, to map several thousand in vivo binding sites of p300 in mouse embryonic forebrain, midbrain, and limb tissue. We tested 86 of these sequences in a transgenic mouse assay, which in nearly all cases revealed reproducible enhancer activity in those tissues predicted by p300 binding. Our results indicate that in vivo mapping of p300 binding is a highly accurate means for identifying enhancers and their associated activities and suggest that such datasets will be useful to study the role of tissue-specific enhancers in human biology and disease on a genome-wide scale.

Clean Cities Now is the official newsletter of DOE's Clean Cities program. It includes articles on coalition activities, fleet and stakeholder success stories, and helpful resources.

Observations of strongly enhanced optical transition radiation (OTR) following significant bunch compression of photoinjector beams by a chicane have been reported during the commissioning of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) accelerator and recently at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) linac. These localized transverse spatial features involve signal enhancements of nearly a factor of 10 and 100 in the APS case at the 150-MeV and 375-MeV OTR stations, respectively. They are consistent with a coherent process seeded by noise and may be evidence of a longitudinal space charge (LSC) microbunching instability which leads to coherent OTR (COTR) emissions. Additionally, we suggest that localized transverse structure in the previous self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) free-electron laser (FEL) data at APS in the visible-UV regime as reported at FEL02 may be attributed to such beam structure entering the FEL undulators and inducing the SASE startup at those structures. Separate beam structures 120 microns apart in x and 2.9 nm apart in wavelength were reported. The details of these observations and operational parameters will be presented.

MINOS is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment that uses two detectors separated by 734 km. The readout systems used for the two detectors are different and have to be independently calibrated. To verify and make a direct comparison of the calibrated response of the two readout systems, test beam data were acquired using a smaller calibration detector. This detector was simultaneously instrumented with both readout systems and exposed to the CERN PS T7 test beam. Differences in the calibrated response of the two systems are shown to arise from differences in response non-linearity, photomultiplier tube crosstalk, and threshold effects at the few percent level. These differences are reproduced by the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation to better than 1% and a scheme that corrects for these differences by calibrating the MC to match the data in each detector separately is presented. The overall difference in calorimetric response between the two readout systems is shown to be consistent with zero to a precision of 1.3% in data and 0.3% in MC with no significant energy dependence.

In this work, computer simulations are used to determine the influence of edge conditions on the overall performance of mesa diodes under dark and illuminated conditions. In particular, we examine the effect of edge shape on the I-V characteristics of the diode.

The IAEA, NRC, and DOE regulations and requirements for safeguarding nuclear material and facilities have been reviewed and each organization’s purpose, objectives, and scope are discussed in this report. Current safeguards approaches are re-examined considering technological advancements and how these developments are changing safeguards approaches used by these organizations. Additionally, the physical protection approaches required by the IAEA, NRC, and DOE were reviewed and the respective goals, objectives, and requirements are identified and summarized in this report. From these, a brief comparison is presented showing the high-level similarities among these regulatory organizations’ approaches to physical protection. The regulatory documents used in this paper have been assembled into a convenient reference library called the Nuclear Safeguards and Security Reference Library. The index of that library is included in this report, and DVDs containing the full library are available.

This subcontract report supplies timely data on the historical make-up of the corn ethanol industry and a current estimate of where the industry stands. The subcontractor has also reported on the expected future trends of the corn ethanol dry grind industry.

Corrective Action Unit (CAU) 371 is located in Areas 11 and 18 of the Nevada Test Site, which is approximately 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. Corrective Action Unit 371 is comprised of the two corrective action sites (CASs) listed below: • 11-23-05, Pin Stripe Contamination Area • 18-45-01, U-18j-2 Crater (Johnnie Boy) These sites are being investigated because existing information on the nature and extent of potential contamination is insufficient to evaluate and recommend corrective action alternatives. Additional information will be obtained by conducting a corrective action investigation before evaluating corrective action alternatives and selecting the appropriate corrective action for each CAS. The results of the field investigation will support a defensible evaluation of viable corrective action alternatives that will be presented in the Corrective Action Decision Document. The sites will be investigated based on the data quality objectives (DQOs) developed on November 19, 2008, by representatives of the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection; U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Site Office; Stoller-Navarro Joint Venture; and National Security Technologies, LLC. The DQO process was used to identify and define the type, amount, and quality of data needed to develop and evaluate appropriate corrective actions for …

The composite material research and development performed over the last year has greatly enhanced the capabilities of CTH for non-isotropic materials. The enhancements provide the users and developers with greatly enhanced capabilities to address non-isotropic materials and their constitutive model development. The enhancements to CTH are intended to address various composite material applications such as armor systems, rocket motor cases, etc. A new method for inserting non-isotropic materials was developed using Diatom capabilities. This new insertion method makes it possible to add a layering capability to a shock physics hydrocode. This allows users to explicitly model each lamina of a composite without the overhead of modeling each lamina as a separate material to represent a laminate composite. This capability is designed for computational speed and modeling efficiency when studying composite material applications. In addition, the layering capability also allows a user to model interlaminar mechanisms. Finally, non-isotropic coupling methods have been investigated. The coupling methods are specific to shock physics where the Equation of State (EOS) is used with a nonisotropic constitutive model. This capability elastically corrects the EOS pressure (typically isotropic) for deviatoric pressure coupling for non-isotropic materials.