This brochure provides an overview of the challenges and successes of Berkeley, CA, a 2007 Solar America City awardee, on the path toward becoming a solar-powered community. Accomplishments, case studies, key lessons learned, and local resource information are given.

Historically, state and local governmental agencies have employed one of two models to deploy solar photovoltaic (PV) projects: (1) self-ownership (financed through a variety of means) or (2) third-party ownership through a power purchase agreement (PPA). Morris County, New Jersey, administrators recently pioneered a way to combine many of the benefits of self-ownership and third-party PPAs through a bond-PPA hybrid, frequently referred to as the Morris Model. At the request of the Department of Energy?s Solar Market Transformation group, NREL examined the hybrid model. This fact sheet describes how the hybrid model works, assesses the model?s relative advantages and challenges as compared to self-ownership and the third-party PPA model, provides a quick guide to project implementation, and assesses the replicability of the model in other jurisdictions across the United States.

UOP LLC, a Honeywell Company, Ford Motor Company, and Striatus, Inc., collaborated with Professor Craig Jensen of the University of Hawaii and Professor Vidvuds Ozolins of University of California, Los Angeles on a multi-year cost-shared program to discover novel complex metal hydrides for hydrogen storage. This innovative program combined sophisticated molecular modeling with high throughput combinatorial experiments to maximize the probability of identifying commercially relevant, economical hydrogen storage materials with broad application. A set of tools was developed to pursue the medium throughput (MT) and high throughput (HT) combinatorial exploratory investigation of novel complex metal hydrides for hydrogen storage. The assay programs consisted of monitoring hydrogen evolution as a function of temperature. This project also incorporated theoretical methods to help select candidate materials families for testing. The Virtual High Throughput Screening served as a virtual laboratory, calculating structures and their properties. First Principles calculations were applied to various systems to examine hydrogen storage reaction pathways and the associated thermodynamics. The experimental program began with the validation of the MT assay tool with NaAlH4/0.02 mole Ti, the state of the art hydrogen storage system given by decomposition of sodium alanate to sodium hydride, aluminum metal, and hydrogen. Once certified, a combinatorial …

The Advanced LWR Fuel Working Group first met in November of 2010 with the objective of looking 20 years ahead to the role that advanced fuels could play in improving light water reactor technology, such as waste reduction and economics. When the group met again in March 2011, the Fukushima incident was still unfolding. After the March meeting, the focus of the program changed to determining what we could do in the near term to improve fuel accident tolerance. Any discussion of fuels with enhanced accident tolerance will likely need to consider an advanced light water reactor with enhanced accident tolerance, along with the fuel. The Advanced LWR Fuel Working Group met in Washington D.C. on October 72-18, 2011 to continue discussions on this important topic.

Nearly four decades ago H-like and He-like resonantly photo-pumped laser schemes were proposed for producing X-ray lasers. However, demonstrating these schemes in the laboratory has proved to be elusive because of the difficulty of finding a strong resonant pump line. With the advent of the X-ray free electron laser (X-FEL) at the SLAC Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) we now have a tunable X-ray laser source that can be used to replace the pump line in previously proposed laser schemes and allow researchers to study the physics and feasibility of resonantly photo-pumped laser schemes. In this paper we use the X-FEL at 1174 eV to photo-pump the singly excited 1s2p state of He-like Ne to the doubly excited 2p3p state and model gain on the 2p3p-2p2s transition at 175 eV and the 2p3p-1s3p transition at 1017 eV. One motivation for studying this scheme is to explore possible quenching of the gain due to strong non-linear coupling effects from the intense X-FEL beam We compare this scheme with photo-pumping the He-like Ne ground state to the 1s3p singly excited state followed by lasing on the 3p-2s and 3d-2p transitions at 158 and 151 eV. Experiments are being planned at LCLS to …

The ILC Crab Cavity is positioned close to the IP and delivered luminosity is very sensitive to the wakefields induced in it by the beam. A set of couplers were designed to couple to and damp the spurious modes of the crab cavity. As the crab cavity operates using a dipole mode, it has different damping requirements from an accelerating cavity. A separate coupler is required for the monopole modes below the operating frequency of 3.9 GHz (known as the LOMs), the opposite polarization of the operating mode (the SOM), and the modes above the operating frequency (the HOMs). Prototypes of each of these couplers have been manufactured out of copper and measured attached to an aluminum nine cell prototype of the cavity and their external Q factors were measured. The results were found to agree well with numerical simulations.

This report documents the calendar Year 2010 radionuclide air emissions and resulting effective dose equivalent to the maximally exposed individual member of the public from operations at the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory Site. This report was prepared in accordance with the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 40, 'Protection of the Environment,' Part 61, 'National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants,' Subpart H, 'National Emission Standards for Emissions of Radionuclides Other than Radon from Department of Energy Facilities.'

A target's terminal ballistic effects involving explosively generated fragments, along with the original blast, are of critical importance for many different security and safety related applications. Personnel safety and protective building design are but a few of the practical disciplines that can gain from improved understanding combined loading effects. Traditionally, any engineering level analysis or design effort involving explosions would divide the target damage analysis into two correspondingly critical areas: blast wave and fragment related impact effects. The hypothesis of this paper lies in the supposition that a linear combination of a blast-fragment loading, coupled with an accurate target response description, can lead to a non-linear target damage effect. This non-linear target response could then stand as the basis of defining what a synergistic or combined frag-blast loading might actually look like. The table below, taken from Walters, et. al. categorizes some of the critical parameters driving any combined target damage effect and drives the evaluation of results. Based on table 1 it becomes clear that any combined frag-blast analysis would need to account for the target response matching similar ranges for the mechanics described above. Of interest are the critical times upon which a blast event or fragment impact …

EERE Wind Program Quarterly Newsletter - September 2011. In September, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it will award $43 million over the next five years to 41 projects across 20 states to speed technical innovations, lower costs, and shorten the timeline for deploying offshore wind energy systems. The projects will advance wind turbine design tools and hardware, improve information about U.S. offshore wind resources, and accelerate the deployment of offshore wind by reducing market barriers such as supply chain development, transmission and infrastructure. The projects announced in September focus on approaches to advancing offshore technology and removing market barriers to responsible offshore wind energy deployment. Funding is subject to Congressional appropriations.

This report covers the topics of discussion and the recommendations of the panel members. On December 8 and 9, 2010, the Geochemistry, Biogeochemistry, and Subsurface Science (GBSS) Science Theme Advisory Panel (STAP) convened for a more in-depth exploration of the five Science Theme focus areas developed at a similar meeting held in 2009. The goal for the fiscal year (FY) 2011 meeting was to identify potential topical areas for science campaigns, necessary experimental development needs, and scientific members for potential research teams. After a review of the current science in each of the five focus areas, the 2010 STAP discussions successfully led to the identification of one well focused campaign idea in pore-scale modeling and five longer-term potential research campaign ideas that would likely require additional workshops to identify specific research thrusts. These five campaign areas can be grouped into two categories: (1) the application of advanced high-resolution, high mass accuracy experimental techniques to elucidate the interplay between geochemistry and microbial communities in terrestrial ecosystems and (2) coupled computation/experimental investigations of the electron transfer reactions either between mineral surfaces and outer membranes of microbial cells or between the outer and inner membranes of microbial cells.

The use of fluorescent screens (e.g. YAG screens) and Optical Transition Radiation (OTR) screens for beam profile monitors provides a simple and widely used way to obtain detailed two dimensional intensity maps. What makes this possible is the availability of relatively inexpensive CCD cameras. For high precision measurements many possible error contributions need to be considered that have to do with properties of the fluorescent screens and of the CCDs. Saturation effects, reflections within and outside the screen, non-linearities, radiation damage, etc are often mentioned. Here we concentrate on an error source less commonly described, namely erroneous baseline subtraction, which is particularly important when fitting projected images. We show computer simulations as well as measurement results having remarkable sensitivity of the fitted profile widths to even partial suppression of the profile baseline data, which often arises from large pixel-to-pixel variations at low intensity levels. Such inadvertent baseline data suppression is very easy to miss as it is usually not obvious when inspecting projected profiles. In this report we illustrate this effect and discuss possible algorithms to automate the detection of this problem as well as some possible corrective measures.

In order to keep the electricity grid stable and the lights on, the power system relies on certain responses from its generating fleet. This presentation evaluates the potential for wind turbines and wind power plants to provide these services and assist the grid during critical times.

FACET is a new facility under construction at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The FACET beam line is designed to provide 23 GeV tightly focused and compressed electron and positron bunches for beam driven plasma wakefield acceleration research and other experiments. Achieving optimal beam parameters for various experimental conditions requires the optics capability for tuning in a sufficiently wide range. This will be achieved by using optics tuning systems (knobs). Design of such systems for FACET is discussed.

The SUPER-B detector solenoid has a strong 1.5 T field in the Interaction Region (IR) area, and its tails extend over the range of several meters. The main effect of the solenoid field is coupling of the horizontal and vertical betatron motion which must be corrected in order to preserve the small design beam size at the Interaction Point. The additional effects are orbit and dispersion caused by the angle between the solenoid and beam trajectories. The proposed correction system provides local compensation of the solenoid effects independently for each side of the IR. It includes 'bucking' solenoids to remove the solenoid field tails and a set of skew quadrupoles, dipole correctors and anti-solenoids to cancel linear perturbations to the optics. Details of the correction system are presented.

A major concern for the implementation of crab crossing in a future High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) is machine protection in an event of a fast crab-cavity failure. Certain types of abrupt crab-cavity amplitude and phase changes are simulated to characterize the effect of failures on the beam and the resulting particle-loss signatures. The time-dependent beam loss distributions around the ring and particle trajectories obtained from the simulations allow for a first assessment of the resulting beam impact on LHC collimators and on sensitive components around the ring. Results for the nominal LHC lattice is presented.

To minimize emittance growth in a long linac, it is necessary to control the wakefields by correcting the beam orbit excursions. In addition, the particle energy is made to vary along the length of the bunch to introduce a damping, known as the BNS damping, to the beam break-up effect. In this paper, we use a two-particle model to examine the relative magnitudes of the various orbit and dispersion functions involved. The results are applied to calculate the effect of a closed orbit bump and a misaligned structure. It is shown that wake-induced dispersion is an important contribution to the beam dynamics in long linacs with strong wakefields like SLC.

We investigate the nature of the mass-metallicity (M-Z) relation for long gamma-ray burst (LGRB) host galaxies. Recent studies suggest that the M-Z relation for local LGRB host galaxies may be systematically offset towards lower metallicities relative to the M-Z relation defined by the general star forming galaxy (SDSS) population. The nature of this offset is consistent with suggestions that low metallicity environments may be required to produce high mass progenitors, although the detection of several GRBs in high-mass, high-metallicity galaxies challenges the notion of a strict metallicity cut-off for host galaxies that are capable of producing GRBs. We show that the nature of this reported offset may be explained by a recently proposed anti-correlation between the star formation rate (SFR) and the metallicity of star forming galaxies. If low metallicity galaxies produce more stars than their equally massive, high-metallicity counterparts, then transient events that closely trace the SFR in a galaxy would be more likely to be found in these low metallicity, low mass galaxies. Therefore, the offset between the GRB and SDSS defined M-Z relations may be the result of the different methods used to select their respective galaxy populations, with GRBs being biased towards low metallicity, high SFR, …

Presents how to create effective community weatherization assistance programs to foster sustainable behavior.

Tests of the Standard Model with Electroweak Physics have been performed over many decades. In these proceedings, we present several analyses from the Tevatron involving single W or Z bosons. Electroweak (EW) physics has been crucial for discovering and confirming many aspects of the Standard Model (SM). Furthermore, through radiative corrections EW physics allows for indirect views of heavy particles. Indeed the relationship between W boson, top quark, and Higgs boson masses is instrumental in predicting at what mass the Higgs boson may finally be found. In these proceedings, we present several recent analyses from the Tevatron involving single W or Z bosons to test the SM. The Tevatron is a p {bar p} collider at {radical}s = 1.96 TeV located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. CDF and D0 are its two multi-purpose detectors concentrating on high P{sub T} physics. Both detectors are described in detail elsewhere.

The assessment of caprocks for geologic CO{sub 2} storage is a multi-scale endeavor. Investigation of a regional caprock - the Kirtland Formation, San Juan Basin, USA - at the pore-network scale indicates high capillary sealing capacity and low permeabilities. Core and wellscale data, however, indicate a potential seal bypass system as evidenced by multiple mineralized fractures and methane gas saturations within the caprock. Our interpretation of {sup 4}He concentrations, measured at the top and bottom of the caprock, suggests low fluid fluxes through the caprock: (1) Of the total {sup 4}He produced in situ (i.e., at the locations of sampling) by uranium and thorium decay since deposition of the Kirtland Formation, a large portion still resides in the pore fluids. (2) Simple advection-only and advection-diffusion models, using the measured {sup 4}He concentrations, indicate low permeability ({approx}10-20 m{sup 2} or lower) for the thickness of the Kirtland Formation. These findings, however, do not guarantee the lack of a large-scale bypass system. The measured data, located near the boundary conditions of the models (i.e., the overlying and underlying aquifers), limit our testing of conceptual models and the sensitivity of model parameterization. Thus, we suggest approaches for future studies to better assess the …

Alternative chicane-type beam lines are proposed for exact emittance exchange between horizontal phase space (x; x{prime}) and longitudinal phase space (z; {delta}). Methods to achieve exact phase space exchanges, i.e. mapping x to z, x{prime} to {delta}, z to x and {delta} to x{prime} are suggested. Methods to mitigate the thick-lens effect of the transverse cavity on emittance exchange are discussed. Some applications of the phase space exchanger and the feasibility of an emittance exchange experiment with the proposed chicane-type beam line at SLAC are discussed.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is interested in supporting manufacturing research and development (R&D) for fuel cell systems in the 10-1,000 kilowatt (kW) power range relevant to stationary and distributed combined heat and power applications, with the intent to reduce manufacturing costs and increase production throughput. To assist in future decision-making, DOE requested that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) provide a baseline understanding of the current levels of adoption of automation in manufacturing processes and flow, as well as of continuous processes. NREL identified and visited or interviewed key manufacturers, universities, and laboratories relevant to the study using a standard questionnaire. The questionnaire covered the current level of vertical integration, the importance of quality control developments for automation, the current level of automation and source of automation design, critical balance of plant issues, potential for continuous cell manufacturing, key manufacturing steps or processes that would benefit from DOE support for manufacturing R&D, the potential for cell or stack design changes to support automation, and the relationship between production volume and decisions on automation.

This study focused on creating a new tristructural isotropic (TRISO) coated particle fuel performance model and demonstrating the integration of this model into an existing system of neutronics and heat transfer codes, creating a user-friendly option for including fuel performance analysis within system design optimization and system-level trade-off studies. The end product enables both a deeper understanding and better overall system performance of nuclear energy systems limited or greatly impacted by TRISO fuel performance. A thorium-fueled hybrid fusion-fission Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) blanket design was used for illustrating the application of this new capability and demonstrated both the importance of integrating fuel performance calculations into mainstream design studies and the impact that this new integrated analysis had on system-level design decisions. A new TRISO fuel performance model named TRIUNE was developed and verified and validated during this work with a novel methodology established for simulating the actual lifetime of a TRISO particle during repeated passes through a pebble bed. In addition, integrated self-consistent calculations were performed for neutronics depletion analysis, heat transfer calculations, and then fuel performance modeling for a full parametric study that encompassed over 80 different design options that went through all three phases of analysis. Lastly, …

Residual impurities in manganese (Mn) are a big obstacle to obtaining high-performance CdMnTe (CMT) X-ray and gamma-ray detectors. Generally, the zone-refining method is an effective way to improve the material's purity. In this work, we purified the MnTe compounds combining the zone-refining method with molten Te, which has a very high solubility for most impurities. We confirmed the improved purity of the material by glow-discharge mass spectrometry (GDMS). We also found that CMT crystals from a multiply-refined MnTe source, grown by the vertical Bridgman method, yielded better performing detectors.