Continuing its tradition of excellence, this Gordon Conference will focus on research at the forefront of the field of defects in semiconductors. The conference will have a strong emphasis on the control of defects during growth and processing, as well as an emphasis on the development of novel defect detection methods and first-principles defect theories. Electronic, magnetic, and optical properties of bulk, thin film, and nanoscale semiconductors will be discussed in detail. In contrast to many conferences, which tend to focus on specific semiconductors, this conference will deal with point and extended defects in a broad range of electronic materials. This approach has proved to be extremely fruitful for advancing fundamental understanding in emerging materials such as wide-band-gap semiconductors, oxides, sp{sup 2} carbon based-materials, and photovoltaic/solar cell materials, and in understanding important defect phenomena such as doping bottleneck in nanostructures and the diffusion of defects and impurities. The program consists of about twenty invited talks and a number of contributed poster sessions. The emphasis should be on work which has yet to be published. The large amount of discussion time provides an ideal forum for dealing with topics that are new and/or controversial.

This report summarizes the final program and provides the abstracts presented at the fourth American Society of Microbiology-sponsored conference on Cell-cell Communication in Bacteria, held November 6-9, 2011 in Miami, Florida. Bacteria are the paradigm for unicellular life, yet they also exhibit elaborate coordinated behaviors that often defy unicellularity. Research over the past two decades has revealed that a wide range of microbes communicate by diverse mechanisms. In most cases these microbial conversations occur through the exchange of diffusible signals, although there are also clear examples of contact-dependent communication. Many microbes use these signaling mechanisms to monitor and respond to population density, a process often described as quorum sensing. Interbacterial communication is not, however restricted to quorum sensing mechanisms, and there is mounting evidence that signaling can function in a range of different capacities. Communication between microorganisms has profound impacts on host interactions, as pathogens and commensals often regulate factors critical for interaction with their hosts via signal production and perception. The CCCB-4 conference provided a unique forum for the discussion, dissemination and exchange of new information and ideas among researchers working within this rapidly developing, yet mature field. Sessions were arranged around topics such as: the diversity of signal …

Results from the 9975 Surveillance Program at the Savannah River Site (SRS) are summarized for justification to extend the life of the 9975 packages currently stored in the K-Area Materials Storage (KAMS) facility from 10 years to 15 years. This justification is established with the stipulation that surveillance activities will continue throughout this extended time to ensure the continued integrity of the 9975 materials of construction and to further understand the currently identified degradation mechanisms. The current 10 year storage life was developed prior to storage. A subsequent report was later used to extend the qualification of the 9975 shipping packages for 2 years for shipping plus 10 years for storage. However the qualification for the storage period was provided by the monitoring requirements of the Storage and Surveillance Program. This report summarizes efforts to determine a new safe storage limit for the 9975 shipping package based on the surveillance data collected since 2005 when the surveillance program began. KAMS is a zero-release facility that depends upon containment by the 9975 to meet design basis storage requirements. Therefore, to confirm the continued integrity of the 9975 packages while stored in KAMS, a 9975 Storage and Surveillance Program was implemented alongside …

We report on the acceleration of annual daylighting simulations for fenestration systems in the Radiance ray-tracing program. The algorithm was optimized to reduce both the redundant data input/output operations and the floating-point operations. To further accelerate the simulation speed, the calculation for matrix multiplications was implemented using parallel computing on a graphics processing unit. We used OpenCL, which is a cross-platform parallel programming language. Numerical experiments show that the combination of the above measures can speed up the annual daylighting simulations 101.7 times or 28.6 times when the sky vector has 146 or 2306 elements, respectively.

Uranium-233 (t{sub 1/2} {approx} 1.59E5 years) is an artificial, fissile isotope of uranium that has significant importance in nuclear forensics. The isotope provides a unique signature in determining the origin and provenance of uranium-bearing materials and is valuable as a mass spectrometric tracer. Alpha spectrometry was employed in the critical evaluation of a {sup 233}U standard reference material (SRM-995) as a dual tracer system based on the in-growth of {sup 229}Th (t{sub 1/2} {approx} 7.34E3 years) for {approx}35 years following radiochemical purification. Preliminary investigations focused on the isotopic analysis of standards and unmodified fractions of SRM-995; all samples were separated and purified using a multi-column anion-exchange scheme. The {sup 229}Th/{sup 233}U atom ratio for SRM-995 was found to be 1.598E-4 ({+-} 4.50%) using recovery-corrected radiochemical methods. Using the Bateman equations and relevant half-lives, this ratio reflects a material that was purified {approx} 36.8 years prior to this analysis. The calculated age is discussed in contrast with both the date of certification and the recorded date of last purification.

In the fall of 2010, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) contracted with vendors to design and build 6CVS containment vessels as part of their effort to ship Fuel Derived Mixed Fission Product material. The 6CVS design is based on the Savannah River National Laboratory's (SRNL) design for 9975 and 9977 six inch diameter containment vessels. The main difference between the designs is that the 6CVS credits the inner O-ring seal as the containment boundary while the SRNL design credits the outer O-ring seal. Since the leak test must be done with the inner O-ring in place, the containment vessel does not have a pathway for getting the helium into the vessel during the leak test. The leak testing contractor was not able to get acceptable leak rates with the specified O-ring, but they were able to pass the leak test with a slightly larger O-ring. ANL asked the SRNL to duplicate the leak test vendor's method to determine the cause of the high leak rates. The SRNL testing showed that the helium leak indications were caused by residual helium left within the 6CVS Closure Assembly by the leak test technique, and by helium permeation through the Viton O-ring seals. After SRNL …

A dilution refrigerator is required for 50mK detector operation of CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search). Besides shielding the dilution refrigerator itself, the liquid nitrogen shield and liquid helium bath in the refrigerator cool the detector cryostat heat shields and cool electronics, resulting in significant external heat loads at 80K and at 4K. An Oxford Instruments Kelvinox 400 has served this role for ten years but required daily transfers of liquid nitrogen and liquid helium. Complicating the cryogen supply is the location 800 meters below ground in an RF shielded, class 10000 clean room at Soudan, MN. Nitrogen and helium re-liquefiers using cryocoolers were installed outside the clean room and continuously condense room temperature gas and return the liquids to the dilution refrigerator through a transfer line. This paper will describe the design, installation, controls and performance of liquefaction systems.

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Abstract Benchmarking of full-wave solvers for ICRF simulations is performed using plasma profiles and equilibria obtained from integrated self-consistent modeling predictions of four ITER plasmas. One is for a high performance baseline (5.3 T, 15 MA) DT H-mode. The others are for half-field, half-current plasmas of interest for the pre-activation phase with bulk plasma ion species being either hydrogen or He4. The predicted profiles are used by six full-wave solver groups to simulate the ICRF electromagnetic fields and heating, and by three of these groups to simulate the current-drive. Approximate agreement is achieved for the predicted heating power for the DT and He4 cases. Factor of two disagreements are found for the cases with second harmonic He3 heating in bulk H cases. Approximate agreement is achieved simulating the ICRF current drive.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will continuously image the entire sky visible from Cerro Pachon in northern Chile every 3-4 nights throughout the year. The LSST will provide data for a broad range of science investigations that require better than 1% photometric precision across the sky (repeatability and uniformity) and a similar accuracy of measured broadband color. The fast and persistent cadence of the LSST survey will significantly improve the temporal sampling rate with which celestial events and motions are tracked. To achieve these goals, and to optimally utilize the observing calendar, it will be necessary to obtain excellent photometric calibration of data taken over a wide range of observing conditions - even those not normally considered 'photometric'. To achieve this it will be necessary to routinely and accurately measure the full optical passband that includes the atmosphere as well as the instrumental telescope and camera system. The LSST mountain facility will include a new monochromatic dome illumination projector system to measure the detailed wavelength dependence of the instrumental passband for each channel in the system. The facility will also include an auxiliary spectroscopic telescope dedicated to measurement of atmospheric transparency at all locations in the sky during LSST …

Fish passage conditions through two spillways, a Francis turbine, and a regulating outlet (RO) at Detroit Dam on the North Santiam River in Oregon were evaluated by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Portland District, using Sensor Fish devices. The objective of the study was to describe and compare passage exposure conditions, identifying potential fish injury regions within the routes. The study was performed in July, October, and December 2009 concurrent with HI-Z balloon-tag studies by Normandeau Associates, Inc. Sensor Fish data were analyzed to estimate 1) exposure conditions, particularly exposure to severe strike, collision, and shear events by passage route sub-regions; 2) differences in passage conditions between passage routes; and 3) relationships to live-fish injury and mortality data estimates. Comparison of the three passage routes evaluated at Detroit Dam indicates that the RO passage route through the 5-ft gate opening was relatively the safest route for fish passage under the operating conditions tested; turbine passage was the most deleterious. These observations were supported also by the survival and malady estimates obtained from live-fish testing. Injury rates were highest for turbine and spillway passage. However, none of the passage routes tested is safe for …

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Quality assurance and optimization are essential elements of any serious technological endeavor, including efforts to improve energy efficiency. Commissioning is an important tool in this respect. The aim of commissioning new buildings is to ensure that they deliver-if not exceed-the performance and energy savings promised by their design. When applied to existing buildings, one-time or repeated commissioning (often called retrocommissioning) identifies the almost inevitable drift in energy performance and puts the building back on course, often surpassing the original design intent. In both contexts, commissioning is a systematic, forensic approach to improving performance, rather than a discrete technology.

This report compiles and analyzes all known wash and caustic leach laboratory studies. As further data is produced, this report will be updated. Included are aluminum mineralogical analysis results as well as a summation of the wash and leach procedures and results. Of the 177 underground storage tanks at Hanford, information was only available for five individual double-shell tanks, forty-one individual single-shell tanks (e.g. thirty-nine 100 series and two 200 series tanks), and twelve grouped tank wastes. Seven of the individual single-shell tank studies provided data for the percent of aluminum removal as a function of time for various caustic concentrations and leaching temperatures. It was determined that in most cases increased leaching temperature, caustic concentration, and leaching time leads to increased dissolution of leachable aluminum solids.

The synthesis of composite Pd membranes has been modified by the addition of a Al(OH){sub 3} graded layer and sequential annealing at high temperatures to obtain membranes with high permeance and outstanding selectivity stability for over 4000 hours at 450°C. Most of the membranes achieved in this work showed H{sub 2} flux well above 2010 DOE targets and in some case, also above 2015 DOE targets. Similar composite membranes were tested in water gas shift reaction atmospheres and showed to be stable with high CO conversion and high hydrogen recovery for over 1000 hours. The H{sub 2} permeance of composite Pd-Au membranes was studied as well as its resistance in H{sub 2}S containing atmospheres. H{sub 2}S poisoning of Pd-based membranes was reduced by the addition of Au and the loss undergone by membranes was found to be almost totally recoverable with 10-30 wt%Au. PSA technique was studied to test the possibility of H{sub 2}S and COS removal from feed stream with limited success since the removal of H{sub 2}S also led to the removal of a large fraction of the CO{sub 2}. The economics of a WGS bundle reactor, using the information of the membranes fabricated under this project and …

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A superconducting octupole magnet has seen extensive service as part of the ALPHA experiment at CERN. ALPHA has trapped antihydrogen, a crucial step towards performing precision measurements of anti-atoms. The octupole was made at the Direct Wind facility by the Superconducting Magnet Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The magnet was wound with a six-around-one NbTi cable about 1 mm in diameter. It is about 300 mm long, with a radius of 25 mm and a peak field at the conductor of 4.04 T. Specific features of the magnet, including a minimal amount of material in the coil and coil ends with low multipole content, were advantageous to its use in ALPHA. The magnet was operated for six months a year for five years. During this time it underwent about 900 thermal cycles (between 4K and 100K). A novel operational feature is that during the course of data-taking the magnet was repeatedly shut off from its 950 A operating current. The magnet quenches during the shutoff, with a decay constant of 9 ms. Over the course of the five years, the magnet was deliberately quenched many thousands of times. It still performs well.

We perform a Dalitz plot analysis of about 100,000 D{sub s}{sup +} decays to K{sup +}K{sup -}{pi}{sup +} and measure the complex amplitudes of the intermediate resonances which contribute to this decay mode. We also measure the relative branching fractions of D{sub s}{sup +} {yields} K{sup +}K{sup +}{pi}{sup -} and D{sub s}{sup +} {yields} K{sup +}K{sup +}K{sup -}. For this analysis we use a 384 fb{sup -1} data sample, recorded by the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy e{sup +}e{sup -} collider running at center-of-mass energies near 10.58 GeV.

This report describes the process and results of a demonstration of solid-state lighting (SSL) technology in a commercial parking lot lighting application, under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solid-State Lighting Technology GATEWAY Demonstration Program. The parking lot is for customers and employees of a Walmart Supercenter in Leavenworth, Kansas and this installation represents the first use of the LED Parking Lot Performance Specification developed by the DOE’s Commercial Building Energy Alliance. The application is a parking lot covering more than a half million square feet, lighted primarily by light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Metal halide wall packs were installed along the building facade. This site is new construction, so the installed baseline(s) were hypothetical designs. It was acknowledged early on that deviating from Walmart’s typical design would reduce the illuminance on the site. Walmart primarily uses 1000W pulse-start metal halide (PMH) lamps. In order to provide a comparison between both typical design and a design using conventional luminaires providing a lower illuminance, a 400W PMH design was also considered. As mentioned already, the illuminance would be reduced by shifting from the PMH system to the LED system. The Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES) provides recommended minimum illuminance values for …

The purpose of the high-level waste (HLW) glass melt rate study is two-fold: (1) to gain a better understanding of the impact of feed chemistry on melt rate through bench-scale testing, and (2) to develop a predictive tool for melt rate in support of the on-going frit development efforts for the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF). In particular, the focus is on predicting relative melt rates, not the absolute melt rates, of various HLW glass formulations solely based on feed chemistry, i.e., the chemistry of both waste and glass-forming frit for DWPF. Critical to the successful melt rate modeling is the accurate determination of the melting rates of various HLW glass formulations. The baseline procedure being used at the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is to; (1) heat a 4 inch-diameter stainless steel beaker containing a mixture of dried sludge and frit in a furnace for a preset period of time, (2) section the cooled beaker along its diameter, and (3) measure the average glass height across the sectioned face using a ruler. As illustrated in Figure 1-1, the glass height is measured for each of the 16 horizontal segments up to the red lines where relatively large-sized bubbles begin …

Wind power forecasting (WPF) provides important inputs to power system operators and electricity market participants. It is therefore not surprising that WPF has attracted increasing interest within the electric power industry. In this report, we document our research on improving statistical WPF algorithms for point, uncertainty, and ramp forecasting. Below, we provide a brief introduction to the research presented in the following chapters. For a detailed overview of the state-of-the-art in wind power forecasting, we refer to [1]. Our related work on the application of WPF in operational decisions is documented in [2]. Point forecasts of wind power are highly dependent on the training criteria used in the statistical algorithms that are used to convert weather forecasts and observational data to a power forecast. In Chapter 2, we explore the application of information theoretic learning (ITL) as opposed to the classical minimum square error (MSE) criterion for point forecasting. In contrast to the MSE criterion, ITL criteria do not assume a Gaussian distribution of the forecasting errors. We investigate to what extent ITL criteria yield better results. In addition, we analyze time-adaptive training algorithms and how they enable WPF algorithms to cope with non-stationary data and, thus, to adapt to …

Boehmite (e.g., aluminum oxyhydroxide) is a major non-radioactive component in Hanford and Savannah River nuclear tank waste sludge. Boehmite dissolution from sludge using caustic at elevated temperatures is being planned at Hanford to minimize the mass of material disposed of as high-level waste (HLW) during operation of the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP). To more thoroughly understand the chemistry of this dissolution process, we have developed an empirical kinetic model for aluminate production due to boehmite dissolution. Application of this model to Hanford tank wastes would allow predictability and optimization of the caustic leaching of aluminum solids, potentially yielding significant improvements to overall processing time, disposal cost, and schedule. This report presents an empirical kinetic model that can be used to estimate the aluminate production from the leaching of boehmite in Hanford waste as a function of the following parameters: (1) hydroxide concentration; (2) temperature; (3) specific surface area of boehmite; (4) initial soluble aluminate plus gibbsite present in waste; (5) concentration of boehmite in the waste; and (6) (pre-fit) Arrhenius kinetic parameters. The model was fit to laboratory, non-radioactive (e.g. 'simulant boehmite') leaching results, providing best-fit values of the Arrhenius A-factor, A, and apparent activation energy, E{sub A}, of A …