Pacific Northwest National Laboratory supports Bechtel Hanford, Inc., in identifying and applying new technologies to clean up contaminated sites on the land bordering the Columbia River where nine nuclear reactors operated. During fiscal year 2004, PNNL screened more than 100 different technologies for potential application to site clean up.

In 2004, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory provided analyses, reviews, testing, and new tools to assist CH2M HILL Hanford Group, Inc. in accomplishing their River Protection Project objectives. These objectives are safe storage, retrieval, and treatment of radioactive waste from Hanford's tanks, closure of tanks, and disposal of treated wastes.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory managed a variety of technical and scientific efforts to support Fluor Hanford's work in cleaning up the Hanford Site. Work done for other Hanford contractors, the Waste Treatment Plant, and directly for the U.S. Department of Energy is summarized in the other booklets in this series.

The influence of ionic strength on the electrostatic interaction of viruses with environmentally relevant surfaces was determined for three viruses, MS2, Q{beta} and Norwalk. The environmental surface is modeled as charged Gouy-Chapman plane with and without a finite atomistic region (patch) of opposite charge. The virus is modeled as a particle comprised of ionizable amino acid residues in a shell surrounding a spherical RNA core of negative charge, these charges being compensated for by a Coulomb screening due to intercalated ions. Surface potential calculations for each of the viruses show excellent agreement with electrophoretic mobility and zeta potential measurements as a function of pH. The results indicate that the electrostatic interaction between the virus and the planar surface, mitigated by the ionic strength of the solute, is dependent upon the spatial distribution of the amino acid residues in the different viruses. Specifically, the order of interaction energies with the patch (MS2 greatest at 5 mM; Norwalk greatest at 20 mM) is dependent upon the ionic strength of the fluid as a direct result of the viral coat amino acid distributions. We have developed an atomistic-scale method of calculation of the binding energy of viruses to surfaces including electrostatic, van der …