This report includes a discussion of the groundwater flow direction and rate, the groundwater analytical results, and the methane monitoring results.

The Gordon Research Conference on Applied and Environmental Microbiology was held at Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut, July 22-27, 2001. The conference was attended by 121 participants. The attendees represented the spectrum of endeavor in this field, coming from academia, industry, and government laboratories, and included US and foreign scientists, senior researchers, young investigators, and students. Emphasis was placed on current unpublished research and discussion of the future target areas in this field. There was a conscious effort to stimulate discussion about the key issues in the field today. Session topics included the following: Environmental and applied genomics, Cell-to-cell signaling and multicellular behavior, Emerging technologies and methods, Novel metabolisms and ecosystems, Directed evolution of enzymes and pathways, Symbiotic and trophic relationships, Synthesis and application of novel biopolymers, and Microbes at the oxic-anoxic interface. There was also a special lecture titled ''Under the umbrella of the big tree: microbial biology into the 21st century.''

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Adaptive optics for the 30-100 meter class telescopes now being considered will require an extension in almost every area of AO system component technology. In this paper, we present scaling laws and strawman error budgets for AO systems on extremely large telescopes (ELTs) and discuss the implications for component technology and computational architecture. In the component technology area, we discuss the advanced efforts being pursued at the NSF Center for Adaptive Optics (CfAO) in the development of large number of degrees of freedom deformable mirrors, wavefront sensors, and guidestar lasers. It is important to note that the scaling of present wavefront reconstructor algorithms will become computationally intractable for ELTs and will require the development of new algorithms and advanced numerical mathematics techniques. We present the computational issues and discuss the characteristics of new algorithmic approaches that show promise in scaling to ELT AO systems.

This manuscript is meant to give a short summary of the advantages of high order schemes and suitable test problems which can properly illustrate these advantages.

The next major step in magnetic fusion studies will be the construction of a burning plasma (BP) experiment where the goals will be to achieve and understand the plasma behavior with the internal heating provided by fusion-generated alpha particles. Two devices with these physics goals have been proposed: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and the Fusion Ignition Research Experiment (FIRE). Extensive conceptual design work for the instrumentation to try to meet the physics demands has been done for these devices, especially ITER. This article provides a new look at the measurements specifically important for understanding the physics aspects of the alpha particles taking into account two significant events. The first is the completion of physics experiments on the Joint European Torus (JET) and the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) with deuterium-tritium fueling with the first chances to study alpha physics and the second is the realization that relatively compact plasmas, making use of advanced tokamak plasma concepts, are the most probable route to burning plasmas and ultimately a fusion reactor.

Development of an ANSI/ANS Standard for the training and qualification of criticality safety engineers has been underway for nearly one year. The working group for this Standard is comprised of criticality safety experts from regulatory, licensee and contractor organizations. Its goal is to develop a standard that can be uniformly adopted, that covers all criticality safety engineer qualification levels, and that includes all required competencies such that most of the qualifications can be easily transferred between sites. This status report is presented to let the general criticality safety community know of progress on the Standard, and to solicit feedback to the working group as it continues work on ANSI/ANS-8.26.

This paper presents a description and analysis of a high-efficiency hydrogen production system. The main component of the system is a novel steam electrolyzer. In conventional electrolyzers, oxygen produced from electrolysis is usually released into the environment. In this design, natural gas is used to react with the oxygen produced in the electrolysis, reducing reduce the chemical potential difference across the electrolyzer, thus minimizing electricity consumption. The oxygen produced from the electrolysis is consumed in either a total oxidation or a partial oxidation reaction with natural gas. Experiments performed on single cells shown a voltage reduction as much as 1 V when compared to conventional electrolyzers. A heat recovery system (heat exchangers and catalytic converter) has been incorporated to the electrolyzer to obtain a high efficiency hydrogen production system. Results from a thermodynamic analysis show up to 70% efficiency with respect to primary energy source.

A question and answer session regarding all aspects of EPAct's State and Alternative Fuel Provider program, including compliance guidelines.

A detailed description of the history of EPAct's State and Alternative Fuel Provider Program and what fleets need to do to comply to its regulations.

The U.S. has generally lacked the capability for an iterative process of detailed structural design, manufacturing, and testing at the full blade level to achieve specific structural performance, cost, and weight targets. This project examined the effects that different composites processing methods had on the performance of representative blade substructures. In addition, the results of the testing of these substructures was used to validate NuMAD, the design tool developed at Sandia National Laboratories.

When the field of modern publishing was on a collision course with telecommunications, publishing organizations had to come up to speed in fields that were, heretofore, completely foreign and technologically forbidding to them. For generations, the technology of publishing centered on offset lithography, typesetting, and photography--fields that saw evolutionary and incremental change from the time of Guttenberg. But publishing now includes making information available over the World Wide Web--Internet publishing--with its ever-accelerating rate of technological change and dependence on computers and networks. Clearly, we need a methodology to help anyone in the field of Internet publishing plan for the future, and there is a well-known, well-tested technique for just this purpose--Scenario Planning. Scenario Planning is an excellent tool to help organizations make better decisions in the present based on what they identify as possible and plausible scenarios of the future. Never was decision making more difficult or more crucial than during the years of this study, 1996-1999. This thesis takes the position that, by applying Scenario Planning, the Technical Information Department at LLNL, a large government laboratory (and organizations similar to it), could be confident that moving into the telecommunications business of Internet publishing stood a very good chance of …

The L-Area cavitation test was designed to better define the onset of cavitation in the reactor system. The onset of gas evolution in the effluent piping and pump cavitation was measured using state-of-the-art equipment to provide data with a high confidence and low uncertainty level. The limits calculated from the new data will allow an approximate two percent increase in reactor power if the reactor is effluent temperature-limited with no compromise in reactor safety.

The BABAR Detector, located in the PEP-II B-Factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, includes a large 1.5 Tesla superconducting solenoid, 2.8 m bore and length 3.7 m. The two layer solenoid is wound with an aluminum stabilized conductor which is graded axially to produce a {+-} 3% field uniformity in the tracking region. This paper summarizes the 3 year design, fabrication and testing program of the superconducting solenoid. The work was carried out by an international collaboration between INFN, LLNL and SLAC. The coil was constructed by Ansaldo Energia. Critical current measurements of the superconducting strand, cable and conductor, cool-down, operation with the thermo-siphon cooling, fast and slow discharges, and magnetic forces are discussed in detail.

The High Level Waste (HLW) Salt Disposition Systems Engineering Team was formed on March 13, 1998, and chartered to identify options, evaluate alternatives, and recommend a selected alternative(s) for processing HLW salt to a permitted wasteform. This requirement arises because the existing In-Tank Precipitation process at the Savannah River Site, as currently configured, cannot simultaneously meet the HLW production and Authorization Basis safety requirements. This engineering study was performed in four phases. This document provides the technical bases, assumptions, and results of this engineering study.

We summarize our lattice QCD study of the form factor at zero recoil in the decay {bar B} {yields} D*{ell}{bar {nu}}. After careful consideration of all sources of systematic uncertainty, we find, h{sub A{sub 1}}(1) = 0.913{sub -17-30}{sup +24+17}, where the first uncertainty is from statistics and fitting while the second combined uncertainty is from all other systematic effects.

Energy deposition issues are extremely important in the Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC) with huge energy stored in its 20 TeV (Stage-1) and 87.5 TeV (Stage-2) beams. The status of the VLHC design on these topics, and possible solutions of the problems are discussed. Protective measures are determined based on the operational and accidental beam loss limits for the prompt radiation dose at the surface, residual radiation dose, ground water activation, accelerator components radiation damage and quench stability. The beam abort and beam collimation systems are designed to protect accelerator from accidental and operational beam losses, IP region quadrupoles from irradiation by the products of beam-beam collisions, and to reduce the accelerator-induced backgrounds in the detectors.

A milestone report that describes the NREL's progress and activities related to the DOE FY2001 Annual Operating Plan milestone entitled ''Benchmark 2 new production or pre-production hybrids with ADVISOR.''

From cost to availability, the fact sheet presents the various the advantages of using biodiesel fuel in fleet vehicles. It also offers a number of real-life success stories.

A great deal of physics understanding is required for the design and construction of thermonuclear weapons. Since the days of the Manhattan Project, physicists have relied on a combination of theory and experiment for the successful creation of nuclear weapons. One of the great experimental difficulties faced by the designers of nuclear weapons is that nuclear weapons operate in a high energy density regime not found on the earth except during a nuclear weapon detonation. Replicating these conditions is difficult unless a nuclear weapon is actually detonated. One of the reasons for the large number of expensive tests at the Nevada Test Site was that there was no other way to obtain the required data. When the laser was first developed many in the weapons program realized that the ability of a laser to concentrate a large amount of energy in a small volume could create experimental conditions that would be useful for studying the physics of nuclear weapons. The national weapons labs began investigating this possibility and started building ever bigger and better lasers. The vast difference in energy scales between the laboratory and a nuclear weapons explosion meant large and powerful lasers were required. By the early '80s …

This paper is extracted from a full-length technical report that presents a detailed analysis of the differences in thermal performance between the SIP and frame units and describes the validation of the STEM method.

There are a number of exothermic chemical reactions which might benefit from the temperature control and freedom from catalyst fouling provided by the ebullated bed reactor technology. A particularly promising area is production of oxygenated chemicals, such as alcohols and ethers, from synthesis gas, which can be economically produced from coal or biomass. The ebullated bed operation requires that the small-diameter ({approx}1/32 inch) catalyst particles have enough mechanical strength to avoid loss by attrition. However, all of the State Of The Art (SOTA) catalysts and advanced catalysts for the purpose are low in mechanical strength. The patented carbon-coated catalyst technology developed in our laboratory converts catalyst particles with low mechanical strength to strong catalysts suitable for ebullated bed application. This R&D program is concerned with the modification on the mechanical strength of the SOTA and advanced catalysts so that the ebullated bed technology can be utilized to produce valuable oxygenated chemicals from syngas/CO{sub 2} efficiently and economically. The objective of this R&D program is to study the technical and economic feasibility of selective production of high-value oxygenated chemicals from synthesis gas and CO{sub 2} mixed feed in an ebullated bed reactor using carbon-coated catalyst particles.

The role of humic acid (HA) in the biodegradation of toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) has been the subject of controversy, particularly in unsaturated environments. By utilizing an infrared spectromicroscope and a very bright, nondestructive synchrotron photon source, we monitored in situ and, over time, the influence of HA on the progression of degradation of pyrene (a model PAH) by a bacterial colony on a magnetite surface. Our results indicate that HA dramatically shortens the onset time for PAH biodegradation from 168 to 2 h. In the absence of HA, it takes the bacteria about 168 h to produce sufficient glycolipids to solubilize pyrene and make it bioavailable for biodegradation. These results will have large implications for the bioremediation of contaminated soils.

The recent development of light-weight foams has led to novel light-weight high-strength carbon based materials and structures. These materials exhibit very high specific strengths and low thermal conductivities. Likewise, the novel development of a very high thermal conductivity graphite foam will lead to novel ''out-of-the-box'' solutions for thermal management problems. With a thermal conductivity equivalent to aluminum 6061 and 1/5th the weight, this material is an enabling technology for thermal management problems ranging from heat sinks to radiators and satellite panels to aircraft heat exchangers. The ability to be machined into a heat sink resembling a metallic heat sink, have comparable thermal conductivities to metallic heat sinks, yet be 1/5th the weight is a significant advance to thermal management. However, the foam is not as rugged as the metallic heat sinks in its foamed and graphitized state. Therefore, the material must be rigidized to improve its durability under high demands applications, such as military vehicles. Therefore, this program focuses on several techniques previously conceived to rigidize the foam: carbon CVI, metalization (plating), and polymer coating. These techniques were all explored with success and should lead to improved heat sinks.