Conference

This document presents a summary of work and progress at the Hanford Engineer Works for December 1952. The report is divided into sections by department. A plant wide general summary is included at the beginning of the report, after which the departmental summaries begin. The Manufacturing Department reports plant statistics, and summaries for the Metal Preparation, Reactor and Separation sections. The Engineering Department`s section summarizes work for the Technical, Design, and Project Sections. Costs for the various departments are presented in the Financial Department`s summary. The Medical, Radiological Sciences, Utilities and General Services, Employee and Public Relations, and Community Real Estate and Services departments have sections presenting their monthly statistics, work, progress, and summaries.

On February 16, 1963 Production Test IP-573-1 was conducted at the K reactors to provide data to revaluate the adequacy of the last-ditch crosstie system. This test was run subsequent to rigorous mechanical cleaning of the crosstie system piping (January 9, 1963); therefore the resulting data reflects essentially clean line conditions. On November 1, 1963, approximately 8-1/2 months after the above-mentioned tests, a series of steady-state tests were conducted under authorization of Production Test IP-628-I. These tests vere designed to accomplish four major objectives: To evaluate the change in flow capability,of the crosstie system since the last test series; to test the ``worst case of crosstie flow capability. (This vas not run in February); to obtain hydraulic data pertinent to a proposed Modified Secondary System; and to obtain pressure drop and flow data on the crosstie system during flushing in order to revaluate the system adequacy, i.e., capacity, at a later date by comparing flushing data. This report contains the numerical results of the pressure and flow data obtained during these tests.

This HAPO report discusses the toxic effects of methyl isobutyl ketone, known commercially as hexone. Explosive limits are discussed, in addition to animal experimentation results.

New developments in vibration analysis better explain machinery resonance, through an example of drill bit chattering during machining of rusted steel. The vibration of an operating drill motor was measured, the natural frequency of an attached spring was measured, and the two frequencies were compared to show that the system was resonant. For resonance to occur, one of the natural frequencies of a structural component must be excited by a cyclic force of the same frequency. In this case, the frequency of drill bit chattering due to motor rotation equaled the spring frequency (cycles per second), and the system was unstable. A soft rust coating on the steel to be drilled permitted chattering to start at the drill bit tip, and the bit oscillated on and off of the surface, which increased the wear rate of the drill bit. This resonant condition is typically referred to as a motor critical speed. The analysis presented here quantifies the vibration associated with this particular critical speed problem, using novel techniques to describe resonance.

Specific inhibitors of MEK have been developed that efficiently inhibit the oncogenic RAF-MEK-ERK pathway. We employed a systems-based approach to identify breast cancer subtypes particularly susceptible to MEK inhibitors and to understand molecular mechanisms conferring resistance to such compounds. Basal-type breast cancer cells were found to be particularly susceptible to growth-inhibition by small-molecule MEK inhibitors. Activation of the PI3 kinase pathway in response to MEK inhibition through a negative MEK-EGFR-PI3 kinase feedback loop was found to limit efficacy. Interruption of this feedback mechanism by targeting MEK and PI3 kinase produced synergistic effects, including induction of apoptosis and, in some cell lines, cell cycle arrest and protection from apoptosis induced by proapoptotic agents. These findings enhance our understanding of the interconnectivity of oncogenic signal transduction circuits and have implications for the design of future clinical trials of MEK inhibitors in breast cancer by guiding patient selection and suggesting rational combination therapies.

There is great demand for thin functional coatings in the semiconductor, optics, electronics, medical, automotive and aerospace industries [1-13]. As fabricated components become smaller and more complex, the properties of the materials’ surface take on greater importance. Thin coatings play a key role in tailoring surfaces to give them the desired hardness, wear resistance, chemical inertness, and electrical characteristics. Diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings possess an array of desirable properties, including outstanding abrasion and wear resistance, chemical inertness, hardness, a low coefficient of friction and exceptionally high dielectric strength [14-22]. Diamond-like carbon is considered to be an amorphous material, containing a mixture of sp2 and sp3 bonded carbon. Based on the percentage of sp3 carbon and the hydrogen content, four different types of DLC coatings have been identified: tetrahedral carbon (ta-C), hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C:H) hard, a-C:H soft, and hydrogenated tetrahedral carbon (ta-C:H) [20,24,25]. Possessing the highest hardness of 80 GPa, ta-C possesses an sp3 carbon content of 80 to 88u%, and no appreciable hydrogen content whereas a-C:H soft possesses a hardness of less than 10 GPa, contains an sp3 carbon content of 60% and a hydrogen content between 30 to 50%. Methods used to deposit DLC coatings include ion beam …

This document summarizes the performance of the groundwater restoration systems installed by the Commodity Credit Corporation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (CCC/USDA) at the former CCC/USDA grain storage facility in Utica, Nebraska, during the fourth year of system operation, from December 1, 2007, until November 30, 2008. Performance in earlier years was reported previously (Argonne 2005, 2006, 2008). In the project at Utica, the CCC/USDA is cooperating with multiple state and federal agencies to remove carbon tetrachloride contamination from a shallow aquifer underlying the town and to provide supplemental treated groundwater for use in the restoration of a nearby wetlands area. Argonne National Laboratory assisted the CCC/USDA by providing technical oversight for the aquifer restoration effort and facilities during this review period. This document presents overviews of the aquifer restoration facilities (Section 2) and system operations (Section 3). The report then describes groundwater production results (Section 4); groundwater treatment results (Section 5); and associated maintenance, system modifications, and costs during the review period (Section 6). Section 7 summarizes the present year of operation.

The Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has entered into an interagency agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under which Argonne National Laboratory provides technical assistance for hazardous waste site characterization and remediation for the CCC/USDA. Carbon tetrachloride is the contaminant of primary concern at sites in Kansas where former CCC/USDA grain storage facilities were located. Argonne applies its QuickSite(reg sign) Expedited Site Characterization (ESC) approach to these former facilities. The QuickSite environmental site characterization methodology is Argonne's proprietary implementation of the ESC process (ASTM 1998). Argonne has used this approach at several former CCC/USDA facilities in Kansas, including Agenda, Agra, Everest, and Frankfort. The Argonne ESC approach revolves around a multidisciplinary, team-oriented approach to problem solving. The basic features and steps of the QuickSite methodology are as follows: (1) A team of scientists with diverse expertise and strong field experience is required to make the process work. The Argonne team is composed of geologists, geochemists, geophysicists, hydrogeologists, chemists, biologists, engineers, computer scientists, health and safety personnel, and regulatory staff, as well as technical support staff. Most of the staff scientists are at the Ph.D. level; each has on average, more than 15 …

The United States Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM) has established a Performance Assessment Community of Practice (PA CoP) to foster the sharing of information among performance assessment (PA) and risk assessment practitioners, regulators and oversight personnel. The general intent is to contribute to continuous improvement in the consistency, technical adequacy and quality of implementation of PAs and risk assessments around the DOE Complex. The PA CoP activities have involved commercial disposal facilities and international participants to provide a global perspective. The PA CoP has also sponsored annual technical exchanges as a means to foster improved communication and to share lessons learned from on-going modelling activities. The PA CoP encourages activities to provide programmatic and technical assistance in the form of sharing experience and lessons learned with practitioners during the development of PAs and risk assessments. This assistance complements DOE-EM reviews through the Low-Level Waste Disposal Facility Federal Review Group (LFRG) that are conducted after modelling efforts are completed. Such up-front assistance is providing additional value in terms of improving consistency and sharing of information. There has been a substantial increase in the amount of assistance being provided. The assistance has been well received by practitioners and regulators …

Monosodium titanate (MST) for use in the Actinide Removal Process (ARP) must be qualified and verified in advance. A single qualification sample for each batch of material is sent to SRNL for analysis, as well as a statistical sampling of verification samples. The Harrell Industries Lot #46000908120 qualification and the 16 verification samples failed to meet the specification for weight percent solids. All of the pails sampled and tested contained less than 15 wt % MST solids.

The works supported by this ARM project lay the solid foundation for improving the parameterization of subgrid cloud-radiation interactions in the NCAR CCSM and the climate simulations. We have made a significant use of CRM simulations and concurrent ARM observations to produce long-term, consistent cloud and radiative property datasets at the cloud scale (Wu et al. 2006, 2007). With these datasets, we have investigated the mesoscale enhancement of cloud systems on surface heat fluxes (Wu and Guimond 2006), quantified the effects of cloud horizontal inhomogeneity and vertical overlap on the domain-averaged radiative fluxes (Wu and Liang 2005), and subsequently validated and improved the physically-based mosaic treatment of subgrid cloud-radiation interactions (Liang and Wu 2005). We have implemented the mosaic treatment into the CCM3. The 5-year (1979-1983) AMIP-type simulation showed significant impacts of subgrid cloud-radiation interaction on the climate simulations (Wu and Liang 2005). We have actively participated in CRM intercomparisons that foster the identification and physical understanding of common errors in cloud-scale modeling (Xie et al. 2005; Xu et al. 2005, Grabowski et al. 2005).

Thin wire analysis was applied to curved wire segments in [1], but a special procedure was needed to evaluate the self and near-self terms. The procedure involved associating the singular behavior with a straight segment tangent to the curved source segment, permitting use of algorithms for straight wires. Recently, a procedure that avoids the singularity extraction for straight wires was presented in [2-4]. In this paper, the approach in [4] is applied to curved (or higher-order) wires using a procedure similar to that used in [1] for singularity extraction. Here, the straight tangent segment is used to determine the quadrature rules to be used on the curved segment. The result is a formulation that allows for a general mixture of higher-order basis functions [5] and higher-order wire segments.

FY2004 progress summary and FY2005 program plan statement of work and deliverables for development of high average power diode-pumped solid state lasers, and complementary technologies for applications in energy and defense.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (http://bioontology.org) is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists funded by the NIH Roadmap to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are: (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. The Center is working toward these objectives by providing tools to develop ontologies and to annotate experimental data, and by developing resources to integrate and relate existing ontologies as well as by creating repositories of biomedical data that are annotated using those ontologies. The Center is providing training workshops in ontology design, …

The Hydrological Synthesis special section presentssynthesis topics that have the potential to revolutionize hydrologicalsciences in a manner needed to meet critical water challenges that we nowface. The special section also highlights topics that are important andexciting enough to compel researchers to engage in collaborativesynthesis activities. This introductory paper provides a brief overviewof nine papers that are included in this special section, which discussthe synthesis of tools, data, concepts, theories, or approaches acrossdisciplines and scales. The wide range of topics that are exploredinclude groundwater quality, river restoration, water management,nitrogen cycling, and Earth surface dynamics. Collectively, the specialsection papers illustrate that the challenge to deal effectively withcomplex water problems is not purely a scientific, technological, orsocioeconomic one; it is instead a complex, 21st century problem thatrequires coordinated synthesis.

The Geometry Description Markup Language (GDML) is a specialized XML-based language designed as an application-independent persistent format for describing the geometries of detectors associated with physics measurements. It serves to implement ''geometry trees'' which correspond to the hierarchy of volumes a detector geometry can be composed of, and to allow to identify the position of individual solids, as well as to describe the materials they are made of. Being pure XML, GDML can be universally used, and in particular it can be considered as the format for interchanging geometries among different applications. In this paper we will present the current status of the development of GDML. After having discussed the contents of the latest GDML schema, which is the basic definition of the format, we will concentrate on the GDML processors. We will present the latest implementation of the GDML ''writers'' as well as ''readers'' for either Geant4 [2], [3] or ROOT [4], [10].

Progress Report Date: 01/23/06 (report delayed due to Hurricane Katrina) Report of results to date: The goals of this 3-year project are to: (1) update and successfully deploy our present immunosensors at DOE sites; (2) devise immunosensor-based assays for Pb(II), Hg(II), chelators, and/or Cr(III) in surface and groundwater; and (3) develop new technologies in antibody engineering that will enhance this immunosensor program. Note: Work on this project was temporarily disrupted when Hurricane Katrina shut down the University on August 29, 2005. While most of the reagents stored in our refrigerators and freezers were destroyed, all of our hybridoma cell lines were saved because they had been stored in liquid nitrogen. We set up new tissue culture reactors with the hybridomas that synthesize the anti-uranium antibodies, and are purifying new monoclonal antibodies from these culture supernatants. Both the in-line and the field-portable sensor were rescued from our labs in New Orleans in early October, and we continued experiments with these sensors in the temporary laboratory we set up in Hammond, LA at Southeastern Louisiana University.

The Gray Cancer Institute has pioneered the use of X ray focussing techniques to develop systems for micro irradiating individual cells and sub cellular targets in vitro. Cellular micro irradiation is now recognised as a highly versatile technique for understanding how ionising radiation interacts with living cells and tissues. The strength of the technique lies in its ability to deliver precise doses of radiation to selected individual cells (or sub cellular targets). The application of this technique in the field of radiation biology continues to be of great interest for investigating a number of phenomena currently of concern to the radiobiological community. One important phenomenon is the so called ‘bystander effect’ where it is observed that unirradiated cells can also respond to signals transmitted by irradiated neighbours. Clearly, the ability of a microbeam to irradiate just a single cell or selected cells within a population is well suited to studying this effect. Our prototype ‘tabletop’ X-ray microprobe was optimised for focusing 278 eV C-K X rays and has been used successfully for a number of years. However, we have sought to develop a new variable energy soft X-ray microprobe capable of delivering focused CK (0.28 keV), Al-K (1.48 keV) and …

We investigated the valence and spin state of iron in an Al-bearing ferromagnesian silicate perovskite sample, (Mg{sub 0.88}Fe{sub 0.09})(Si{sub 0.94}Al{sub 0.10})O{sub 3}, at 300 K and up to 100 GPa, using diamond-anvil cells and synchrotron Moessbauer spectroscopy techniques. Under elevated pressures, our Moessbauer time spectra are sufficiently fitted by a ''three-doublet'' model, which assumes two ferrous (Fe{sup 2+}) iron types and one ferric (Fe{sup 3+}) iron type with distinct hyperfine parameters. At pressures above 20 GPa, the fraction of the ferric iron, Fe{sup 3+}/{Sigma}Fe, is about 75% and remains unchanged to the highest pressure, indicating a fixed valence state of iron within this pressure range. Between 20 and 100 GPa, the quadruple splittings of all three iron types do not change with pressure, while the isomer shift between the Fe{sup 3+} types and the Fe{sup 2+} type increases continuously with increasing pressure. In conjunction with previous x-ray emission data on the same sample, the unchanging quadruple splittings and increasing isomer shift suggest that Fe{sup 2+} undergoes a broad spin crossover towards the low-spin state at 100 GPa, while Fe{sup 3+} remains in the high-spin state. The essentially constant quadruple splittings of Fe{sup 2+} can also be taken as an indication …

We are developing a Compton telescope based on high resolution Si and CdTe detectors for astrophysical observations in sub-MeV/MeV gamma-ray region. Recently, we constructed a prototype Compton telescope which consists of six layers of double-sided Si strip detectors and CdTe pixel detectors to demonstrate the basic performance of this new technology. By irradiating the detector with gamma-rays from radio isotope sources, we have succeeded in Compton reconstruction of images and spectra. The obtained angular resolution is 3.9{sup o} (FWHM) at 511 keV, and the energy resolution is 14 keV (FWHM) at the same energy. In addition to the conventional Compton reconstruction, i.e., drawing cones in the sky, we also demonstrated a full reconstruction by tracking Compton recoil electrons using the signals detected in successive Si layers. By irradiating {sup 137}Cs source, we successfully obtained an image and a spectrum of 662 keV line emission with this method. As a next step, development of larger double-sided Si strip detectors with a size of 4 cm x 4 cm is underway to improve the effective area of the Compton telescope. We are also developing a new low-noise analog ASIC to handle the increasing number of channels. Initial results from these two new …

Due to the recent explosion of interest in studying the electromagnetic behavior of large (truncated) periodic structures such as phased arrays, frequency-selective surfaces, and metamaterials, there has been a renewed interest in efficiently modeling such structures. Since straightforward numerical analyses of large, finite structures (i.e., explicitly meshing and computing interactions between all mesh elements of the entire structure) involve significant memory storage and computation times, much effort is currently being expended on developing techniques that minimize the high demand on computer resources. One such technique that belongs to the class of fast solvers for large periodic structures is the GIFFT algorithm (Green's function interpolation and FFT), which is first discussed in [1]. This method is a modification of the adaptive integral method (AIM) [2], a technique based on the projection of subdomain basis functions onto a rectangular grid. Like the methods presented in [3]-[4], the GIFFT algorithm is an extension of the AIM method in that it uses basis-function projections onto a rectangular grid through Lagrange interpolating polynomials. The use of a rectangular grid results in a matrix-vector product that is convolutional in form and can thus be evaluated using FFTs. Although our method differs from [3]-[6] in various respects, …

During FY 2001, two arrays, each containing seven neptunium-loaded targets, were irradiated at the Advanced Test Reactor in Idaho to examine the influence of multi-target self-shielding on {sup 236}Pu content and to evaluate fission product release data. One array consisted of seven targets that contained 10 vol% NpO{sub 2} pellets, while the other array consisted of seven targets that contained 20 vol % NpO{sub 2} pellets. The arrays were located in the same irradiation facility but were axially separated to minimize the influence of one array on the other. Each target also contained a dosimeter package, which consisted of a small NpO{sub 2} wire that was inside a vanadium container. After completion of irradiation and shipment back to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, nine of the targets (four from the 10 vol% array and five from the 20 vol% array) were punctured for pressure measurement and measurement of {sup 85}Kr. These nine targets and the associated dosimeters were then chemically processed to measure the residual neptunium, total plutonium production, {sup 238}Pu production, and {sup 236}Pu concentration at discharge. The amount and isotopic composition of fission products were also measured. This report provides the results of the processing and analysis of …

Novel applications of gamma ray spectroscopy for D&D process development, inventory reduction, safety analysis and facility management are discussed in this paper. These applications of gamma spectroscopy were developed and implemented during the Risk Reduction Program (RPP) to successfully downgrade the Heavy Element Facility (B251) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) from a Category II Nuclear Facility to a Radiological Facility. Non-destructive assay in general, gamma spectroscopy in particular, were found to be important tools in project management, work planning, and work control (''Expect the unexpected and confirm the expected''), minimizing worker dose, and resulted in significant safety improvements and operational efficiencies. Inventory reduction activities utilized gamma spectroscopy to identify and confirm isotopics of legacy inventory, ingrowth of daughter products and the presence of process impurities; quantify inventory; prioritize work activities for project management; and to supply information to satisfy shipper/receiver documentation requirements. D&D activities utilize in-situ gamma spectroscopy to identify and confirm isotopics of legacy contamination; quantify contamination levels and monitor the progress of decontamination efforts; and determine the point of diminishing returns in decontaminating enclosures and glove boxes containing high specific activity isotopes such as {sup 244}Cm and {sup 238}Pu. In-situ gamma spectroscopy provided quantitative comparisons of several …