A well developed infrastructure exists for the reuse and recycling of automotive parts and materials. At the end of a vehicle's useful life many parts are removed and sold for reuse and fluids are recovered for recycling or proper disposal. What remains is shredded, along with other metal bearing scrap such as home appliances, demolition debris and process equipment, and the metals are separated out and recycled. The remainder of the vehicle materials is call shredder residue which ends up in the landfill. As energy and natural resources becomes more treasured, increased effort has been afforded to find ways to reduce energy consumption and minimize the use of our limited resources. Many of the materials found in shredder residue could be recovered and help offset the use of energy and material consumption. For example, the energy content of the plastics and rubbers currently landfilled with the shredder residue is equivalent to 16 million barrels of oil per year. However, in the United States, the recovered materials, primarily polymers, cannot be recycled due to current regulatory barriers which preclude the re-introduction into commerce of certain materials because of residual contamination with substances of concern (SOCs) such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The …

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) commitment to assuring the health and safety of its workers includes the conduct of illness and injury surveillance activities that provide an early warning system to detect health problems among workers. The Illness and Injury Surveillance Program monitors illnesses and health conditions that result in an absence, occupational injuries and illnesses, and disabilities and deaths among current workers.

As part of its commitment to promoting and improving the local enforcement of appliance energy efficiency standards and labeling, the China National Institute of Standardization (CNIS) launched the National and Local Enforcement of Energy Efficiency Standards and Labeling project on August 14, 2009. The project’s short-term goal is to expand the effort to improve enforcement of standards and labeling requirements to the entire country within three years, with a long-term goal of perfecting overall enforcement. For this project, Jiangsu, Shandong, Sichuan and Shanghai were selected as pilot locations. This report provides information on the local enforcement project’s recent background, activities and results as well as comparison to previous rounds of check-testing in 2006 and 2007. In addition, the report also offers evaluation on the achievement and weaknesses in the local enforcement scheme and recommendations. The results demonstrate both improvement and some backsliding. Enforcement schemes are in place in all target cities and applicable national standards and regulations were followed as the basis for local check testing. Check testing results show in general high labeling compliance across regions with 100% compliance for five products, including full compliance for all three products tested in Jiangsu province and two out of three products …

This report describes the results from laboratory tests performed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) to evaluate candidate stabilization technologies that have the potential to successfully treat liquid secondary waste stream effluents produced by the Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). WRPS is considering the design and construction of a Solidification Treatment Unit (STU) for the Effluent Treatment Facility (ETF) at Hanford. The ETF, a multi-waste, treatment-and-storage unit that has been permitted under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), can accept dangerous, low-level, and mixed wastewaters for treatment. The STU needs to be operational by 2018 to receive secondary liquid waste generated during operation of the WTP. The STU will provide the additional capacity needed for ETF to process the increased volume of secondary waste expected to be produced by WTP. This report on radionuclide retention mechanisms describes the testing and characterization results that improve understanding of radionuclide retention mechanisms, especially for pertechnetate, {sup 99}TcO{sub 4}{sup -} in four different waste forms: Cast Stone, DuraLith alkali aluminosilicate geopolymer, encapsulated fluidized bed steam reforming (FBSR) product, and Ceramicrete phosphate bonded ceramic. These data and results will be used to fill existing data …

A team headed by LANL and including many members from LLNL and NSTec LO and NSTec LAO fielded a neutron imaging system (NIS) at the National Ignition Facility at the start of 2011. The NIS consists of a pinhole array that is located 32.5 cm from the source and that creates an image of the source in a segmented scintillator 28 m from the source. The scintillator is viewed by two gated, optical imaging systems: one that is fiber coupled, and one that is lens coupled. While there are a number of other pieces to the system related to pinhole alignment, collimation, shielding and data acquisition, those pieces are discussed elsewhere and are not relevant here. The system is operational and has successfully obtained data on more that ten imaging shots. This remainder of this whitepaper is divided in five main sections. In Section II, we identify three critical areas of improvement that we believe should be pursued to improve the performance of the system for future experiments: spatial resolution, temporal response and signal-to-noise ratio. In Section III, we discuss technologies that could be used to improve these critical performance areas. In Section IV, we describe a path to evolve …

A microscopic calculation of reaction cross sections for nucleon-nucleus scattering has been performed by explicitly coupling the elastic channel to all particle-hole excitations in the target and one-nucleon pickup channels. The particle-hole states may be regarded as doorway states through which the flux flows to more complicated configurations, and subsequently to long-lived compound nucleus resonances. Target excitations for {sup 40,48}Ca, {sup 58}Ni, {sup 90}Zr and {sup 144}Sm were described in a random-phase framework using a Skyrme functional. Reaction cross sections obtained agree very well with experimental data and predictions of a state-of-the-art fitted optical potential. Couplings between inelastic states were found to be negligible, while the pickup channels contribute significantly. The effect of resonances from higher-order channels was assessed. Elastic angular distributions were also calculated within the same method, achieving good agreement with experimental data. For the first time observed absorptions are completely accounted for by explicit channel coupling, for incident energies between 10 and 70 MeV, with consistent angular distribution results.

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