The New York legislature passed the Green Jobs-Green New York (GJGNY) Act in 2009. Administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), GJGNY programs provide New Yorkers with access to free or low-cost energy assessments,1 energy upgrade services,2 low-cost financing, and training for various 'green-collar' careers. Launched in November 2010, GJGNY's residential initiative is notable for its use of novel underwriting criteria to expand access to energy efficiency financing for households seeking to participate in New York's Home Performance with Energy Star (HPwES) program.3 The GJGNY financing program is a valuable test of whether alternatives to credit scores can be used to responsibly expand credit opportunities for households that do not qualify for traditional lending products and, in doing so, enable more households to make energy efficiency upgrades.

In an effort to develop and optimize chemical cleaning methods for the removal of sludge heels from High Level Waste tanks, solubility tests have been conducted using nonradioactive, pure metal phases. The metal phases studied included the aluminum phase gibbsite and the iron phases hematite, maghemite, goethite, lepidocrocite, magnetite, and wustite. Many of these mineral phases have been identified in radioactive, High Level Waste sludge at the Savannah River and Hanford Sites. Acids evaluated for dissolution included oxalic, nitric, and sulfuric acids and a variety of other complexing organic acids. The results of the solubility tests indicate that mixtures of oxalic acid with either nitric or sulfuric acid are the most effective cleaning solutions for the dissolution of the primary metal phases in sludge waste. Based on the results, optimized conditions for hematite dissolution in oxalic acid were selected using nitric or sulfuric acid as a supplemental proton source. Electrochemical corrosion studies were also conducted (reported separately; Wiersma, 2010) with oxalic/mineral acid mixtures to evaluate the effects of these solutions on waste tank integrity. The following specific conclusions can be drawn from the test results: (1) Oxalic acid was shown to be superior to all of the other organic acids …

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection has constructed interim surface barriers over a portion of the T and TY tank farms as part of the Interim Surface Barrier Demonstration Project. The interim surface barriers (hereafter referred to as the surface barriers or barriers) are designed to minimize the infiltration of precipitation into the soil zones containing radioactive contaminants and minimize the movement of the contaminants. As part of the demonstration effort, vadose zone moisture is being monitored to assess the effectiveness of the barriers at reducing soil moisture. Solar-powered systems were installed to continuously monitor soil water conditions at four locations in the T (i.e., instrument Nests TA, TB, TC, and TD) and the TY (i.e., instrument Nests TYA and TYB) Farms beneath the barriers and outside the barrier footprint as well as site meteorological conditions. Nests TA and TYA are placed in the area outside the barrier footprint and serve as controls, providing subsurface conditions outside the influence of the surface barriers. Nest TB provides subsurface measurements to assess surface-barrier edge effects. Nests TC, TD, and TYB are used to assess changes in soil-moisture conditions beneath the interim surface barriers. Except for occasional times for TC …

Supported catalysts are widely used in industry and can be optimized by tuning the composition and interface of the metal nanoparticles and oxide supports. Rational design of metal-metal oxide interfaces in nanostructured catalysts is critical to achieve better reaction activities and selectivities. We introduce here a new class of nanocrystal tandem catalysts that have multiple metal-metal oxide interfaces for the catalysis of sequential reactions. We utilized a nanocrystal bilayer structure formed by assembling platinum and cerium oxide nanocube monolayers of less than 10 nm on a silica substrate. The two distinct metal-metal oxide interfaces, CeO2-Pt and Pt-SiO2, can be used to catalyse two distinct sequential reactions. The CeO2-Pt interface catalysed methanol decomposition to produce CO and H2, which were subsequently used for ethylene hydroformylation catalysed by the nearby Pt-SiO2 interface. Consequently, propanal was produced selectively from methanol and ethylene on the nanocrystal bilayer tandem catalyst. This new concept of nanocrystal tandem catalysis represents a powerful approach towards designing high-performance, multifunctional nanostructured catalysts

This report is part of the planning process for the demolition of the 234-5Z, 236-Z, 242-Z, and 291-Z-1 structures at the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) facilities on the Hanford Site. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) supports the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Company (CHPRC) demolition planning effort by making engineering estimates of potential releases for various potential demolition alternatives. This report documents an analysis considering open-air demolition using standard techniques. It does not document any decisions about the decommissioning approaches; it is expected that this report will be revisited as demolition plans are finalized.

TAUWER is a proposed astroparticle experiment to detect ultrahigh energy TAU neutrinos, using detector towers arrayed on a mountainside looking down into a valley. This test is to study the possibility of replacing Hamamatsu miniature PMTs with SiPMs for readout by determining the response of scintillation detectors with SiPM readout to low energy electrons, 2 GeV or lower, as the beam will provide. The detector itself is a compact package shown in the picture on the cover. it was used in a parasitic test beam run on December 15, 2010, to compare the relative timing of the signals from three counters for MIPs. The only change for this new run is the insertion of 1.5 cm of Pb in front of counter 2 or counter 3 during most of the running. The experiment takes some electron data without Pb for calibration purposes. The apparatus will be mounted on the moving table in MT6.2B.

The Small Column Ion Exchange (SCIX) process is being developed to remove cesium, strontium, and actinides from Savannah River Site (SRS) Liquid Waste using an existing waste tank (i.e., Tank 41H) to house the process. Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is conducting pilot-scale mixing tests to determine the pump requirements for suspending monosodium titanate (MST), crystalline silicotitanate (CST), and simulated sludge. The purpose of this pilot scale testing is for the pumps to suspend the MST particles so that MST can be removed from the tank. The pilot-scale tank is a 1/10.85 linear scaled model of Tank 41H. The tank diameter, tank liquid level, pump nozzle diameter, pump elevation, and cooling coil diameter are all 1/10.85 of their dimensions in Tank 41H. The pump locations correspond to the proposed locations in Tank 41H by the SCIX program (Risers B5 and B2 for two pump configurations and Risers B5, B3, and B1 for three pump configurations).

Here is a review of the current way we handle source photons in Implicit Monte Carlo (IMC). A source photon is created with a randomly sampled position x{sub p} in the zone, a direction {Omega}{sub p}, a frequency v{sub p} sampled from the appropriate distribution, and a time t{sub p} uniformly sampled from [t{sup n}, t{sup n+1}]. The source photons each have an energy E{sub p}. The sum of E{sub p} over all of the photons equals the energy of the source for that time step. In the case of thermal emission in a zone with Volume V, they would have {Sigma}{sub p=1}{sup N} E{sub p} = {sigma} {sub p}acT{sup 4}V{Delta}t, where N is the number of thermal source photons for that time step, and {sigma}{sub p} is the Planck mean opacity. Census photons do not differ from source photons in any way, except that they all start the time step with t{sub p} = t{sup n}. Then they advance each photon until it reaches the end of the time step. When they are done with all of the photons, they update the matter temperature using the difference between the emitted and absorbed energy, and proceed to the next time …