This report describes conditions, as required by the state of Idaho Industrial Wastewater Reuse Permit (#LA 000161 01, Modification B), for the wastewater land application site at the Idaho National Laboratory Site’s Advanced Test Reactor Complex Cold Waste Pond from November 1, 2011 through October 31, 2012. The report contains the following information: Facility and system description Permit required effluent monitoring data and loading rates Groundwater monitoring data Status of compliance activities Noncompliance issues Discussion of the facility’s environmental impacts During the 2012 permit year, approximately 183 million gallons of wastewater were discharged to the Cold Waste Pond. This is well below the maximum annual permit limit of 375 million gallons. As shown by the groundwater sampling data, sulfate and total dissolved solids concentrations are highest near the Cold Waste Pond and decrease rapidly as the distance from the Cold Waste Pond increases. Although concentrations of sulfate and total dissolved solids are elevated near the Cold Waste Pond, both parameters were below the Ground Water Quality Rule Secondary Constituent Standards in the down gradient monitoring wells.

This report describes conditions, as required by the state of Idaho Industrial Wastewater Reuse Permit (WRU-I-0160-01, formerly LA 000160 01), for the wastewater reuse site at the Idaho National Laboratory Site’s Materials and Fuels Complex Industrial Waste Ditch and Industrial Waste Pond from November 1, 2011 through October 31, 2012. The report contains the following information: • Facility and system description • Permit required effluent monitoring data and loading rates • Groundwater monitoring data • Status of special compliance conditions • Discussion of the facility’s environmental impacts During the 2012 reporting year, an estimated 11.84 million gallons of wastewater were discharged to the Industrial Waste Ditch and Pond which is well below the permit limit of 17 million gallons per year. The concentrations of all permit-required analytes in the samples from the down gradient monitoring wells were below the Ground Water Quality Rule Primary and Secondary Constituent Standards.

This report is about the progress report for Propulsion Materials.

This report describes conditions, as required by the state of Idaho Wastewater Reuse Permit (#LA-000141-03), for the wastewater land application site at Idaho National Laboratory Site’s Central Facilities Area Sewage Treatment Plant from November 1, 2011, through October 31, 2012. The report contains the following information: • Site description • Facility and system description • Permit required monitoring data and loading rates • Status of compliance conditions and activities • Discussion of the facility’s environmental impacts. During the 2012 permit year, no wastewater was land-applied to the irrigation area of the Central Facilities Area Sewage Treatment Plant.

This report summarizes radiological monitoring performed of the Idaho National Laboratory Site’s Advanced Test Reactor Complex Cold Waste wastewater prior to discharge into the Cold Waste Pond and of specific groundwater monitoring wells associated with the Industrial Wastewater Reuse Permit (#LA-000161-01, Modification B). All radiological monitoring is performed to fulfill Department of Energy requirements under the Atomic Energy Act.

The biosynthesis of chlorophyll is a critical biochemical step in the development of photosynthetic vascular plants and green algae. From photosynthetic bacteria (cyanobacteria) to algae, non-vascular plants, gymnosperms and vascular plants, mechanisms have evolved for protochlorophyllide reduction a key step in chlorophyll synthesis. Protochlorophyllide reduction is carried out by both a light-dependent (POR) and light-independent (LIPOR) mechanisms. NADPH: protochlorophyllide oxidoreductase (EC 1.3.1.33, abbreviated POR) catalyzes the light-dependent reduction of protochlorophyllide (PChlide) to chlorophyllide (Chlide). In contrast, a light-independent protochlorophyllide reductase (LIPOR) involves three plastid gene products (chlL, chlN, and chlB) and several nuclear factors. Our work focused on characterization of both the POR and LIPOR catalyzed processes.

The U.S. Department of Energy developed the K-12 Advanced Energy Retrofit Guide to provide specific methodologies, information, and guidance to help energy managers and other stakeholders plan and execute energy efficiency improvements. We emphasize actionable information, practical methodologies, diverse case studies, and unbiased evaluation of the most promising retrofit measure for each building type. K-12 schools were selected as one of the highest priority building sectors, because schools affect the lives of most Americans. They also represent approximately 8% of the energy use and 10% of the floor area in commercial buildings.

Sodium cooled Fast Reactors (SFR) have been under consideration for production of electricity, fissile material production, and for destruction of transuranics for decades. The neutron economy of a SFR can be operated in one of two ways. One possibility is to operate the reactor in a transuranic burner mode which has been the focus of active R&D in the last 15 years. However, prior to that the focus was on breeding transuranics. This later mode of managing the neutron economy relies on ensuring the maximum fuel utilization possible in such a way as to maximize the amount of plutonium produced per unit of fission energy in the reactor core. The goal of maximizing plutonium production in this study is as fissile feed stock for the production of MOX fuel to be used in Light Water Reactors (LWR). Throughout the l970’s, this fuel cycle scenario was the focus of much research by the Atomic Energy Commission in the event that uranium supplies would be scarce. To date, there has been sufficient uranium to supply the once through nuclear fuel cycle. However, interest in a synergistic relationship Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors (LMFBR) and a consumer LWR fleet persists, prompting this study. …

It is the intent of this analysis to examine the operational benefits of increased cooperation between a large number of WECC operating regions.

We demonstrate an approach for assessing the quality of a signature system designed to predict the culture medium used to grow a microorganism. The system was comprised of four chemical assays designed to identify various ingredients that could be used to produce the culture medium. The analytical measurements resulting from any combination of these four assays can be used in a Bayesian network to predict the probabilities that the microorganism was grown using one of eleven culture media. We evaluated combinations of the signature system by removing one or more of the assays from the Bayes network. We measured and compared the quality of the various Bayes nets in terms of fidelity, cost, risk, and utility, a method we refer to as Signature Quality Metrics

This report documents a series of tests used to assess the proposed air sampling location in the Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) Lab C3V (LB-S1) exhaust stack with respect to the applicable criteria regarding the placement of an air sampling probe. Federal regulations require that an air sampling probe be located in the exhaust stack in accordance with the criteria of American National Standards Institute/Health Physics Society (ANSI/HPS) N13.1-1999, Sampling and Monitoring Releases of Airborne Radioactive Substances from the Stack and Ducts of Nuclear Facilities. These criteria address the capability of the sampling probe to extract a sample that represents the effluent stream.

Work reported included analysis of pentad (5 day) averaged data, proposal of a hypothesis concerning the key role of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation in 20th century drought and wet periods over the Great Plains, analysis of recurrent super-synoptic evolution of the Great Plains low-level jet, and study of pentad evolution of the 1988 drought and 1993 flood over the Great Plains from a NARR perspective on the atmospheric and terrestrial water balance.

A key assumption in supervised machine learning is that future data will be similar to historical data. This assumption is often false in real world applications, and as a result, prediction models often return predictions that are extrapolations. We compare four approaches to estimating extrapolation risk for machine learning predictions. Two builtin methods use information available from the classification model to decide if the model would be extrapolating for an input data point. The other two build auxiliary models to supplement the classification model and explicitly model extrapolation risk. Experiments with synthetic and real data sets show that the auxiliary models are more reliable risk detectors. To best safeguard against extrapolating predictions, however, we recommend combining builtin and auxiliary diagnostics.

This report describes a reactor design with a burnup concept for a long-life fast reactor core that was evaluated using Monte Carlo N-Particle eXtended (MCNPX). The current trend in advanced reactor design is the concept of a small modular reactor (SMR). However, very few of the SMR designs attempt to substantially increase the lifetime of a reactor core, especially without zone loading, fuel reshuffling, or other artificial mechanisms in the core that %E2%80%9Cflatten%E2%80%9D the power profile, including non-uniform cooling, non-uniform moderation, or strategic poison placement. Historically, the limitations of computing capabilities have prevented acceptable margins in the temporal component of the spatial excess reactivity in a reactor design, due primarily to the error in burnup calculations. This research was performed as an initial scoping analysis into the concept of a long-life fast reactor. It can be shown that a long-life fast reactor concept can be modeled using MCNPX to predict burnup and neutronics behavior. The inherent characteristic of this conceptual design is to minimize the change in reactivity over the lifetime of the reactor. This allows the reactor to operate substantially longer at full power than traditional Light Water Reactors (LWRs) or other SMR designs. For the purpose of this …

This report documents investigations of downstream fish passage research involving a spillway fish weir and turbine passage conditions at Foster Dam in May 2012.

This is the final report for the EOTCD project, which is formally titled 'Classification of the End-of-Term Archive: Extending Collection Development Practices to Web Archives.' The project commenced December 1, 2009 and ended November 30, 2012. The overview includes background information about the End of Term (EOT) 2008 Archive and a brief description of the activities conducted in the project's four work areas. Following the Overview there are three sections: Goals Accomplished; Significant Findings and Accomplishments; and Project Achievements.

Annual report of the Clean Air Status and Trends Network (CASTNET) describing the program and data collection. It also presents information on air quality and recorded concentrations of pollutants such as ozone, sulfur, gases, and other elements of concern.

The UCLA Plasma Simulation Group is a major partner of the "Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation. This is the final technical report. We include an overall summary, a list of publications and individual progress reports for each years. During the past five years we have made tremendous progress in enhancing the capabilities of OSIRIS and QuickPIC, in developing new algorithms and data structures for PIC codes to run on GPUS and many future core architectures, and in using these codes to model experiments and in making new scientific discoveries. Here we summarize some highlights for which SciDAC was a major contributor.

As a contribution to the AHRI Low-GWP Alternative Refrigerants Evaluation Program (AREP), this study compares performance of alternative refrigerants R32, DR-5, and L-41A to that of refrigerant R-410A (baseline) in a scroll compressor designed for air-conditioning and heat pump applications. Compressor calorimeter tests were performed to evaluate the performance of the lower-GWP alternative refrigerants in place of the common refrigerant R-410A in a 36,000 Btu/hr compressor calorimeter using a compressor having a nominal rated capacity of 21,300 Btu/hr. Tests were conducted over a suction dew point temperature range of 10 F to 55 F in 5 F increments and a discharge dew point temperature range of 70 F to 140 F in 10 F increments. All the tests were performed with 20 F superheat, 40 F superheat and 65 F suction temperature. A liquid subcooling level of 15 F was maintained for all the test conditions. The tests showed that performance of these three lower-GWP alternative refrigerants is comparable to that of R-410A. For the 20 F superheat and 15 F subcooling test conditions, EERs of R32, DR-5, and L-41A were 90% to 99%, 96% to 99%, and 94% to 101%, respectively, compared to that of R-410A. Similarly, cooling capacities …

As the PV industry matures, successful risk management practices will become more imperative to ensure investor confidence, control costs, and facilitate further growth. This report discusses several key aspects of risk management during the commercial- and utility-scale project life cycle, from identification of risks, to the process of mitigating and allocating those risks among project parties, to transferring those risks through insurance. The report also explores novel techniques in PV risk management, options to offload risks onto the capital markets, and innovative insurance policies (namely warranty policies) that address risks unique to the PV sector. One of the major justifications for robust risk management in the PV industry is the cost-reduction opportunities it affords. If the PV industry can demonstrate the capability to successfully manage its risks, thereby inspiring confidence in financiers, it may be able to obtain a lower cost of capital in future transactions. A lower cost of capital translates to a lower cost of energy, which will in turn enhance PV?s competitiveness at a time when it will have to rely less on subsidies to support its market penetration.

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Thorium based fuel has been considered as an option to uranium-based fuel, based on considerations of resource utilization (Thorium is more widely available when compared to Uranium). The fertile isotope of Thorium (Th-232) can be converted to fissile isotope U-233 by neutron capture during the operation of a suitable nuclear reactor such as High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR). However, the fertile Thorium needs a fissile supporter to start and maintain the conversion process such as U-235 or Pu-239. This report presents the results of a study that analyzed the thorium utilization in a prismatic HTGR, namely Modular High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (MHTGR) that was designed by General Atomics (GA). The collected for the modeling of this design come from Chapter 4 of MHTGR Preliminary Safety Information Document that GA sent to Department of Energy (DOE) on 1995. Both full core and unit cell models were used to perform this analysis using SCALE 6.1 and Serpent 1.1.18. Because of the long mean free paths (and migration lengths) of neutrons in HTRs, using a unit cell to represent a whole core can be non-trivial. The sizes of these cells were set to match the spectral index between unit cell and full core …

Kontek Industries (Kannapolis, NC) and their subsidiary, Stonewater Control Systems (Kannapolis, NC), have entered into a cooperative research and development agreement with Sandia to jointly develop and evaluate an integrated perimeter security system solution, one that couples access delay with detection and assessment. This novel perimeter solution was designed to be configurable for use at facilities ranging from high-security military sites to commercial power plants, to petro/chemical facilities of various kinds. A prototype section of the perimeter has been produced and installed at the Sandia Test and Evaluation Center in Albuquerque, NM. This prototype system integrated fiber optic break sensors, active infrared sensors, fence disturbance sensors, video motion detection, and ground sensors. This report documents the design, testing, and performance evaluation of the developed ReKon system. The ability of the system to properly detect pedestrian or vehicle attempts to bypass, breach, or otherwise defeat the system is characterized, as well as the Nuisance Alarm Rate.