Policymakers rely on transportation statistics, including data on personal travel behavior, to formulate strategic transportation policies, and to improve the safety and efficiency of the U.S. transportation system. Data on personal travel trends are needed to examine the reliability, efficiency, capacity, and flexibility of the Nation's transportation system to meet current demands and accommodate future demands; to assess the feasibility and efficiency of alternative congestion-alleviating technologies (e.g., high-speed rail, magnetically levitated trains, intelligent vehicle and highway systems); to evaluate the merits of alternative transportation investment programs; and to assess the energy-use and air-quality impacts of various policies. To address these data needs, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) initiated an effort in 1969 to collect detailed data on personal travel. The 1969 survey was the first Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey (NPTS). The survey was conducted again in 1977, 1983, 1990, 1995, and 2001. Data on daily travel were collected in 1969, 1977, 1983, 1990 and 1995. Longer-distance travel was collected in 1977 and 1995. The 2001 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) collected both daily and longer-distance trips in one survey. The 2001 survey was sponsored by three USDOT agencies: Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), and National …

This report presents the 2009 groundwater monitoring results collected by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Legacy Management (LM) at the Project Shoal Area (PSA) Subsurface Corrective Action Unit (CAU) 447 in Churchill County, Nevada. Responsibility for the environmental site restoration of the PSA was transferred from the DOE Office of Environmental Management to LM on October 1, 2006. The environmental restoration process and corrective action strategy for CAU 447 are conducted in accordance with the Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order (FFACO 1996, as amended February 2008) entered into by DOE, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the State of Nevada. The corrective action strategy for the site includes monitoring in support of site closure. This report summarizes investigation activities associated with CAU 447 that were conducted at the PSA during fiscal year 2009.

This report discusses the current political state of Iran, focusing particularly on the influence of the Taliban and other militant groups and on the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. This report also discusses the U.S.-Iran relationship and U.S. efforts under the Obama Administration to provide military, reconstructive, and stabilization aid.

ABSTRACT Projects for the very high temperature reactor (VHTR) Technology Development Office (TDO) program provide data in support of Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing of the VHTR. Fuel and materials to be used in the reactor are tested and characterized to quantify performance in high temperature and high fluence environments. The VHTR program has established the NGNP Data Management and Analysis System (NDMAS) to ensure that VHTR data are (1) qualified for use, (2) stored in a readily accessible electronic form, and (3) analyzed to extract useful results. This document focuses on the first NDMAS objective. It describes the data streams associated with the first Advanced Gas Reactor experiment (AGR-1), the processing of these data within NDMAS, and reports the qualification status of the data. Data qualification activities within NDMAS for specific types of data are determined by the data qualification category assigned by the data generator. They include: (1) capture testing, to confirm that the data stored within NDMAS are identical to the raw data supplied, (2) accuracy testing, to confirm that the data are an accurate representation of the system or object being measured, and (3) documentation that the data were collected under an NQA-1 or equivalent quality assurance …

This report represents findings of a design review team that evaluated construction documents (at the 70% level) and operating specifications for a new control tower and support building that will be build at Oakland, California by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The focus of the review was to identify measures that could be incorporated into the final design and operating specification that would result in additional energy savings for the FAA that would not have otherwise occurred.

An overview of NREL's partnership with Ampulse, a startup company, providing insight about how industry can successfully work with a U.S. Department of Energy lab.

This annual Environmental Monitoring Report (EMR) presents results of environmental monitoring performed during fiscal year (FY) 2009 (October 1, 2008 - September 30, 2009) at the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility (EMWMF). The EMWMF is an operating state-of-the-art hazardous waste landfill located in Bear Creek Valley (BCV) west of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) on the DOE Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Appendix A, Fig. A.1). Opened in 2002 and operated by a DOE prime contractor, Bechtel Jacobs Company LLC (BJC), the EMWMF was built specifically to accommodate disposal of acceptable solid wastes generated from Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA) remedial actions for former waste sites and buildings that have been impacted by past DOE operations on the ORR and at DOE sites off the ORR within the state of Tennessee. Environmental monitoring at the EMWMF is performed to detect and monitor the impact of facility operations on groundwater, surface water, stormwater, and air quality and to determine compliance with applicable or relevant and appropriate requirements (ARARs) specified in governing CERCLA decision documents. Annually, the EMR presents an evaluation of the groundwater, surface water, stormwater, and …

A computer software package was developed to predict tissue doses to an infant due to intake of radionuclides in breast milk based on bioassay measurements and exposure data for the mother. The package is intended mainly to aid in decisions regarding the safety of breast feeding by a mother who has been acutely exposed to a radionuclide during lactation or pregnancy, but it may be applied to previous intakes during the mother s adult life. The package includes biokinetic and dosimetric information needed to address intake of Co-60, Sr-90, Cs-134, Cs-137, Ir-192, Pu-238, Pu-239, Am-241, or Cf-252 by the mother. It has been designed so that the library of biokinetic and dosimetric files can be expanded to address a more comprehensive set of radionuclides without modifying the basic computational module. The methods and models build on the approach used in Publication 95 of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP 2004), Doses to Infants from Ingestion of Radionuclides in Mothers Milk . The software package allows input of case-specific information or judgments such as chemical form or particle size of an inhaled aerosol. The package is expected to be more suitable than ICRP Publication 95 for dose assessment for real …

This document provides detailed test results of ballistic impact experiments performed on several types of high performance concrete. These tests were performed at the Sandia National Laboratories Shock Thermodynamic Applied Research Facility using a 50 caliber powder gun to study penetration resistance of concrete samples. This document provides test results for ballistic impact experiments performed on two types of concrete samples, (1) Ductal{reg_sign} concrete is a fiber reinforced high performance concrete patented by Lafarge Group and (2) ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) produced in-house by DoD. These tests were performed as part of a research demonstration project overseen by USACE and ERDC, at the Sandia National Laboratories Shock Thermodynamic Applied Research (STAR) facility. Ballistic penetration tests were performed on a single stage research powder gun of 50 caliber bore using a full metal jacket M33 ball projectile with a nominal velocity of 914 m/s (3000 ft/s). Testing was observed by Beverly DiPaolo from ERDC-GSL. In all, 31 tests were performed to achieve the test objectives which were: (1) recovery of concrete test specimens for post mortem analysis and characterization at outside labs, (2) measurement of projectile impact velocity and post-penetration residual velocity from electronic and radiographic techniques and, (3) high-speed photography …

This program has involved investigations of the stability of CdTe and copper-indium-gallium-diselenide (CIGS) solar cells under damp heat conditions and effects of barrier coatings.

These best practices for Subsurface Survey processes were developed at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and later shared and formalized by a sub-committee, under the Electrical Safety Committee of EFCOG. The developed best practice is best characterized as a Tier II (enhanced) survey process for subsurface investigations. A result of this process has been an increase in the safety and lowering of overall cost, when utility hits and their related costs are factored in. The process involves improving the methodology and thoroughness of the survey and reporting processes; or improvement in tool use rather than in the tools themselves. It is hoped that the process described here can be implemented at other sites seeking to improve their Subsurface Investigation results with little upheaval to their existing system.

The survey includes degrees granted between September 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009, and fall 2009 enrollments. Thirty-two academic programs reported having nuclear engineering programs during 2009, and data was obtained from all thirty-two.

This survey includes degrees granted between September 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009. Enrollment information refers to the fall term 2009. Twenty-four academic programs were included in the survey universe, and all twenty-four responded. The report includes data by degree level including citizenship, gender, and race/ethnicity, plus enrollments of junior and senior undergraduate students and graduate students.

This document provides common best practices for the efficient utilization of parallel file systems for analysts and application developers. A multi-program, parallel supercomputer is able to provide effective compute power by aggregating a host of lower-power processors using a network. The idea, in general, is that one either constructs the application to distribute parts to the different nodes and processors available and then collects the result (a parallel application), or one launches a large number of small jobs, each doing similar work on different subsets (a campaign). The I/O system on these machines is usually implemented as a tightly-coupled, parallel application itself. It is providing the concept of a 'file' to the host applications. The 'file' is an addressable store of bytes and that address space is global in nature. In essence, it is providing a global address space. Beyond the simple reality that the I/O system is normally composed of a small, less capable, collection of hardware, that concept of a global address space will cause problems if not very carefully utilized. How much of a problem and the ways in which those problems manifest will be different, but that it is problem prone has been well established. Worse, …

The U.S. Department of Energy is exploring the potential for the VHTR which will be either of a prismatic or a pebble-bed type. One important design consideration for the reactor core of a prismatic VHTR is coolant bypass flow which occurs in the interstitial regions between fuel blocks. Such gaps are an inherent presence in the reactor core because of tolerances in manufacturing the blocks and the inexact nature of their installation. Furthermore, the geometry of the graphite blocks changes over the lifetime of the reactor because of thermal expansion and irradiation damage. The existence of the gaps induces a flow bias in the fuel blocks and results in unexpected increase of maximum fuel temperature. Traditionally, simplified methods such as flow network calculations employing experimental correlations are used to estimate flow and temperature distributions in the core design. However, the distribution of temperature in the fuel pins and graphite blocks as well as coolant outlet temperatures are strongly coupled with the local heat generation rate within fuel blocks which is not uniformly distributed in the core. Hence, it is crucial to establish mechanistic based methods which can be applied to the reactor core thermal hydraulic design and safety analysis. Computational …

Samples from the wall of Tank 18F were obtained to determine the associated source term using a special wall sampling device. Two wall samples and a scale sample were obtained and characterized at the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL). All the analyses of the Tank 18F wall and scale samples met the targeted detection limits. The upper wall samples show {approx}2X to 6X higher concentrations for U, Pu, and Np on an activity per surface area basis than the lower wall samples. On an activity per mass basis, the upper and lower wall samples show similar compositions for U and Pu. The Np activity is still {approx}2.5X higher in the upper wall sample on a per mass basis. The scale sample contains 2-3X higher concentrations of U, Pu, and Sr-90 than the wall samples on an activity per mass basis. The plutonium isotopics differ for all three wall samples (upper, lower, and scale samples). The Pu-238 appears to increase as a proportion of total plutonium as you move up the tank wall from the lowest sample (scale sample) to the upper wall sample. The elemental composition of the scale sample appears similar to other F-Area PUREX sludge compositions. The composition …

We summarize and combine direct measurements of the width of the W boson in data collected by the Tevatron experiments CDF and D0 at Fermilab. Results from CDF and D0 Run-I (1992-1995) have been combined with the CDF 200 pb{sup -1} results from the first period of Run-II (2001-2004) and the recent 1 fb{sup -1} result in the electron channel from D0 (2002-2006). The results are corrected for any inconsistencies in parton distribution functions and assumptions about electroweak parameters used in the different analyses. The resulting Tevatron average for the width of the W boson is {Lambda}{sub W} = 2,046 {+-} 49 MeV.

Combined results are presented on the search for a neutral Higgs boson in the di-tau final state using 1.8 fb{sup -1} and 2.2 fb{sup -1} of integrated luminosity collected at the CDF and D0 experiments respectively. Data were collected in p{bar p} collisions at a centre of mass energy of 1.96 TeV during RunII of the Tevatron. Limits are set on the cross section x branching ratio ranging from 13.6 pb to 0.653 pb for Higgs masses from 90 GeV to 200 GeV respectively. The results are then interpreted as limits in four different benchmark scenarios within the framework of the MSSM.

As the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Solar Energy Technologies Program prepares to initiate a new cost-shared research and development (R&D) effort on photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing, it is useful to review the experience to date with consortia focused on PV R&D, manufacturing, and testing. Information was gathered for this report by conducting interviews and accessing Web sites of 14 U.S. consortia and four European consortia, each with either a primary focus on or an emerging interest in PV technology R&D, manufacturing, or testing. Additional input was collected from several workshops held by the DOE and National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2009, which examined the practical steps -- including public-private partnerships and policy support -- necessary to enhance the United States' capacity to competitively manufacture photovoltaics. This report categorizes the 18 consortia into three groups: university-led consortia, industry-led consortia, and manufacturing and testing facilities consortia. The first section summarizes the organizations within the different categories, with a particular focus on the key benefits and challenges for each grouping. The second section provides a more detailed overview of each consortium, including the origins, goals, organization, membership, funding sources, and key contacts. This survey is a useful resource for stakeholders interested in …

Delphi Automotive Systems and ORNL established this CRADA to expand the operational range of Homogenous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) mixed-mode combustion for gasoline en-gines. ORNL has extensive experience in the analysis, interpretation, and control of dynamic engine phenomena, and Delphi has extensive knowledge and experience in powertrain compo-nents and subsystems. The partnership of these knowledge bases was important to address criti-cal barriers associated with the realistic implementation of HCCI and enabling clean, efficient operation for the next generation of transportation engines. The foundation of this CRADA was established through the analysis of spark-assisted HCCI data from a single-cylinder research engine. This data was used to (1) establish a conceptual kinetic model to better understand and predict the development of combustion instabilities, (2) develop a low-order model framework suitable for real-time controls, and (3) provide guidance in the initial definition of engine valve strategies for achieving HCCI operation. The next phase focused on the development of a new combustion metric for real-time characterization of the combustion process. Rapid feedback on the state of the combustion process is critical to high-speed decision making for predictive control. Simultaneous to the modeling/analysis studies, Delphi was focused on the development of engine hardware and the …

The need for the engineering analysis of systems in which the transport of thermal energy occurs primarily through a conduction process is a common situation. For all but the simplest geometries and boundary conditions, analytic solutions to heat conduction problems are unavailable, thus forcing the analyst to call upon some type of approximate numerical procedure. A wide variety of numerical packages currently exist for such applications, ranging in sophistication from the large, general purpose, commercial codes, such as COMSOL, COSMOSWorks, ABAQUS and TSS to codes written by individuals for specific problem applications. The original purpose for developing the finite element code described here, COYOTE, was to bridge the gap between the complex commercial codes and the more simplistic, individual application programs. COYOTE was designed to treat most of the standard conduction problems of interest with a user-oriented input structure and format that was easily learned and remembered. Because of its architecture, the code has also proved useful for research in numerical algorithms and development of thermal analysis capabilities. This general philosophy has been retained in the current version of the program, COYOTE, Version 5.0, though the capabilities of the code have been significantly expanded. A major change in the code …

Climate change is a long-term process that will trigger a range of multi-dimensional demographic, economic, geopolitical, and national security issues with many unknowns and significant uncertainties. At first glance, climate-change-related national security dimensions seem far removed from today's major national security threats. Yet climate change has already set in motion forces that will require U.S. attention and preparedness. The extent and uncertainty associated with these situations necessitate a move away from conventional security practices, toward a small but flexible portfolio of assets to maintain U.S. interests. Thoughtful action is required now if we are to acquire the capabilities, tools, systems, and institutions needed to meet U.S. national security requirements as they evolve with the emerging stresses and shifts of climate change.

This project by the Thermal Hydraulics Research Laboratory at U.C. Berkeley Studied advanced high-temperature heat transport and power conversion technology, in support of the Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative and Generation IV.

Thermoelectric power plants use large volumes of water for condenser cooling and other plant operations. Traditionally, this water has been withdrawn from the cleanest water available in streams and rivers. However, as demand for electrical power increases it places increasing demands on freshwater resources resulting in conflicts with other off stream water users. In July 2002, NETL and the Governor of Pennsylvania called for the use of water from abandoned mines to replace our reliance on the diminishing and sometimes over allocated surface water resource. In previous studies the National Mine Land Reclamation Center (NMLRC) at West Virginia University has demonstrated that mine water has the potential to reduce the capital cost of acquiring cooling water while at the same time improving the efficiency of the cooling process due to the constant water temperatures associated with deep mine discharges. The objectives of this project were to develop and demonstrate a user-friendly computer based design aid for assessing the costs, technical and regulatory aspects and potential environmental benefits for using mine water for thermoelectric generation. The framework provides a systematic process for evaluating the hydrologic, chemical, engineering and environmental factors to be considered in using mine water as an alternative to …