A principal goal at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is to safely dispose of the large volume of liquid nuclear waste held in many storage tanks. In-tank ion exchange (IX) columns are being considered for cesium removal. The spherical form of resorcinol formaldehyde ion exchange resin (sRF) is being evaluated for decontamination of dissolved saltcake waste at SRS, which is generally lower in potassium and organic components than Hanford waste. The sRF performance with SRS waste was evaluated in two phases: resin batch contacts and IX column testing with both simulated and actual dissolved salt waste. The tests, equipment, and results are discussed.

The main objective of this report is to provide quantitative data to support the Committee in its task of establishing a report to support rulemaking on medium- and heavy-duty fuel efficiency improvement. In particular, it is of paramount importance for the Committee to base or illustrate their conclusions on established models and actual state-of-the art data. The simulations studies presented in the report have been defined and requested by the members of the National Academy committee to provide quantitative inputs to support their recommendations. As such, various technologies and usage scenarios were considered for several applications. One of the objective is to provide the results along with their associated assumptions (both vehicle and drive cycles), information generally missing from public discussions on literature search. Finally, the advantages and limitations of using simulation will be summarized. The study addresses several of the committee tasks, including: (1) Discussion of the implication of metric selection; (2) Assessing the impact of existing technologies on fuel consumption through energy balance analysis (both steady-state and standard cycles) as well as real world drive cycles; and (3) Impact of future technologies, both individually and collectively.

The Nevada Test Site (NTS) is located approximately 105 km (65 mi) northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Site Office (NNSA/NSO) is the federal lands management authority for the NTS and National Security Technologies LLC (NSTec) is the Management and Operations contractor. Access on and off the NTS is tightly controlled, restricted, and guarded on a 24-hour basis. The NTS is posted with signs along its entire perimeter. NSTec is the operator of all solid waste disposal sites on the NTS. The site will be used for the disposal of refuse, rubbish, garbage, sewage sludge, pathological waste, Asbestos-Containing Material (ACM), industrial solid waste, hydrocarbon-burdened soil, hydrocarbon-burdened demolition and construction waste, and other inert waste (hereafter called permissible waste). Waste containing free liquids or regulated under Subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) will not be accepted for disposal at the site. Waste regulated under the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), excluding Polychlorinated Biphenyl [PCB], Bulk Product Waste (see Section 6.2.5) and ACM (see Section 6.2.2.2) will not be accepted for disposal at the site. The disposal site will be used as the sole depository of permissible waste which is: (1) Generated by entities …

Jackson Park Hospital completed the construction of a new Medical Office Building on its campus this spring. The new building construction has adopted the City of Chicago's recent focus on protecting the environment, and conserving energy and resources, with the introduction of green building codes. Located in a poor, inner city neighborhood on the South side of Chicago, Jackson Park Hospital has chosen green building strategies to help make the area a better place to live and work. The new green building houses the hospital's Family Medicine Residency Program and Specialty Medical Offices. The residency program has been vital in attracting new, young physicians to this medically underserved area. The new outpatient center will also help to allure needed medical providers to the community. The facility also has areas designated to women's health and community education. The Community Education Conference Room will provide learning opportunities to area residents. Emphasis will be placed on conserving resources and protecting our environment, as well as providing information on healthcare access and preventive medicine. The new Medical Office Building was constructed with numerous energy saving features. The exterior cladding of the building is an innovative, locally-manufactured precast concrete panel system with integral insulation that …

Pulverized coal power plants which fire lignites and other low-rank high-moisture coals generally operate with reduced efficiencies and increased stack emissions due to the impacts of high fuel moisture on stack heat loss and pulverizer and fan power. A process that uses plant waste heat sources to evaporate a portion of the fuel moisture from the lignite feedstock in a moving bed fluidized bed dryer (FBD) was developed in the U.S. by a team led by Great River Energy (GRE). The demonstration was conducted with Department of Energy (DOE) funding under DOE Award Number DE-FC26-04NT41763. The objectives of GRE's Lignite Fuel Enhancement project were to demonstrate reduction in lignite moisture content by using heat rejected from the power plant, apply technology at full scale at Coal Creek Station (CCS), and commercialize it. The Coal Creek Project has involved several stages, beginning with lignite drying tests in a laboratory-scale FBD at the Energy Research Center (ERC) and development of theoretical models for predicting dryer performance. Using results from these early stage research efforts, GRE built a 2 ton/hour pilot-scale dryer, and a 75 ton/hour prototype drying system at Coal Creek Station. Operated over a range of drying conditions, the results from …

The objective of this program is to develop phosphor systems that will enable LED lamps with 96 lm/W efficacy at correlated color temperatures, (CCTs) ~3000 K, and color rendering indices (CRIs) >80 and 71 lm/W efficacy at CCT<3100 K and CRI~95 using phosphor downconversion of LEDs. This primarily involves the invention and development of new phosphor materials that have improved efficiency and better match the eye sensitivity curves.

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 built in Las Vegas, Nevada 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.

A novel electrochemical setup has been developed for soft x-ray absorption studies of the electronic structure of electrode materials during electrochemical cycling. In this communication we illustrate the operation of the cell with a study of the corrosion behavior of copper in aqueous NaHCO3 solution via the electrochemically induced changes of its electronic structure. This development opens the way for in situ investigations of electrochemical processes, photovoltaics, batteries, fuel cells, water splitting, corrosion, electrodeposition, and a variety of important biological processes.

This report represents findings of a design review team that evaluated construction documents (at the 100% level) and operating specifications for a new control tower and support building that will be built in Palm Springs, 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 specifications that would result in additional energy savings for the FAA that would not have otherwise occurred.

Lean NO{sub x} traps (LNTs) represent a promising technology for the abatement of NO{sub x} under lean conditions. Although LNTs are starting to find commercial application, the issue of catalyst durability remains problematic. LNT susceptibility to sulfur poisoning is the single most important factor determining effective catalyst lifetime. The NO{sub x} storage element of the catalyst has a greater affinity for SO{sub 3} than it does for NO{sub 2}, and the resulting sulfate is more stable than the stored nitrate. Although this sulfate can be removed from the catalyst by means of high temperature treatment under rich conditions, the required conditions give rise to deactivation mechanisms such as precious metal sintering, total surface area loss, and solid state reactions between the various oxides present. The principle objective of this project was to improve understanding of the mechanisms of lean NO{sub x} trap aging, and to understand the effect of washcoat composition on catalyst aging characteristics. The approach utilized involved detailed characterization of model catalysts prior to and after aging, in tandem with measurement of catalyst performance in NO{sub x} storage and reduction. In this manner, NO{sub x} storage and reduction characteristics were correlated with the evolution of catalyst physico-chemical properties …

The goals of this project were to develop innovative 3D seismic attribute technologies and workflows to assess the structural integrity and heterogeneity of subsurface reservoirs with potential for CO{sub 2} sequestration. Our specific objectives were to apply advanced seismic attributes to aide in quantifying reservoir properies and lateral continuity of CO{sub 2} sequestration targets. Our study area is the Dickman field in Ness County, Kansas, a type locality for the geology that will be encountered for CO{sub 2} sequestration projects from northern Oklahoma across the U.S. midcontent to Indiana and beyond. Since its discovery in 1962, the Dickman Field has produced about 1.7 million barrels of oil from porous Mississippian carbonates with a small structural closure at about 4400 ft drilling depth. Project data includes 3.3 square miles of 3D seismic data, 142 wells, with log, some core, and oil/water production data available. Only two wells penetrate the deep saline aquifer. Geological and seismic data were integrated to create a geological property model and a flow simulation grid. We systematically tested over a dozen seismic attributes, finding that curvature, SPICE, and ANT were particularly useful for mapping discontinuities in the data that likely indicated fracture trends. Our simulation results in …

Federal support for renewable energy deployment in the United States has traditionally been delivered primarily through tax benefits, including the production tax credit ('PTC') in Section 45 of the U.S. tax code, investment tax credits ('ITC') in Sections 25D and 48, and accelerated tax depreciation in Section 168. Many renewable power project developers are unable to use the majority of these tax benefits directly or immediately, however, and have therefore often relied on third-party 'tax equity' investors for the necessary investment capital in order to monetize the available tax benefits. As has been well-publicized, most of these tax equity investors were hit hard by the global financial crisis that unfolded in the last months of 2008 and, as a result, most either withdrew from the renewable power market at that time or reduced their available investment capital. This left a significant financing gap beginning in late 2008, and placed at some risk the continued near-term growth of renewable energy supply in the U.S. In recognition of these developments, the U.S. Congress passed two stimulus bills - The Energy Improvement and Extension Act ('the Extension Act') in October 2008 and The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ('the Recovery Act') in February …

Polymer nanofibers are nanoscale materials whose properties can be adjusted to provide desirable light management performance for high efficiency solid-state lighting luminaires. The polymeric nanofibers at the core of this project have diameters on the order of 100 to 1000 nm and a length of more than 1 cm. By controlling fiber diameter, fiber packing, and fiber morphology, a low cost, high performance optical material can be fabricated. This report describes the fabrication of these nanofiber structures and their uses and benefits in solid-state lighting application. When used in solid state lighting devices, nanofibers can take the form of either diffuse reflectors or photoluminescent materials. Nanofiber reflectors (NFR) were developed which displayed high diffuse reflectance with reflectance values in excess of 0.90. In contrast, traditional reflector materials such as aluminum and paint typically possess reflectance values below 0.80 and absorb a larger fraction of light, reducing luminaire output efficiency. The incorporation of the NFR technology into reflectors, troffers, and beam formers present in SSL luminaires provides better reflectance and lower light loss than is possible with conventional materials. Photoluminescent nanofibers (PLN) can be formed by combining nanofibers with photoluminescent materials such as phosphors and quantum dots (QD). Forming the PLN …

This report develops innovative and efficient methodologies and practical procedures to determine the wide-area security region of a power system, which take into consideration all types of system constraints including thermal, voltage, voltage stability, transient and potentially oscillatory stability limits in the system. The approach expands the idea of transmission system nomograms to a multidimensional case, involving multiple system limits and parameters such as transmission path constraints, zonal generation or load, etc., considered concurrently. The security region boundary is represented using its piecewise approximation with the help of linear inequalities (so called hyperplanes) in a multi-dimensional space, consisting of system parameters that are critical for security analyses. The goal of this approximation is to find a minimum set of hyperplanes that describe the boundary with a given accuracy. Methodologies are also developed to use the security hyperplanes, pre-calculated offline, to determine system security margins in real-time system operations, to identify weak elements in the system, and to calculate key contributing factors and sensitivities to determine the best system controls in real time and to assist in developing remedial actions and transmission system enhancements offline . A prototype program that automates the simulation procedures used to build the set of security …

The major problem of measurement of a power spectral density (PSD) distribution of surface heights with surface profilometers arises due to the unknown Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) of the instruments, which tends to distort the PSD at higher spatial frequencies. The special mathematical properties of binary pseudo-random patterns make them an ideal basis for developing MTF calibration test surfaces. Two-dimensional binary pseudo-random arrays (BPRAs) have been fabricated and used for the MTF calibration of the MicroMap{trademark}-570 interferometric microscope with all available objectives. An investigation into the effects of fabrication imperfections on the quality of the MTF calibration and a procedure for accounting for such imperfections are presented.

Our current fossil-fuel-based system is causing potentially catastrophic changes to our planet. The quest for renewable, nonpolluting sources of energy requires us to understand, predict, and ultimately control matter and energy at the electronic, atomic, and molecular levels. Light-source facilities - the synchrotrons of today and the next-generation light sources of tomorrow - are the scientific tools of choice for exploring the electronic and atomic structure of matter. As such, these photon-science facilities are uniquely positioned to jump-start a global revolution in renewable and carbonneutral energy technologies. In these pages, we outline and illustrate through examples from our nation's light sources possible scientific directions for addressing these profound yet urgent challenges.

Nearly all designs of accelerators for heavy ion fusion rely on a velocity (energy) ramp to compress the beam longitudinally from its length in the accelerator to the length required at the target. The size of the velocity ramp is constrained by the longitudinal emittance of the beam. For example, if the longitudinal emittance is 0.05 eV {center_dot} s and we wish to produce a pulse having a width of {+-}2.5 ns at the target, we must supply an energy tilt such that the energy spread at the target is at least {+-}0.05 eV {center_dot} s/2.5 ns = {+-}2 x 10{sup 7} eV. The minimal value of energy spread occurs when the beam has propagated to the point where there is no correlation between the time and energy variables of the beam particles. (In the simple approximation where the boundary of the longitudinal phase space containing the particles is an ellipse, the ellipse is erect at this point, i.e., not tilted with respect to the axes.) In any case, the energy spread can affect focusing. If, for example, the beam kinetic energy is of the order of 5 GeV, a tilt of {+-}2 x 10{sup 7} eV corresponds to a …

The objective of the work described in this report is to demonstrate the capabilities of the current version of LeachXS{trademark}/ORCHESTRA for simulating chemical behavior and constituent release processes in a range of applications that are relevant to the CBP. This report illustrates the use of LeachXS{trademark}/ORCHESTRA for the following applications: (1) Comparing model and experimental results for leaching tests for a range of cementitious materials including cement mortars, grout, stabilized waste, and concrete. The leaching test data includes liquid-solid partitioning as a function of pH and release rates based on laboratory column, monolith, and field testing. (2) Modeling chemical speciation of constituents in cementitious materials, including liquid-solid partitioning and release rates. (3) Evaluating uncertainty in model predictions based on uncertainty in underlying composition, thermodynamic, and transport characteristics. (4) Generating predominance diagrams to evaluate predicted chemical changes as a result of material aging using the example of exposure to atmospheric conditions. (5) Modeling coupled geochemical speciation and diffusion in a three layer system consisting of a layer of Saltstone, a concrete barrier, and a layer of soil in contact with air. The simulations show developing concentration fronts over a time period of 1000 years. (6) Modeling sulfate attack and cracking due …

Five alternatives to vapor compression technology were qualitatively evaluated to determine their prospects for being better than vapor compression for space cooling and food refrigeration applications. The results of the assessment are summarized in the report. Overall, thermoacoustic and magnetic technologies were judged to have the best prospects for competing with vapor compression technology, with thermotunneling, thermoelectric, and thermionic technologies trailing behind in that order.

This report documents the inclusion of the STEM focus in the annual competition theme for the Innoventure youth project. The STEM concepts have always played a part in the selection of the theme. However, this year, STEM is intentionally mentioned in the description of the theme to emphasize the importance of these concepts. This work is a part of the National Security Preparedness Project (NSPP), being performed under a Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) grant.

This report documents progress made on all LDRD-funded projects during fiscal year 2009. As a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science (SC) national laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has an enduring mission to bring molecular and environmental sciences and engineering strengths to bear on DOE missions and national needs. Their vision is to be recognized worldwide and valued nationally for leadership in accelerating the discovery and deployment of solutions to challenges in energy, national security, and the environment. To achieve this mission and vision, they provide distinctive, world-leading science and technology in: (1) the design and scalable synthesis of materials and chemicals; (2) climate change science and emissions management; (3) efficient and secure electricity management from generation to end use; and (4) signature discovery and exploitation for threat detection and reduction. PNNL leadership also extends to operating EMSL: the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility dedicated to providing itnegrated experimental and computational resources for discovery and technological innovation in the environmental molecular sciences.

This report documents the research that has been undertaken as background for preparation of a marketing campaign for middle and high school students to increase interest in national security careers at the National Nuclear Security Administration. This work is a part of the National Security Preparedness Project (NSPP), being performed under a Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) grant. Previous research on the development of a properly trained and skilled national security workforce has identified a lack of interest by k-12 students in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Further, participation in these careers by women and minority populations is limited and is not increasing. Added to this are low educational achievement levels in New Mexico, where the marketing campaign will be deployed.

This report summarizes Detection and Analysis of Threats to the Energy Sector (DATES), a project sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and performed by a team led by SRI International, with collaboration from Sandia National Laboratories, ArcSight, Inc., and Invensys Process Systems. DATES sought to advance the state of the practice in intrusion detection and situational awareness with respect to cyber attacks in energy systems. This was achieved through adaptation of detection algorithms for process systems as well as development of novel anomaly detection techniques suited for such systems into a detection suite. These detection components, together with third-party commercial security systems, were interfaced with the commercial Security Information Event Management (SIEM) solution from ArcSight. The efficacy of the integrated solution was demonstrated on two testbeds, one based on a Distributed Control System (DCS) from Invensys, and the other based on the Virtual Control System Environment (VCSE) from Sandia. These achievements advance the DOE Cybersecurity Roadmap [DOE2006] goals in the area of security monitoring. The project ran from October 2007 until March 2010, with the final six months focused on experimentation. In the validation phase, team members from SRI and Sandia coupled the two test environments and carried …

This program was undertaken in response to the US Department of Energy Solicitation DE-PS30-03GO93010, resulting in this Cooperative Agreement with the Ford Motor Company and BP to demonstrate and evaluate hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and required fueling infrastructure. Ford initially placed 18 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCV) in three geographic regions of the US (Sacramento, CA; Orlando, FL; and southeast Michigan). Subsequently, 8 advanced technology vehicles were developed and evaluated by the Ford engineering team in Michigan. BP is Ford's principal partner and co-applicant on this project and provided the hydrogen infrastructure to support the fuel cell vehicles. BP ultimately provided three new fueling stations. The Ford-BP program consists of two overlapping phases. The deliverables of this project, combined with those of other industry consortia, are to be used to provide critical input to hydrogen economy commercialization decisions by 2015. The program's goal is to support industry efforts of the US President's Hydrogen Fuel Initiative in developing a path to a hydrogen economy. This program was designed to seek complete systems solutions to address hydrogen infrastructure and vehicle development, and possible synergies between hydrogen fuel electricity generation and transportation applications. This project, in support of that national goal, was designed …