Privatized services are being procured to vitrify low-activity tank wastes for eventual disposalin a shallow subsurface facility at the Hanford Site. Over 500,000 metric tons of low-activitywaste glass will be generated, which is among the largest volumes of waste within the U.S.Department of Energy (DOE) complex and is one of the largest inventories of long-livedradionuclides planned for disposal in a low-level waste facility. Before immobilized waste canbe disposed, DOE must approve a"performance assessment," which is a document that describesthe impacts of the disposal facility on public health and environmental resources. Because therelease rate of radionuclides from the glass waste form is a key factor determining these impacts,a sound scientific basis for determining their long-term release rates must be developed if thisdisposal action is to be accepted by regulatory agencies, stakeholders, and the public. In part, thescientific basis is determined from a sound testing strategy.The foundation of the proposed testing strategy is a well accepted mechanistic model that isbeing used to calculate the glass corrosion behavior over the geologic time scales required forperformance assessment. This model requires that six parameters be determined, and the testingprogram is defined by an appropriate set of laboratory experiments to determine theseparameters, and is combined with …

This newsletter is prepared for the NARUC Subcommittee on Renewable Energy to promote information sharing on state-level renewable electric activities. It is sponsored by the Office of Power Technologies of the U.S. Department of Energy.

The following major pieces of work were completed under the sponsorship of this grant: (1) singular perturbation theory for dynamical systems; (2) homoclinic orbits and chaotic dynamics in second-harmonic generating, optically pumped, passive optical cavities; (3) chaotic dynamics in short ring-laser cavities; (4) homoclinic orbits in moderately-long ring-laser cavities; (5) finite-dimensional attractor in ring-laser cavities; (6) turbulent dynamics in long ring-laser cavities; (7) bifurcations in a model for a free-boundary problem for the heat equation; (8) weakly nonlinear dynamics of interface propagation; (9) slowly periodically forced planar Hamiltonian systems; and (10) soliton spectrum of the solutions of the nonlinear Schroedinger equation. A brief summary of the research is given for each project.

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We used split-beam hydroacoustics to monitor kokanee Oncorhynchus nerka kennerlyi abundance in Dworshak Reservoir from 1995 to 1996 in order to quantify the impacts of water releases from Dworshak Dam. The kokanee population was at a record high level of 1.9 million age-1 and age-2 fish (350 fish/ha) during June 1995. Large discharges of water during July and August of 1995 did not result in major losses of kokanee. Mid-winter flooding in February. March, and April of 1996: however, caused entrainment losses of 90% of all kokanee in the reservoir. The population declined to 140,000 kokanee. High flows during spring runoff used another 50% of the kokanee to be lost, further reducing the population to 71,000 fish (13 fish/ha). Entrainment losses were partially explainable by the distribution of kokanee in the reservoir. During winter, all age-classes of kokanee congregated near the dam making them susceptible to high releases of water. Kokanee appeared to be less susceptible to entrainment during summer and early fall because most kokanee were in other parts of the reservoir: adults were in the upper reservoir staging to spawn, fry were in the upper reservoir having emerged from tributary streams, and juvenile kokanee were spread throughout the …

In the Continued Storage Analysis Report (CSAR) (Reference 1), DOE decided to analyze the environmental consequences of continuing to store the commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) at 72 commercial nuclear power sites and DOE-owned spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste at five Department of Energy sites by region rather than by individual site. This analysis assumes that three commercial facilities pairs--Salem and Hope Creek, Fitzpatrick and Nine-Mile Point, and Dresden and Moms--share common storage due to their proximity to each other. The five regions selected for this analysis are shown on Figure 1. Regions 1, 2, and 3 are the same as those used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in their regulatory oversight of commercial power reactors. NRC Region 4 was subdivided into two regions to more appropriately define the two different climates that exist in NRC Region 4. A single hypothetical site in each region was assumed to store all the SNF and HLW in that region. Such a site does not exist and has no geographic location but is a mathematical construct for analytical purposes. To ensure that the calculated results for the regional analyses reflect appropriate inventory, facility and material degradation, and radionuclide transport, the waste inventories, …

One of the current unsolved problems in human factors is the difficulty in acquiring information from lessons learned and data collected among human performance analysts in different domains. There are several common concerns and generally accepted issues of importance for human factors, psychology and industry analysts of performance and safety. Among these are the need to incorporate lessons learned in design, to carefully consider implementation of new designs and automation, and the need to reduce human performance-based contributions to risk. In spite of shared concerns, there are several roadblocks to widespread sharing of data and lessons learned from operating experience and simulation, including the fact that very few publicly accessible data bases exist (Gertman & Blackman, 1994, and Kirwan, 1997). There is a need to draw together analysts and analytic methodologies to comprise a centralized source of data with sufficient detail to be meaningful while ensuring source anonymity. We propose that a generic source of performance data and a multi-domain data store may provide the first steps toward cooperative performance modeling and analysis across industries.

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The purpose of this document is to present the details of the calculations used to define the radionuclide inventory for the Department of Energy (DOE) spent nuclear fuel (SNF) used in the TSPA-VA calculations.

A study was conducted to evaluate how workers predict manufacturing production potentials given positively and negatively framed information. Findings indicate the existence of a bias toward positive information and suggest that this bias may be reduced with experience but is never the less maintained. Experts err in the same way non experts do in differentially processing negative and positive information. Additionally, both experts and non experts tend to overestimate production potentials in a positive direction. The authors propose that these biases should be addressed with further research including cross domain analyses and consideration in training, workplace design, and human performance modeling.

Test Area North (TAN) at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) is the site of a large trichloroethene (TCE) plume resulting from the historical injection of wastewater into the Snake River Plain Aquifer. The TAN Record of Decision (ROD) selected pump and treat as the final remedy and included a contingency for post-ROD treatability studies of alternative technologies. The technologies still under consideration are in situ bioremediation, in situ chemical oxidation, and natural attenuation. Both anaerobic and aerobic laboratory microcosm studies indicate the presence of microorganisms capable of chloroethene degradation. Field data indicate that TCE concentrations decrease relative to tritium and tetrachloroethene indicating an as yet unknown process is contributing to natural attenuation of TCE. Several methods for analyzing the field data have been evaluated and important limitations identified. Early results from the continued evaluation of the three alternative technologies suggest the combined approach of active remediation of the source area (in situ bioremediation and/or chemical oxidation replacing or augmenting pump and treat) and natural attenuation within the dissolved phase plume may be more cost and schedule effective than the base case pump and treat.

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D-Zero installed a new 2 Tesla superconducting solenoid magnet into the central tracking region of the D-Zero detector. This report documents the cryogenic performance of the superconducting solenoid during its first cryogenic operation at Fermilab. By necessity, the liquid helium refrigerator was also operated. This was the second time the refrigerator plant has been operated. The refrigerator's performance is also documented herein.

Understanding how the information is conveyed from outside to inside the cell is a critical challenge for all biologists involved in signal transduction. The flow of information initiated by cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix contacts is mediated by the formation of adhesion complexes involving multiple proteins. Inside adhesion complexes, connective membrane skeleton (CMS) proteins are signal transducers that bind to adhesion molecules, organize the cytoskeleton, and initiate biochemical cascades. Adhesion complex-mediated signal transduction ultimately directs the formation of supramolecular structures in the cell nucleus, as illustrated by the establishment of multi complexes of DNA-bound transcription factors, and the redistribution of nuclear structural proteins to form nuclear subdomains. Recently, several CMS proteins have been observed to travel to the cell nucleus, suggesting a distinctive role for these proteins in signal transduction. This review focuses on the nuclear translocation of structural signal transducers of the membrane skeleton and also extends our analysis to possible translocation of resident nuclear proteins to the membrane skeleton. This leads us to envision the communication between spatially distant cellular compartments (i.e., membrane skeleton and cell nucleus) as a bidirectional flow of information (a dynamic reciprocity) based on subtle multilevel structural and biochemical equilibria. At one level, it is …

One of the current unsolved problems in human factors is the difficulty in acquiring information from lessons learned and data collected among human performance analysts in different domains. There are several common concerns and generally accepted issues of importance for human factors, psychology and industry analysts of performance and safety. Among these are the need to incorporate lessons learned in design, to carefully consider implementation of new designs and automation, and the need to reduce human performance-based contributions to risk. In spite of shared concerns, there are several road blocks to widespread sharing of data and lessons learned from operating experience and simulation, including the fact that very few publicly accessible data bases exist(Gertman & Blackman, 1994, and Kirwan, 1997). There is a need to draw together analysts and analytic methodologies to comprise a centralized source of data with sufficient detail to be meaningful while ensuring source anonymity. We propose that a generic source of performance data and a multi-domain data store may provide the first steps toward cooperative performance modeling and analysis across industries.

We have deposited CdTe thin films by close-spaced sublimation at two different temperature ranges. The films deposited at the lower temperature partially recrystallized after CdCl{sub 2} treatment at 350 C and completely recrystallized after the same treatment at 400 C. The films deposited at higher temperature did not recrystallize at these two temperatures. These results confirmed that the mechanisms responsible for changes in physical properties of CdTe films treated with CdCl{sub 2} are recrystallization and grain growth, and provided an alternative method to deposit CSS films using lower temperatures.

This report provides a summary of the radiological surveys performed in support of near-facility environmental monitoring at the Hanford Site. The Third Quarter 1998 survey results and the status of actions required are summarized: (1) All of the eighty-five environmental radiological surveys scheduled during July, August and September were performed as planned. Fifty-one of the surveys were conducted at Project Hanford Management Contractors (PHMC) sites and thirty-four at Environmental Restoration Contractor (ERC) sites. Contamination above background levels was found at seventeen of the PHMC waste sites and two of the ERC waste sites. Contamination levels as high >1,000,000 disintegrations per minute (dpm) per 100 cm{sup 2} were reported. Of these contaminated surveys nine were in Underground Radioactive Material (URM) areas, three were in unposted areas and seven were in contamination areas. The contamination found within four of the URM and three of the CA areas was immediately cleaned up and no further action was required. The remaining five URM and two unposted sites were posted and along with the five CA sites will require remediation. Radiological Problem Reports (RPR's) were issued and the sites were turned over to the landlord for further action as required. (2) During the second quarter …

Mixed high-level waste is currently stored in underground tanks at the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Hanford Site. The plan is to retrieve the waste, process the water, and dispose of the waste in a manner that will provide less long-term health risk. The AX Tank Farm has been identified for purposes of demonstration. Not all the waste can be retrieved from the tanks and some waste has leaked from these tanks into the underlying soil. Retrieval of this waste could result in additional leakage. During FY1998, the Sandia National Laboratory was under contract to evaluate concepts for immobilizing the residual waste remaining in tanks and mitigating the migration of contaminants that exist in the soil column. Specifically, the scope of this evaluation included: development of a layered tank fill design for reducing water infiltration; development of in-tank getter technology; mitigation of soil contamination through grouting; sequestering of specific radionuclides in soil; and geochemical and hydrologic modeling of waste-water-soil interactions. A copy of the final report prepared by Sandia National Laboratory is attached.

The research activities performed in this quarter (reporting period: 10/01/97- 12/31/97) are summarized as follows: The activities concentrated on: . Partial analysis of the multi pulse test results . Data analysis and comparison with that of the single pulse test data

Quality Process Plan for the Restart of Cell Hot-Work. Addition of Table 4.