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Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Alvin, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Photograph of Dallas Fire-Rescue Station #1. The building has three bays. A fire engine is pulled out of the bay on the right, while another is in the bay on the left. A red car is parked in front of the bay between them.

The loss in efficiency of power plants with mixed metallurgy, due to transport and deposition of copper and its oxides in HP turbines, has been recognized as one of the key problems to be solved in the utility industry worldwide. Within this context, the most important problem to be addressed is the solubility and volatility of copper compounds under steam generation condition. This paper presents an evaluation of different solubility end volatility models for copper compounds, and presents a comparison between the calculated and test data.

An understanding of activity-composition (a/X) relations and phase equilibria for halite-bearing, mixed-species supercritical fluids is critically important in many geological and industrial applications. The authors have performed experiments on the a/X relations and phase equilibria of H{sub 2}O-CO{sub 2}-NaCl fluids at 5OO C, 500 bars, to obtain highly accurate and precise data for this ternary system. H{sub 2}O-CO{sub 2}-NaCl samples were reacted at a (H{sub 2}O) = 0.350, 0.425, 0.437, 0.448, 0.560, 0.606, 0.678, 0.798, and 0.841. Results indicate that fluids with these activities lie in the vapor-NaCl two-phase region, and that a fluid with the last value has a composition close to the three-phase (vapor + brine + halite) field. Data from these experiments and NaCl solubility runs also suggest that the vapor comer of the three-phase field lies near X(H{sub 2}O) = 0.760, X(NaCl) = 0.065, which is a significantly more water-rich composition than suggested by the model of [1].

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Photograph of Fire Station #20 in Dallas, Texas. Two fire engines are pulled out of two open bays on the left. The other two bays are closed, and other buildings are visible in the background.

A flow-through high-pressure electrical conductance cell was designed and constructed to measure limiting molar conductances and ion association constants of dilute aqueous solutions with high precision at high temperatures and pressures. The basic concept of the cell employs the principle developed at the University of Delaware in 1995, but overall targets higher temperatures (to 600 C) and pressures (to 300 MPa). At present the cell has been tested by measuring aqueous NaCl and LiOH solutions (10{sup {minus}3} to 10{sup {minus}5} mol.kg{sup {minus}1}) to 405 C and 33 MPa with good results.

The calculations with the broad-group cross-section library Bugle-96, and atom displacement (dpa) cross sections for iron, both derived from ENDF/B-VI data, result in higher calculated fast neutron fluxes, better agreement of calculations with radiometric dosimeter measurements, and significantly slower dpa rate attenuation through pressure vessel walls relative to the results with their predecessors: the Sailor library and ASTM iron dpa cross sections.

Semiweekly newspaper from Levelland, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

One mission of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is to affect pollution prevention and waste minimization surrounding operations at their Plutonium Facility. Efforts are underway and technologies are being deployed to capture the actinide at the source thereby reducing the amount of nuclear material leaving the facility as transuranic waste. Traditional processing alternatives for decontamination, such as strong acid leaching and surface brushing have not achieved the desired recovery efficiencies for plastic or non-actinide metal matrices. Much of the nuclear material present is fixed in the matrix, and is not susceptible to recovery with surface cleaning techniques. In addition, the relatively large secondary waste volumes associated with the acid leaching have persuaded LANL to evaluate alternative recovery methods. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and testing of a prototype chemical decontamination and co-precipitation process installed at the Los Al amos Plutonium Facility that is based on the patented TechXtract{reg_sign} system developed by Active Environmental Technologies Inc. (AET). The technology was enhanced under a PRDA contract awarded by DOE in 1997.

Semiweekly newspaper from Carthage, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Semi-weekly newspaper from Livingston, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.

Highly accurate and precise density data for CO{sub 2}-H{sub 2}O mixtures at 400 C 10-400 MPa, were used to develop a modified, B-truncated virial equation for excess pressure (P{sup ex}). This function and empirical equations of state for H{sub 2}O and CO{sub 2} accurately represent the experimentally determined densities, and interpolate smoothly between data points. Integrating the P{sub ex} expression with respect to molar volume yields an equation for excess Helmholta free energy, which can be used to calculate other excess properties of interest. The P{sup ex} modeling method has important advantages over more conventional, alternative approaches.

Semiweekly newspaper from Seminole, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Cracking of the stainless steel layer of co-extruded 304L stainless steel/SA210 Gd A 1 carbon steel black liquor recovery boiler floor tubes has been identified as one of the most serious material problems in the pulp and paper industry. A DOE-funded study was initiated in 1995 with the goal of determining the cause of and possible solutions to this cracking problem. These studies have characterized tube cracking as well as the chemical and thermal environment and stress state of floor tubes. Investigations of possible cracking mechanisms indicate that stress corrosion cracking rather than thermal fatigue is a more likely cause of crack initiation. The cracking mechanism appears to require the presence of hydrated sodium sulfide and is most likely active during shut-downs and/or start-ups. Based on these results and operating experience, certain alloys appear to be more resistant than others to cracking in the floor environment, and certain operating practices appear to significantly lessen the likelihood of cracking. This report is the latest in a series of progress reports presented on this project.

The temperatures of floor tubes in a slope-floored black liquor recovery boiler were measured using an array of thermocouples located on the tube crowns. It was found that sudden, short duration temperature increases occurred with a frequency that increased with distance from the spout wall. To determine if the temperature pulses were associated with material falling from the convective section of the boiler, the pattern of sootblower operation was recorded and compared with the pattern of temperature pulses. During the period from September, 1998, through February, 1999, it was found that more than 2/3 of the temperature pulses occurred during the time when one of the fast eight sootblowers, which are directed at the back of the screen tubes and the leading edge of the first superheater bank, was operating.

Large amounts of data obtained from surveillance capsules and test reactor experiments are needed, comprising many different materials and different irradiation conditions, to develop generally applicable damage prediction models that can be used for industry standards and regulatory guides. Version 1 of the Embrittlement Data Base (EDB) [I] is such a comprehensive collection of such data resulting from the merging of the Power Reactor Embrittlement Data Base (PR-EDB) [2] and the Test Reactor Embrittlement Data Base (TR-EDB) [3]. Fracture toughness data were also integrated into Version 1 of the EDB. The EDB data files are in dBASE format and can be accessed with a personal computer using the DOS or WINDOWS operating system. A utility program has been written to investigate radiation embrittlement using this data base. The utility program is used to retrieve and select specific data, manipulate data, display data to the screen or printer, and to tit and plot Charpy impact data.

The volumetric properties and phase relations of binary mixtures of H{sub 2}0, CO{sub 2}, CH{sub 4} and N{sub 2} were determined experimentally at 3OO C, 74.4--999.3 bars, using a custom-built vibrating-tube densimeter. Densities of all single-phase fluids increase steadily with increasing pressure. At a given pressure, CO{sub 2}-rich H{sub 2}O-CO{sub 2} mixtures show a pronounced nonlinear decrease in density with increasing mole fraction CO, in marked contrast to the densities of N{sub 2}-rich H{sub 2}O-N{sub 2} mixtures which are nearly independent of composition. At pressure up to 500 bars, non-aqueous mixtures have much smaller excess molar volumes than gas-rich aqueous mixtures. H{sub 2}O-rich mixtures at pressures ca.86 bars, and CO{sub 2}-poor non-aqueous mixtures at 99.4 bars, exhibit negative excess molar volumes. Excess molar volumes for aqueous mixtures peak at 86 bars, then decrease monotonically with increasing pressure above 86 bars. The H{sub 2}O-CO{sub 2} liquid-vapor field widens continuously from 86 to ca.400 bars, then narrows with increasing pressure, closing at ca.565 bars, in sharp contrast to the H{sub 2}O-N{sub 2} liquid-vapor field, which widens continuously with increasing pressure to at least 1000 bars.