Ecological risk assessment (ERA) is a tool used by many regulatory agencies to evaluate the impact to ecological receptors from changes in environmental conditions. Widespread use of ERAs began with the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program to assess the ecological impact from hazardous chemicals released to the environment. Many state hazardous chemical regulatory agencies have adopted the use of ERAs, and several state regulatory agencies are evaluating the use of ERAs to assess ecological impacts from releases of petroleum and gas-related products. Typical ERAs are toxicologically-based, use conservative assumptions with respect to ecological receptor exposure duration and frequency, often require complex modeling of transport and exposure and are very labor intensive. In an effort to streamline the ERA process, efforts are currently underway to develop default soil screening levels, to identify ecological screening criteria for excluding sites from formal risk assessment, and to create risk-based corrective action worksheets. This should help reduce the time spent on ERAs, at least for some sites. Work is also underway to incorporate bioavailability and spatial considerations into ERAs. By evaluating the spatial nature of contaminant releases with respect to the spatial context of the ecosystem under consideration, more realistic ERAs with respect …

The problem of generating light neutrinos within supersymmetric models is discussed. It is shown that the hierarchy of scales induced by supersymmetry breaking can give rise to suppression factors of the correct order of magnitude to produce experimentally allowed neutrino spectra.

Over the course of testing a substantial number of KDP and DKDP crystals from rapid and conventional growth processes, we have discovered that there is a consistent difference in the value of the damage resistance between z-cut and tripler, x-cut and y-cut crystals for a given test fluence. This increase in damage probability for tripler, x and y-cut crystals is consistent for both conventional and rapid growth KDP as well as DKDP. It also holds for unconditioned (S/1) and conditioned (R/l) tests and has values of 2.1 {+-} 0.6 and 1.5 {+-} 0.3 respectively. Testing has also revealed that there is no sensitivity to incident laser polarization. This is in direct contradiction to models based on simple, non-spherical absorbers. This result plus new information on the size and evolution of bulk damage density (see Runkel et al., this proceedings) has led to a reinterpretation of the growth parameter data for rapid growth NIF boules. It now appears that variations in impurity concentration throughout the boule do not affect the damage probability curve as dramatically as previously thought; although, this is still a topic of intensive investigation.

Results are reported from recently performed bulk-damage, pulse-scaling experiments on DKDP tripler samples taken from NIF-size, rapid-growth boule BD7. The tests were performed on LLNL's Optical Sciences Laser. A matrix of samples was exposed to single shots at 351 mn (3 {omega}) with average fluences from 4 to 8 J/cm{sup 2} for pulse durations of 1, 3 and 10 ns. The damage sites were scatter-mapped after testing to determine the damage evolution as a function of local beam fluence. The average bulk damage microcavity (pinpoint) density varied nearly linearly with fluence with peak values of approximately 16,000 pp/mm{sup 3} at 1 ns, 10,000 pp/mm{sup 3} at 3 ns and 400 pp/mm{sup 3} at 10 ns for fluences in the 8-10 J/cm{sup 2} range. The average size of a pinpoint was 10(+14,-9) {micro}m at 1 ns, 37 {+-} 20 {micro}m at 3 ns and {approx} 110 {micro}m at 10 ns, although all pulse durations produced pinpoints with a wide distribution of sizes. Analysis of the pinpoint density data yielded pulse-scaling behavior of t{sup 0.35}. Significant planar cracking around the pinpoint as was observed for the 10 ns case but not for the 1 and 3 ns pulses. Crack formation around pinpoints …

Laser conditioning has been shown to improve the laser damage threshold of some optical coatings by greater than 2x. Debate continues within the damage community regarding laser-conditioning mechanisms, but it is clear that nodular ejection is one of the byproducts of the laser conditioning process. To better understand why laser conditioning is so effective, photothermal microscopy was used to measure absorption of coating defects before and after laser exposure. Although a modest absorption reduction was expected due to the lower electric field peaks within a pit and the absence of potentially absorbing nodular seeds, surprisingly, absorption reductions up to 150x were observed. Photothermal microscopy has also been successfully used to correlate laser-induced damage threshold and absorption of defects in hafnia/silica multilayer optical coatings. Defects with high absorption, as indicated by high photothermal signal, have low damage thresholds. Previously a linear correlation of damage threshold and defect photothermal signal was established with films designed and damage tested at 1{omega} (1053 nm) and Brewster's angle (56.4{sup o}), but characterized by photothermal microscopy at 514.5 nm and near-normal angle of incidence (10{sup o}). In this study coatings designed, characterized by photothermal microscopy, and damage tested at the same wavelength, incident angle, and polarization …

This paper discusses the results of thermal annealing and in-situ second harmonic generation (SHG) damage tests performed on six rapid growth KDP type 1 doubler crystals at 1064 nm (1 {omega}) on the Zeus automated damage test facility. Unconditioned (S/1) and conditioned (R/1) damage probability tests were performed before and after thermal annealing, then with and without SHG on six doubler crystals from the NIF-size, rapid growth KDP boule F6. The tests revealed that unannealed, last-grown material from the boule in either prismatic or pyramidal sectors exhibited the highest damage curves. After thermal annealing at 160 C for seven days, the prismatic sector samples increased in performance ranging from 1.6 to 2.4X, while material from the pyramidal sector increased only modestly, ranging from 1.0 to 1.4X. Second harmonic generation decreased the damage fluence by an average of 20 percent for the S/1 tests and 40 percent for R/1 tests. Conversion efficiencies under test conditions were measured to be 20 to 30 percent and compared quite well to predicted behavior, as modeled by LLNL frequency conversion computer codes. The damage probabilities at the 1 {omega} NIF redline fluence (scaled to 10 ns via t{sup 0.5}) for S/1 tests for the unannealed …

This article discusses high sensitivity measurement of implanted As in the presence of Ge in Ge(x)Si(1-x)/Si layered alloys using trace element accelerator mass spectrometry.

The technical papers presented in this special publication represent the efforts of students from 16 colleges and universities across North America. Over 600 students have participated in the Ethanol Vehicle Challenge since its inception in 1998. The 2000 Ethanol Vehicle Challenge was the final year of this successful 3-year advanced vehicle competition series. The papers presented are enhanced and expanded versions of those prepared in advance of the competition by the participating student engineers. They describe the design elements, construction details, and performance of the dedicated ethanol vehicles brought to the Challenge by the participating universities. The goal of this competition was to demonstrate the potential of E85 (85% denatured ethanol and 15% hydrocarbon primer) to significantly lower emissions and improve the performance, fuel efficiency and cold starting of vehicles fueled by ethanol. The competition series began with a Request for Proposals in January 1997. A letter announcing and soliciting interest in the competition (Notice of Interest) was sent to all accredited engineering programs and two-year technical schools in the US and Canada. The Notice described the competition and the requirements for the conversion of a 1997 Chevrolet Malibu to dedicated E85 operation. On the basis of the submitted proposals, …

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The MINOS experiment is a long-baseline, neutrino-oscillation experiment. In total, 28,000 m{sup 2} of scintillator is needed for the experiment. This is almost 300 tons of finished scintillator. The solution has been the development of an extruded scintillator with a 2-mm deep grove in the upper surface for a wavelength-shifting fiber and a co-extruded TiO{sub 2} coating as a reflector. The TiO{sub 2} coating also allows the scintillator to be directly epoxied into panels. Production and quality control techniques are presented.

Undulator beamlines at third-generation synchrotrons x-ray sources are designed to use the high-brilliance radiation that is contained in the central cone of the generated x-ray beams. The rest of the x-ray beam is often unused. Moreover, in some cases, such as in the zone-plate-based microfocusing beamlines, only a small part of the central radiation cone around the optical axis is used. In this paper, a side-station branch line at the Advanced Photon Source that takes advantage of some of the unused off-axis photons in a microfocusing x-ray beamline is described. Detailed information on the design and analysis of a high-heat-load water-cooled monochromator developed for this beamline is provided.

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A radiation-hard pixel readout chip, FPIX2, is being developed at Fermilab for the recently approved BTeV experiment. Although designed for BTeV, this chip should also be appropriate for use by CDF and DZero. A short review of this development effort is presented. Particular attention is given to the circuit redesign which was made necessary by the decision to implement FPIX2 using a standard deep-submicron CMOS process rather than an explicitly radiation-hard CMOS technology, as originally planned. The results of initial tests of prototype 0.25{micro} CMOS devices are presented, as are plans for the balance of the development effort.

Population synthesis studies of binaries are always limited by a myriad of uncertainties from the poorly understood effects of binary mass transfer and common envelope evolution to the many uncertainties that still remain in stellar evolution. But the importance of these uncertainties depends both upon the objects being studied and the questions asked about these objects. Here I review the most critical uncertainties in the population synthesis of gamma-ray burst progenitors. With a better understanding of these uncertainties, binary population synthesis can become a powerful tool in understanding, and constraining, gamma-ray burst models. In turn, as gamma-ray bursts become more important as cosmological probes, binary population synthesis of gamma-ray burst progenitors becomes an important tool in cosmology.