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Cleanup of the Hanford Site is currently planned to take until 2046 and another approximately $SOB. In the summer of 1999, Fluor Hanford initiated an ''Accelerated Closure Team'' to evaluate opportunities to reduce this long schedule and high cost for the parts of the Hanford Site which they manage. To-date, this breakthrough team has developed two approaches which will move > 50 million curies away from the Columbia River sooner than planned and at a significantly reduced cost. The approaches successfully applied so far are presently being applied to other opportunities at Hanford.

The ATLAS Electromagnetic (EM) calorimeter (EMCAL) Front End Board (FEB) will be located in custom-designed enclosures solidly connected to the feedtroughs. It is a complex mixed signal board which includes the preamplifier, shaper, switched capacitor array analog memory unit (SCA), analog to digital conversion, serialization of the data and related control logic. It will be described in detail elsewhere in these proceedings. The electromagnetic interference (either pick-up from the on board digital activity, from power supply ripple or from external sources) which affects coherently large groups of channels (coherent noise) is of particular concern in calorimetry and it has been studied in detail.

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Information technology has completely changed our concept of record keeping--the advent of digital records was a momentous discovery, as significant as the invention of the printing press. Digital records allowed huge amounts of information to be stored in a very small space and to be examined quickly. However, digital documents are much more vulnerable to the passage of time than printed documents, because the media on which they are stored are easily affected by physical phenomena, such as magnetic fields, oxidation, material decay, and by various environmental factors that may erase the information. Even more important, digital information becomes obsolete, because even if future generations maybe able to read it, they may not necessarily be able to interpret it. Over the centuries analog documents have been written on solid materials such as stone, clay and metal plates using tools to inscribe the characters. These archival methods have preserved records for centuries, and even millennia, but suffer from low information density. Modem methods facilitate writing pages on smooth material surfaces at high information densities. This writing can generate from about 25 to 100,000 times the area information density of microfilm and work with either analog or digital storage methods. Information of …

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Work on design of ignition targets for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) has progressed in three areas. First, hohlraums have been re-optimized taking advantage of improvements in efficiency in several areas: use of high albedo material mixtures in the hohlraum wall; optimizing the laser entrance hole; optimizing the case-to-capsule ratio; and taking advantage of increased efficiency of longer pulses. These changes, in combination, allow for the possibility of quite high yields ({approx}100 MJ),gains (>40) and significantly more margin for ignition on NIF. Second, work has continued on specifications for target fabrication. Third, detailed design and analysis has been done on targets for the commissioning phase of NIF, when only 96 beams are available. We find excellent hydrodynamic similarity is possible with sub-scale cryogenic targets. These targets can be used to test all of the physics of full-scale ignition targets in detail except, perhaps, for ignition itself.

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Many non-silica aerogels are notably weak and fragile in monolithic form. Particularly, few monolithic aerogels with densities less than 50kg/m3 have any significant strength. It is especially difficult to prepare uncracked monoliths of pure alumina aerogels that are robust and moisture stable. In this paper, we discuss the synthesis of strong, stable, monolithic, high porosity (>98% porous) alumina aerogels, using a two-step sol-gel process. The alumina aerogels have a polycrystalline morphology that results in enhanced physical properties. Most of the measured physical properties of the alumina aerogels are superior to those for silica aerogels for equivalent densities.

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The authors report the first measurements of the z-dependent evolution of electron-beam microbunching as revealed through coherent transition radiation (CTR) measurements in a visible self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) free-electron laser (FEL) experiment. The increase in microbunching was detected by tracking the growth of the visible CTR signals as generated from insertable metal mirrors/foils after each of the last three undulators. The same optical imaging diagnostics that were used to track the z-dependent intensity of the undulator radiation (UR) were also used to track the electron beam/CTR information. Angular distribution, beam size, and intensity data were obtained after each of the last three undulators in the five-undulator series, and spectral information was obtained after the last undulator. The exponential growth rate of the CTR was found to be very similar to that of the UR and consistent with simulations using the code GENESIS.