Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, water, and heat. Unlike batteries, fuel cells continuously generate electricity, as long as a source of fuel is supplied. Moreover, fuel cells do not burn fuel, making the process quiet, pollution-free and two to three times more efficient than combustion. Fuel cell systems can be a truly zero-emission source of electricity, if the hydrogen is produced from non-polluting sources. Global concerns about climate change, energy security, and air pollution are driving demand for fuel cell technology. More than 630 companies and laboratories in the United States are investing $1 billion a year in fuel cells or fuel cell component technologies. This report provides an overview of trends in the fuel cell industry and markets, including product shipments, market development, and corporate performance. It also provides snapshots of select fuel cell companies, including general business strategy and market focus, as well as, financial information for select publicly-traded companies.

The emissions of radionuclides from Department of Energy Facilities such as Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are regulated by the Amendments to the Clean Air Act of 1990, National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (40 CFR 61 Subpart H). These regulations established an annual dose limit of 10 mrem to the maximally exposed member of the public attributable to emissions of radionuclides. This document describes the emissions of radionuclides from LANL and the dose calculations resulting from these emissions for calendar year 2009. This report meets the reporting requirements established in the regulations.

Discusses the use of straight vegetable oil as a diesel fuel and the use of biodiesel as a transportation fuel.

The Advanced Engineering Environment (AEE) project identifies emerging engineering environment tools and assesses their value to Sandia National Laboratories and our partners in the Nuclear Security Enterprise (NSE) by testing them in our design environment. This project accomplished several pilot activities, including: the preliminary definition of an engineering bill of materials (BOM) based product structure in the Windchill PDMLink 9.0 application; an evaluation of Mentor Graphics Data Management System (DMS) application for electrical computer-aided design (ECAD) library administration; and implementation and documentation of a Windchill 9.1 application upgrade. The project also supported the migration of legacy data from existing corporate product lifecycle management systems into new classified and unclassified Windchill PDMLink 9.0 systems. The project included two infrastructure modernization efforts: the replacement of two aging AEE development servers for reliable platforms for ongoing AEE project work; and the replacement of four critical application and license servers that support design and engineering work at the Sandia National Laboratories/California site.

Fact sheet describes NREL's work with heat transfer technologies to keep hybrid electric and all-electric vehicle power electronic components cool.

This report presents estimates of dispersion coefficients and effective dose for potential air dispersion scenarios of uncontrolled releases from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) buildings 3026C, 3026D, and 3140 prior to or during the demolition of the 3026 Complex. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) AERMOD system1-6 was used to compute these estimates. AERMOD stands for AERMIC Model, where AERMIC is the American Meteorological Society-EPA Regulatory Model Improvement Committee. Five source locations (three in building 3026D and one each in building 3026C and the filter house 3140) and associated source characteristics were determined with the customer. In addition, the area of study was determined and building footprints and intake locations of air-handling systems were obtained. In addition to the air intakes, receptor sites consisting of ground level locations on four polar grids (50 m, 100 m, 200 m, and 500 m) and two intersecting lines of points (50 m separation), corresponding to sidewalks along Central Avenue and Fifth Street. Three years of meteorological data (2006 2008) were used each consisting of three datasets: 1) National Weather Service data; 2) upper air data for the Knoxville-Oak Ridge area; and 3) local weather data from Tower C (10 m, 30 m and 100 …

The Lakeview, Oregon, office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) contracted Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to classify vegetation communities on Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in northeastern Nevada. The objective of the mapping project was to provide USFWS refuge biologists and planners with detailed vegetation and habitat information that can be referenced to make better decisions regarding wildlife resources, fuels and fire risk, and land management. This letter report describes the datasets and methods used to develop vegetation cover type and shrub canopy cover maps for the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge. The two map products described in this report are 1) a vegetation cover classification that provides updated information on the vegetation associations occurring on the refuge and 2) a map of shrub canopy cover based on high-resolution images and field data.

The Lakeview, Oregon, office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) contracted Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to classify vegetation communities on Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Nevada. The objective of the mapping project was to provide USFWS refuge biologists and planners with detailed vegetation and habitat information that can be referenced to make better decisions regarding wildlife resources, fuels and fire risk, and land management. This letter report describes the datasets and methods used to develop vegetation cover type and shrub canopy cover maps for the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge. The two map products described in this report are (1) a vegetation cover classification that provides updated information on the vegetation associations occurring on the refuge and (2) a map of shrub canopy cover based on high-resolution images and field data.

This report summarizes the offshore wind resource potential for the contiguous United States and Hawaii as of May 2009. The development of this assessment has evolved over multiple stages as new regional meso-scale assessments became available, new validation data was obtained, and better modeling capabilities were implemented. It is expected that further updates to the current assessment will be made in future reports.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to determining whether the Racing Commission (Agency) processes racetrack license applications in a timely manner and in accordance with applicable law and Agency rules.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to evaluating selected financial processes to determining whether Sam Houston State University has implemented a system of financial and administrative internal controls and considering whether accounting procedures and controls provide assurance of accurate, complete, reliable, and timely financial information; security controls within the University's financial system provide assurance that critical data is protected from unauthorized alteration, loss, or improper use; controls are adequate and effective in providing assurance to safeguard assets; and the University complies with applicable laws and regulations.

The Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) provides grants to states, territories, and the District of Columbia to support their energy priorities through the State Energy Program (SEP). The SEP provides Federal financial assistance to carry out energy efficiency and renewable energy projects that meet each state's unique energy needs while also addressing national goals such as energy security. Federal funding is based on a grant formula that takes into account population and energy consumption. The SEP emphasizes the state's role as the decision maker and administrator for the program. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) expanded the SEP, authorizing $3.1 billion in grants. Based on existing grant formulas and after reviewing state-level plans, EERE made awards to states. The State of Florida's Energy Office (Florida) was allocated $126 million - a 90-fold increase over Florida's average annual SEP grant of $1.4 million. Per the Recovery Act, this funding must be obligated by September 30, 2010, and spent by April 30, 2012. As of March 10, 2010, Florida had expended $13.2 million of the SEP Recovery Act funds. Florida planned to use its grant funds to undertake activities that would preserve …

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) highlighted the importance of reducing the Nation's dependence on foreign oil and conserving scarce energy resources. The Department of Energy, as the designated lead agency for promoting new technologies, providing leadership for energy conservation and helping Federal agencies reduce energy costs, plays a pivotal role in achieving the Recovery Act's energy related goals. The Department spends nearly $300 million per year in energy costs for its 9,000 buildings at 24 sites. Electricity costs, totaling $190 million, account for close to two-thirds of the Department's total energy expenditures, with roughly 40 percent or $76 million of those costs attributable to the cost of lighting. New lighting technologies and advanced lighting systems offer the Department the opportunity to significantly reduce energy consumption; decrease operating costs at its sites throughout the country; and, demonstrate the benefits of using new lighting technologies that are currently being developed in its laboratories and by other sources. Because of its energy conservation leadership role, we initiated this audit to determine whether the Department's facilities had implemented lighting conservation measures.

Policies aimed at limiting anthropogenic climate change would result in significant transformations of the energy and land-use systems. However, increasing the demand for bioenergy could have a tremendous impact on land use, and can result in land clearing and deforestation. Wise et al. (2009a,b) analyzed an idealized policy to limit the indirect land use change emissions from bioenergy. The policy, while effective, would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement in the real world. In this paper, we consider several different land use policies that deviate from this first-best, using the Joint Global Change Research Institute’s Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM). Specifically, these new frameworks are (1) a policy that focuses on just the above-ground or vegetative terrestrial carbon rather than the total carbon, (2) policies that focus exclusively on incentivizing and protecting forestland, and (3) policies that apply an economic penalty on the use of biomass as a proxy to limit indirect land use change emissions. For each policy, we examine its impact on land use, land-use change emissions, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, agricultural supply, and food prices.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In July 2008, the Department of State (State) began issuing passport cards as a lower-cost alternative to passports for U.S. citizens to meet Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative requirements. In October 2008, State began issuing the second generation border crossing card (BCC) based on the architecture of the passport card. GAO was asked to examine the effectiveness of the physical and electronic security features of the passport card and second generation BCC. This report addresses: (1) How effectively State's development process--including testing and evaluation--for the passport card and second generation BCC mitigates the risk of fraudulent use? (2) How are U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers using the cards' security features to prevent fraudulent use at land ports of entry? To conduct this work, GAO evaluated the security features of passport cards and second generation BCCs against international standards and guidance and results from testing and evaluation and observed the inspection of these cards at five land ports of entry (POE)."

This report describes how NREL used the CNG Vehicle and Infrastructure Cash-Flow Evaluation (VICE) model to establish guidance for fleets making decisions about using compressed natural gas.

Wet powder-samples of five rock minerals, granite, albite, hornblende, diorite, and biotite mica, were exposed in supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) for 3 days at 250 C under 17.23 MPa pressure, and then the susceptibility of the various crystalline phases present in these mineral structures to reactions with hot scCO2 was investigated by XRD and FT-IR. The anorthite present in diorite was identified as the most vulnerable phase to carbonation. In contrast, biotite displayed a great resistance, although its phase was transformed hydrothermally to sanidine and quartz. Granite comprised of two phases, anorthoclase-type albite and quartz. The carbonation of former phase led to the formation of amorphous sodium and potassium carbonates coexisting with the clay-like by-products of the carbonation reaction. The reactivity of quartz to scCO2 was minimal, if any. Among these rock minerals, only hornblende formed crystalline carbonation products, such as calcite and magnesite after exposure, reflecting the likelihood of an increase in its volume. Based upon the feldspar ternary diagram, the carbonation rate of various different minerals in the plagioclase feldspar family depended primarily on the amount of anorthite. On the other hand, alkali feldspar minerals involving anorthoclase-type albite and sanidine had a lower reactivity with scCO2, compared with …

This report is about the social acceptance of utility-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) plants in the San Luis Valley, approximately 200 miles southwest of Denver, Colorado. The research focused on social factors that may facilitate and impede the adoption and implementation of CSP. During the winter of 2008-2009, interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 25 CSP-related stakeholders inside and outside the Valley. Interviews focused on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of siting a hypothetical 100-MW CSP facility in the Valley, the level of community support and opposition to CSP development, and related issues, such as transmission. State policy recommendations based on the findings include developing education programs for Valley residents, integrating Valley decision makers into an energy-water-land group, providing training for Valley decision makers, offering workforce training, evaluating models of taxation, and forming landholder energy associations. In addition, the SLV could become a laboratory for new approaches to CSP facility and transmission siting decision-making. The author recommends that outside stakeholders address community concerns and engage Valley residents in CSP decisions. Engaging the residents in CSP and transmission decisions, the author says, should take parallel significance with the investment in solar technology.

During the Engineering Design Activity of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the MELCOR 1.8.2 code was selected as one of several codes to be used to perform ITER safety analyses [1]. MELCOR was chosen because it has the capability of predicting coolant pressure, temperature, mass flow rate, and radionuclide and aerosol transport in nuclear facilities and reactor cooling systems. MELCOR can also predict structural temperatures (e.g. first wall, blanket, divertor, and vacuum vessel) resulting from energy produced by radioactive decay heat and/or chemical reactions (oxidation). The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Fusion Safety Program (FSP) made fusion specific modifications to the MELCOR 1.8.2 code [2-6], including models for water freezing, air condensation, beryllium, carbon, and tungsten oxidation in steam and air environments, flow boiling in coolant loops, and radiation in enclosures, that allowed MELCOR to assess the thermal hydraulic response of ITER cooling systems and the transport of radionuclides as aerosols during accident conditions. Recently, the ITER International Organization (IO) used a “pedigreed” version of MELCOR 1.8.2 [7] to perform accident analyses for ITER’s “Rapport Préliminaire de Sûreté” (Report Preliminary on Safety - RPrS). The MELCOR thermal-hydraulics code [8] is currently under development at the Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) for …

Since the late 1970s, energy labeling programs and mandatory energy performance standards have been used in many different countries to improve the efficiency levels of major residential and commercial equipment. As more countries and regions launch programs covering a greater range of products that are traded worldwide, greater attention has been given to harmonizing the specific efficiency criteria in these programs and the test methods for measurements. For example, an international compact fluorescent light (CFL) harmonization initiative was launched in 2006 to focus on collaboration between Australia, China, Europe and North America. Given the long history of standards and labeling programs, most major energy-consuming residential appliances and commercial equipment are already covered under minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) and/or energy labels. For these products, such as clothes washers and CFLs, harmonization may still be possible when national MEPS or labeling thresholds are revised. Greater opportunity for harmonization exists in newer energy-consuming products that are not commonly regulated but are under consideration for new standards and labeling programs. This may include commercial products such as water dispensers and vending machines, which are only covered by MEPS or energy labels in a few countries or regions. As China continues to expand its …

This document describes the design at a conceptual level for the Irradiated Materials Characterization Laboratory (IMCL) to be located at the Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The IMCL is an 11,000-ft2, Hazard Category-2 nuclear facility that is designed for use as a state of the-art nuclear facility for the purpose of hands-on and remote handling, characterization, and examination of irradiated and nonirradiated nuclear material samples. The IMCL will accommodate a series of future, modular, and reconfigurable instrument enclosures or caves. To provide a bounding design basis envelope for the facility-provided space and infrastructure, an instrument enclosure or cave configuration was developed and is described in some detail. However, the future instrument enclosures may be modular, integral with the instrument, or reconfigurable to enable various characterization environments to be configured as changes in demand occur. They are not provided as part of the facility.

In this report we describe the development of the Environmental Risk Evaluation System (ERES), a risk-informed analytical process for estimating the environmental risks associated with the construction and operation of offshore wind energy generation projects. The development of ERES for offshore wind is closely allied to a concurrent process undertaken to examine environmental effects of marine and hydrokinetic (MHK) energy generation, although specific risk-relevant attributes will differ between the MHK and offshore wind domains. During FY10, a conceptual design of ERES for offshore wind will be developed. The offshore wind ERES mockup described in this report will provide a preview of the functionality of a fully developed risk evaluation system that will use risk assessment techniques to determine priority stressors on aquatic organisms and environments from specific technology aspects, identify key uncertainties underlying high-risk issues, compile a wide-range of data types in an innovative and flexible data organizing scheme, and inform planning and decision processes with a transparent and technically robust decision-support tool. A fully functional version of ERES for offshore wind will be developed in a subsequent phase of the project.

The U. S. Department of Energy, Idaho Operations Office is considering options for construction of a facility for disposal of Idaho National Laboratory (INL) generated remote-handled low-level waste. Initial screening has resulted in the identification of two recommended alternative locations for this new facility: one near the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) Complex and one near the Idaho Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act Disposal Facility (ICDF). In April and May of 2010, the INL Cultural Resource Management Office conducted archival searches, intensive archaeological field surveys, and initial coordination with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes to identify cultural resources that may be adversely affected by new construction within either one of these candidate locations. This investigation showed that construction within the location near the ATR Complex may impact one historic homestead and several historic canals and ditches that are potentially eligible for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. No resources judged to be of National Register significance were identified in the candidate location near the ICDF. Generalized tribal concerns regarding protection of natural resources were also documented in both locations. This report outlines recommendations for protective measures to help ensure that the impacts of construction on the identified resources are …

A multi-laboratory ontology construction effort during the summer and fall of 2009 prototyped an ontology for counterfeit semiconductor manufacturing. This effort included an ontology development team and an ontology validation methods team. Here the third team of the Ontology Project, the Data Analysis (DA) team reports on their approaches, the tools they used, and results for mining literature for terminology pertinent to counterfeit semiconductor manufacturing. A discussion of the value of ontology-based analysis is presented, with insights drawn from other ontology-based methods regularly used in the analysis of genomic experiments. Finally, suggestions for future work are offered.