Within the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Technology Innovation and Development, the Office of Waste Processing manages a research and development program related to the treatment and disposition of radioactive waste. At the Savannah River (South Carolina) and Hanford (Washington) Sites, approximately 90 million gallons of waste are distributed among 226 storage tanks (grouped or collocated in 'tank farms'). This waste may be considered to contain mixed and stratified high activity and low activity constituent waste liquids, salts and sludges that are collectively managed as high level waste (HLW). A large majority of these wastes and associated facilities are unique to the DOE, meaning many of the programs to treat these materials are 'first-of-a-kind' and unprecedented in scope and complexity. As a result, the technologies required to disposition these wastes must be developed from basic principles, or require significant re-engineering to adapt to DOE's specific applications. Of particular interest recently, the development of In-tank or At-Tank separation processes have the potential to treat waste with high returns on financial investment. The primary objective associated with In-Tank or At-Tank separation processes is to accelerate waste processing. Insertion of the technologies will (1) maximize available tank space to efficiently support …

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reviews the human factors engineering (HFE) programs of applicants for nuclear power plant construction permits, operating licenses, standard design certifications, and combined operating licenses. The purpose of these safety reviews is to help ensure that personnel performance and reliability are appropriately supported. Detailed design review procedures and guidance for the evaluations is provided in three key documents: the Standard Review Plan (NUREG-0800), the HFE Program Review Model (NUREG-0711), and the Human-System Interface Design Review Guidelines (NUREG-0700). These documents were last revised in 2007, 2004 and 2002, respectively. The NRC is committed to the periodic update and improvement of the guidance to ensure that it remains a state-of-the-art design evaluation tool. To this end, the NRC is updating its guidance to stay current with recent research on human performance, advances in HFE methods and tools, and new technology being employed in plant and control room design. This paper describes the role of HFE guidelines in the safety review process and the content of the key HFE guidelines used. Then we will present the methodology used to develop HFE guidance and update these documents, and describe the current status of the update program.

Hardware and software co-design is becoming increasingly important due to complexities in supercomputing architectures. Simulating applications before there is access to the real hardware can assist machine architects in making better design decisions that can optimize application performance. At the same time, the application and runtime can be optimized and tuned beforehand. BigSim is a simulation-based performance prediction framework designed for these purposes. It can be used to perform packet-level network simulations of parallel applications using existing parallel machines. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of BigSim in analyzing and optimizing parallel application performance for future systems based on the PERCS network. We present simulation studies using benchmarks and real applications expected to run on future supercomputers. Future petascale systems will have more than 100,000 cores, and we present simulations at that scale.