Dynamic Quantum Clustering (DQC) is an unsupervised, high visual data mining technique. DQC was tested as an analysis method for X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES) data from the Transmission X-ray Microscopy (TXM) group. The TXM group images hierarchically heterogeneous materials with nanoscale resolution and large field of view. XANES data consists of energy spectra for each pixel of an image. It was determined that DQC successfully identifies structure in data of this type without prior knowledge of the components in the sample. Clusters and sub-clusters clearly reflected features of the spectra that identified chemical component, chemical environment, and density in the image. DQC can also be used in conjunction with the established data analysis technique, which does require knowledge of components present.

The Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007 established new renewable fuel categories and eligibility requirements (EPA 2010). A significant aspect of the National Renewable Fuel Standard 2 (RFS2) program is the requirement that the life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of a qualifying renewable fuel be less than the life cycle GHG emissions of the 2005 baseline average gasoline or diesel fuel that it replaces. Four levels of reduction are required for the four renewable fuel standards. Table 1 lists these life cycle performance improvement thresholds. Table 1. Life Cycle GHG Thresholds Specified in EISA Fuel Type Percent Reduction from 2005 Baseline Renewable fuel 20% Advanced biofuel 50% Biomass-based diesel 50% Cellulosic biofuel 60% Notably, there is a specialized subset of advanced biofuels that are the cellulosic biofuels. The cellulosic biofuels are incentivized by the Cellulosic Biofuel Producer Tax Credit (26 USC 40) to stimulate market adoption of these fuels. EISA defines a cellulosic biofuel as follows (42 USC 7545(o)(1)(E)): The term “cellulosic biofuel” means renewable fuel derived from any cellulose, hemicellulose, or lignin that is derived from renewable biomass and that has lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, as determined by the Administrator, that are at least 60 percent …

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This report summarizes the occupational exposure data that are maintained in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Radiation Exposure Information and Reporting System (REIRS). The bulk of the information contained in the report was compiled from the 2010 annual reports submitted by five of the seven categories of NRC licensees subject to the reporting requirements of 10 CFR 20.2206. Because there are no geologic repositories for high-level waste currently licensed and no NRC-licensed low-level waste disposal facilities currently in operation, only five categories will be considered in this report. The annual reports submitted by these licensees consist of radiation exposure records for each monitored individual. These records are analyzed for trends and presented in this report in terms of collective dose and the distribution of dose among the monitored individuals. Annual reports for 2010 were received from a total of 190 NRC licensees. The summation of reports submitted by the 190 licensees indicated that 192,424 individuals were monitored, 81,961 of whom received a measurable dose. When adjusted for transient workers who worked at more than one licensee during the year, there were actually 142,471 monitored individuals and 62,782 who received a measurable dose. The collective dose incurred by these individuals …

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The goal of any particle accelerator is to optimize the transport of a charged particle beam along a set path by confining the beam to a small region close to the design trajectory and directing it accurately along the beamline. To do so in the simplest fashion, accelerators use a system of magnets that exert approximately linear electromagnetic forces on the charged beam. These electromagnets bend the beam along the desired path, in the case of bending magnets, and constrain the beam to the desired area through alternating focusing and defocusing effects, in the case of quadrupole magnets. We can model the transport of such a beam through transfer matrices representing the actions of the various beamline elements. However, space charge effects, produced from self electric fields within the beam, defocus the beam and must be accounted for in the calculation of beam emittance. We present below the preliminary results of a MATLAB code built to model the transport of a charged particle beam through an accelerator and measure the emittance under the influence of space charge effects. We demonstrate the method of correctly calculating the emittance of a beam under space charge effects using a least square fit to …

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The Carbon Calculator for Land Use Change from Biofuels Production (CCLUB) calculates carbon emissions from land use change (LUC) for four different ethanol production pathways including corn grain ethanol and cellulosic ethanol from corn stover, miscanthus, and switchgrass. This document discusses the version of CCLUB released May 31, 2012 which includes corn, as did the previous CCLUB version, and three cellulosic feedstocks: corn stover, miscanthus, and switchgrass. CCLUB calculations are based upon two data sets: land change areas and above- and below-ground carbon content. Table 1 identifies where these data are stored and used within the CCLUB model, which is built in MS Excel. Land change area data is from Purdue University's Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model, a computable general equilibrium (CGE) economic model. Section 2 describes the GTAP data CCLUB uses and how these data were modified to reflect shrubland transitions. Feedstock- and spatially-explicit below-ground carbon content data for the United States were generated with a surrogate model for CENTURY's soil organic carbon sub-model (Kwon and Hudson 2010) as described in Section 3. CENTURY is a soil organic matter model developed by Parton et al. (1987). The previous CCLUB version used more coarse domestic carbon emission factors. Above-ground …

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The study was designed to estimate dam passage survival at Bonneville Dam as stipulated by the 2008 Federal Columbia River Power System (FCRPS) Biological Opinion (BiOp) and to provide additional fish passage performance measures at that site as stipulated in the Columbia Basin Fish Accords.

For the grand challenge of reducing our energy and carbon footprint, the development of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies offer a potential solution. Energy technologies can reduce our dependence on foreign oil as well as the energy consumed by the petroleum industry, the leading consumer of energy by a U.S. industry sector. Nonetheless, the manufacturing processes utilized to manufacture equipment for alternative energy technologies often involve energy-intensive processes. This undermines some of the advantages to moving to 'green' technologies in the first place. Our answer to the Industrial Technology Program's (ITP) Grand Challenge FOA was to develop a transformational low cost manufacturing process for plastic-based photovoltaics that will lower by over 50% both energy consumption and greenhouse emissions and offer a return-of-investment of over 20%. We demonstrated a Luminescent Solar Concentrator fabricated on a plastic acrylic substrate (i.e. no glass) that increases the power output of the PV cell by 2.2x with a 2% power efficiency as well as an LSC with a 7% power efficiency that increased the power output from the PV cells by 35%. S large area 20-inch x 60-inch building-integrated photovoltaic window was fabricated using contract manufacturing with a 4% power efficiency which improved the …

The MATADOR project is focused on developing methods to infer the operational mode of facilities that have the potential to be used in weapons development programs. Our central hypothesis is that by persistent, non-intrusive monitoring of such facilities, differences between various use scenarios can be reliably discovered. The impact of success in this area is that new tools and techniques for monitoring and treaty verification would make it easier to reliably discover and document weapons development activities. This document captures the literature that will serve as a basis to approach this task. The relevant literature is divided into topical areas that relate to the various aspects of expected MATADOR project development. We have found that very little work that is directly applicable for our purposes has been published, which has motivated the development of novel methods under the project. Therefore, the manuscripts referenced in this document were selected based on their potential use as foundational blocks for the methods we anticipate developing, or so that we can understand the limitations of existing methods.

During this period, our research was concentrated on the study of beam-beam effects in large storage-ring colliders and coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) effect in light sources. Our group was involved in and made significant contribution to several international accelerator projects such as the US-LHC project for the design of the LHC interaction regions, the luminosity upgrade of Tevatron and HERA, the design of eRHIC, and the U.S. LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP) for the future LHC luminosity upgrade.

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The goal of this paper is to characterize the effects of small non-axisymmetric divertor plate electrodes on the local scrape-off layer plasma. Four small rectangular electrodes were installed into the outer divertor plates of NSTX. When the electrodes were located near the outer divertor strike point and biased positively, there was an increase in the nearby probe currents and probe potentials and an increase in the LiI light emission at the large major radius end of these electrodes. When an electrode located farther outward from the outer divertor strike point was biased positively, there was sometimes a significant decrease in the LiI light emission at the small major radius end of this electrode, but there were no clear effects on the nearby probes. No non-local effects were observed with the biasing of these electrodes.

The electron pulses generated by the Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory occur on the order of tens of femtoseconds and cannot be directly measured by conventional means. The length of the pulses can instead be reconstructed by measuring the spectrum of optical transition radiation emitted by the electrons as they move toward a conducting foil. Because the emitted radiation occurs in the mid-infrared from 0.6 to 30 microns a novel optical layout is required. Using a helium-neon laser with wavelength 633 nm, a series of gold-coated off-axis parabolic mirrors were positioned to direct a beam through a zinc selenide prism and to a focus at a CCD camera for imaging. Constructing this layout revealed a number of novel techniques for reducing the aberrations introduced into the system by the off-axis parabolic mirrors. The beam had a recorded radius of less than a millimeter at its final focus on the CCD imager. This preliminary setup serves as a model for the spectrometer that will ultimately measure the LCLS electron pulse duration.

The survey includes degrees granted between September 1, 2010 and August 31, 2011. Enrollment information refers to the fall term 2011. The enrollment and degree data include students majoring in health physics or in an option program equivalent to a major. Twenty-four academic programs reported having health physics programs during 2011. The data for two health physics options within nuclear engineering programs are also included in the enrollments and degrees that are reported in the nuclear engineering enrollments and degrees data.

In a proton therapy beamline, the range compensator modulates the beam energy, which subsequently controls the depth at which protons deposit energy. In this paper, we introduce two computational representations of range compensator. One of our compensator representations, which we refer to as a subtraction solid-based range compensator, precisely represents the compensator. Our other representation, the 3D hexagon-based range compensator, closely approximates the compensator geometry. We have implemented both of these compensator models in a proton therapy Monte Carlo simulation called TOPAS (Tool for Particle Simulation). In the future, we will present a detailed study of the accuracy and runtime performance trade-offs between our two range compensator representations.

Based on existing sources, I compile parameters for the RF systems for a neutrino factory which accelerates to 10 GeV.

The purpose of this report is to examine occupational radiation exposures received under Agreement State licensees. As such, this report reflects the occupational radiation exposure data contained in the Radiation Exposure Information and Reporting System (REIRS) database, for 1997 through 2010, from Agreement State-licensed materials facilities.

The purpose of this document is to describe the current state of the art for determination of hydrogen generation rates of radioactive slurries and solutions to provide a basis for design, fabrication, testing, and implementation of a measurement method for Hydrogen Generation Rate (HGR) during qualification of waste feeds for the Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). The HGR measurement will be performed on samples of the Low Activity Waste (LAW) and High Level Waste (HLW) staged waste feeds for the WTP as well as on samples from selected unit operations testing during the qualification program. SRNL has performed a review of techniques utilized to measure HGR of high level radioactive waste slurries, evaluated the Hanford 222-S Laboratory method for measurement of hydrogen, and reviewed the hydrogen generation rate models for Hanford waste.Based on the literature review, method evaluation, and SRNL experience with measuring hydrogen generation rate, SRNL recommends that a continuous flow system with online gas analysis be used as the HGR measurement method during waste qualification.

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This month's issue has the following articles: (1) Lawrence Livermore as the 'Go-To' National Security Laboratory - Commentary by Penrose (Parney) C. Albright; (2) Launching Traffic Cameras into Space - The Space-Based Telescopes for Actionable Refinement of Ephemeris project is designing nanosatellites to more accurately determine the trajectory of space objects orbiting Earth; (3)An Improved Tool for Nuclear Forensics - Resonance ionization mass spectrometry provides rapid isotopic analysis for studying materials derived from nuclear events; (4) A Simple Way to Better Protect Soldiers against Head Trauma - A modest increase in the foam padding used in Army helmets could significantly reduce brain injuries; and (5) Shocking Aluminum for Greater Understanding - Experiments using a laser beam to hit a thin film of aluminum provide an unprecedented look into the physics of shock waves traveling through a metal.

Travel support was provided for a range of invited speakers, students, early-career, and developing-country, and key scientists who required financial assistance to participate, and would otherwise be unable to attend, to contribute to, and benefit from, this important event. This support also allowed participants to present their research findings, provide input to WCRP planning and plans, and encourage collaboration with other research scientists. In particular, the participation and engagement of regional scientists in the OSC helped to ensure communication and advocacy in identifying the climate research needs of the region and their inclusion in the WCRP long-range research priorities.