Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., is developing the sour pressure swing adsorption (PSA) technology which can be used to reject acid gas components (hydrogen sulfide [H{sub 2}S] and carbon dioxide [CO{sub 2}]) from sour syngas streams such as coal gasification syngas. In the current work, tests were conducted to investigate the impact of continuous exposure of real sour syngas and dilute levels of hydrochloric acid (HCl) and ammonia (NH{sub 3}) on the preferred adsorbent of that process. The results show a modest (~10%–15%) decrease in CO{sub 2} adsorption capacity after sour syngas exposure, as well as deposition of metals from carbonyl decomposition. Continuous exposure to HCl and NH{sub 3} yield a higher degree of CO{sub 2} capacity degradation (up to 25%). These tests represent worst-case approaches since the exposure is continuous and the HCl and NH{sub 3} levels are relatively high compare to an industrial sour syngas stream. Long-term PSA tests are needed to unequivocally evaluate the impact of cyclic exposure to these types of streams.

This report provides an overview of the mechanical, structural, and neutronic aspects of the Advanced High Temperature Reactor (AHTR) design concept. The AHTR is a design concept for a large output Fluoride salt cooled High-temperature Reactor (FHR) that is being developed to enable evaluation of the technology hurdles remaining to be overcome prior to FHRs becoming an option for commercial reactor deployment. This report documents the incremental AHTR design maturation performed over the past year and is focused on advancing the design concept to a level of a functional, self-consistent system. The reactor concept development remains at a preconceptual level of maturity. While the overall appearance of an AHTR design is anticipated to be similar to the current concept, optimized dimensions will differ from those presented here. The AHTR employs plate type coated particle fuel assemblies with rapid, off-line refueling. Neutronic analysis of the core has confirmed the viability of a 6-month two-batch cycle with 9 wt. % enriched uranium fuel. Refueling is intended to be performed automatically under visual guidance using dedicated robotic manipulators. The report includes a preconceptual design of the manipulators, the fuel transfer system, and the used fuel storage system. The present design intent is for …

The 2009 and 2012 International Energy Conservation Codes (IECC) yield positive benefits for Louisiana homeowners. Moving to either the 2009 or 2012 IECC from the 2006 IECC is cost effective over a 30-year life cycle. On average, Louisiana homeowners will save $1,663 over 30 years under the 2009 IECC, with savings still higher at $4,107 with the 2012 IECC. After accounting for upfront costs and additional costs financed in the mortgage, homeowners should see net positive cash flows (i.e., cumulative savings exceeding cumulative cash outlays) in 2 years for both the 2009 and 2012 IECC. Average annual energy savings are $149 for the 2009 IECC and $358 for the 2012 IECC.

In 1998, carbon tetrachloride was found above the maximum contaminant level (MCL) of 5 {micro}g/L in groundwater from one private livestock well at Sylvan Grove, Kansas, by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE). The 1998 KDHE sampling was conducted under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) private well sampling program. The Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), a USDA agency, operated a grain storage facility in Sylvan Grove from 1954 to1966. Carbon tetrachloride is the contaminant of primary concern at sites associated with former CCC/USDA grain storage operations. Sylvan Grove is located in western Lincoln County, approximately 60 mi west of Salina (Figure 1.1). To determine whether the former CCC/USDA facility at Sylvan Grove is a potential contaminant source and its possible relationship to the contamination in groundwater, the CCC/USDA has agreed to conduct an investigation, in accordance with the Intergovernmental Agreement between the KDHE and the Farm Service Agency (FSA) of the USDA. This Work Plan presents historical data related to previous investigations, grain storage operations, local private wells and public water supply (PWS) wells, and local geologic and hydrogeologic conditions at Sylvan Grove. The findings from a review of all available documents are discussed in Section 2. On …

Project Objective: The purpose of this project is to identify and address regulatory issues that affect the cost, time and the management of potential effects as it relates to siting and permitting advanced water power technologies. Background: The overall goal of this effort is to reduce the cost, time and effort of managing potential effects from the development advanced water power projects as it relates to the regulatory process in siting and permitting. To achieve this goal, a multi-disciplinary team will collect and synthesize existing information regarding regulatory processes into a user-friendly online format. In addition, the team will develop a framework for project planning and assessment that can incorporate existing and new information. The team will actively collaborate and coordinate with other efforts that support or influence regulatory process. Throughout the process, the team will engage in an iterative, collaborative process for gathering input and testing ideas that involves the relevant stakeholders across all sectors at the national, regional, and all state levels.

The Alignment Diagnostic System (ADS) of the LCLS undulator system indicates that the 33 undulator quadrupoles have extremely high position stability over many weeks. However, beam trajectory straightness and lasing efficiency degrade more quickly than this. A lengthy Beam Based Alignment (BBA) procedure must be executed every two to four weeks to re-optimize the X-ray beam parameters. The undulator system includes RF cavity Beam Position Monitors (RFBPMs), several of which are utilized by an automatic feedback system to align the incoming electron-beam trajectory to the undulator axis. The beam trajectory straightness degradation has been traced to electronic drifts of the gain and offset of the BPMs used in the beam feedback system. To quickly recover the trajectory straightness, we have developed a fast beam-based procedure to recalibrate the BPMs. This procedure takes advantage of the high-precision monitoring capability of the ADS, which allows highly repeatable positioning of undulator quadrupoles. This report describes the ADS, the position stability of the LCLS undulator quadrupoles, and some results of the new recovery procedure.

The 2009 and 2012 International Energy Conservation Codes (IECC) yield positive benefits for West Virginia homeowners. Moving to either the 2009 or 2012 IECC from the 2006 IECC is cost effective over a 30-year life cycle. On average, West Virginia homeowners will save $1,996 over 30 years under the 2009 IECC, with savings still higher at $7,301 with the 2012 IECC. After accounting for upfront costs and additional costs financed in the mortgage, homeowners should see net positive cash flows (i.e., cumulative savings exceeding cumulative cash outlays) in 1 year for both the 2009 and 2012 IECC. Average annual energy savings are $135 for the 2009 IECC and $480 for the 2012 IECC.

Using spectroscopic data produced in the experimental investigations of bulk systems, including X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS), Photoelectron Spectroscopy (PES) and Bremstrahlung Isochromat Spectroscopy (BIS), the theoretical results within for UO{sub 2}{sup 6}, PuO{sub 2}{sup 6} and Pu{sup 7} clusters have been evaluated. The calculations of the electronic structure of the clusters have been performed within the framework of the Relativistic Discrete-Variational Method (RDV). The comparisons between the LLNL experimental data and the Russian calculations are quite favorable. The cluster calculations may represent a new and useful avenue to address unresolved questions within the field of actinide electron structure, particularly that of Pu. Observation of the changes in the Pu electronic structure as a function of size suggests interesting implications for bulk Pu electronic structure.

Temperature is a key process variable at any nuclear power plant (NPP). The harsh reactor environment causes all sensor properties to drift over time. At the higher temperatures of advanced NPPs the drift occurs more rapidly. The allowable reactor operating temperature must be reduced by the amount of the potential measurement error to assure adequate margin to material damage. Johnson noise is a fundamental expression of temperature and as such is immune to drift in a sensor’s physical condition. In and near the core, only Johnson noise thermometry (JNT) and radiation pyrometry offer the possibility for long-term, high-accuracy temperature measurement due to their fundamental natures. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) place a higher value on long-term stability in their temperature measurements in that they produce less power per reactor core and thus cannot afford as much instrument recalibration labor as their larger brethren. The purpose of the current ORNL-led project, conducted under the Instrumentation, Controls, and Human-Machine Interface (ICHMI) research pathway of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced SMR Research and Development (R&D) program, is to develop and demonstrate a drift free Johnson noise-based thermometer suitable for deployment near core in advanced SMR plants.

Long-term storage of low level radioactive material in below ground concrete disposal units (DUs) (Saltstone Disposal Facility) is a means of depositing wastes generated from nuclear operations of the U.S. Department of Energy. Based on the currently modeled degradation mechanisms, possible microbial induced effects on the structural integrity of buried low level wastes must be addressed. Previous international efforts related to microbial impacts on concrete structures that house low level radioactive waste showed that microbial activity can play a significant role in the process of concrete degradation and ultimately structural deterioration. This literature review examines the recent research in this field and is focused on specific parameters that are applicable to modeling and prediction of the fate of concrete vaults housing stored wastes and the wastes themselves. Rates of concrete biodegradation vary with the environmental conditions, illustrating a need to understand the bioavailability of key compounds involved in microbial activity. Specific parameters require pH and osmotic pressure to be within a certain range to allow for microbial growth as well as the availability and abundance of energy sources like components involved in sulfur, iron and nitrogen oxidation. Carbon flow and availability are also factors to consider in predicting concrete biodegradation. …

Unconventional fuel development will require scarce water resources. In an environment characterized by scarcity, and where most water resources are fully allocated, prospective development will require minimizing water use and seeking to use water resources in the most efficient manner. Conjunctive use of surface and groundwater provides just such an opportunity. Conjunctive use includes two main practices: First, integrating surface water diversions and groundwater withdrawals to maximize efficiency and minimize impacts on other resource users and ecological processes. Second, conjunctive use includes capturing surplus or unused surface water and injecting or infiltrating that water into groundwater aquifers in order to increase recharge rates. Conjunctive management holds promise as a means of addressing some of the West's most intractable problems. Conjunctive management can firm up water supplies by more effectively capturing spring runoff and surplus water, and by integrating its use with groundwater withdrawals; surface and groundwater use can be further integrated with managed aquifer recharge projects. Such integration can maximize water storage and availability, while simultaneously minimizing evaporative loss, reservoir sedimentation, and surface use impacts. Any of these impacts, if left unresolved, could derail commercial-scale unconventional fuel development. Unconventional fuel developers could therefore benefit from incorporating conjunctive use into their …

Below is the referee report. It is not as bad as it seems at first. The manuscript has not been rejected. Instead, the referee is 'not recommending publication.' On the APS website, the status is 'with authors,' instead of 'not under consideration.' Thus, this manuscript is still alive, but we will need to work on it. Please take a look at what the referee says below and let me know how you would respond. I will do the same. Hopefully, we will be able to respond well and find a way for this manuscript to get into PRB. According to the introduction of their manuscript, the authors intend to study the electronic structure of clusters of Pu atoms and, among other things, to illustrate how the properties of the cluster's central region approach those of the bulk Pu metal as the cluster size increases. It is then somewhat surprising to find out that all the 'cluster' calculations discussed in the paper are in fact set up in such a way that they model the bulk properties - the clusters are embedded in a kind of mean field that is designed to approximate the rest of an infinite lattice (the authors …

GPUs have emerged as a powerful tool for accelerating general-purpose applications. The availability of programming languages that makes writing general-purpose applications for running on GPUs tractable have consolidated GPUs as an alternative for accelerating generalpurpose applications. Among the areas that have bene#12;ted from GPU acceleration are: signal and image processing, computational uid dynamics, quantum chemistry, and, in general, the High Performance Computing (HPC) Industry. In order to continue to exploit higher levels of parallelism with GPUs, multi-GPU systems are gaining popularity. In this context, single-GPU applications are parallelized for running in multi-GPU systems. Furthermore, multi-GPU systems help to solve the GPU memory limitation for applications with large application memory footprint. Parallelizing single-GPU applications has been approached by libraries that distribute the workload at runtime, however, they impose execution overhead and are not portable. On the other hand, on traditional CPU systems, parallelization has been approached through application transformation at pre-compile time, which enhances the application to distribute the workload at application level and does not have the issues of library-based approaches. Hence, a parallelization scheme for GPU systems based on application transformation is needed. Like any computing engine of today, reliability is also a concern in GPUs. GPUs are vulnerable …

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Currently, design of earth-penetrating munitions relies heavily on empirical relationships to estimate behavior, making it difficult to design novel munitions or address novel target situations without expensive and time-consuming full-scale testing with relevant system and target characteristics. Enhancing design through numerical studies and modeling could help reduce the extent and duration of full-scale testing if the models have enough fidelity to capture all of the relevant parameters. This can be separated into three distinct problems: that of the penetrator structural and component response, that of the target response, and that of the coupling between the two. This project focuses on enhancing understanding of the target response, specifically granular geomaterials, where the temporal and spatial multi-scale nature of the material controls its response. As part of the overarching goal of developing computational capabilities to predict the performance of conventional earth-penetrating weapons, this project focuses specifically on developing new models and numerical capabilities for modeling sand response in ALE3D. There is general recognition that granular materials behave in a manner that defies conventional continuum approaches which rely on response locality and which degrade in the presence of strong response nonlinearities, localization, and phase gradients. There are many numerical tools available to address …

Nuclei are prototypes of many-body open quantum systems. Complex aggregates of protons and neutrons that interact through forces arising from quantum chromo-dynamics, nuclei exhibit both bound and unbound states, which can be strongly coupled. In this respect, one of the major challenges for computational nuclear physics, is to provide a unified description of structural and reaction properties of nuclei that is based on the fundamental underlying physics: the constituent nucleons and the realistic interactions among them. This requires a combination of innovative theoretical approaches and high-performance computing. In this contribution, we present one of such promising techniques, the ab initio no-core shell model/resonating-group method, and discuss applications to light nuclei scattering and fusion reactions that power stars and Earth-base fusion facilities.

Many-body perturbation theory is applied to compute the quasiparticle electronic structures and the optical-absorption spectra (including excitonic effects) for several transparent conducting oxides. We discuss HSE+G{sub 0}W{sub 0} results for band structures, fundamental band gaps, and effective electron masses of MgO, ZnO, CdO, SnO{sub 2}, SnO, In{sub 2}O{sub 3}, and SiO{sub 2}. The Bethe-Salpeter equation is solved to account for excitonic effects in the calculation of the frequency-dependent absorption coefficients. We show that the HSE+G{sub 0}W{sub 0} approach and the solution of the Bethe-Salpeter equation are very well-suited to describe the electronic structure and the optical properties of various transparent conducting oxides in good agreement with experiment.

The research conducted in this work package is aimed at taking advantage of the long term thermodynamic stability of crystalline ceramics to create more durable waste forms (as compared to high level waste glass) in order to reduce the reliance on engineered and natural barrier systems. Durable ceramic waste forms that incorporate a wide range of radionuclides have the potential to broaden the available disposal options and to lower the storage and disposal costs associated with advanced fuel cycles. Assemblages of several titanate phases have been successfully demonstrated to incorporate radioactive waste elements, and the multiphase nature of these materials allows them to accommodate variation in the waste composition. Recent work has shown that they can be successfully produced from a melting and crystallization process. The objective of this report is to explain the design of ceramic host systems culminating in a reference ceramic formulation for use in subsequent studies on process optimization and melt property data assessment in support of FY13 melter demonstration testing. The waste stream used as the basis for the development and testing is a combination of the projected Cs/Sr separated stream, the Trivalent Actinide - Lanthanide Separation by Phosphorous reagent Extraction from Aqueous Komplexes (TALSPEAK) …

Starting from concrete AdS/CFT dual pairs, one can introduce ingredients which produce cosmological solutions, including metastable de Sitter and its decay to non-accelerating FRW. We present simple FRW solutions sourced by magnetic flavor branes and analyze correlation functions and particle and brane dynamics. To obtain a holographic description, we exhibit a time-dependent warped metric on the solution and interpret the resulting redshifted region as a Lorentzian low energy effective field theory in one fewer dimension. At finite times, this theory has a finite cutoff, a propagating lower dimensional graviton and a finite covariant entropy bound, but at late times the lower dimensional Planck mass and entropy go off to infinity in a way that is dominated by contributions from the low energy effective theory. This opens up the possibility of a precise dual at late times. We reproduce the time-dependent growth of the number of degrees of freedom in the system via a count of available microscopic states in the corresponding magnetic brane construction.

Final Report for '20% Wind by 2030: Overcoming the Challenges in West Virginia'. The objective of this project was to examine the obstacles and constraints to the development of wind energy in West Virginia as well as the obstacles and constraints to the achievement of the national goal of 20% wind by 2030. For the portion contracted with WVU, there were four tasks in this examination of obstacles and constraints. Task 1 involved the establishment of a Wind Resource Council. Task 2 involved conducting limited research activities. These activities involved an ongoing review of wind energy documents including documents regarding the potential for wind farms being located on reclaimed surface mining sites as well as other brownfield sites. The Principal Investigator also examined the results of the Marshall University SODAR assessment of the potential for placing wind farms on reclaimed surface mining sites. Task 3 involved the conducting of outreach activities. These activities involved working with the members of the Wind Resource Council, the staff of the Regional Wind Energy Institute, and the staff of Penn Future. This task also involved the examination of the importance of transmission for wind energy development. The Principal Investigator kept informed as to transmission …

We point out that detectable inflationary tensor modes can be generated by particle or string sources produced during inflation, consistently with the requirements for inflation and constraints from scalar fluctuations. We show via examples that this effect can dominate over the contribution from quantum fluctuations of the metric, occurring even when the inflationary potential energy is too low to produce a comparable signal. Thus a detection of tensor modes from inflation does not automatically constitute a determination of the inflationary Hubble scale.

A series of tests were planned to examine the removal of Ra and Th by monosodium titanate (MST) and modified monosodium titanate (mMST). Simulated waste solutions were prepared containing Ra and Th, along with Sr, Np, Pu, and U. Following simulant preparation the simulants were filtered through 0.45-m filters. Analysis of the simulants indicated no Th in the filtered solution. This is due to the very low solubility of Th in alkaline solutions. Based on the reported detection limits for {sup 228}Th by gamma analyses, the solubility of Th in the simulant solutions is < 3.0E-10 g/L or < 1.3E-12 M. Therefore, data could not be obtained regarding the removal of Th by MST and mMST; however, testing proceeded to examine the removal of Ra. Sorption testing indicated that Ra, like Sr, is very rapidly removed from solution by both MST and mMST. The Ra concentration in solution fell below the method detection limit (MDL) within 30 minutes of contact with MST, and within 2 hours of contact with mMST, when tested at 25 C using a 5.6 M Na simulant. Additional testing examined the effects of ionic strength and temperature on the MST and mMST performance. Results from these …