Electron cyclotron emission (ECE) has been employed as a standard electron temperature profile diagnostic on many tokamaks and stellarators, but most magnetically confined plasma devices cannot take advantage of standard ECE diagnostics to measure temperature. They are either overdense, operating at high density relative to the magnetic field (e.g. {omega}{sub pe} >> {Omega}{sub ce} in a spherical torus) or they have insufficient density and temperature to reach the blackbody condition ({tau} > 2). Electron Bernstein waves (EBWs) are electrostatic waves which can propagate in overdense plasmas and have a high optical thickness at the electron cyclotron resonance layers, as a result of their large K{sub i}. This talk reports on measurements of EBW emission on the CDX-U spherical torus, where B{sub 0} {approx} 2 kG, <n{sub e}> {approx} 10{sup 13} cm{sup -3} and T{sub e} {approx} 10 - 200 eV. Results will be presented for both direct detection of EBWs and for mode-converted EBW emission. The EBW emission was absolutely calibrated and compared to the electron temperature profile measured by a multi-point Thomson scattering diagnostic. Depending on the plasma conditions, the mode-converted EBW radiation temperature was found to be {le} T{sub e} and the emission source was determined to be …

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The results of Laboratory and Bench-Scale experiments and supporting technical and economic assessments conducted under DOE Contract No. DE-AC22-91PC91040 are reported for the period January 1, 1999 to March 31, 2000. This contract is with the University of Kentucky Research Foundation, which supports work with the University of Kentucky Center for Applied Energy Research, CONSOL, Inc., LDP Associates, and Hydrocarbon Technologies, Inc. This work involves the introduction into the basic two-stage liquefaction process several novel concepts, which include dispersed lower-cost catalysts, coal cleaning by oil agglomeration, and distillate hydrotreating and dewaxing. This project has been modified to include an investigation into the production of value added materials from coal using low-severity liquefaction based technologies.

During fiscal year 1999, a total of nine 18-inch diameter test canisters were fabricated at the Idaho National Engineering & Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) to represent the standardized Department of Energy (DOE) Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) canister design. Various "worst case" internal loadings were incorporated. Seven of the test canisters were 15-foot long and weighed approximately 6000 pounds, while two were 10-foot long and weighed 3000 and 3800 pounds. Seven of the test canisters were dropped from thirty feet onto an essentially unyielding flat surface and one of the test canisters was dropped from 40-inches onto a 6-inch diameter puncture post. The final test canister was dropped from 24 inches onto a 2-inch thick vertically oriented steel plate, and then tipped over to impact another 2-inch thick vertically oriented steel plate. This last test was attempting to represent a canister dropping onto another larger container such as a repository disposal container. All drop testing was performed at Sandia National Laboratory (SNL). The nine test canisters experienced varying degrees of damage to their skirts, lifting rings, and pressure boundary components (heads and main body). However, all of the canisters were shown to have maintained their pressure boundary (through pressure testing), and the …

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Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Gasification combined cycle continues to represent an important defining technology area for the forest products industry. The ''Forest Products Gasification Initiative'', organized under the Industry's Agenda 2020 technology vision and supported by the DOE ''Industries of the Future'' program, is well positioned to guide these technologies to commercial success within a five-to ten-year timeframe given supportive federal budgets and public policy. Commercial success will result in significant environmental and renewable energy goals that are shared by the Industry and the Nation. The Battelle/FERCO LIVG technology, which is the technology of choice for the application reported here, remains of high interest due to characteristics that make it well suited for integration with the infrastructure of a pulp production facility. The capital cost, operating economics and long-term demonstration of this technology area key input to future economically sustainable projects and must be verified by the 200 BDT/day demonstration facility currently operating in Burlington, Vermont. The New Bern application that was the initial objective of this project is not currently economically viable and will not be implemented at this time due to several changes at and around the mill which have occurred since the inception of the project in 1995. The analysis shows …

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The U. S. Department of Energy Strategic Petroleum Reserve currently has approximately 500 million barrels of crude oil stored in 62 caverns solution-mined in salt domes along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas. One of the challenges of operating these caverns is ensuring that none of the fluids in the caverns are leaking into the environment. The current approach is to test the mechanical integrity of all the wells entering each cavern approximately once every five years. An alternative approach to detecting cavern leaks is to monitor the cavern pressure, since leaking fluid would act to reduce cavern pressure. Leak detection by pressure monitoring is complicated by other factors that influence cavern pressure, the most important of which are thermal expansion and contraction of the fluids in the cavern as they come into thermal equilibrium with the host salt, and cavern volume reduction due to salt creep. Cavern pressure is also influenced by cavern enlargement resulting from salt dissolution following introduction of raw water or unsaturated brine into the cavern. However, this effect only lasts for a month or two following a fluid injection. In order to implement a cavern pressure monitoring program, a software program called CaveMan has …

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Though ISCRE 15 goal was to emphasize the fundamentals, of equal importance were the technological advances currently shaping the future of the field. Topical areas for ISCRE 15 included: (1) Reactors for Materials Processing; (2) Waste Minimization and Remediation; (3) Environmentally Benign Processing; (4) Reactor Dynamics; (5) Reactor Control and Safety; (6) Reactor Scale-up and Economic Evaluation; (7) Computational and Modeling Aspects of Reaction/ Reactor Engineering; (8)Fluid-Solid Catalytic and Non-Catalytic Reaction Systems; and (9) Catalytic, Polymerization and Biochemical Reactors.

For improving the control of small arms, technology provides many possibilities. Present and future technical means are described in several areas. With the help of sensors deployed on the ground or on board aircraft, larger areas can be monitored. Using tags, seals, and locks, important objects and installations can be safeguarded better. With modern data processing and communication systems, more information can be available, and it can be more speedily processed. Together with navigation and transport equipment, action can be taken faster and at greater range. Particular considerations are presented for cargo control at roads, seaports, and airports, for monitoring designated lines, and for the control of legal arms. By starting at a modest level, costs can be kept low, which would aid developing countries. From the menu of technologies available, systems need to be designed for the intended application and with an understanding of the local conditions. It is recommended that states start with short-term steps, such as acquiring more and better radio transceivers, vehicles, small aircraft, and personal computers. For the medium term, states should begin with experiments and field testing of technologies such as tags, sensors, and digital communication equipment.

The Area 25 Underground Storage Tanks site Corrective Action Unit (CAU) 135 will be closed by unrestricted release decontamination and verification survey, in accordance with the Federal Facility Agreement and Consert Order (FFACO, 1996). The CAU includes one Corrective Action Site (CAS). The Area 25 Underground Storage Tanks, (CAS 25-02-01), referred to as the Engine-Maintenance Assembly and Disassembly (E-MAD) Waste Holdup Tanks and Vault, were used to receive liquid waste from all of the radioactive drains at the E-MAD Facility. Based on the results of the Corrective Action Investigation conducted in June 1999 discussed in the Corrective Action Investigation Plan for Corrective Action Unit 135: Area 25 Underground Storage Tanks, Nevada Test Site, Nevada (DOE/NV,1999a), one sample from the radiological survey of the concrete vault interior exceeded radionuclide preliminary action levels. The analytes from the sediment samples that exceeded the preliminary action levels are polychlorinated biphenyls, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act metals, total petroleum hydrocarbons as diesel-range organics, and radionuclides. Unrestricted release decontamination and verification involves removal of concrete and the cement-lined pump sump from the vault. After verification that the contamination has been removed, the vault will be repaired with concrete, as necessary. The radiological- and chemical-contaminated pump sump …

The decay constants of B and D mesons are computed in quenched lattice QCD at two different values of the coupling. The action and operators are ? (a) improved with non-perturbative coefficients where available. The results and systematic errors are discussed in detail. Results for vector decay constants, flavour symmetry breaking ratios of decay constants, the pseudoscalar-vector mass splitting and D meson masses are also presented.

Management of contaminated dredged material is a major problem in the Port of New York and New Jersey. One component of an overall management plan can be the application of a decontamination technology followed by creation of a product suitable for beneficial use. This concept is the focus of a project now being carried out by the US Environmental Protection Agency-Region 2, the US Army Corps of Engineers-New York District, the US Department of Energy-Brookhaven National Laboratory, and regional university groups that have included Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rutgers University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Stevens Institute of Technology. The project has gone through phased testing of commercial technologies at the bench scale (15 liters) and pilot scale (1.5--500 m{sup 3}) levels. Several technologies are now going forward to large-scale demonstrations that are intended to treat from 23,000 to 60,000 m{sup 3}. Selections of the technologies were made based on the effectiveness of the treatment process, evaluation of the possible beneficial use of the treated materials, and other factors. Major elements of the project are summarized here.

This publication summarizes the progress made by the Office of International Programs (IP) in deploying innovative technologies for the environmental remediation of the DOE complex and for sites of its international collaborators for fiscal years 1995 through 2000.

The purpose of this Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) University Research Consortium (URC) project is to investigate the suitability of lead or lead-bismuth cooled fast reactors for producing low-cost electricity as well as for actinide burning. The goal is to identify and analyze the key technical issues in core neutronics, materials, thermal-hydraulics, fuels, and economics associated with the development of this reactor concept. Work has been accomplished in four major areas of research: core neutronic design, material compatibility, plant engineering, and coolant activation. In the area of core neutronic design, the reactivity vs. burnup and discharge isotopics of both non-fertile and fertile fuels were evaluated. An innovative core for pure actinide burning that uses streaming, fertile-free fuel assemblies was studied in depth. This particular core exhibits excellent reactivity performance upon coolant voiding, even for voids that occur in the core center, and has a transuranic (TRU) destruction rate that is comparable to the proposed accelerator transmutation of waste (ATW) facility. These studies suggest that a core can be designed to achieve a long life while maintaining safety and minimizing waste. In the area of material compatibility studies, an experimental apparatus for the …

The project involves the development of an efficient, environmentally friendly system for the economical recovery of carbon from fine-coal refuse ponds. The project will be conducted in two phases. Phase I was involved in the development and evaluation of process equipment and techniques to be used in carbon recovery, product dewatering and reconstitution, and refuse management. Phase II will integrate the various units into a continuously operating circuit that will be demonstrated at a site selected based on the results presented in this study.

The fundamental motivation for the research presented in this dissertation was the need to development a more accurate prediction method for characterization of mixed radiation fields around medical electron accelerators (MEAs). Specifically, a model is developed for simulation of neutron and other particle production from photonuclear reactions and incorporated in the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) radiation transport code. This extension of the capability within the MCNP code provides for the more accurate assessment of the mixed radiation fields. The Nuclear Theory and Applications group of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has recently provided first-of-a-kind evaluated photonuclear data for a select group of isotopes. These data provide the reaction probabilities as functions of incident photon energy with angular and energy distribution information for all reaction products. The availability of these data is the cornerstone of the new methodology for state-of-the-art mutually coupled photon-neutron transport simulations. The dissertation includes details of the model development and implementation necessary to use the new photonuclear data within MCNP simulations. A new data format has been developed to include tabular photonuclear data. Data are processed from the Evaluated Nuclear Data Format (ENDF) to the new class ''u'' A Compact ENDF (ACE) format using a standalone processing …

This report outlines broad modeling issues pertaining to polymeric materials behavior under detonation conditions. Models applicable system wide are necessary to cope with the broad range of polymers and complex composite forms that can appear in Laboratory weapons systems. Nine major topics are discussed to span the breadth of materials, forms, and physical phenomena encountered when shocking polymers and foams over wide ranges of temperatures, pressures, shock strengths, confinement conditions, and geometries. The recommendations for directions of more intensive investigation consider physical fidelity, computational complexity, and application over widely varying physical conditions of temperature, pressure, and shock strength.

Magnetic resonance is the most powerful analytical tool used by chemists today. Its applications range from determining structures of large biomolecules to imaging of human brains. Nevertheless, magnetic resonance remains a relatively young field, in which many techniques are currently being developed that have broad applications. In this dissertation, two new techniques are presented, one that enables the determination of torsion angles in solid-state peptides and proteins, and another that involves imaging of heterogenous materials at ultra-low magnetic fields. In addition, structural studies of the prion protein via solid-state NMR are described. More specifically, work is presented in which the dependence of chemical shifts on local molecular structure is used to predict chemical shift tensors in solid-state peptides with theoretical ab initio surfaces. These predictions are then used to determine the backbone dihedral angles in peptides. This method utilizes the theoretical chemicalshift tensors and experimentally determined chemical-shift anisotropies (CSAs) to predict the backbone and side chain torsion angles in alanine, leucine, and valine residues. Additionally, structural studies of prion protein fragments are described in which conformationally-dependent chemical-shift measurements were made to gain insight into the structural differences between the various conformational states of the prion protein. These studies are of …

Thermoelectric generators (TEG) are a well-established technology for compact low power output long-life applications. Solid state TEGs are the technology of choice for many space missions and have also been used in remote earth-based applications. Since TEGs have no moving parts and can be hermetically sealed, there is the potential for nuclear reactor power systems using TEGs to be safe, reliable and resistant to proliferation. Such power units would be constructed in a manner that would provide decades of maintenance-free operation, thereby minimizing the possibility of compromising the system during routine maintenance operations. It should be possible to construct an efficient direct energy conversion cascade from an appropriate combination of solid-state thermoelectric generators, with each stage in the cascade optimized for a particular range of temperature. Performance of cascaded thermoelectric devices could be further enhanced by exploitation of compositionally graded p-n couples, as well as radial elements to maximize utilization of the heat flux. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena has recently reported segmented unicouples that operate between 300 and 975 K and have conversion efficiencies of 15 percent [Caillat, 2000]. TEGs are used in nuclear-fueled power sources for space exploration, in power sources for the military, and in electrical …

One of the important phenomena that thermal-hydraulic codes such as RELAP5 must accurately calculate is heat transfer between a fluid and solid. Currently all thermal-hydraulic safety codes use the finite-difference technique to solve the transient conduction equation. This paper will examine the effect of different nodalization strategies on the accuracy of the finite-difference solution of a transient conduction problem with one convective boundary condition and no internal heat generation. The paper concludes with recommendations for choosing an appropriate nodalization scheme for modeling conduction in a wall without internal heat generation.

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