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A synthetic Topopah Spring Tuff water representative of one type of pore water at Yucca Mountain, Nevada (USA) was evaporated at 95 C in a series of experiments to determine the geochemical controls for brines that may form on, and possibly impact upon the long-term integrity of waste containers and drip shields at the designated high-level, nuclear-waste repository. Solution chemistry, condensed vapor chemistry, and precipitate mineralogy were used to identify important chemical divides and to validate geochemical calculations of evaporating water chemistry using a high temperature Pitzer thermodynamic database. The water evolved towards a complex ''sulfate type'' brine that contained about 45 mol% Na, 40 mol% Cl, 9 mol% NO{sub 3}, 5 mol% K, and less than 1 mol% each of SO{sub 4}, Ca, Mg, {Sigma}CO{sub 2}(aq), F, and Si. All measured ions in the condensed vapor phase were below detection limits. The mineral precipitates identified were halite, anhydrite, bassanite, niter and nitratine. Trends in the solution composition and identification of CaSO{sub 4} solids suggest that fluorite, carbonate, sulfate, and magnesium-silicate precipitation control the aqueous solution composition of sulfate type waters by removing fluoride, calcium, and magnesium during the early stages of evaporation. In most cases, the high temperature Pitzer …

The Savannah River Site is a Department of Energy, government-owned, company-operated industrial complex built in the 1950s to produce materials used in nuclear weapons. Five reactors were built to support the production of nuclear weapons material. Irradiated materials were moved from the reactors to one of the two chemical separation plants. In these facilities, known as ''canyons,'' the irradiated fuel and target assemblies were chemically processed to separate useful products from waste. Unfortunately, the by-product waste of nuclear material production was a highly radioactive liquid that had to be stored and maintained. In 1993 a strategy was developed to implement predictive maintenance technologies in the Liquid Waste Disposition Project Division responsible for processing the liquid waste. Responsibilities include the processing and treatment of 51 underground tanks designed to hold 750,000 to1,300,000 gallons of liquid waste and operation of a facility that vitrifies highly radioactive liquid waste into glass logs. Electrical and mechanical equipment monitored at these facilities is very similar to that found in non-nuclear industrial plants. Annual inspections are performed on electrical components, roof systems, and mechanical equipment. Troubleshooting and post installation and post-maintenance infrared inspections are performed as needed. In conclusion, regardless of the industry, the use of …

This paper discusses advances made in the field of Micron-gap ThermoPhotoVoltaics (MTPV). Initial modeling has shown that MTPV may enable significant performance improvements relative to conventional far field TPV. These performance improvements include up to a 10x increase in power density, 30% to 35% fractional increase in conversion efficiency, or alternatively, reduced radiator temperature requirements to as low as 550 C. Recent experimental efforts aimed at supporting these predictions have successfully demonstrated that early current and voltage enhancements could be done repeatedly and at higher temperatures. More importantly, these efforts indicated that no unknown energy transfer process occurs reducing the potential utility of MTPV. Progress has been made by running tests with at least one of the following characteristics relative to the MTPV results reported in 2001: Tests at over twice the temperature (900 C); Tests at 50% smaller gaps (0.12 {micro}m); Tests with emitter areas from 4 to 100 times larger (16 mm{sup 2} to 4 cm{sup 2}); and Tests with over 20x reduction in parasitic spacer heat flow. Remaining fundamental challenges to realizing these improvements relative to the recent breakthroughs in conventional far field TPV include reengineering the photovoltaic (PV) diode, filter, and emitter system for MTPV and …

An increasing amount of electricity is used by equipment that is neither fully ''on'' nor fully ''off.'' We call these equipment states low power modes, or ''lopomos.'' ''Standby'' and ''sleep'' are the most familiar lopomos, but some new products already have many modes. Lopomos are becoming common in household appliances, safety equipment, and miscellaneous products. Ross and Meier (2000) reports that several international studies have found standby power to be as much as 10 percent of residential energy consumption. Lopomo energy consumption is likely to continue growing rapidly as products with lopomos that use significant amounts of energy penetrate the market. Other sectors such as commercial buildings and industry also have lopomo energy use, perhaps totaling more in aggregate than that of households, but no comprehensive measurements have been made. In this paper, we propose a research agenda for study of lopomo energy consumption. This agenda has been developed with input from over 200 interested parties. Overall, there is consensus that lopomo energy consumption is an important area for research. Many see this as a critical time for addressing lopomo issues. As equipment designs move from the binary ''on/off'' paradigm to one that encompasses multiple power modes, there is a …

Recently the collider physics community has seen significant advances in the formalisms and implementations of event generators. This review is a primer of the methods commonly used for the simulation of high energy physics events at particle colliders. We provide brief descriptions, references, and links to the specific computer codes which implement the methods. The aim is to provide an overview of the available tools, allowing the reader to ascertain which tool is best for a particular application, but also making clear the limitations of each tool.

The removal of cesium from aqueous waste solution was investigated in a column setup using SuperLig(R) 644 resin. The resin was significantly coarser in size than those used in previous studies because of hydraulic problems encountered during pilot-scale tests. The bed volume (BV = 140) at the onset of breakthrough surpassed the design requirement of 100 BV at 50 percent breakthrough. The percent of cesium removed by the resin at the onset of breakthrough was 99.96. The elution of cesium with 0.5 M HNO3 was satisfactory with a peak BV of 2.5. The elution BV for C/Co = 0.01 was 10, which is less than the target of 15 BV. The percent of sorbed cesium eluted from the resin was 99.88 percent. In addition, the BV of the various solutions used for the supporting process steps (feed displacement, post-feed displacement rinse, post-elution rinse, and regeneration) of the cesium ion exchange system was sufficient.

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Variation in the detection, signaling, and repair of DNA damage contributes to human cancer risk. To assess capacity to modulate endogenous DNA damage among radiologic technologists who had been diagnosed with breast cancer and another malignancy (breast-other; n=42), early-onset breast cancer (early-onset, age {<=} 35; n=38), thyroid cancer (n=68), long-lived cancer-free individuals (hyper-normals; n=20) and cancer-free controls (n=49) we quantified DNA damage (single strand breaks and abasic sites) in untreated lymphoblastoid cell lines using the alkaline comet assay. Komet{trademark} software provided comet tail length, % DNA in tail (tail DNA), comet distributed moment (CDM), and Olive tail moment (OTM) summarized as the geometric mean of 100 cells. Category cut-points (median and 75th percentile) were determined from the distribution among controls. Tail length (for {>=} 75% vs. below the median, age adjusted) was most consistently associated with the highest odds ratios in the breast-other, early-onset, and thyroid cancer groups (with risk increased 10-, 5- or 19-fold, respectively, with wide confidence intervals) and decreased risk among the hyper-normal group. For the other three Comet measures, risk of breast-other was elevated approximately three-fold. Risk of early-onset breast cancer was mixed and risk of thyroid cancer ranged from null to a two-fold increase. The …

We study predictions for B-physics in a class of models, recently introduced, with a non-supersymmetric warped extra dimension. In these models few ({approx} 3) TeV Kaluza-Klein masses are consistent with electroweak data due to bulk custodial symmetry. Furthermore, there is an analog of GIM mechanism which is violated by the heavy top quark (just as in SM) leading to striking signals at B-factories: (1) New Physics (NP) contributions to {Delta}F = 2 transitions are comparable to SM. This implies that, within this NP framework, the success of the SM unitarity triangle fit is a ''coincidence''. Thus, clean extractions of unitarity angles via e.g. B {yields} {pi}{pi}, {rho}{pi}, {rho}{rho}, DK are likely to be affected, in addition to O(1) deviation from SM prediction in Bs mixing. (2) O(1) deviation from SM predictions for B {yields} X{sub s}{ell}{sup +}{ell}{sup -} in rate as well as in forward-backward and direct CP asymmetry. (3) Large mixing-induced CP asymmetry in radiative B decays, wherein the SM unambiguously predicts very small asymmetries. Also, with KK masses 3 TeV or less, and with anarchic Yukawa masses, contributions to electric dipole moments of the neutron are roughly 20 times larger than the current experimental bound so that this …