As part of continuing compliance, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requires the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to provide any change in information since the most recent compliance application. This requirement is identified in Title 40 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Section 194.4(b)(4), which states: “No later than six months after the administrator issues a certification, and at least annually thereafter, the Department shall report to the Administrator, in writing, any changes in conditions or activities pertaining to the disposal system that were not required to be reported by paragraph (b)(3) of this section and that differ from information contained in the most recent compliance application.” In meeting the requirement, the DOE provides an annual report of all changes applicable under the above requirement each November. This annual report informs the EPA of changes to information in the most recent compliance application, or for this report the 1996 Compliance Certification Application (CCA). Significant planned changes must be reported to the EPA prior to implementation by the DOE. In addition, Title 40 CFR, Section 194.4(b)(3) requires that significant unplanned changes be reported to the EPA within 24 hours or ten days, depending on the severity of the activity or condition. …

As a polysaccharide-encrusting component, lignin is critical to cell wall integrity and plant growth but also hinders recovery of cellulose fibers during the wood pulping process. To improve pulping efficiency, it is highly desirable to genetically modify lignin content and/or structure in pulpwood species to maximize pulp yields with minimal energy consumption and environmental impact. This project aimed to genetically augment the syringyl-to-guaiacyl lignin ratio in low-lignin transgenic aspen in order to produce trees with reduced lignin content, more reactive lignin structures and increased cellulose content. Transgenic aspen trees with reduced lignin content have already been achieved, prior to the start of this project, by antisense downregulation of a 4-coumarate:coenzyme A ligase gene (Hu et al., 1999 Nature Biotechnol 17: 808- 812). The primary objective of this study was to genetically augment syringyl lignin biosynthesis in these low-lignin trees in order to enhance lignin reactivity during chemical pulping. To accomplish this, both aspen and sweetgum genes encoding coniferaldehyde 5-hydroxylase (Osakabe et al., 1999 PNAS 96: 8955-8960) were targeted for over-expression in wildtype or low-lignin aspen under control of either a constitutive or a xylem-specific promoter. A second objective for this project was to develop reliable and cost-effective methods, such as …

Bulk damage sites in frequency conversion crystals scatter and/or absorb laser light leading to interference and downstream intensification .We find that laser induced bulk damage sites in DKDP exhibit a 'shell' of structurally and/or chemically modified material surrounding a central core as indicated by SEM and optical micrographs and micro Raman spectral maps. We hypothesize that the modified material has been shock wave densified and estimate the amount of densification and its effect on scattering. A simple model indicates that densification of several percent is likely and that the scattering cross section may be larger than the geometric area of the inner core by an order of magnitude.

The Optical Sciences Laser (OSL) Upgrade facility, described in last year's proceedings, is a kJ-class, large aperture (100cm{sup 2}) laser system that can accommodate prototype optical components for large-scale inertial confinement fusion lasers. High-energy operation of such lasers is often limited by damage to the optical components. Recent experiments on the OSL Upgrade facility using fused silica components at 4 J/cm{sup 2} (351-nm, 3-ns) have created output surface and bulk damage sites that have been correlated to phase objects in the bulk of the material. Optical Path Difference (OPD) measurements of the phase defects indicate the probability of laser-induced damage is strongly dependent on OPD.

We present a natural solution to the strong CP problem in the context of split fermions. By assuming CP is spontaneously broken in the bulk, a weak CKM phase is created in the standard model due to a twisting in flavor space of the bulk fermion wavefunctions. But the strong CP phase remains zero, being essentially protected by parity in the bulk and CP on the branes. As always in models of spontaneous CP breaking, radiative corrections to theta bar from the standard model are tiny, but even higher dimension operators are not that dangerous. The twisting phenomenon was recently shown to be generic, and not to interfere with the way that split fermions naturally weaves small numbers into the standard model. It follows that out approach to strong CP is compatible with flavor, and we sketch a comprehensive model. We also look at deconstructed version of this setup which provides a viable 4D model of spontaneous CP breaking which is not in the Nelson-Barr class.

The goals of the first six months of this project were to lay the foundations for both the SiC front-end optical chip fabrication as well as the free-space laser beam interferometer designs and preliminary tests. In addition, a Phase I goal was to design and experimentally build the high temperature and pressure infrastructure and test systems that will be used in the next 6 months for proposed sensor experimentation and data processing. All these goals have been achieved and are described in detail in the report. Both design process and diagrams for the mechanical elements as well as the optical systems are provided. In addition, photographs of the fabricated SiC optical chips, the high temperature & pressure test chamber instrument, the optical interferometer, the SiC sample chip holder, and signal processing data are provided. The design and experimentation results are summarized to give positive conclusions on the proposed novel high temperature optical sensor technology. The goals of the second six months of this project were to conduct high temperature sensing tests using the test chamber and optical sensing instrument designs developed in the first part of the project. In addition, a Phase I goal was to develop the basic processing …

At the U.S. Department of Energy Savannah River Site, complex environmental models were required to analyze the performance of a suite of radionuclides, including decay chains consisting of multiple radionuclides. To facilitate preparation of the model for each radionuclide a sophisticated protocol was established to link a database containing material information with a template. The protocol consists of data and special commands in the template, control information in the database and key selection information in the database. A preprocessor program reads a template, incorporates the appropriate information from the database and generates the final model. In effect, the database/template protocol forms a command language. That command language typically allows the user to perform multiple independent analyses merely by setting environmental variables to identify the nuclides to be analyzed and having the template reference those environmental variables. The environmental variables ca n be set by a batch or script that serves as a shell to analyze each radionuclide in a separate subdirectory (if desired) and to conduct any preprocessing and postprocessing functions. The user has complete control to generate the database and how it interacts with the template. This protocol was valuable for analyzing multiple radionuclides for a single disposal unit. …

Under the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Computational Biology, I have been afforded the opportunity to study phylogenetics--one of the most important and exciting disciplines in computational biology. A phylogeny depicts an evolutionary relationship among a set of organisms (or taxa). Typically, a phylogeny is represented by a binary tree, where modern organisms are placed at the leaves and ancestral organisms occupy internal nodes, with the edges of the tree denoting evolutionary relationships. The task of phylogenetics is to infer this tree from observations upon present-day organisms. Reconstructing phylogenies is a major component of modern research programs in many areas of biology and medicine, but it is enormously expensive. The most commonly used techniques attempt to solve NP-hard problems such as maximum likelihood and maximum parsimony, typically by bounded searches through an exponentially-sized tree-space. For example, there are over 13 billion possible trees for 13 organisms. Phylogenetic heuristics that quickly analyze large amounts of data accurately will revolutionize the biological field. This final report highlights my activities in phylogenetics during the two-year postdoctoral period at the University of New Mexico under Prof. Bernard Moret. Specifically, this report reports my scientific, community and professional activities as an Alfred P. Sloan Postdoctoral …

New instabilities of fishbone type are predicted. First, a trapped-particle-induced m = n = 1 instability with the mode structure having nothing to do with the conventional rigid kink displacement. This instability takes place when the magnetic field is weak, so that the precession frequency of the energetic ions is not small as compared to the frequency of the corresponding Alfven continuum at r = 0 and the magnetic shear is small inside the q = 1 radius [the case relevant to spherical tori]. Second, an Energetic Particle Mode fishbone instability driven by circulating particles. Third, a double-kink-mode instability driven by the circulating energetic ions. In particular, the latter can have two frequencies simultaneously: we refer to it as ''doublet'' fishbones. This instability can occur when the radial profile of the energetic ions has an off-axis maximum inside the region of the mode localization.

High current and low emittance are principal requirements for heavy-ion injection into a linac driver for inertial fusion energy. An electrostatic quadrupole (ESQ) injector is capable of providing these high charge density and low emittance beams. We have modified the existing 2-MV Injector to reduce beam emittance and to double the pulse length. We characterize the beam delivered by the modified injector to the High Current Transport Experiment (HCX) and the effects of finite rise time of the extraction voltage pulse in the diode on the beam head. We demonstrate techniques for mitigating aberrations and reducing beam emittance growth in the injector.

The purpose of this calculation is to develop estimates of key mechanical properties for the lithophysal rock masses of the Topopah Spring Tuff (Tpt) within the repository host horizon, including their uncertainties and spatial variability. The mechanical properties to be characterized include an elastic parameter, Young's modulus, and a strength parameter, uniaxial compressive strength. Since lithophysal porosity is used as a surrogate property to develop the distributions of the mechanical properties, an estimate of the distribution of lithophysal porosity is also developed. The resulting characterizations of rock parameters are important for supporting the subsurface design, developing the preclosure safety analysis, and assessing the postclosure performance of the repository (e.g., drift degradation and modeling of rockfall impacts on engineered barrier system components).

The injector of the Flash X-Ray (FXR) accelerator has a significantly larger than expected beam emittance. A computer modeling effort involving three different injector design codes was undertaken to characterize the FXR injector and determine the cause of the large emittance. There were some variations between the codes, but in general the simulations were consistent and pointed towards a much smaller normalized, rms emittance (36 cm-mr) than what was measured (193 cm-mr) at the exit of the injector using a pepperpot technique. The simulations also indicated that the present diode design was robust with respect to perturbations to the nominal design. Easily detected mechanical alignment/position errors and magnet errors did not lead to appreciable increase in the simulated emittance. The physics of electron emission was not modeled by any of the codes and could be the source of increased emittance. The nominal simulation assumed uniform Child-Langmuir Law emission from the velvet cathode and no shroud emission. Simulations that looked at extreme non-uniform cathode and shroud emission scenarios resulted in doubling of the emittance. An alternative approach was to question the pepperpot measurement. Simulations of the measurement showed that the pepperpot aperture foil could double the emittance with respect to the …

An experimental technique has been developed to measure the damage density {rho}({phi}) variation with fluence from scatter maps of bulk damage sites in plates of KD{sub 2}PO{sub 4} (DKDP) crystals combined with calibrated images of the damaging beam's spatial profile. Unconditioned bulk damage in tripler-cut DKDP crystals has been studied using 351 nm (3 {omega}) light at pulse lengths of 0.055, 0.091, 0.30, 0.86, 2.6, and 10 ns. It is found that there is less scatter due to damage at fixed fluence for longer pulse lengths. The results also show that for all the pulse lengths the scatter due to damage is a strong function of the damaging fluence. It is determined that the pulse length scaling for bulk damage scatter in unconditioned DKDP material varies as {tau}{sup 0.24 {+-} 0.05} over two orders of magnitude of pulse lengths. The effectiveness of 3 {omega} laser conditioning at pulse lengths of 0.055, 0.096, 0.30, 0.86, 3.5, and 23 ns is analyzed in term of damage density {rho}({phi}) at 3 {omega}, 2.6 ns. The 860 ps conditioning to a peak irradiance of 7 GW/cm{sup 2} had the best performance under 3 {omega}, 2.6 ns testing. It is shown that the optimal conditioning …

The effective lifetime of a laser optic is limited by both laser-induced damage and the subsequent growth of laser initiated damage sites. We have measured the growth rate of laser-induced damage on polished fused silica surfaces in 10 torr of air at 1053 nm at 10 ns. The data shows exponential growth in the lateral size of the damage site with shot number above a threshold fluence. The size of the initial damage influences the threshold for growth. We will compare the growth rates for input and output surface damage. Possible reasons for the observed growth behavior are discussed.

An edge illumination technique has been designed using a monochromatic light source that improves the identification of surface flaws on optics. The system uses a high-resolution CCD camera to capture images of the optics. Conventional edge illumination methods using white light sources have been plagued by light leaking around the optics causing high background levels. The background combined with lower resolution cameras has made it difficult to determine size and intensity characteristics of the flaws. Thus photographs taken of the optics are difficult to analyze quantitatively and do not allow for the detection of small, faintly illuminated sites. Infrared diodes have been utilized to illuminate large-scale (43 cm x 43 cm) fused silica optics, and a two-dimensional array CCD camera has been used to collect the image data. Flaw sizes as small as {approx}10 {micro}m have been detected. A set of frames has been built to support the infrared sources where one diode array per side is magnetically attached to the frame. The diodes inject light into the optic causing the sites to illuminate, which can be detected by the camera. A customized mounting design has been implemented to secure the frames to the stage, or base, for image acquisition. …

We describe a system to inspect and remove surface debris in-situ from the surfaces of upward-facing mirrors that transport 1053 nm laser light to the target chamber of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Grazing angle (2-5{sup o}) illumination with a bar light highlights debris {approx}10 {micro}m in size and larger, which is then viewed through windows in the enclosures of selected mirrors. Debris is removed with 1-second bursts of high velocity (76 m/s) clean air delivered across the optic surfaces by a commercially available linear nozzle (''gas knife''). Experiments with aluminum, stainless steel, glass and polystyrene particles of various sizes >30 {micro}m show that particle removal efficiency is near 100% over most of the mirror surfaces for all sizes tested.

Recently, a new mechanism for Type I supernovae has been proposed whereby relativistic terms enhance the self gravity of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf as it passes near a black hole. It was suggested but not confirmed that this relativistic compression can cause the central density to exceed the threshold for pycnonuclear reactions so that a thermonuclear runaway ensues. Here, we present numerical studies of such relativistically induced explosions of white dwarfs and red giant cores of various mass (particularly a typical 0.6 M{sub {circle_dot}} white dwarf) as they pass near a 3.7 x 10{sup 6} black hole like Sgr A* in the Galactic center. We confirm by hydrodynamic thermonuclear burn simulations in three spatial dimensions that white dwarfs and red giant cores do indeed ignite and explode. In fact they seem to explode even farther from the black hole than earlier estimates due to increased internal temperatures from adiabatic heating as the stars are compressed. We find that the compression is sufficiently fast that red giant cores, or young (< 10{sup 8} yr) white dwarfs can even be heated to thermonuclear rather than pychnonuclear ignition. We propose that such an event might explain the observed ''mixed-morphology'' Sgr A East supernova …

The authors have implemented an automated pulse shaper for NIF capsules in HYDRA. We have developed the infrastructure to do scans using the automatic pulse shaper across any n-dimensions of capsule parameter space. Using this infrastructure, we have performed several scans examining parameters for uniformly doped Beryllium capsules. To coordinate more closely with the anticipated experimental shock timing strategy, we have started to develop an automated pulse shaper which uses planar geometry and liquid DD.

When metallic plates are welded, for example using the Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW) process, residual tensile stresses may develop in the vicinity of the weld seam. Processes such as Low Plasticity Burnishing (LPB) and Laser Shock Peening (LSP) could be applied locally to eliminate the residual stresses produced by welding. In this study, Alloy 22 (N06022) plates were welded and then the above-mentioned surface treatments were applied to eliminate the residual tensile stresses. The aim of the current study was to comparatively test the corrosion behavior of as-welded (ASW) plates with the corrosion behavior of plates with stress mitigated surfaces. Immersion and electrochemical tests were performed. Results from both general and localized corrosion tests show that the corrosion resistance of the mitigated plates was not affected by the surface treatments applied.

Recently we were asked to produce target capsules with bumps on the surface. The bumps were to test the effects of fill tubes in future targets. The bumps desired were to be Gaussian in shape and from 60 to 40 {micro}m in diameter and from 1 to 6 {micro}m high. The capsules had a nominal diameter of 500 {micro}m. The approach we used was to align a precision aperture to the capsule and coat through the aperture onto the capsule surface using plasma polymer coating. The bumps were characterized using optical microscopy, Wyko interferometry, and AFM sphere mapping.

Traffic congestion and its impacts significantly affect the nation's economic performance and the public's quality of life. In most urban areas, travel demand routinely exceeds highway capacity during peak periods. In addition, events such as crashes, vehicle breakdowns, work zones, adverse weather, railroad crossings, large trucks loading/unloading in urban areas, and other factors such as toll collection facilities and sub-optimal signal timing cause temporary capacity losses, often worsening the conditions on already congested highway networks. The impacts of these temporary capacity losses include delay, reduced mobility, and reduced reliability of the highway system. They can also cause drivers to re-route or reschedule trips. Such information is vital to formulating sound public policies for the highway infrastructure and its operation. In response to this need, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), made an initial attempt to provide nationwide estimates of the capacity losses and delay caused by temporary capacity-reducing events (Chin et al. 2002). This study, called the Temporary Loss of Capacity (TLC) study, estimated capacity loss and delay on freeways and principal arterials resulting from fatal and non-fatal crashes, vehicle breakdowns, and adverse weather, including snow, ice, and fog. In addition, it estimated capacity loss …

Project Abstract This project was a continuation of work begun under a subcontract issued off of TSI-DOE Grant 1528746, awarded to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Anthony Mezzacappa is the Principal Investigator on the Illinois award. A separate award was issued to Santa Clara University to continue the collaboration during the time period May 2003 ? 2004. Smolarski continued to work on preconditioner technology and its interface with various iterative methods. He worked primarily with F. Dough Swesty (SUNY-Stony Brook) in continuing software development started in the 2002-03 academic year. Special attention was paid to the development and testing of difference sparse approximate inverse preconditioners and their use in the solution of linear systems arising from radiation transport equations. The target was a high performance platform on which efficient implementation is a critical component of the overall effort. Smolarski also focused on the integration of the adaptive iterative algorithm, Chebycode, developed by Tom Manteuffel and Steve Ashby and adapted by Ryan Szypowski for parallel platforms, into the radiation transport code being developed at SUNY-Stony Brook.

The federal government has been an active participant in the development and use of USGBC's Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design Green Building Rating System (LEED). This paper presents a review of this participation and some expectations for ongoing partnership.

All of the high-heat-load critical components in the new canted-undulator front-end (CU FE) design use wire-coil inserts inside of the cooling channels to significantly enhance heat transfer. Wire-coil inserts have replaced the copper-mesh inserts used in previous front-end high-heat-load critical-component designs. The exit mask, the most downstream component in the CU FE line relative to the x-ray beam path, has an exit aperture of 2 mm vertical x 3 mm horizontal and is the most sensitive component, in terms of final beam stability, of all of the CU FE components. In general, final beam stability is determined by the storage-ring output-beam stability and not by the CU FE components. Although front-end components are not very sensitive to vibration, several measurements have been performed to assess the flow-induced vibration associated with the CU FE exit mask. Results yield only 0.16 {micro}mrms vertical displacement and 1.0 {micro}mrms horizontal displacement under worst-case conditions. The maximum displacement values are very small compared to the aperture size, and therefore flow-induced vibration has a negligible effect on the CU FE output beam stability. More general measurements have also been performed to directly compare flow-induced vibration in an open, unrestricted tube relative to the same tube containing …