The Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy is supporting system studies to gain a better understanding of nuclear power's potential role in a hydrogen economy and what hydrogen production technologies show the most promise. This assessment includes identifying commercial hydrogen applications and their requirements, comparing the characteristics of nuclear hydrogen systems to those market requirements, evaluating nuclear hydrogen configuration options within a given market, and identifying the key drivers and thresholds for market viability of nuclear hydrogen options. One of the objectives of the current analysis phase is to determine how nuclear hydrogen technologies could evolve under a number of different futures. The outputs of our work will eventually be used in a larger hydrogen infrastructure and market analysis conducted for DOE-EE using a system-level market simulation tool now underway. This report expands on our previous work by moving beyond simple levelized cost calculations and looking at profitability, risk, and uncertainty from an investor's perspective. We analyze a number of technologies and quantify the value of certain technology and operating characteristics. Our model to assess the profitability of the above technologies is based on Real Options Theory and calculates the discounted profits from investing in each of the production …

This report summarizes the research performed in the past year in the Argonne Physics Division. The Division's programs include operation of ATLAS as a national heavy-ion user facility, nuclear structure and reaction research with beams of heavy ions, accelerator research and development especially in superconducting radio frequency technology, nuclear theory and medium energy nuclear physics. The Division took significant strides forward in its science and its initiatives for the future in the past year. Major progress was made in developing the concept and the technology for the future advanced facility of beams of short-lived nuclei, the Rare Isotope Accelerator. The scientific program capitalized on important instrumentation initiatives with key advances in nuclear science. In 1999, the nuclear science community adopted the Argonne concept for a multi-beam superconducting linear accelerator driver as the design of choice for the next major facility in the field a Rare Isotope Accelerator (WA) as recommended by the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee's 1996 Long Range Plan. Argonne has made significant R&D progress on almost all aspects of the design concept including the fast gas catcher (to allow fast fragmentation beams to be stopped and reaccelerated) that in large part defined the RIA concept the superconducting rf …

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Hydrodynamic instability phenomena in a thin liquid lithium film, which has been proposed for the first stripper in the driver linac of Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA), were discussed. Since it was considered that film instability could significantly impair the feasibility of the liquid lithium film stripper concept, potential issues and research tasks in the RIA project due to these instability phenomena were raised. In order to investigate these instability phenomena, a research proposal plan was developed. In the theoretical part of this research proposal, a use of the linear stability theory was suggested. In the experimental part, it was pointed out that the concept of Reynolds number and Weber number scaling may allow conducting a preliminary experiment using inert simulants, hence reducing technical difficulty, complexity, and cost of the experiments. After confirming the thin film formation in the preliminary experiment using simulants, demonstration experiments using liquid lithium were proposed.

This report highlights the research performed in 2004 in the Physics Division of Argonne National Laboratory. The Division's programs include operation of ATLAS as a national user facility, nuclear structure and reaction research, nuclear theory, medium energy nuclear research and accelerator research and development. The intellectual challenges of this research represent some of the most fundamental challenges in modern science, shaping our understanding of both tiny objects at the center of the atom and some of the largest structures in the universe. A great strength of these efforts is the critical interplay of theory and experiment. Notable results in research at ATLAS include a measurement of the charge radius of He-6 in an atom trap and its explanation in ab-initio calculations of nuclear structure. Precise mass measurements on critical waiting point nuclei in the rapid-proton-capture process set the time scale for this important path in nucleosynthesis. An abrupt fall-off was identified in the subbarrier fusion of several heavy-ion systems. ATLAS operated for 5559 hours of research in FY2004 while achieving 96% efficiency of beam delivery for experiments. In Medium Energy Physics, substantial progress was made on a long-term experiment to search for the violation of time-reversal invariance using trapped Ra …