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A comprehensive validation analysis has been performed that incorporates representativity of multiple parameters, experiments, reference designs, and adjustment of the nuclear data. The work involves a new representativity study among selected reactor designs and several experiments. Application, using existing experiments, to reference design like the ABTR and the SFR has demonstrated that it is possible to achieve a significant reduction of uncertainty on the main integral parameters of interest for their neutronic design. This is possible when the set of available experiments are relevant (i.e. representative of the reference designs), of good quality (i.e. of reduced uncertainty on experimental results), and consistent (i.e. not providing conflictive information).

The gas-cooled fast reactor (GFR) is one of six advanced nuclear energy systems being studied under the auspices of the Gen IV International Forum (GIF). In a bilateral International Nuclear Energy Research Initiative (I-NERI) project French and U.S. national laboratories, industry, and universities are collaborating on the development of the GFR. This effort is led by the ANL in the U.S. and the CEA in France. Some of the attractions of the GFR include: (1) Hard spectrum and core breeding ratio, BR {approx} 1. These features allow minimal waste production, improved transmutation capability, optimal and flexible use of natural resources, potentially better economy (because of use of higher power density relative to current thermal gas-cooled systems), and improved non-proliferation (no fertile blanket); (2) Temperature resistant fuel and structure elements that are favorable to tight fission product confinement and system operation at high temperature; (3) High temperature and transparent helium (He) gas coolant that allows a high thermodynamic conversion efficiency, other energy applications (e.g., hydrogen production), and ease of in-service inspection and repair; and (4) Possible direct energy conversion cycle leading to a simpler design, increased conversion efficiency, and lower investment costs. The French strategy for advanced systems includes the development …

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An evidence of the existence of leptoquarks (LQ) would prove the validity of various extensions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM). The search for first generation leptoquarks presented in this dissertation has been performed by analyzing a 1.02 fb{sup -1} sample of data collected by the D0 detector, events with a final state comprising two light jets and two electrons. The absence of an excess of events in comparison to SM expectations leads to exclude scalar LQ masses up to 292 GeV and vector LQ masses from 350 to 458 GeV, depending on the LQ-l-q coupling type. The great importance of a good jet energy measurement motivated the study of the instrumental backgrounds correlated to the calorimeter, as much as studies of the hadronic showers energy resolution in {gamma} + jets events.

The GNEP program envisions continuing the use of light-water reactors (LWRs), with the addition of processing the discharged, or spent, LWR fuel to recover actinide and fission product elements, and then recycling the actinide elements in sodium-cooled fast reactors. Previous work has established the relationship between the processing efficiencies of spent LWR fuel, as represented by spent PWR fuel, and the potential increase in repository utilization for the resulting processing waste. The purpose of this current study is to determine a similar relationship for the waste from processing spent fast reactor fuel, and then to examine the wastes from the combination of LWRs and fast reactors as would be deployed with the GNEP approach.

Solar domestic hot water systems have been installed at Camp Darby and the Leghorn Army Depot near Livorno, Italy, by the United States Army. These systems range from single panel installations providing hot water to maintenance shops to large multipanel systems serving barracks. Guidance provided in this bilingual (English-Italian) report includes operating and maintenance procedures and recommendations for spare parts inventory. Operating procedures address start-up, normal operations, shut-down, and response to abnormal conditions; maintenance procedures address collector fluid drainage and replacement and equipment change-out. Flow diagrams reflecting as-built conditions are also included for many of the systems. Water quality and corrosion control are also discussed.

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With data from the SELEX experiment we study charm hadro-production. We report the differential production cross sections as function of the longitudinal and transverse momentum, as well as for two different target materials, of 14 charmed hadron and/or their decay modes. This is the most extensive study to date. SELEX is a fixed target experiment at Fermilab with high forward acceptance; it took data during 1996-1997 with 600 GeV/c {Sigma}{sup -} and {pi}{sup -}, and 540 GeV/c proton and {pi}{sup +} beams. It used 5 target foils (two copper and three diamond). We use the results to determine {alpha}, used in parametrizing the production cross section as {infinity} A{sup {alpha}}, where A is the mass number of the target nuclei. We found within our statistics that {alpha} is independent of the longitudinal momentum fraction x{sub F} in the interval 0.1 < x{sub F} < 1.0, with {alpha} = 0.778 {+-} 0.014. The average value of {alpha} for charm production by pion beams is {alpha}{sub meson} = 0.850 {+-} 0.028. This is somewhat larger than the corresponding average {alpha}{sub baryon} = 0.755 {+-} 0.016 for charm production by baryon beams ({Sigma}{sup -} and protons).

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 …

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The Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office within the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE) has been charged with revolutionizing the design tools used to build nuclear power plants during the next 10 years. To accomplish this, the DOE has brought together the national laboratories, U.S. universities, and the nuclear energy industry to establish the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) Program. The mission of NEAMS is to modernize computer modeling of nuclear energy systems and improve the fidelity and validity of modeling results using contemporary software environments and high-performance computers. NEAMS will create a set of engineering-level codes aimed at designing and analyzing the performance and safety of nuclear power plants and reactor fuels. The truly predictive nature of these codes will be achieved by modeling the governing phenomena at the spatial and temporal scales that dominate the behavior. These codes will be executed within a simulation environment that orchestrates code integration with respect to spatial meshing, computational resources, and execution to give the user a common 'look and feel' for setting up problems and displaying results. NEAMS is building upon a suite of existing simulation tools, including those developed by the federal Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing and …

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Quarterly highlights are: (1) The integration of Denovo and AMP was demonstrated in an AMP simulation of the thermo-mechanics of a complete fuel assembly; (2) Bison was enhanced with a mechanistic fuel cracking model; (3) Mechanistic algorithms were incorporated into various lower-length-scale models to represent fission gases and dislocations in UO2 fuels; (4) Marmot was improved to allow faster testing of mesoscale models using larger problem domains; (5) Component models of reactor piping were developed for use in Relap-7; (6) The mesh generator of Proteus was updated to accept a mesh specification from Moose and equations were formulated for the intermediate-fidelity Proteus-2D1D module; (7) A new pressure solver was implemented in Nek5000 and demonstrated to work 2.5 times faster than the previous solver; (8) Work continued on volume-holdup models for two fuel reprocessing operations: voloxidation and dissolution; (9) Progress was made on a pyroprocessing model and the characterization of pyroprocessing emission signatures; (10) A new 1D groundwater waste transport code was delivered to the used fuel disposition (UFD) campaign; (11) Efforts on waste form modeling included empirical simulation of sodium-borosilicate glass compositions; (12) The Waste team developed three prototypes for modeling hydride reorientation in fuel cladding during very long-term fuel …

The thermochemical database of species involved in combustion processes is and has been available for free use for over 25 years. It was first published in print in 1984, approximately 8 years after it was first assembled, and contained 215 species at the time. This is the 7th printed edition and most likely will be the last one in print in the present format, which involves substantial manual labor. The database currently contains more than 1300 species, specifically organic molecules and radicals, but also inorganic species connected to combustion and air pollution. Since 1991 this database is freely available on the internet, at the Technion-IIT ftp server, and it is continuously expanded and corrected. The database is mirrored daily at an official mirror site, and at random at about a dozen unofficial mirror and 'finger' sites. The present edition contains numerous corrections and many recalculations of data of provisory type by the G3//B3LYP method, a high-accuracy composite ab initio calculation. About 300 species are newly calculated and are not yet published elsewhere. In anticipation of the full coupling, which is under development, the database started incorporating the available (as yet unpublished) values from Active Thermochemical Tables. The electronic version now …

This report presents the software engineering effort under way at ANL towards a comprehensive integrated computational framework (SHARP) for high fidelity simulations of sodium cooled fast reactors. The primary objective of this framework is to provide accurate and flexible analysis tools to nuclear reactor designers by simulating multiphysics phenomena happening in complex reactor geometries. Ideally, the coupling among different physics modules (such as neutronics, thermal-hydraulics, and structural mechanics) needs to be tight to preserve the accuracy achieved in each module. However, fast reactor cores in steady state mode represent a special case where weak coupling between neutronics and thermal-hydraulics is usually adequate. Our framework design allows for both options. Another requirement for SHARP framework has been to implement various coupling algorithms that are parallel and scalable to large scale since nuclear reactor core simulations are among the most memory and computationally intensive, requiring the use of leadership-class petascale platforms. This report details our progress toward achieving these goals. Specifically, we demonstrate coupling independently developed parallel codes in a manner that does not compromise performance or portability, while minimizing the impact on individual developers. This year, our focus has been on developing a lightweight and loosely coupled framework targeted at UNIC …

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Supersymmetry, extension of the Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM), is searched for by trying to observe the supersymmetric partner of bottom quark ({tilde b}). This search is performed using events with a final state comprising two acoplanar b-quark jets and missing transverse energy (MET) and coming from a sample of 992 pb{sup -1} of data collected by the D0 detector at the Tevatron, the Fermilab p{bar p} collider. The absence of an excess of events in comparison to MS expectations leads to exclude sb masses up to 201 GeV, neutralino masses up to 94 GeV. The MET has been studied under two points of view, because of its fundamental role in this search. First, at the level of the trigger system which allows the online selection candidate events, and then, within the framework of the ALPGEN generator, the simulation of the Z boson transverse momentum which appears as MET when the Z boson decays into neutrino.

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This report summarizes the methodology and results of a user perspectives study conducted by the Community Driven Improvement of Globus Software (CDIGS) project. The purpose of the study was to document the work-related goals and challenges facing today's scientific technology users, to record their perspectives on Globus software and the distributed-computing ecosystem, and to provide recommendations to the Globus community based on the observations. Globus is a set of open source software components intended to provide a framework for collaborative computational science activities. Rather than attempting to characterize all users or potential users of Globus software, our strategy has been to speak in detail with a small group of individuals in the scientific community whose work appears to be the kind that could benefit from Globus software, learn as much as possible about their work goals and the challenges they face, and describe what we found. The result is a set of statements about specific individuals experiences. We do not claim that these are representative of a potential user community, but we do claim to have found commonalities and differences among the interviewees that may be reflected in the user community as a whole. We present these as a series …

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