One problem faced in the clean-up operation at Hanford is that a number of radioactive waste storage tanks are experiencing a periodic buildup and release of potentially explosive gases. The best known example is Tank 241-SY-101 (commonly referred to as 101-SY) in which hydrogen gas periodically built up within the waste to the point that increased buoyancy caused a roll-over event, in which the gas was suddenly released in potentially explosive concentrations (if an ignition source were present). The sonic probe concept is to generate acoustic vibrations in the 101-SY tank waste at nominally 100 Hz, with sufficient amplitude to cause the controlled release of hydrogen bubbles trapped in the waste. The sonic probe may provide a potentially cost-effective alternative to large mixer pumps now used for hydrogen mitigation purposes. Two important parameters needed to determine sonic probe effectiveness and design are the speed of sound and yield stress of the tank waste. Tests to determine these parameters in a 240 ml sample of 101-SY waste (obtained near the tank bottom) were performed, and the results are reported.

Building anchorage analysis is performed to qualify the design of the new compressor building foundation given in the ECN ``241-U-701 New Compressor Building.`` Recommendations for some changes in the ECN are made accordingly. Calculations show that the 6-in.-slab is capable of supporting the pipe supports, and that the building foundation, air compressor and dryer anchorage, and electric rack are adequate structurally. Analysis also shows that the instrument air piping and pipe supports for the compressed air system meet the applicable code requirements and are acceptable. The building is for the U-Farm instrument air systems.

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This paper describes the validation, in accordance with ANSI/ANS-8.1-1983(R1988), of KENO V.a using the 27-group ENDF/B-IV cross section library for some neutronic systems containing highly-enriched uranium, carbon, and hydrogen. This constituent combination is present in many packaging applications for the safe transportation of fissile and fissionable materials. The validation has been performed for two separate computational platforms: an IBM 3090 mainframe and an HP 9000 Series 700 workstation, both using the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant Nuclear Criticality Safety Software (NCSS) code package. Critical experiments performed at the Oak Ridge Critical Experiments Facility in support of the Rover reactor program were identified as having the constitutents desired for this validation as well as sufficient experimental detail to allow accurate construction of KENO V.a calculational models. Calculated values of k{sub eff} for the Rover experiments, which contain uranium, carbon, and hydrogen, are between 1.0012 {+-} 0.0026 and 1.0245 {+-} 0.0023. These experiments can now be added to KENO V.a and other computer code critical experiment data bases which are used for validation and to establish upper limits on calculated values of k{sub eff} for specific applications.

Japan is one of the world's largest wood importers, with two-thirds of its imports as logs (unprocessed timber). Southeast Asia has been the largest log supplier, but supplies (and exports to Japan) have been declining. The United States has become a more important supplier, but concerns about declining domestic timber supplies have led to proposals to prohibit or to tax log exports. Opponents suggest that Japan would simply turn to other sources to replace U.S. logs. One question in this debate is where the alternative sources of logs or wood products might be.

The comprehensive rehabilitation of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Sanitary Sewer System centers around a Cured-in-Place Pipe project. Driven by regulatory requirements to eliminate the potential for exfiltration, a careful condition assessment of the existing infrastructure was conducted. Under programmatic constraints to maintain continuous operations, the INLINER USA cured-in-place pipe system was selected as the appropriate technology, and the project is currently under contract.

The objectives of this project are to continue reservoir characterization of the Cypress Sandstone; to identify and map fades-defined waterflood units (FDWS); and to design and Implement water-alternating-gas (WAG) oil recovery utilizing carbon dioxide (CO{sub 2}). The producibility problems are permeability variation and poor sweep efficiency. Phase 1 of the project focuses on the development of computer-generated geological and reservoir simulation models that will be used to select sites for the demonstration and implementation of CO{sub 2} displacement programs in Phase 2. Included in Phase 1 is the site selection and drilling of an infill well, coring of the Cypress interval, and injectivity testing to gather information used to update the reservoir simulation model. Phase 2 involves field implementation of WAG. Technology Transfer includes outreach activity such as seminars, workshops, and field trips. Technical progress for this quarter is described.

The Westinghouse Savannah River Company operates the Savannah River Site for the US Department of Energy (Department) under a cost-plus-award-fee contract. Department policies require contractors to ensure a high level of performance in operating Department facilities by establishing operating standards, assessing performance against such standards, and holding contractor employees accountable for their performance. The purpose of the audit was to review Westinghouse`s policies and practices for determining staffing requirements. Since assuming responsibility for the Savannah River Site in 1989, Westinghouse increased its staffing by over 4,000 employees. The Department had undertaken some actions to reduce the number of contractor employees at the Savannah River Site. Our audit showed that the use of industry and federal performance work standards in its construction and management activities could enable Westinghouse to further reduce its staff by over 1,800 employees. The potential savings in salaries and benefits associated with such action could be about $399 million over a 5-year period. Additional staffing reductions could be attained through the use of engineered time standards in the maintenance and fabrication shops. In addition, Westinghouse significantly understated, in periodic reports to the Department, the personnel resources applied to accomplish contract requirements. Of course, the actual staffing reductions …

In the late 1980s, DOE decided to construct a Uranium Solidification Facility at the Savannah River Site to process liquid uranyl nitrate into powder. Since the need for weapons materials has been reduced, an audit was conducted to assess the need for this facility. The audit disclosed that DOE continued to construct the facility, because DOE`s procedures did not ensure that projects of this type were periodically reassessed when significant program changes occurred. The audit identified more economical alternatives for processing existing quantities of liquid uranyl nitrate at the Savannah River Site.

This project is aimed at development of a process that, by using ultra fine magnetite suspension, would expand the application of heavy media separation technology to processing fine, {minus}28 mesh coals. These coal fines, produced during coal mining and crushing, are separated in the conventional coal preparation plant and generally impounded in a tailings pond. Development of an economic process for processing these fines into marketable product will expand the utilization of coal for power production in an environmentally acceptable and economically viable way. This process has been successfully researched at PETC but has not been studied on a continuous bench-scale unit, which is a necessary step towards commercial development of this promising technology. The goal of the program is to investigate the technology in a continuous circuit at a reasonable scale to provide a design basis for larger plants and a commercial feasibility data.

This report provides results of a comprehensive biologic survey performed in Coyote Canyon Test Complex (CCTC), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Bernalillo County, New Mexico, which was conducted during the spring and summer of 1992 and 1993. CCTC is sited on land owned by the Department of Energy (DOE) and Kirtland Air Force Base and managed by SNL. The survey covered 3,760 acres of land, most of which is rarely disturbed by CCTC operations. Absence of grazing by livestock and possibly native ungulates, and relative to the general condition of private range lands throughout New Mexico, and relative to other grazing lands in central New Mexico. Widely dispersed, low intensity use by SNL as well as prohibition of grazing has probably contributed to abundance of special status species such as grama grass cactus within the CCTC area. This report evaluates threatened and endangered species found in the area, as well as comprehensive assessment of biologic habitats. Included are analyses of potential impacts and mitigative measures designed to reduce or eliminate potential impacts. Included is a summary of CCTC program and testing activities.

The geometric construction of the E. Cartan moment of rotation associated to the spacetime curvature provides a geometric interpretation of the gravitational field sources and describes geometrically how the sources are ``wired`` to the field in standard geometrodynamics. E. Cartan moment of rotation yields an alternate way (as opposed to using variational principles) to obtain Einstein equations. The E. Cartan construction uses in an essential way the soldering structure of the frame bundle underlying the geometry of the gravitational field of general relativity. The geometry of Ashtekar`s connection formulation of gravitation theory is based on a complex-valued self-dual connection that is defined not on the frame bundle of spacetime but, rather, on its complexification. We show how to transfer the construction of the E. Cartan moment of rotation to Ashtekar`s theory of gravity and demonstrate that no spurious equations are produced via this procedure.

This document assumes that you have read and understood the Wingz user`s manuals. CaWingz is an external Wingz program which, when combined with a set of script files, provides easy-to-use EPICS channel access interface functions for Wingz users. The external function run allows Wingz user to invoke any Unix processor within caWingz. Few additional functions for accessing static database field and monitoring of value change event is available for EPICS users after release 3.11. The functions, script files, and usage are briefly described in this document. The script files supplied here serve as examples only. Users are responsible for generating their own spreadsheet and script files. CaWingz communicates with IOC through channel access function calls.

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This report covers work completed during the sixth quarter for the project. The project consists of three tasks: the first relates to developing a database of waste volumes and disposal methods used by the industry; the second and third tasks are aimed at investigating technologies that could be used for the treatment of produced waters and developing cost estimates for those technologies. The remainder of this report describes progress related to the three tasks in the project. Overall, construction of the Production Environmental Database (PED) is ongoing. While much of the data has been collected and entered into the database, a few data categories are still missing, for example, soils and geology and geohydrology. Work is currently under way to collect these data. In addition, a detailed data analysis has begun in order to develop relationships between oil and gas activities and environmental characteristics. In terms of the treatment of produced water, much of the work in the past quarter was focused on analyzing the costs associated with the treatment and disposal of waste residuals such as sludges.

During the past year, the authors have used the Surface Forces Apparatus (SFA) to measure the intermolecular forces between a model protein (hen egg-white lysozyme) and a model hydrophilic surface (mica), between lysozyme and itself and between lysozyme and a model hydrophobic surface composed of a crosslinked alkoxysilane surfactant (hexadecyltriethoxysilane, HTE). As expected, repulsive forces are dominant between the hydrophilic surfaces with the same charge (lysozyme-lysozyme) while attractive forces are dominant between oppositely charged surfaces (lysozyme-mica) and between the lysozyme and the hydrophobic surface. The DLVO theory for charged surfaces was found to agree with the results of the lysozyme-lysozyme interaction. Efforts also have been focused on trying to create a well-formed, defect-free monolayer of the HTE on the surface of the mica using a Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) apparatus. A smooth, defect-free surface is desired for the intermolecular force studies. Atomic force microscopy has been used to determine the topography of the HTE films.

since the mid-1950s, China has made strong efforts within its limited economic and technical capabilities to develop a modest nuclear force and related delivery systems in order to: help deter superpower or regional aggression and intimidation;

Science and engineering doctoral students performing energy related research were supported by a USDOE/ESPCoR Traineeship grant awarded to the Kentucky EPSCoR Committee. The grant, administered by the KY DOE/EPSCoR Subcommittee, focused on research having the general description of {open_quotes}Clean Uses of Fossil Fuels{close_quotes}. The value of the grant was $500,000 for three years duration, beginning September 30, 1991 and ending September 29, 1994. Ten PhD students were selected for support during the first year of the Traineeship. Upon reviewing coursework and research progress of the students at the end of the first year, the KY DOE/EPSCoR Subcommittee awarded a second year of support at the same $25,000/year funding level. A total of 12 students will have been supported during the duration of the grant as a consequence of one student completing his degree during the support period and of one student deciding that she wanted to complete only a Masters rather than a PhD degree. The students supported were at either the University of Kentucky or the University of Louisville - the two PhD, science and engineering granting universities within the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The disciplines of these students included Biology, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Geological Sciences, and Physics. The methods …

The project was designed to develop and apply a novel unconventional approach to genome mapping based on physical properties of DNA that are a sensitive function of the base sequence, and so does not depend on the clonability of the sequences to be mapped nor on the presence of particular restriction sites. We have shown that a broad array of DNA fragments are retarded at nearly the same level in denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) if the segment with the lowest thermal stability has the same melting temperature, regardless of the length of the fragment. The retarded pattern remain steady in the gel, changing little with continued field exposure. Mapping proceeds by the analysis of two-dimensional patterns produced by random fragmentation of genomic DNA and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis. Random fragments are first separated according to length by conventional agarose electrophoresis. The result is a two- dimensional pattern which can be idealized as an array of nearly parallel, mostly separated lines of DNA. The pattern is blotted onto a membrane and probed sequentially with oligos or relevant DNA or RNA fragments. The endpoints on the fragment length scale of each line hybridizing with each probe, the distribution along each line, …

This document is the Process Test Report for performing operation testing with water of the modified E-F11 concentrator in PUREX on water. The test was performed to determine the effects of the following concentrator modifications; routing concentrator off-gasses via the PUREX air tunnel to the main stack, blanking of condenser cooling water, blanking of process condensate route to a crib, restricting flow to steam tube bundles, and routing of steam condensate to TK-F12. The test was successful. Concentrator boil-off rates of 6--7 gpm were achieved while the overheads exited the PUREX plant in vapor form. With minor recommended modifications, this process is recommended for use in processing PUREX deactivation flush solutions and other miscellaneous wastes accumulated during the completion of the deactivation project.

The Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant is investigating the use of induction melting as a method of consolidating Zircaloy-4, a zirconium alloy used in the fabrication of submarine nuclear reactor cores. Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL) furnished about 4000 lb of typical core material, also known as hardware, for use in evaluating induction melting as a method of consolidation. Three ingots were produced by the induction melting of hardware in a graphite crucible that was protected by a laminated coating specifically developed for this application. This report includes a description of both the equipment and the crucible coating materials used for this project, a discussion of results, and a production assessment of using this technique for full-scale consolidation.

This is a final report from Bend Research, Inc., (BRI) to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for work performed under Contract No. DE-AC22-92MT92005, titled {open_quotes}Development of a Membrane-Based Process for the Treatment of Oily Waste Waters.{close_quotes} This report covers the period from March 4, 1992, to March 5, 1994. The overall goal of this program was to develop an economical oily-water treatment system based on reverse osmosis (RO). The RO system would be used to (1) reduce oil production costs by reducing the volume of waste water that must be disposed of, (2) form the basis of a generic waste-water treatment system that can easily be integrated into oil-field operations, especially at production facilities that are small or in remote locations; and (3) produce water clean enough to meet existing and anticipated environmental regulations. The specific focus of this program was the development of a hollow-fiber membrane module capable of treating oily waste waters.

Assignment of the vibrational modes Of Os{sub 2}(CO){sub 8}(CHCH{sub 3}) and Os(CO){sub 4}(C{sub 2}H{sub 4)} has given fingerprint vibrational spectra for the following species when chemisorbed on metal catalyst surfaces: ethylidene and ethylene bound in a metallacyclopropane mode. The formation and fragmentation of diosmacyclobutanes have been shown to involve slippage of the outgoing olefin onto a single osmium, and associative exchange of the olefin from that site. The incorporation of vinylcyclopropane without rearrangement has confirmed the absence of a diradical intermediate. The anomalous stability of the diosmacyclobutane derived from trans-2-butene has proven due to greater destabilization (by the substituent methyls) of the slipped intermediate than of the ground state. Reaction of an osmacyclobutane with 1,3- or 1,2-dienes (allenes) gives 1,2 rather than 1,4 addition to the diosmium unit. Treatment of Os(CO){sub 4}(C{sub 2}H{sub 4}) with triflic acid results in the formation of Os(CO){sub 4}(C{sub 2}H{sub 5})OTf. The authors have found that the reaction of an aryl iodine(III) reagent with propargyl stannanes or silanes results in o-iodo propargyl arenes.