This is the annual project report for the ASGRAD project - Amorphous Semiconductors for Gamma Radiation Detection. We describe progress in the development of new materials for portable, room temperature, gammaradiation detection at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. High Z, high resistivity, amorphous semiconductors are being designed for use as solid-state detectors at near ambient temperatures; their principles of operation are analogous to single-crystal semiconducting detectors. Compared to single crystals, amorphous semiconductors have the advantages of rapid, cost-effective, bulk-fabrication; nearnet-shape fabrication of complicated geometries; compositional flexibility; and greater electronic property control. The main disadvantage is reduced-charge carrier mobility. The focus of this project is to develop optimized amorphous semiconductor materials for gamma detection applications that leverage their material advantages while mitigating their limitations. During the second year of this project, several important milestones were accomplished. Major accomplishments were: (1) Significant processing - property and composition - property correlations were determined for Cd-Ge-As glasses; (2) Radiation response testing was successfully demonstrated on three different amorphous semiconductor materials (Cd-Ge-As, As-Se, and As-Se-Te systems) at ambient and near ambient temperatures; (3) Advanced, enabling Schottky contacts were developed for Cd-Ge-As compounds, this will allow these materials to perform at ambient temperatures; and (4) The collaborative …

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The use of magnetic coordinates is ubiquitous in toroidal plasma physics, but the distortion in Fourier spectra produced by these coordinates is not well known. A spatial symmetry of the field is not always represented by a symmetry in the Fourier spectrum when magnetic coordinates are used because of the distortion of the toroidal angle. The practical importance of spectral distortion is illustrated with a tokamak example.

Optical streak cameras are used as primary diagnostics for a wide range of physics and laser experiments at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF). To meet the strict accuracy requirements needed for these experiments, the systematic nonlinearities of the streak cameras (attributed to nonlinearities in the optical and electrical components that make up the streak camera system) must be characterized. In some cases the characterization information is used as a guide to help determine how experiment data should be taken. In other cases, the characterization data are applied to the raw data images to correct for the nonlinearities. In order to characterize an optical streak camera, a specific set of data is collected, where the response to defined inputs are recorded. A set of analysis software routines has been developed to extract information such as spatial resolution, dynamic range, and temporal resolution from this data set. The routines are highly automated, requiring very little user input and thus provide very reliable and repeatable results that are not subject to interpretation. An emphasis on quality control has been placed on these routines due to the high importance of the camera characterization information.

Our ongoing investigation of how 'Pillars' and other structure form in molecular clouds irradiated by ultraviolet (UV) stars has revealed that the Rayleigh-Taylor instability is strongly suppressed by recombination in the photoevaporated outflow, that clumps and filaments may be key, that the evolution of structure is well-modeled by compressible hydrodynamics, and that directionality of the UV radiation may have significant effects. We discuss a generic, flexible set of laboratory experiments that can address these issues.

This CRS Report for Congress contains descriptions of U.S. policy response, legislation, and sanctions pertaining to Iran. Updated May 6, 2008.

This paper will discuss the present electronics design for the beam current monitor system to be used throughout the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) under construction at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The beam is composed of a micro-pulse structure due to the 402.5MHz RF, and is chopped into mini-pulses of 645ns duration with a 300ns gap, providing a macro-pulse of 1060 mini-pulses repeating at a 60Hz rate. Ring beam current will vary from about 15ma peak during studies, to about 50Amps peak (design to 100 amps). A digital approach to droop compensation has been implemented and initial test results presented.

The electric power system must address two unique requirements: the need to maintain a near real-time balance between generation and load, and the need to adjust generation (or load) to manage power flows through individual transmission facilities. These requirements are not new: vertically integrated utilities have been meeting them for a century as a normal part of conducting business. With restructuring, however, the services needed to meet these requirements, now called ''ancillary services'', are being more clearly defined. Ancillary services are those functions performed by the equipment and people that generate, control, and transmit electricity in support of the basic services of generating capacity, energy supply, and power delivery. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has defined such services as those ''necessary to support the transmission of electric power from seller to purchaser given the obligations of control areas and transmitting utilities within those control areas to maintain reliable operations of the interconnected transmission system''. This statement recognizes the importance of ancillary services for both bulk-power reliability and support of commercial transactions. Balancing generation and load instantaneously and continuously is difficult because loads and generators are constantly fluctuating. Minute-to-minute load variability results from the random turning on and off of …

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), at the request of the California Energy Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy, is investigating opportunities for electrical load to provide the ancillary service of spinning reserve to the electric grid. The load would provide this service by stopping for a short time when there is a contingency on the grid such as a transmission line or generator outage. There is a possibility that a significant portion of the California Independent System Operator's (CAISO's) spinning reserve requirement could be supplied from the California Department of Water Resources (CDWR) pumping load. Spinning reserve has never been supplied from load before, and rule changes would be needed to allow it. In this report, we are presenting technical findings on the possibility of supplying spinning reserve from pumping system load. In parallel, we are pursuing the needed rule changes with the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC), and the CAISO. NERC and FERC have agreed that they have no prohibition against supplying spinning reserve from load. The WECC Minimum Operability Reliability Criteria working group has agreed that the concept should be considered, and they …

We present an introduction to the operating principles of free-electron lasers, discussing the amplification process, and the requirements on the electron beam necessary to achieve desired performance.

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This report discusses the ongoing debate over the efficacy and constitutionality of federal regulation of firearms and ammunition. The report provides background information and analysis over the pros and cons of the debate and gun related statistics.

Congress continues to debate the efficacy and constitutionality of federal regulation of firearms and ammunition. It is a contentious debate, with strong advocates for and against the further federal regulation of firearms.

This report provides a distribution reliability measurement ''toolkit'' that is intended to be an asset to regulators, utilities and power users. The metrics and standards discussed range from simple reliability, to power quality, to the new blend of reliability and power quality analysis that is now developing. This report was sponsored by the Office of Electric Transmission and Distribution, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Inconsistencies presently exist in commonly agreed-upon practices for measuring the reliability of the distribution systems. However, efforts are being made by a number of organizations to develop solutions. In addition, there is growing interest in methods or standards for measuring power quality, and in defining power quality levels that are acceptable to various industries or user groups. The problems and solutions vary widely among geographic areas and among large investor-owned utilities, rural cooperatives, and municipal utilities; but there is still a great degree of commonality. Industry organizations such as the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the American Public Power Association (APPA), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have made tremendous strides in preparing self-assessment templates, optimization guides, diagnostic techniques, and better definitions of reliability and power …

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This presentation's summaries: a convenient truth, comparison of three concentrator technologies, value of high efficiency, and status of industry.

This report discusses inflation including its causes and effect on the economy. In particular, it brings together broad knowledge from economists to discuss the real costs of inflation on the economy.

Report on the FY2009 appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security, and the listing of departments that comprise the DHS, as well as their subsequent fund dispersal.

The confinement of auxiliary heated NSTX discharges is discussed. The energy confinement time in plasmas with either L-mode or H-mode edges is enhanced over the values given by the ITER97L and ITER98Pby(2) scalings, being up to 2-3 times L-mode and 1.5 times H-mode. TRANSP calculations based on the kinetic profile measurements reproduce the magnetics-based determination of stored energy and the measured neutron production rate. Power balance calculations reveal that, in a high power neutral beam heated H-mode discharge, the ion thermal transport is near neoclassical levels, and well below the electron thermal transport, which is the main loss channel. Perturbative impurity injection techniques indicate the particle diffusivity to be slightly above the neoclassical level in discharges with L-mode edge. High-harmonic fast-wave (HHFW) bulk electron heating is described and thermal transport is discussed. Thermal ion transport is found to be above neoclassical level, but thermal electron transport remains the main loss mechanism. Evidences of an electron thermal internal transport barrier obtained with HHFW heating are presented. A description of H-mode discharges obtained during HHFW heating is presented.

New single-family home construction represents a significant and important market for the introduction of energy-efficient gas-fired space heating and water-heating equipment. In the new construction market, the choice of furnace and water-heater type is primarily driven by first cost considerations and the availability of power vent and condensing water heaters. Few analysis have been performed to assess the economic impacts of the different combinations of space and water-heating equipment. Thus, equipment is often installed without taking into consideration the potential economic and energy savings of installing space and water-heating equipment combinations. In this study, we use a life-cycle cost analysis that accounts for uncertainty and variability of the analysis inputs to assess the economic benefits of gas furnace and water-heater design combinations. This study accounts not only for the equipment cost but also for the cost of installing, maintaining, repairing, and operating the equipment over its lifetime. Overall, this study, which is focused on US single-family new construction households that install gas furnaces and storage water heaters, finds that installing a condensing or power-vent water heater together with condensing furnace is the most cost-effective option for the majority of these houses. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the new construction residential …

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On the Cray XT, aprun is the command to launch an application to a set of compute nodes reserved through the Application Level Placement Scheduler (ALPS). At the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), interactive aprun is disabled. That is, invocations of aprun have to go through the batch system. Batch scripts can and often do contain several apruns which either use subsets of the reserved nodes in parallel, or use all reserved nodes in consecutive apruns. In order to better understand how NERSC users run on the XT, it is necessary to associate aprun information with jobs. It is surprisingly more challenging than it sounds. In this paper, we describe those challenges and how we solved them to produce daily per-job reports for completed apruns. We also describe additional uses of the data, e.g. adjusting charging policy accordingly or associating node failures with jobs/users, and plans for enhancements.

This study evaluates the tropical intraseasonal variability, especially the fidelity of Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) simulations, in 14 coupled general circulation models (GCMs) participating in the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Eight years of daily precipitation from each model's 20th century climate simulation are analyzed and compared with daily satellite retrieved precipitation. Space-time spectral analysis is used to obtain the variance and phase speed of dominant convectively coupled equatorial waves, including the MJO, Kelvin, equatorial Rossby (ER), mixed Rossby-gravity (MRG), and eastward inertio-gravity (EIG) and westward inertio-gravity (WIG) waves. The variance and propagation of the MJO, defined as the eastward wavenumbers 1-6, 30-70 day mode, are examined in detail. The results show that current state-of-the-art GCMs still have significant problems and display a wide range of skill in simulating the tropical intraseasonal variability. The total intraseasonal (2-128 day) variance of precipitation is too weak in most of the models. About half of the models have signals of convectively coupled equatorial waves, with Kelvin and MRG-EIG waves especially prominent. However, the variances are generally too weak for all wave modes except the EIG wave, and the phase speeds are generally too fast, being scaled to excessively deep …

Time resolved shadowgraph images were recorded of shockwaves and particle ejection from silicon during laser ablation. Particle ejection and expansion were correlated to an internal shockwave resonating between the shockwave front and the target surface. The number of particles ablated increased with laser energy and was related to the crater volume.