The Department of Energy Organization Act, which created DOE, was enacted in 1977 and DOE officially came into existence in October of that year. That law brought together for the first time, not only most of the government’s energy programs, but also science and technology programs and defense responsibilities that included the design, construction, and testing of nuclear weapons. Over its history, DOE has shifted its emphasis and focus as the energy and security needs of the Nation have changed. Today, DOE stands at the forefront of helping the Nation meet our energy, scientific, environmental, and national security goals. These include developing and deploying new energy technologies, reducing our dependence on foreign energy sources, protecting our nuclear weapons stockpile, and ensuring that America remains competitive in the global marketplace. To help achieve these goals, President Bush has launched two key initiatives: the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) and the Advanced Energy Initiative (AEI). The President launched these initiatives recognizing that science, technology, and engineering hold the answers to many of the critical challenges our world faces. These new initiatives to spur scientific innovation and technology development expand DOE’s continuing support for the competitive energy markets, both domestically and internationally, and of …

Policymakers have been talking for years about measures to cut back how much petroleum we use. Interest has spiked recently, with government and private companies coming together to push forward scientific research and development of alternative fuel products such as ethanol. Biotechnology is helping make alternative energy sources easier - and more affordable - to produce. Most of the world's energy needs are met with oil and natural gas, which come from fossil fuel. No one knows how long the supply can last. Biobased fuels come from natural sources that can be replaced quickly. Along with corn, there are many other grains, grasses, trees, and even agricultural wastes being investigated for their usefulness and environmental friendliness as alternative fuel sources. Careers in this emerging new field emphasize chemistry and engineering. Look into it for a potential career - it's definitely a job full of energy.

The Illinois State Geological Survey and the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium are conducting CO{sub 2} sequestration and enhanced oil recovery testing at six different sites in the Illinois Basin. The capital and operating costs for equipment to capture and liquefy CO{sub 2} from ethanol plants in the Illinois area were evaluated so that ethanol plants could be considered as an alternate source for CO{sub 2} in the event that successful enhanced oil recovery tests create the need for additional sources of CO{sub 2} in the area. Estimated equipment and operating costs needed to capture and liquefy 68 metric tonnes/day (75 tons/day) and 272 tonnes/day (300 tons/day) of CO{sub 2} for truck delivery from an ethanol plant are provided. Estimated costs are provided for food/beverage grade CO{sub 2} and also for less purified CO{sub 2} suitable for enhanced oil recovery or sequestration. The report includes preliminary plant and equipment designs and estimates major capital and operating costs for each of the recovery options. Availability of used equipment was assessed.

High performance computational science and engineering simulations have become an increasingly important part of the scientist's problem solving toolset. A key reason is the development of widely used codes and libraries that support these applications, for example, Netlib, a collection of numerical libraries [33]. The term community codes refers to those libraries or applications that have achieved some critical level of acceptance by a user community. Many of these applications are on the high-end in terms of required resources: computation, storage, and communication. Recently, there has been considerable interest in putting such applications on-line and packaging them as network services to make them available to a wider user base. Applications such as data mining [22], theorem proving and logic [14], parallel numerical computation [8][32] are example services that are all going on-line. Transforming applications into services has been made possible by advances in packaging and interface technologies including component systems [2][6][13][28][37], proposed communication standards [34], and newer Web technologies such as Web Services [38]. Network services allow the user to focus on their application and obtain remote service when needed by simply invoking the service across the network. The user can be assured that the most recent version of the …

The work presented here can be divided into two parts: 1) an experimental and analysis section dealing with the investigation of small molecules such as methyl bromide, carbon dioxide, diatomic nitrogen, methane and methane?s photochemical derivative methyl radical adsorbed onto the Pt(111) surface, and 2) A detailed explanation of the current STM and chamber, with included designs and detailed instructions for operation and maintenance of both the STM and chamber. The investigations of the methyl bromide molecule show interesting dipole-dipole interactions on the Pt(111) surface. With a (6 x 3) lattice being described as the full monolayer that was created by overdosing and annealing to 104 K. The (6 x 3) lattice is shown to occupy top sites and three fold hollow sites on the Pt(111) surface giving rise to a very sharp and symmetrically split ν2 RAIRS mode, and the absence of the ν5 mode in RAIRS is indicative that the molecules are all aligned with their C-Br bond parallel to the surface normal. Additional sub-monolayer structures were observed that had components that were not aligned with the surface normal. The submonolayer lattices ranging from a structured 0.12 ML to a random coverages estimated at 0.20 ML, to a …

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Since August of 2001, Bob Lawrence and Associates, Inc. (BL&A) has applied its outreach and support services to lead a highly effective work effort on behalf of Wind Powering America (WPA). In recent years, the company has generated informative brochures and posters, researched and created case studies, and provided technical support to key wind program managers. BL&A has also analyzed Lamar, Colorado’s 162MW wind project and developed a highly regarded 'wind supply chain' report and outreach presentation. BL&A’s efforts were then replicated to characterize similar supply chain presentations in New Mexico and Illinois. Note that during the period of this contract, the recipient met with members of the DOE Wind Program a number of times to obtain specific guidance on tasks that needed to be pursued on behalf of this grant. Thus, as the project developed over the course of 5 years, the recipient varied the tasks and emphasis on tasks to comply with the on-going and continuously developing requirements of the Wind Powering America Program. This report provides only a brief summary of activities to illustrate the recipient's work for advancing wind energy education and outreach from 2001 through the end of the contract period in 2006. It provides …

The development of global on-stream inspection technology will have a dramatic effect on how refinery operations are managed in the U.S. in the future. Global on-stream inspection will provide assurance of the mechanical integrity of critical plant equipment and will allow refineries to operate more efficiently with less impact on our environment and with an increased margin of safety.

This report presents a summary of research projects in the area of low energy nuclear reactions and structure, carried out between 1 January 2003 and 31 December 2005 and supported by U.S. DOE grant number DE-FG03-03NA00074. Cross sections measured with high resolution have been subjected to an Ericson theory analysis to infer information about the nuclear level density. Other measurements were made of the spectral shape of particles produced in evaporation processes; these also yield level density information. A major project was the development of a new Hauser-Feshbach code for analyzing such spectra. Other measurements produced information on the spectra of gamma rays emitted in reactions on heavy nuclei and gave a means of refining our understanding of gamma-ray strength functions. Finally,reactions on light nuclei were studied and subjected to an R-matrix analysis. Cross sections fora network of nuclear reactions proceedingthrough a given compound nucleus shouldgreatly constrain the family of allowed parameters. Modifications to the formalism andcomputer code are also discussed.

This project developed a comprehensive mathematical and simulation model for calculating thermal hydraulic, electrochemical, and corrosion parameters, viz. temperature, fluid flow velocity, pH, corrosion potential, hydrogen injection, oxygen contamination, stress corrosion cracking, crack growth rate, and other important quantities in the coolant circuits of water-cooled nuclear power plants, including both Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) and Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs). The model is being used to assess the three major operational problems in Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR), which include mass transport, activity transport, and the axial offset anomaly, and provide a powerful tool for predicting the accumulation of SCC damage in BWR primary coolant circuits as a function of operating history. Another achievement of the project is the development of a simulation tool to serve both as a training tool for plant operators and as an engineering test-bed to evaluate new equipment and operating strategies (normal operation, cold shut down and others). The development and implementation of the model allows us to estimate the activity transport or "radiation fields" around the primary loop and the vessel, as a function of the operating parameters and the water chemistry.

Pebble-bed nuclear reactor technology, which is currently being revived around the world, raises fundamental questions about dense granular flow in silos. A typical reactor core is composed of graphite fuel pebbles, which drain very slowly in a continuous refueling process. Pebble flow is poorly understood and not easily accessible to experiments, and yet it has a ma jor impact on reactor physics. To address this problem, we perform full-scale, discrete-element simulations in realistic geometries, with up to 440,000 frictional, viscoelastic 6cm-diameter spheres draining in a cylindrical vessel of diameter 3.5m and height 10m with bottom funnels angled at 30◦ or 60◦ . We also simulate a bidisperse core with a dynamic central column of smaller graphite moderator pebbles and show that little mixing occurs down to a 1:2 diameter ratio. We analyze the mean velocity, diffusion and mixing, local ordering and porosity (from Voronoi volumes), the residence-time distribution, and the effects of wall friction and discuss implications for reactor design and the basic physics of granular flow.

PCQUEST, a package of eight predictive indices, was developed with U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) support by the Energy and Environmental Research Center to predict fireside performance in coal-fired utility boilers more reliably than traditional indices. Since the development of PCQUEST, the need has arisen for additional fuel types into the program database. PCQUEST was developed using combustion inorganic transformation theory from previous projects and from empirical data derived from laboratory experiments and coal boiler field observations. The goal of this joint venture project between commercial industry clients and DOE is to further enhance PCQUEST and improve its utility for a variety of new fuels and systems. Specific objectives include initiating joint venture projects with utilities, boiler vendors, and coal companies that involve real-world situations and needs in order to strategically improve algorithms and input-output functions of PCQUEST, as well as to provide technology transfer to the industrial sector. The main body of this report provides a short summary of the projects that were closed from February 1999 through June 2006. All of the reports sent to the commercial clients can be found in the appendix.

Executive Summary: Initially the funds were sufficient funds were awarded to support one graduate student and one post-doc. Lange, though other funds, also supported a graduate intern from ETH Zurich, Switzerland for a period of 6 months. The initial direction was to study the chemical solution deposition method to understand the microstructural and mechanical phenomena that currently limit the production of thick film, reliable superconductor wires. The study was focused on producing thicker buffer layer(s) on Ni-alloy substrates produced by the RABiTS method. It focused on the development of the microstructure during epitaxy, and the mechanical phenomena that produce cracks during dip-coating, pyrolysis (decomposition of precursors during heating), crystallization and epitaxy. The initial direction of producing thicker layers of a know buffer layer material was redirected by co-workers at ORNL, in an attempt to epitaxially synthesize a potential buffer layer material, LaMnO3, via the solution route. After a more than a period of 6 months that showed that the LaMnO3 reacted with the Ni-W substrate at temperatures that could produce epitaxy, reviewers at the annual program review strongly recommended that the research was not yielding positive results. The only positive result presented at the meeting was that much thicker films …

This report presents and discusses results from Task 6 of the study 'Fate of Mercury in Synthetic Gypsum Used for Wallboard Production,' performed at a full-scale commercial wallboard plant. Synthetic gypsum produced by wet flue gas desulfurization (FGD) systems on coal-fired power plants is commonly used in the manufacture of wallboard. This practice has long benefited the environment by recycling the FGD gypsum byproduct, which is becoming available in increasing quantities, decreasing the need to landfill this material, and increasing the sustainable design of the wallboard product. However, new concerns have arisen as recent mercury control strategies involve the capture of mercury in FGD systems. The objective of this study is to determine whether any mercury is released into the atmosphere when the synthetic gypsum material is used as a feedstock for wallboard production. The project is being co-funded by the U.S. DOE National Energy Technology Laboratory (Cooperative Agreement DE-FC26-04NT42080), USG Corporation, and EPRI. USG Corporation is the prime contractor, and URS Group is a subcontractor. The project scope now includes six discrete tasks, each conducted at various USG wallboard plants using synthetic gypsum from different FGD systems. The project was originally composed of five tasks, which were to include …

Software for automated test equipment can be tedious and monotonous making it just as error-prone as other software. Active defect prevention and detection are also important for test applications. Incomplete or unclear requirements, a cryptic syntax used for some test applications—especially script-based test sets, variability in syntax or structure, and changing requirements are among the problems encountered in one tester. Such problems are common to all software but can be particularly problematic in test equipment software intended to test another product. Each of these issues increases the probability of error injection during test application development. This report describes a test application development tool designed to address these issues and others for a particular piece of test equipment. By addressing these problems in the development environment, the tool has powerful built-in defect prevention and detection capabilities. Regular expressions are widely used in the development tool as a means of formally defining test equipment requirements for the test application and verifying conformance to those requirements. A novel means of using regular expressions to perform range checking was developed. A reduction in rework and increased productivity are the results. These capabilities are described along with lessons learned and their applicability to other test …

The mercury adsorption capacity of a residual oil fly ash (ROFA) sample collected form Florida Power and Light Company's Port Everglades Power Plant was evaluated using a bituminous coal combustion flue gas simulator and fixed-bed testing protocol. A size-segregated (>38 {micro}g) fraction of ROFA was ground to a fine powder and brominated to potentially enhance mercury capture. The ROFA and brominated-ROFA were ineffective in capturing or oxidizing the Hg{sup 0} present in a simulated bituminous coal combustion flue gas. In contrast, a commercially available DARCO{reg_sign} FGD initially adsorbed Hg{sup 0} for about an hour and then catalyzed Hg{sup 0} oxidation to produce Hg{sup 2+}. Apparently, the unburned carbon in ROFA needs to be more rigorously activated in order for it to effectively capture and/or oxidize Hg{sup 0}.

A group of business, government, environmental and academic leaders convened in a dialogue by the Aspen Institute proposed a series of actions to promote the widespread commercialization of both corn and cellulosic ethanol to improve energy security, the environment, and the economy. Co-chaired by Booz Allen Hamilton Vice President and former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and former Congressman Tom Ewing (R. IL), they developed a series of recommendations involving improved crop yields, processing of biomass into ethanol, manufacture of more cars that can burn either ethanol or gasoline, and the provision of ethanol pumps at more filling stations. Their report, "A High Growth Strategy for Ethanol, includes a discussion of the potential of ethanol, the group's recommendations, and a series of discussion papers commissioned for the dialogue.

The objective of this three-year research program is to study the development of turbulence in Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) and Richtmyer-Meshkov (RM) instabilities. Incompressible RT and RM instabilities are studied in an apparatus in which a box containing two unequal density liquids is accelerated on a linear rail system either impulsively (by bouncing it off of a spring) to produce RM instability, or at a constant downward rate (using a weight and pulley system) to produce RT instability. These experiments are distinguished from others in the field in that they are initialized with well defined, measurable initial perturbations and are well visualized utilizing planar laser induced fluorescence imaging. New experiments are proposed aimed at generating fully turbulent RM and RT instabilities and quantifying the turbulent development once fully turbulent flows are achieved. The proposed experiments focus on the development and the subsequent application of techniques to accelerate the production of fully turbulent instabilities and the quantification of the turbulent instabilities once they are achieved. The proposed tasks include: the development of RM and RT experiments utilizing fluid combinations having larger density ratios than those previously used; the development of RM experiments with larger acceleration impulse than that previously used; and the investigation …

This funding was support for student and postdoctoral attendance at the Annual Recomb Conference from 2001 to 2005. The RECOMB Conference series was founded in 1997 to provide a scientific forum for theoretical advances in computational biology and their applications in molecular biology and medicine. The conference series aims at attracting research contributions in all areas of computational molecular biology. Typical, but not exclusive, the topics of interest are: Genomics, Molecular sequence analysis, Recognition of genes and regulatory elements, Molecular evolution, Protein structure, Structural genomics, Gene Expression, Gene Networks, Drug Design, Combinatorial libraries, Computational proteomics, and Structural and functional genomics. The origins of the conference came from the mathematical and computational side of the field, and there remains to be a certain focus on computational advances. However, the effective use of computational techniques to biological innovation is also an important aspect of the conference. The conference had a growing number of attendees, topping 300 in recent years and often exceeding 500. The conference program includes between 30 and 40 contributed papers, that are selected by a international program committee with around 30 experts during a rigorous review process rivaling the editorial procedure for top-rate scientific journals. In previous years papers …

This proposal was to support a portion of the costs of Methods in Protein Structure Analysis 2004 (MPSA2004). MPSA2004 was the 15th in the series of MPSA international conferences on protein structure analysis that began in 1974. MPSA2004 was held on the campus of the University of Washington, Seattle, WA August 29 through September 2, 2004. Twenty-four internationally recognized speakers gave invited presentations; additional participants were chosen to present short talks in the 10 topics that were addressed. The aim of MPSA conferences is to communicate the latest, cutting-edge techniques in protein structure analysis and proteomics through science success stories as told by the scientific leaders who developed the technologies. Biotechnology vendors are present to explain currently available commercial technology through workshops and demonstrations booths. The overall aim is to provide a forum for exchanging the latest methods and ideas in protein structure analysis and proteomics to current and future practitioners. The conference supported the missions of the DOE Office of Science and the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) in at least two ways: by enabling the above forum, and by encouraging young researchers who might otherwise not attend to meet leading researchers and to learn about the …

Summary of the 12th Advanced Accelerator Concept (AAC 2006) Workshop help by NIU and ANL on July 10th-15th 2006 in Lake Geneva WI. The proceedings of the workshop have been published as an AIP conference proceedings "12th Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop” volume 877.

Closing report for project DOE-FG02-03ER15436. The project studied obligate autotrophy in the ammonia oxidizing bacterium Nitrosomonas europaea. Nitrosomonas europaea can obtain all of its energy and reductant for growth from the oxidation of ammonia to nitrite and is, therefore, classified as a chemolithotroph. This bacterium is also an autotroph, which can derive all cellular carbon from carbon dioxide. N. europaea seems incapable of growth with other carbon or energy sources. This restricted capability is surprising given that ammonia is a poor energy source. The main goal of the project was to examine the basis of autotrophy in N. europaea or, thought of another way, to determine the barriers to heterotrophy. The approach was enabled by the N. europaea genome sequence, stimulating new ways of thinking about this physiological paradox—an insistence on a single, albeit poor, energy source. Objective 1 was to examine the expression and regulation of the genes coding for alpha-ketoglutarate dehydrogenase, determine if the enzyme’s activity is present, and determine whether alteration of the expression levels influences autotrophic growth. Although Nitrosomonas europaea lacks measurable alpha-ketoglutarate dehydrogenase activity, the genome sequence revealed the presence of the genes encoding the enzyme. A knockout mutation was created in the sucA gene …