The workshop aimed to identify outstanding climate change science questions and the observational strategies for addressing them. The scientific focus was clouds, aerosols, and precipitation, and the required ground- and aerial-based observations. The workshop findings will be useful input for setting priorities within the Department of Energy (DOE) and the participating European centers. This joint workshop was envisioned as the first step in enhancing the collaboration among these climate research activities needed to better serve the science community.

The 2013 Gordon Conference on Inorganic Reaction Mechanisms will present cutting-edge research on the molecular aspects of inorganic reactions involving elements from throughout the periodic table and state-of-the art techniques that are used in the elucidation of reaction mechanisms. The Conference will feature a wide range of topics, such as homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, metallobiochemistry, electron-transfer in energy reactions, polymerization, nitrogen fixation, green chemistry, oxidation, solar conversion, alkane functionalization, organotransition metal chemistry, and computational chemistry. The talks will cover themes of current interest including energy, materials, and bioinorganic chemistry. Sections cover: Electron-Transfer in Energy Reactions; Catalytic Polymerization and Oxidation Chemistry; Kinetics and Spectroscopy of Heterogeneous Catalysts; Metal-Organic Chemistry and its Application in Synthesis; Green Energy Conversion;Organometallic Chemistry and Activation of Small Molecules; Advances in Kinetics Modeling and Green Chemistry; Metals in Biology and Disease; Frontiers in Catalytic Bond Activation and Cleavage.

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Due to its low density, good structural characteristics, excellent fabrication properties, and attractive appearance, aluminum metal and its alloys continue to be widely utilized. The transportation industry continues to be the largest consumer of aluminum products, with aerospace as the principal driver for this use. Boeing has long been the largest single company consumer of heat-treated aluminum in the U.S. The extensive use of aluminum to build aircraft and launch vehicles has been sustained, despite the growing reliance on more structurally efficient carbon fiber reinforced composite materials. The trend in the aerospace industry over the past several decades has been to rely extensively on large, complex, thin-walled, monolithic machined structural components, which are fabricated from heavy billets and thick plate using high speed machining. The use of these high buy-to-fly ratio starting product forms, while currently cost effective, is energy inefficient, with a high environmental impact. The widespread implementation of Solid State Joining (SSJ) technologies, to produce lower buy-to-fly ratio starting forms, tailored to each specific application, offers the potential for a more sustainable manufacturing strategy, which would consume less energy, require less material, and reduce material and manufacturing costs. One objective of this project was to project the energy …

This report describes the results of studies related to the incorporation of sulfate in high level waste (HLW) borosilicate glass produced at the Savannah River Site (SRS) Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF). A group of simulated HLW glasses produced for earlier sulfate retention studies was selected for full chemical composition measurements to determine whether there is any clear link between composition and sulfate retention over the compositional region evaluated. In addition, the viscosity of several glasses was measured to support future efforts in modeling sulfate solubility as a function of predicted viscosity. The intent of these studies was to develop a better understanding of sulfate retention in borosilicate HLW glass to allow for higher loadings of sulfate containing waste. Based on the results of these and other studies, the ability to improve sulfate solubility in DWPF borosilicate glasses lies in reducing the connectivity of the glass network structure. This can be achieved, as an example, by increasing the concentration of alkali species in the glass. However, this must be balanced with other effects of reduced network connectivity, such as reduced viscosity, potentially lower chemical durability, and in the case of higher sodium and aluminum concentrations, the propensity for nepheline crystallization. …

This is the final scientific report for the University of Pittsburgh portion of the collaborative grant, 'Optimizing New Dark Energy Experiments'

From the 1950s through 1989, the F Area Seepage Basins at the Savannah River Site (SRS) received low level radioactive wastes resulting from processing nuclear materials. Discharges of process wastes to the F Area Seepage Basins followed by subsequent mixing processes within the basins and eventual infiltration into the subsurface resulted in contamination of the underlying vadose zone and downgradient groundwater. For simulating contaminant behavior and subsurface transport, a quantitative understanding of the interrelated discharge-mixing-infiltration system along with the resulting chemistry of fluids entering the subsurface is needed. An example of this need emerged as the F Area Seepage Basins was selected as a key case study demonstration site for the Advanced Simulation Capability for Environmental Management (ASCEM) Program. This modeling evaluation explored the importance of the wide variability in bulk wastewater chemistry as it propagated through the basins. The results are intended to generally improve and refine the conceptualization of infiltration of chemical wastes from seepage basins receiving variable waste streams and to specifically support the ASCEM case study model for the F Area Seepage Basins. Specific goals of this work included: (1) develop a technically-based 'charge-balanced' nominal source term chemistry for water infiltrating into the subsurface during basin …

There have been impressive improvements in the performance of small-animal positron emission tomography (PET) systems since their first development in the mid 1990s, both in terms of spatial resolution and sensitivity, which have directly contributed to the increasing adoption of this technology for a wide range of biomedical applications. Nonetheless, current systems still are largely dominated by the size of the scintillator elements used in the detector. Our research predicts that developing scintillator arrays with an element size of 250 {micro}m or smaller will lead to an image resolution of 500 {micro}m when using 18F- or 64Cu-labeled radiotracers, giving a factor of 4-8 improvement in volumetric resolution over the highest resolution research systems currently in existence. This proposal had two main objectives: (i) To develop and evaluate much higher resolution and efficiency scintillator arrays that can be used in the future as the basis for detectors in a small-animal PET scanner where the spatial resolution is dominated by decay and interaction physics rather than detector size. (ii) To optimize one such high resolution, high sensitivity detector and adaptively integrate it into the existing microPET II small animal PET scanner as a 'zoom-in' detector that provides higher spatial resolution and sensitivity …

This project had goals of advancing the performance capabilities of the numerical general circulation model EULAG and using it to produce a fully operational atmospheric global climate model (AGCM) that can employ either static or dynamic grid stretching for targeted phenomena. The resulting AGCM combined EULAG's advanced dynamics core with the "physics" of the NCAR Community Atmospheric Model (CAM). Effort discussed below shows how we improved model performance and tested both EULAG and the coupled CAM-EULAG in several ways to demonstrate the grid stretching and ability to simulate very well a wide range of scales, that is, multi-scale capability. We leveraged our effort through interaction with an international EULAG community that has collectively developed new features and applications of EULAG, which we exploited for our own work summarized here. Overall, the work contributed to over 40 peer-reviewed publications and over 70 conference/workshop/seminar presentations, many of them invited. 3a. EULAG Advances EULAG is a non-hydrostatic, parallel computational model for all-scale geophysical flows. EULAG's name derives from its two computational options: EULerian (flux form) or semi-LAGrangian (advective form). The model combines nonoscillatory forward-in-time (NFT) numerical algorithms with a robust elliptic Krylov solver. A signature feature of EULAG is that it is formulated …

An analysis is given of the impact of the tokamak divertor magnetic structure on the temporal and spatial divertor heat flux from edge localized modes (ELMs). Two configurations are studied: the standard divertor where the poloidal magnetic field (B{sub p}) varies linearly with distance (r) from the magnetic null and the snowflake where B{sub p} varies quadratrically with r. Both one and two-dimensional models are used to analyze the effect of the longer magnetic field length between the midplane and the divertor plate for the snowflake that causes a temporal dilation of the ELM divertor heat flux. A second effect discussed is the appearance of a broad region near the null point where the poloidal plasma beta can substantially exceed unity, especially for the snowflake configuration during the ELM; such a condition is likely to drive additional radial ELM transport.

The PET radionuclides, 18F and 11C consist of very high radiation to mass amounts and should be easily adapted to new technologies such as “chip chemistry” with nanofluidics. However, environmental contamination with nonradioactive fluorine, carbon and other trace contaminants add sufficient mass, micrograms to milligrams, to prevent adapting PET radiochemistry to the nanochip technologies. In addition, the large volumes of material required for beam irradiation make it necessary to also remove the 18F and 11C from their chemical matrices. These steps add contaminants. The work described in this report was a systematic investigation of sources of these contaminants and methods to reduce these contaminants and the reaction volumes for radiochemical synthesis. Several methods were found to lower the contaminants and matrices to within a factor of 2 to 100 of those needed to fully implement chip technology but further improvements are needed.

Recent astrophysical and terrestrial experiments have motivated the proposal of a dark sector with GeV-scale gauge boson force carriers and new Higgs bosons. We present a search for a dark Higgs boson using 516 fb{sup -1} of data collected with the BABAR detector. We do not observe a significant signal and we set 90% confidence level upper limits on the product of the Standard Model-dark sector mixing angle and the dark sector coupling constant.

The F-Area Tank Farm (FTF) Performance Assessment (PA) utilizes waste speciation in the waste release model used in the FTF fate and transport modeling. The waste release modeling associated with the residual plutonium in Tank 18 has been identified as a primary contributor to the Tank 18 dose uncertainty. In order to reduce the uncertainty related to plutonium in Tank 18, a better understanding of the plutonium speciation in the Tank 18 waste (including the oxidation state and stoichiometry) is desired. Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) utilized Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and X-ray Diffraction (XRD) to analyze Tank 18 samples to provide information on the speciation of plutonium in the waste material. XRD analysis of the Tank 18 samples did not identify any plutonium mineral phases in the samples. These indicates the crystalline mineral phases of plutonium are below the detection limits of the XRD method or that the plutonium phase(s) lack long range order and are present as amorphous or microcrystalline solids. SEM analysis of the Tank 18 samples did locate particles containing plutonium. The plutonium was found as small particles, usually <1 {micro}m but ranging up to several micrometers in diameter, associated with particles of an iron matrix …

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is preparing a Surplus Plutonium Disposition (SPD) Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS). Included in the evaluation are up to 6 metric tons (MT) of plutonium in the form of impure oxides and metals for which a disposition plan has not been decided, among options that include preparation as feed for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility; disposing to high-level waste through the Savannah River Site (SRS) HB Line and H Canyon; can-in-canister disposal using the SRS Defense Waste Processing Facility; and preparation for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). DOE and SRS have identified at least 0.5 MT of plutonium that, because of high levels of chemical and isotopic impurities, is impractical for disposition by methods other than the WIPP pathway. Characteristics of these items and the disposition strategy are discussed.

Hackensack University Medical Center's major initiative to create a cleaner healthier and safer environment for patients, employees and the community served by the medical center is built on its commitment to protect the environment and conserve precious energy resources. Since 2004 the Medical Center launched a long term campaign to temper the negative environmental impact of proposed and existing new construction at the medical center and to improve campus wide overall energy efficiency. The plan was to begin by implementing a number of innovative and eco-friendly enhancements to the Gabrellian Women's and Children's Pavilion, in construction at the time, which would lead to Certification by the US Green Building Councils Leadership & Environmental Design (LEED) program. In addition the medical center would evaluate the feasibility of implementing a photovoltaic system in the new construction (in development and planned) to provide clean pollution free electricity. The steps taken to achieve this included conducting a feasibility study complete with architectural and engineering assessments to determine the potential for implementation of a photovoltaic system on the campus and also to conduct an energy survey that would focus on determining specific opportunities and upgrades that would lead to a healthier energy efficient interior environment …

General Motors, LLC and energy partner Shell Hydrogen, LLC, deployed a system of hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles integrated with a hydrogen fueling station infrastructure to operate under real world conditions as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's Controlled Hydrogen Fleet and Infrastructure Validation and Demonstration Project. This technical report documents the performance and describes the learnings from progressive generations of vehicle fuel cell system technology and multiple approaches to hydrogen generation and delivery for vehicle fueling.

The degradation of organic matter by microorganisms provides a source of electrical potential or so-called 'self potential' (SP) that can be measured by using a voltmeter. During this process electrons are being produced as a waste-product and bacterial cells have to dispose of these to allow for the complete biodegradation of organic matter. Especially in anaerobic microbial communities, exo-cellular electron transfer is the most important driving force behind this process and organisms have developed different, but also similar, ways to transfer electrons to other microorganisms. Recently, it has been postulated that direct electron transfer from cell-to-cell is actually done by 'hard-wired' microorganisms. This shuttling of electrons is most likely done by certain c-type cytochromes that form the functional part of electrically conductive nanowires. In this study we investigated if nanowires can explain the geoelectrical (self potential and spectral induced polarization) signals observed at some biostimulated environments such as DOE sites. The objectives of our project are to: (1) investigate any temporal changes in the geophysical signatures (Self Potential (SP) and Induced Polarization (IP)) associated with nanowires of the bacterium Shewanella oneidensis MR-1, wild type and mtrc/omcA deletion mutant, (2) demonstrate that mutant strains of bacteria that produce nonconductive nanowires do …

A study has been conducted on the material demand and life-cycle energy and emissions performance of power-generating technologies in addition to those reported in Part I of this series. The additional technologies included concentrated solar power, integrated gasification combined cycle, and a fossil/renewable (termed hybrid) geothermal technology, more specifically, co-produced gas and electric power plants from geo-pressured gas and electric (GPGE) sites. For the latter, two cases were considered: gas and electricity export and electricity-only export. Also modeled were cement, steel and diesel fuel requirements for drilling geothermal wells as a function of well depth. The impact of the construction activities in the building of plants was also estimated. The results of this study are consistent with previously reported trends found in Part I of this series. Among all the technologies considered, fossil combustion-based power plants have the lowest material demand for their construction and composition. On the other hand, conventional fossil-based power technologies have the highest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, followed by the hybrid and then two of the renewable power systems, namely hydrothermal flash power and biomass-based combustion power. GHG emissions from U.S. geothermal flash plants were also discussed, estimates provided, and data needs identified. Of the GPGE …

Undetected microcracks in solar cells are a principal cause of failure in service due to subsequent weather exposure, mechanical flexing or diurnal temperature cycles. Existing methods have not been able to detect cracks early enough in the production cycle to prevent inadvertent shipment to customers. This program, sponsored under the DOE Photovoltaic Supply Chain and Cross-Cutting Technologies program, studied the feasibility of quantifying surface micro-discontinuities by use of a novel technique, thermoreflectance imaging, to detect surface temperature gradients with very high spatial resolution, in combination with a suite of conventional imaging methods such as electroluminescence. The project carried out laboratory tests together with computational image analyses using sample solar cells with known defects supplied by industry sources or DOE National Labs. Quantitative comparisons between the effectiveness of the new technique and conventional methods were determined in terms of the smallest detectable crack. Also the robustness of the new technique for reliable microcrack detection was determined at various stages of processing such as before and after antireflectance treatments. An overall assessment is that the new technique compares favorably with existing methods such as lock-in thermography or ultrasonics. The project was 100% completed in Sept, 2010. A detailed report of key findings …

Saltstone Disposal Unit 2 contains a sheet drain fabric intended to separate solids from drain water to be returned to the Salt Feed Tank. A similar system installed in Vault 4 appears to be ineffective in keeping solids out of the drain water return lines. Waste Solidification Engineering is considering installation of an additional fabric membrane to supplement the existing sheet drain in SDU 2. Amerdrain 200 is the product currently installed in SDU 2. This product is no longer available, so Sitedrain 94 was used as the replacement product in this testing. Fabrics with apparent opening sizes of 10, 25, 50 and 100 microns were evaluated. These fabrics were evaluated under three separate test conditions, a water flow test, a solids retention test and a grout pour test. A flow test with water showed that installation of an additional filter layer will predictably reduce the theoretical flux through the sheet drain. The manufacturer reports the flux for Sitedrain 94 as 150 gpm/ft{sup 2} by ASTM D-4491. This compares reasonably well with the 117 gpm/ft{sup 2} obtained in this testing. A combination of the 10 micron fabric with Sitedrain 94 could be expected to decrease flux by about 10 times …

The parent phases of the Fe-arsenide superconductors harbor an antiferromagnetic ground state. Significantly, the Neel transition is either preceded or accompanied by a structural transition that breaks the four fold symmetry of the high-temperature lattice. Borrowing language from the field of soft condensed matter physics, this broken discrete rotational symmetry is widely referred to as an Ising nematic phase transition. Understanding the origin of this effect is a key component of a complete theoretical description of the occurrence of superconductivity in this family of compounds, motivating both theoretical and experimental investigation of the nematic transition and the associated in-plane anisotropy. Here we review recent experimental progress in determining the intrinsic in-plane electronic anisotropy as revealed by resistivity, reflectivity and ARPES measurements of detwinned single crystals of underdoped Fe arsenide superconductors in the '122' family of compounds.

The goal of this project is to provide an innovative, new crab cavity design relevant to the MEIC. Through this work, we will provide comprehensive modeling of this new cavity design, including electromagnetic, thermal, and microphonic effects. One most likely candidate configuration is the design put forward by JLab and Lancaster University, UK, researchers known as the four-rod configuration. In the Phase I, Tech-X Corporation researchers performed analysis and design optimization and iteration, utilizing their state-of-the art time-domain particle-in-cell software, on a 400 MHz design for the LHC by JLab and Lancaster University, UK, researchers known as the four-rod design.

Targeted radionuclide therapy is emerging as a viable approach for cancer treatment because of its potential for delivering curative doses of radiation to malignant cell populations while sparing normal tissues. Alpha particles such as those emitted by 211At are particularly attractive for this purpose because of their short path length in tissue and high energy, making them highly effective in killing cancer cells. The current impact of targeted radiotherapy in the clinical domain remains limited despite the fact that in many cases, potentially useful molecular targets and labeled compounds have already been identified. Unfortunately, putting these concepts into practice has been impeded by limitations in radiochemistry methodologies. A critical problem is that the synthesis of therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals provides additional challenges in comparison to diagnostic reagents because of the need to perform radio-synthesis at high levels of radioactivity. This is particularly important for {alpha}-particle emitters such as 211At because they deposit large amounts of energy in a highly focal manner. The overall objective of this project is to develop convenient and reproducible radiochemical methodologies for the radiohalogenation of molecules with the {alpha}-particle emitter 211At at the radioactivity levels needed for clinical studies. Our goal is to address two problems in astatine …

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