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Agricultural residues have significant potential as a near term source of cellulosic biomass for bioenergy production, but sustainable removal of agricultural residues requires consideration of the critical roles that residues play in the agronomic system. Previous work has developed an integrated model to evaluate sustainable agricultural residue removal potential considering soil erosion, soil organic carbon, greenhouse gas emission, and long-term yield impacts of residue removal practices. The integrated model couples the environmental process models WEPS, RUSLE2, SCI, and DAYCENT. This study uses the integrated model to investigate the impact of interval removal practices in Boone County, Iowa, US. Residue removal of 4.5 Mg/ha was performed annually, bi-annually, and tri-annually and were compared to no residue removal. The study is performed at the soil type scale using a national soil survey database assuming a continuous corn rotation with reduced tillage. Results are aggregated across soil types to provide county level estimates of soil organic carbon changes and individual soil type soil organic matter content if interval residue removal were implemented. Results show interval residue removal is possible while improving soil organic matter. Implementation of interval removal practices provide greater increases in soil organic matter while still providing substantial residue for bioenergy …

I discuss how global QCD fits of parton distribution functions can make the somewhat separated fields of high-energy particle physics and lower energy hadronic and nuclear physics interact to the benefit of both. In particular, I will argue that large rapidity gauge boson production at the Tevatron and the LHC has the highest short-term potential to constrain the theoretical nuclear corrections to DIS data on deuteron targets necessary for up/down flavor separation. This in turn can considerably reduce the PDF uncertainty on cross section calculations of heavy mass particles such as W' and Z' bosons.

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The U.S. Air Force is facing a number of challenges as it moves into the future, one of the biggest being how to provide safe and secure energy to support base operations. A team of scientists and engineers met at Mountain Home Air Force Base near Boise, Idaho, to discuss the possibility of exploring for geothermal resources under the base. The team identified that there was a reasonable potential for geothermal resources based on data from an existing well. In addition, a regional gravity map helped identify several possible locations for drilling a new well. The team identified several possible sources of funding for this well—the most logical being to use U.S. Department of Energy funds to drill the upper half of the well and U.S. Air Force funds to drill the bottom half of the well. The well was designed as a slimhole well in accordance with State of Idaho Department of Water Resources rules and regulations. Drilling operations commenced at the Mountain Home site in July of 2011 and were completed in January of 2012. Temperatures increased gradually, especially below a depth of 2000 ft. Temperatures increased more rapidly below a depth of 5500 ft. The bottom of …

This slide show documents waste disposal at the Nevada National Security Site. Topics covered include: radionuclide requirements for waste disposal; approved performance assessment (PA) for depleted uranium disposal; requirements; program approval; the Waste Acceptance Review Panel (WARP); description of the Radioactive Waste Acceptance Program (RWAP); facility evaluation; recent program accomplishments, nuclear facility safety changes; higher-activity waste stream disposal; and, large volume bulk waste streams.

The authors present a search for the radiative leptonic decay B{sup +} {yields} {ell}{sup +}{nu}{sub {ell}}{gamma}, where {ell} = e, {mu}, using a data sample of 465 million B{bar B} pairs collected by the BABAR experiment. In this analysis, they fully reconstruct the hadronic decay of one of the B mesons in {Upsilon}(4S) {yields} B{sup +}B{sup -} decays, then search for evidence of B{sup +} {yields} {ell}{sup +}{nu}{sub {ell}}{gamma} in the rest of the event. They observe no significant evidence of signal decays and report model-independent branching fraction upper limits of {Beta}(B{sup +} {yields} e{sup +}{nu}{sub e}{gamma}) < 17 x 10{sup -6}, {Beta}(B{sup +} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{nu}{sub {mu}}{gamma}) < 24 x 10{sup -6}, and {Beta}(B{sup +} {yields} {ell}{sup +}{nu}{sub {ell}}{gamma}) < 15.6 x 10{sup -6} ({ell} = e or {mu}), all at the 90% confidence level.

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The Alignment Diagnostic System (ADS) of the LCLS undulator system indicates that the 33 undulator quadrupoles have extremely high position stability over many weeks. However, beam trajectory straightness and lasing efficiency degrade more quickly than this. A lengthy Beam Based Alignment (BBA) procedure must be executed every two to four weeks to re-optimize the X-ray beam parameters. The undulator system includes RF cavity Beam Position Monitors (RFBPMs), several of which are utilized by an automatic feedback system to align the incoming electron-beam trajectory to the undulator axis. The beam trajectory straightness degradation has been traced to electronic drifts of the gain and offset of the BPMs used in the beam feedback system. To quickly recover the trajectory straightness, we have developed a fast beam-based procedure to recalibrate the BPMs. This procedure takes advantage of the high-precision monitoring capability of the ADS, which allows highly repeatable positioning of undulator quadrupoles. This report describes the ADS, the position stability of the LCLS undulator quadrupoles, and some results of the new recovery procedure.

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Cellulosic energy varieties of Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench show promise as a bioenergy feedstock, however, high moisture content at the time of harvest results in unacceptable levels of degradation when stored in aerobic conditions. To safely store sorghum biomass for extended periods in baled format, the material must be dried to inhibit microbial growth. One possible solution is allowing the material to dry under natural in-field conditions. This study examines the differences in thin-layer drying rates of intact and conditioned sorghum under laboratory-controlled temperatures and relative humidity levels (20 degrees C and 30 degrees C from 40% to 85% relative humidity), and models experimental data using the Page’s Modified equation. The results demonstrate that conditioning drastically accelerates drying times. Relative humidity had a large impact on the time required to reach a safe storage moisture content for intact material (approximately 200 hours at 30 degrees C and 40% relative humidity and 400 hours at 30 degrees C and 70% relative humidity), but little to no impact on the thin-layer drying times of conditioned material (approximately 50 hours for all humidity levels < 70% at 30 degrees C). The drying equation parameters were influenced by temperature, relative humidity, initial moisture content, …

This paper provides background on a reconfigurable control room simulator for nuclear power plants. The main control rooms in current nuclear power plants feature analog technology that is growing obsolete. The need to upgrade control rooms serves the practical need of maintainability as well as the opportunity to implement newer digital technologies with added functionality. There currently exists no dedicated research simulator for use in human factors design and evaluation activities for nuclear power plant modernization in the U.S. The new research simulator discussed in this paper provides a test bed in which operator performance on new control room concepts can be benchmarked against existing control rooms and in which new technologies can be validated for safety and usability prior to deployment.

Computerized procedures (CPs) are an emerging technology within nuclear power plant control rooms. While CPs have been implemented internationally in advanced control rooms, to date no U.S. nuclear power plant has implemented CPs in its main control room. Yet, CPs are a reality of new plant builds and are an area of considerable interest to existing plants, which see advantages in terms of easier records management by omitting the need for updating hardcopy procedures. The overall intent of this paper is to provide a characterization of human reliability analysis (HRA) issues for computerized procedures. It is beyond the scope of this document to propose a new HRA approach or to recommend specific methods or refinements to those methods. Rather, this paper serves as a review of current HRA as it may be used for the analysis and review of computerized procedures.

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A new multiplying test assembly is under development at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to support research, validation, evaluation, and learning. The item is comprised of two stacked highly-enriched uranium (HEU) cylinders each 11.4 cm in diameter and having a combined height of 8.4 cm. The combined mass is 14.4 kg of HEU. Calculations for the bare configuration of the assembly indicate a multiplication level of >2.5 (keff = 0.62). Reflected configurations of the assembly, using either polyethylene or tungsten, are possible and have the capability of raising its multiplication level to approximately 8. This paper will describe the MCNP calculations performed to assess the assembly's multiplication level under different conditions and describe the resource available at INL to support visiting researchers in their use of the material. We will also describe some preliminary calculations and test activities using the assembly to study neutron multiplicity.

A comprehensive modeling study has been carried out to evaluate the utility of multiple active neutron interrogation signatures for detecting shielded highly enriched uranium (HEU). The modeling effort focused on varying HEU masses from 1 kg to 20 kg; varying types of shields including wood, steel, cement, polyethylene, and borated polyethylene; varying depths of the HEU in the shields, and varying engineered shields immediately surrounding the HEU including steel, tungsten, and cadmium. Neutron and gamma-ray signatures were the focus of the study and false negative detection probabilities versus measurement time were used as a performance metric. To facilitate comparisons among different approaches an automated method was developed to generate receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for different sets of model variables for multiple background count rate conditions. This paper summarizes results or the analysis, including laboratory benchmark comparisons between simulations and experiments. The important impact engineered shields can play towards degrading detectability and methods for mitigating this will be discussed.

One-dimensional fiber-bundle arrays may prove useful in a number of radiation sensing applications where radiation detection over large areas is needed. Tests have been performed to evaluate the light generation and transmission characteristics of 15-meter long, 10-fiber bundles of BCF-10, BCF-12, and BCF-20 scintillating fibers (Saint Gobain) exposed to collimated gamma-ray sources. The test set-up used one R9800 (Hamamatsu) photomultiplier tube (PMT) at each end, with a high-speed waveform digitizer to collect data. Time constraints were imposed on the waveform data to perform time-of-flight analysis of the events in the fiber bundles, eliminating spurious noise pulses in the high gain PMTs and also allowing 1-dimensional localization of interactions along the lengths of the fiber bundles. This paper will present the results of these measurements including the attenuation coefficients of the two fiber types and the timing resolution (position uncertainty) possible for each fiber bundle when using the R9800 PMTs.

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