SPIRES, an aging high-energy physics publication data base, is in the process of being replaced by INSPIRE. In order to ease the transition from SPIRES to INSPIRE it is important to understand user behavior and the drivers for adoption. The goal of this project was to address some questions in regards to the presumed two-thirds of the users still using SPIRES. These questions are answered through analysis of the log files from both websites. A series of scripts were developed to collect and interpret the data contained in the log files. The common search patterns and usage comparisons are made between INSPIRE and SPIRES, and a method for detecting user frustration is presented. The analysis reveals a more even split than originally thought as well as the expected trend of user transition to INSPIRE.

Research done in this study showed that P-SV seismic data provide better spatial resolution of geologic targets at our Appalachian Basin study area than do P-P data. This finding is important because the latter data (P-P) are the principal seismic data used to evaluate rock systems considered for CO{sub 2} sequestration. The increase in P-SV{sub 1} resolution over P-P resolution was particularly significant, with P-SV{sub 1} wavelengths being approximately 40-percent shorter than P-P wavelengths. CO{sub 2} sequestration projects across the Appalachian Basin should take advantage of the increased resolution provided by converted-shear seismic modes relative to P-wave seismic data. In addition to S-wave data providing better resolution of geologic targets, we found S-wave images described reservoir heterogeneities that P-P data could not see. Specifically, a channel-like anomaly was imaged in a key porous sandstone interval by P-SV{sub 1} data, and no indication of the feature existed in P-P data. If any stratigraphic unit is considered for CO{sub 2} storage purposes, it is important to know all heterogeneities internal to the unit to understand reservoir compartmentalization. We conclude it is essential that multicomponent seismic data be used to evaluate all potential reservoir targets whenever a CO{sub 2} storage effort is considered, …

This study, supported by the US Department of Energy, Wind Powering America Program, Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Chesapeake Bay Foundation, analyzed barriers to wind energy development in the Mid-Atlantic region along with options for overcoming or mitigating them. The Mid-Atlantic States including Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia, have excellent wind energy potential and growing demand for electricity, but only two utility-scale projects have been installed to date. Reasons for this apathetic development of wind resources were analyzed and quantified for four markets. Specific applications are: 1) Appalachian mountain ridgeline sites, 2) on coastal plains and peninsulas, 3) at shallow water sites in Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds, and 4) at deeper water sites off the Atlantic coast. Each market has distinctly different opportunities and barriers. The primary barriers to wind development described in this report can be grouped into four categories; state policy and regulatory issues, wind resource technical uncertainty, economic viability, and public interest in environmental issues. The properties of these typologies are not mutually independent and do interact. The report concluded that there are no insurmountable barriers to land-based wind energy projects and they could be economically viable today. Likewise potential sites …

1) How the project adds to the education of engineering students in the area of vehicle electrification: This project created and implemented a significant interdisciplinary curriculum in HEV engineering that includes courses focused on the major components (engines, battery cells, e‐machines, and power electronics). The new curriculum, rather uniquely, features two new classes and two new labs that emphasize a vehicle level integration of a hybrid electric powertrain that parallels the vehicle development process used by the OEMs ‐ commercial grade software is used to design a hybrid electric vehicle, hardware‐in‐the‐loop testing is performed on each component until the entire powertrain is optimized, the calibration is flashed to a vehicle, ride‐and‐drives are executed including on board data acquisition. In addition, nine existing courses were modified by adding HEV material to the courses. 2) The educational effectiveness and economic feasibility of the new curriculum: The new courses are offered at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. They are listed across the college in mechanical, chemical, electrical, and materials science and engineering. They are offered both on campus and to distance learning students. Students across the college of engineering and at all degree levels are integrating these courses into their degree programs. …

We present the results of a project to apply scintillator technology recently developed at Louisiana Tech University to hadronic calorimetry. In particular, we developed a prototype calorimeter module incorporating scintillator embedded with metal oxide nanoparticles as the active layers. These metal oxide nanoparticles of gadolinium oxide, have high cross-sections for interactions with slow neutrons. As a part fo this research project, we have developed a novel method for producing plastic scintillators with metal oxide nanoparticles evenly distributed through the plastic without aggregation.We will test the performance of the calorimeter module in test beam and with a neutron source, in order to measure the response to the neutron component of hadronic showers. We will supplement our detector prototyping activities with detailed studies of the effect of neutron component on the resolution of hadronic energy measurements, particular in the next generation of particle flow calorimeters.

The Graduate Automotive Technology Education (GATE) Program at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) was established in October 1998 pursuant to an award from the U.S. Department of Energy (U.S. DOE). The focus area of the Penn State GATE Program is advanced energy storage systems for electric and hybrid vehicles.

The performance statistics for the Hanford excreta radiobioassay program are presented and discussed. The performance period covers the second contract year of Contract 112512 - April 2011 to March 2012.

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 objective of this project was to create an internet-based Water Treatment Technology Catalog and Decision Tool that will increase production, decrease costs and enhance environmental protection. This is to be accomplished by pairing an operator's water treatment cost and capacity needs to specific water treatments. This project cataloged existing and emerging produced water treatment technologies and allows operators to identify the most cost-effective approaches for managing their produced water. The tool captures the cost and capabilities of each technology and the disposal and beneficial use options for each region. The tool then takes location, chemical composition, and volumetric data for the operator's water and identifies the most cost effective treatment options for that water. Regulatory requirements or limitations for each location are also addressed. The Produced Water Treatment Catalog and Decision Tool efficiently matches industry decision makers in unconventional natural gas basins with: 1) appropriate and applicable water treatment technologies for their project, 2) relevant information on regulatory and legal issues that may impact the success of their project, and 3) potential beneficial use demands specific to their project area. To ensure the success of this project, it was segmented into seven tasks conducted in three phases over a …

The objective of this project is to develop a modeling system to allow operators and regulators to plan all aspects of water management activities associated with shale gas development in the target project area of New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia (“target area”), including water supply, transport, storage, use, recycling, and disposal and which can be used for planning, managing, forecasting, permit tracking, and compliance monitoring. The proposed project is a breakthrough approach to represent the entire shale gas water lifecycle in one comprehensive system with the capability to analyze impacts and options for operational efficiency and regulatory tracking and compliance, and to plan for future water use and disposition. It will address all of the major water-related issues of concern associated with shale gas development in the target area, including water withdrawal, transport, storage, use, treatment, recycling, and disposal. It will analyze the costs, water use, and wastes associated with the available options, and incorporate constraints presented by permit requirements, agreements, local and state regulations, equipment and material availability, etc. By using the system to examine the water lifecycle from withdrawals through disposal, users will be able to perform scenario analysis to answer "what if" questions for various situations. …

Radiochemical analyses of surface water samples, in the framework of Environmental Monitoring, have associated uncertainties for the radioisotopic results reported. These uncertainty analyses pertain to the tritium results from surface water samples collected at five locations on the Savannah River near the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River Site (SRS). Uncertainties can result from the field-sampling routine, can be incurred during transport due to the physical properties of the sample, from equipment limitations, and from the measurement instrumentation used. The uncertainty reported by the SRS in their Annual Site Environmental Report currently considers only the counting uncertainty in the measurements, which is the standard reporting protocol for radioanalytical chemistry results. The focus of this work is to provide an overview of all uncertainty components associated with SRS tritium measurements, estimate the total uncertainty according to ISO 17025, and to propose additional experiments to verify some of the estimated uncertainties. The main uncertainty components discovered and investigated in this paper are tritium absorption or desorption in the sample container, HTO/H{sub 2}O isotopic effect during distillation, pipette volume, and tritium standard uncertainty. The goal is to quantify these uncertainties and to establish a combined uncertainty in order to increase the scientific depth …

The Saltstone Facility is designed and permitted to immobilize and dispose of low-level radioactive and hazardous liquid waste (salt solution) remaining from the processing of radioactive material at the Savannah River Site. Low-level waste (LLW) streams from the Effluent Treatment Project (ETP), H-Canyon, and the decontaminated salt solution product from the Actinide Removal Process/Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction (CSSX) Unit (ARP/MCU) process are stored in Tank 50 until the LLW can be transferred to the Saltstone Facility for treatment and disposal. The LLW must meet the specified waste acceptance criteria (WAC) before it is processed into saltstone. The specific chemical and radionuclide contaminants and their respective WAC limits are in the current Saltstone WAC. Waste Solidification Engineering (WSE) requested that Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) perform quarterly analysis on saltstone samples. The concentrations of chemical and radionuclide contaminants are measured to ensure the saltstone produced during each quarter is in compliance with the current WAC. This report documents the concentrations of chemical and radionuclide contaminants for the 2011 Fourth Quarter samples collected from Tank 50 on October 12, 2011 and discusses those results in further detail than the previously issued results report.

The Saltstone Production Facility (SPF) receives waste from Tank 50H for treatment. In the fourth quarter of the 2011 calendar year (4QCY11), Tank 50H accepted transfers of approximately 10 kgal from the Effluent Treatment Project (ETP), approximately 4 kgal from 211H, approximately 573 kgal from the Actinide Removal Process/Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction Unit (ARP/MCU) Decontaminated Salt Solution Hold Tank (DSS-HT), and approximately 5 kgal from other sources. The Saltstone Grout Sampling plan provides the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) with the chemical and physical characterization strategy for the salt solution which is to be disposed of in the Z-Area Solid Waste Landfill (SWLF). During operation, samples were collected from Tank 50H and grout samples prepared to determine the non-hazardous nature of the grout to meet the requirements of the South Carolina Hazardous Waste Management Regulations (SCHWMR) R.61-79.261.24(b) and R.61-79.268.48(a). Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) was asked to prepare saltstone from samples of Tank 50H obtained Oct. 12, 2011 during 4QCY11 to determine the non-hazardous nature of the grout. The samples were cured and shipped to Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Group-Radioisotope and Analytical Chemistry Laboratory (B&W TSG-RACL) to perform the Toxic Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP) …

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This report gives an overview of tax reform issues. The President and leading members of Congress have stated that fundamental tax reform is a major policy objective for the 112th Congress. Some Members have said that fundamental tax reform is needed in order to raise a large amount of additional revenue, which is necessary to reduce high forecast budget deficits and the sharply rising national debt. Congressional interest has been expressed in both a major overhaul of the U.S. tax system and the feasibility of levying a consumption tax.

This report provides examples of recent Administration "combating violent extremism" (CVE) activity and examines some of the risks and challenges evident in the Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States' (SIP's) three objectives. The report also diagrams and briefly discusses the "future activities and efforts" outlined in the SIP for each of these three objectives.

In August 2011, the Obama Administration announced its counter-radicalization strategy. It is devised to address the forces that influence some people living in the United States to acquire and hold radical or extremist beliefs that may eventually compel them to commit terrorism. This is the first such strategy for the federal government, which calls this effort “combating violent extremism” (CVE). This report provides examples of recent Administration CVE activity and examines some of the risks and challenges evident in the SIP's three objectives. The report also diagrams and briefly discusses the “future activities and efforts” outlined in the SIP for each of these three objectives. A number of areas may call for oversight from Congress. These include the following: picking partners and establishing "rules of the road," intervention with at-risk individuals, identifying programs to assist grassroots CVE efforts, countering extremist ideas, the lack of a lead agency, and transparency.

Beamline 6-2c at Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) is capable of Transmission X-ray Microscopy (TXM) at 30 nm resolution. Raw images from the microscope must undergo extensive image processing before publication. Since typical data sets normally contain thousands of images, it is necessary to automate the image processing workflow as much as possible, particularly for the aligning and averaging of similar images. Currently we align images using the 'phase correlation' algorithm, which calculates the relative offset of two images by multiplying them in the frequency domain. For images containing high frequency noise, this algorithm will align noise with noise, resulting in a blurry average. To remedy this we multiply the images by a Gaussian function in the frequency domain, so that the algorithm ignores the high frequency noise while properly aligning the features of interest (FOI). The shape of the Gaussian is manually tuned by the user until the resulting average image is sharpest. To automatically optimize this process, it is necessary for the computer to evaluate the quality of the average image by quantifying its sharpness. In our research we explored two image sharpness metrics, the variance method and the frequency threshold method. The variance method uses the variance …

The Reference Site (RS) study is part of the research, monitoring, and evaluation (RME) effort developed by the Action Agencies (Bonneville Power Administration [BPA], U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Portland District [USACE], and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation) in response to Federal Columbia River Power System (FCRPS) Biological Opinions (BiOp). While the RS study was initiated in 2007, data have been collected at relatively undisturbed reference wetland sites in the LCRE by PNNL and collaborators since 2005. These data on habitat structural metrics were previously summarized to provide baseline characterization of 51 wetlands throughout the estuarine and tidal freshwater portions of the 235-km LCRE; however, further analysis of these data has been limited. Therefore, in 2011, we conducted additional analyses of existing field data previously collected for the Columbia Estuary Ecosystem Restoration Program (CEERP) - including data collected by PNNL and others - to help inform the multi-agency restoration planning and ecosystem management work underway in the LCRE.

The use of titanium in commercial aircraft production has risen steadily over the last half century. The aerospace industry currently accounts for 58% of the domestic titanium market. The Kroll process, which has been used for over 50 years to produce titanium metal from its mineral form, consumes large quantities of energy. And, methods used to convert the titanium sponge output of the Kroll process into useful mill products also require significant energy resources. These traditional approaches result in product forms that are very expensive, have long lead times of up to a year or more, and require costly operations to fabricate finished parts. Given the increasing role of titanium in commercial aircraft, new titanium technologies are needed to create a more sustainable manufacturing strategy that consumes less energy, requires less material, and significantly reduces material and fabrication costs. A number of emerging processes are under development which could lead to a breakthrough in extraction technology. Several of these processes produce titanium alloy powder as a product. The availability of low-cost titanium powders may in turn enable a more efficient approach to the manufacture of titanium components using powder metallurgical processing. The objective of this project was to define energy-efficient …

This report provides A Brief Review of Provisions in District of Columbia Appropriations Acts Restricting the Funding of Abortion Services in the District of Columbia.

The focus of this research project was atoms with scattering lengths that are large compared to the range of their interactions and which therefore exhibit universal behavior at sufficiently low energies. Recent dramatic advances in cooling atoms and in manipulating their scattering lengths have made this phenomenon of practical importance for controlling ultracold atoms and molecules. This research project was aimed at developing a systematically improvable method for calculating few-body observables for atoms with large scattering lengths starting from the universal results as a first approximation. Significant progress towards this goal was made during the five years of the project.

The primary objective of the Net-Zero Energy Building Operator Training Program (NZEBOT) was to develop certificate level training programs for commercial building owners, managers and operators, principally in the areas of energy / sustainability management. The expected outcome of the project was a multi-faceted mechanism for developing the skill-based competency of building operators, owners, architects/engineers, construction professionals, tenants, brokers and other interested groups in energy efficient building technologies and best practices. The training program draws heavily on DOE supported and developed materials available in the existing literature, as well as existing, modified, and newly developed curricula from the Department of Engineering Technology & Construction Management (ETCM) at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC-Charlotte). The project goal is to develop a certificate level training curriculum for commercial energy and sustainability managers and building operators that: 1) Increases the skill-based competency of building professionals in energy efficient building technologies and best practices, and 2) Increases the workforce pool of expertise in energy management and conservation techniques. The curriculum developed in this project can subsequently be used to establish a sustainable energy training program that can contribute to the creation of new “green” job opportunities in North Carolina and throughout the …