This Measure Guideline covers installation of high-efficiency gas furnaces. Topics covered include when to install a high-efficiency gas furnace as a retrofit measure, how to identify and address risks, and the steps to be used in the selection and installation process. The guideline is written for Building America practitioners and HVAC contractors and installers. It includes a compilation of information provided by manufacturers, researchers, and the Department of Energy as well as recent research results from the Partnership for Advanced Residential Retrofit (PARR) Building America team.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Storage Systems (ESS) Program, through the support of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), facilitated the development of the protocol provided in this report. The focus of the protocol is to provide a uniform way of measuring, quantifying, and reporting the performance of EESs in various applications; something that does not exist today and, as such, is hampering the consideration and use of this technology in the market. The availability of an application-specific protocol for use in measuring and expressing performance-related metrics of ESSs will allow technology developers, power-grid operators and other end-users to evaluate the performance of energy storage technologies on a uniform and comparable basis. This will help differentiate technologies and products for specific application(s) and provide transparency in how performance is measured. It also will assist utilities and other consumers of ESSs make more informed decisions as they consider the potential application and use of ESSs, as well as form the basis for documentation that might be required to justify utility investment in such technologies.

This research project included two main thrusts; energetic particle effects on resistive MHD modes in tokamaks, and turbulence interactions with tearing modes in simplified geometry.

Temperature is a key process variable at any nuclear power plant (NPP). The harsh reactor environment causes all sensor properties to drift over time. At the higher temperatures of advanced NPPs the drift occurs more rapidly. The allowable reactor operating temperature must be reduced by the amount of the potential measurement error to assure adequate margin to material damage. Johnson noise is a fundamental expression of temperature and as such is immune to drift in a sensor s physical condition. In and near core, only Johnson noise thermometry (JNT) and radiation pyrometry offer the possibility for long-term, high-accuracy temperature measurement due to their fundamental natures. Small, Modular Reactors (SMRs) place a higher value on long-term stability in their temperature measurements in that they produce less power per reactor core and thus cannot afford as much instrument recalibration labor as their larger brethren. The purpose of this project is to develop and demonstrate a drift free Johnson noise-based thermometer suitable for deployment near core in advanced SMR plants.

Report that analyzes the legal and policy issues associated with reallocation of water under the Water Supply Act of 1958 (WSA) and industrial (M&I) water supply use at Lake Lanier as an example.

The automotive and engine industries are in a period of very rapid change being driven by new emission standards, new types of after treatment, new combustion strategies, the introduction of new fuels, and drive for increased fuel economy and efficiency. The rapid pace of these changes has put more pressure on the need for modeling of engine combustion and performance, in order to shorten product design and introduction cycles. New combustion strategies include homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI), partial-premixed combustion compression ignition (PCCI), and dilute low temperature combustion which are being developed for lower emissions and improved fuel economy. New fuels include bio-fuels such as ethanol or bio-diesel, drop-in bio-derived fuels and those derived from new crude oil sources such as gas-to-liquids, coal-to-liquids, oil sands, oil shale, and wet natural gas. Kinetic modeling of the combustion process for these new combustion regimes and fuels is necessary in order to allow modeling and performance assessment for engine design purposes. In this research covered by this CRADA, ORNL developed and supplied experimental data related to engine performance with new fuels and new combustion strategies along with interpretation and analysis of such data and consulting to Reaction Design, Inc. (RD). RD performed additional …

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Gas-Puff-Imaging (GPI) is a two dimensional diagnostic which measures the edge Dα light emission from a neutral D2 gas puff nears the outer mid-plane of NSTX. DEGAS 2 is a 3-D Monte Carlo code used to model neutral transport and atomic physics in tokamak plasmas. In this paper we compare measurements of the Dα light emission obtained by GPI on NSTX with DEGAS 2 simulations of Dα light emission for specific experiments. Both the simulated spatial distribution and absolute intensity of the Dα light emission agree well with the experimental data obtained between ELMs in H-mode.

This report provides information on presidential appointments in the executive and judicial branch including a brief background on advice and consent issues, an overview of the appointment process in both the executive and legislative branches, and a brief discussion of recent concerns about the system. Also, the report explores the events in the 112th Congress leading up to the introduction and passage of two measures purported to make the appointment process easier and quicker, and it concludes with an analysis of the two measures.

This document provides information regarding the regulation of the manufacture and sale of beer and malt beverages at microbreweries and brewpubs in 38 states, including Texas, selected for inclusion based on the following criteria.

Report regarding congressional efforts to structure federal actions and programs so they provide incentives to reduce flood risk without unduly infringing on private property rights or usurping local decision making.

Taxonomy, genetics, morphometrics of North American wolves.

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This report documents work performed by Idaho National Laboratory and the University of Michigan in fiscal year (FY) 2012 to examine design parameters related to the use of fast-neutron multiplicity counting for assaying plutonium for materials protection, accountancy, and control purposes. This project seeks to develop a new type of neutron-measurement-based plutonium assay instrument suited for assaying advanced fuel cycle materials. Some current-concept advanced fuels contain high concentrations of plutonium; some of these concept fuels also contain other fissionable actinides besides plutonium. Because of these attributes the neutron emission rates of these new fuels may be much higher, and more difficult to interpret, than measurements made of plutonium-only materials. Fast neutron multiplicity analysis is one approach for assaying these advanced nuclear fuels. Studies have been performed to assess the conceptual performance capabilities of a fast-neutron multiplicity counter for assaying plutonium. Comparisons have been made to evaluate the potential improvements and benefits of fast-neutron multiplicity analyses versus traditional thermal-neutron counting systems. Fast-neutron instrumentation, using for example an array of liquid scintillators such as EJ-309, have the potential to either a) significantly reduce assay measurement times versus traditional approaches, for comparable measurement precision values, b) significantly improve assay precision values, for measurement …

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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