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This report gives an overview of Fishery, Aquaculture, and Marine Mammal Issues in the 112th Congress

The Endangered Species Act has been one of the more contentious environmental laws. This may stem from its strict substantive provisions, which can affect the use of both federal and nonfederal lands and resources. This report discusses oversight issues and legislation introduced in the 112th Congress to address Endangered Species Act implementation and management of endangered and threatened species.

This report is a compilation of some unique component repair time data and it also presents citations of more extensive reports where lists of repair times can be found. This collection of information should support analysts who seek to quantify maintainability and availability of high technology and nuclear energy production systems. While there are newer sources of repair time information, most, if not all, of the newer sources are proprietary and cannot be shared. This report offers data that, while older, is openly accessible and can serve as reasonable estimates of repair times, at least for initial studies. Some times were found for maintenance times in radiation environments, and some guidance for multiplicative factors to use to account for work in contamination areas.

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. __________________________________________________

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This document provides guidelines for the selection of energy-efficient windows in new and existing residential construction in all US climate zones. It includes information on window products, their attributes and performance. It provides cost/benefit information on window energy savings as well as information on non-energy benefits such as thermal comfort and reduced HVAC demands. The document also provides information on energy impacts of design decisions such as window orientation, total glazing area and shading devices and conditions. Information on resources for proper window installation is included as well. This document is for builders, homeowners, designers and anyone making decisions about selecting energy efficient window. It is intended to complement other Building America information and efforts.

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Mechanistic Studies at the Interface Between Organometallic Chemistry and Homogeneous Catalysis Charles P. Casey, Principal Investigator Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin - Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706 Phone 608-262-0584 FAX: 608-262-7144 Email: casey@chem.wisc.edu http://www.chem.wisc.edu/main/people/faculty/casey.html Executive Summary. Our goal was to learn the intimate mechanistic details of reactions involved in homogeneous catalysis and to use the insight we gain to develop new and improved catalysts. Our work centered on the hydrogenation of polar functional groups such as aldehydes and ketones and on hydroformylation. Specifically, we concentrated on catalysts capable of simultaneously transferring hydride from a metal center and a proton from an acidic oxygen or nitrogen center to an aldehyde or ketone. An economical iron based catalyst was developed and patented. Better understanding of fundamental organometallic reactions and catalytic processes enabled design of energy and material efficient chemical processes. Our work contributed to the development of catalysts for the selective and mild hydrogenation of ketones and aldehydes; this will provide a modern green alternative to reductions by LiAlH4 and NaBH4, which require extensive work-up procedures and produce waste streams. (C5R4OH)Ru(CO)2H Hydrogenation Catalysts. Youval Shvo described a remarkable catalytic system in which the key intermediate (C5R4OH)Ru(CO)2H (1) has an electronically coupled acidic …

It has been demonstrated that Eastern Boundary Currents (EBC) are a baroclinic intensification of the interior circulation of the ocean due to the emergence of mesoscale eddies in response to the sharp buoyancy gradients driven by the wind-stress and the thermal surface forcing. The eddies accomplish the heat and salt transport necessary to insure that the subsurface flow is adiabatic, compensating for the heat and salt transport effected by the mean currents. The EBC thus generated occurs on a cross-shore scale of order 20-100 km, and thus this scale needs to be resolved in climate models in order to capture the meridional transport by the EBC. Our result indicate that changes in the near shore currents on the oceanic eastern boundaries are linked not just to local forcing, such as coastal changes in the winds, but depend on the basin-wide circulation as well.

A new chiller-less data center liquid cooling system utilizing the outside air environment has been shown to achieve up to 90% reduction in cooling energy compared to traditional chiller based data center cooling systems. The system removes heat from Volume servers inside a Sealed Rack and transports the heat using a liquid loop to an Outdoor Heat Exchanger which rejects the heat to the outdoor ambient environment. The servers in the rack are cooled using a hybrid cooling system by removing the majority of the heat generated by the processors and memory by direct thermal conduction using coldplates and the heat generated by the remaining components using forced air convection to an air- to- liquid heat exchanger inside the Sealed Rack. The anticipated benefits of such energy-centric configurations are significant energy savings at the data center level. When compared to a traditional 10 MW data center, which typically uses 25% of its total data center energy consumption for cooling this technology could potentially enable a cost savings of up to $800,000-$2,200,000/year (assuming electricity costs of 4 to 11 cents per kilowatt-hour) through the reduction in electrical energy usage.

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A silicon carbide (SiC) based electronic temperature sensor prototype has been demonstrated to operate at 300°C. We showed continuous operation of 1,000 hours with SiC operational amplifier and surface mounted discreet resistors and capacitors on a ceramic circuit board. This feasibility demonstration is a major milestone in the development of high temperature electronics in general and high temperature geothermal exploration and well management tools in particular. SiC technology offers technical advantages that are not found in competing technologies such as silicon-on-insulator (SOI) at high temperatures of 200°C to 300°C and beyond. The SiC integrated circuits and packaging methods can be used in new product introduction by GE Oil and Gas for high temperature down-hole tools. The existing SiC fabrication facility at GE is sufficient to support the quantities currently demanded by the marketplace, and there are other entities in the United States and other countries capable of ramping up SiC technology manufacturing. The ceramic circuit boards are different from traditional organic-based electronics circuit boards, but the fabrication process is compatible with existing ceramic substrate manufacturing. This project has brought high temperature electronics forward, and brings us closer to commercializing tools that will enable and reduce the cost of enhanced geothermal …

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DOE-OE and DOE-SC workshops (Reference 1-3) identified the key power grid problem that requires insight addressable by the next generation of exascale computing is coupling of real-time data streams (1-2 TB per hour) as the streams are ingested to dynamic models. These models would then identify predicted disruptions in time (2-4 seconds) to trigger the smart grid s self healing functions. This project attempted to establish the feasibility of this approach and defined the scientific issues, and demonstrated example solutions to important smart grid simulation problems. These objectives were accomplished by 1) using the existing frequency recorders on the national grid to establish a representative and scalable real-time data stream; 2) invoking ORNL signature identification algorithms; 3) modeling dynamically a representative region of the Eastern interconnect using an institutional cluster, measuring the scalability and computational benchmarks for a national capability; and 4) constructing a prototype simulation for the system s concept of smart grid deployment. The delivered ORNL enduring capability included: 1) data processing and simulation metrics to design a national capability justifying exascale applications; 2) Software and intellectual property built around the example solutions; 3) demonstrated dynamic models to design few second self-healing.

Hanford sediments impacted by hyperalkaline high level radioactive waste have undergone incongruent silicate mineral weathering concurrent with contaminant uptake. In this project, we studied the impact of background pore water (BPW) on strontium, cesium and iodine desorption and transport in Hanford sediments that were experimentally weathered by contact with simulated hyperalkaline tank waste leachate (STWL) solutions. Using those lab-weathered Hanford sediments (HS) and model precipitates formed during nucleation from homogeneous STWL solutions (HN), we (i) provided thorough characterization of reaction products over a matrix of field-relevant gradients in contaminant concentration, partial pressure of carbon dioxide, and reaction time; (ii) improved molecular-scale understanding of how sorbate speciation controls contaminant desorption from weathered sediments upon removal of caustic sources; and (iii) developed a mechanistic, predictive model of meso- to field-scale contaminant reactive transport under these conditions. In this final report, we provide detailed descriptions of our results from this three-year study, completed in 2012 following a one-year no cost extension.

We present a forecast for systems-focused applications of non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), which meet the needs of homeowners, the technology sector, the service sector, and/or utilities. We discuss both near- and long-term applications.

This report provides an overview of the mid-session review and analysis of the timing of the mid-session review and discusses the President's budget request.

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