The purpose of the Caldwell Ranch Exploration and Confirmation Project was to drill, test, and confirm the present economic viability of the undeveloped geothermal reservoir in the 870 acre Caldwell Ranch area of the Northwest Geysers that included the CCPA No.1 steam field. All of the drilling, logging, and sampling challenges were met. � Three abandoned wells, Prati 5, Prati 14 and Prati 38 were re-opened and recompleted to nominal depths of 10,000 feet in 2010. Two of the wells required sidetracking. � The flow tests indicated Prati 5 Sidetrack 1 (P-5 St1), Prati 14 (P-14) and Prati 38 Sidetrack 2 (P-38 St2) were collectively capable of initially producing an equivalent of 12 megawatts (MWe) of steam using a conversion rate of 19,000 pounds of steam/hour

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The project investigated the development and improvement process of a R744 (CO2) commercial heat pump water heater (HPWH) package of approximately 35 kW. The improvement process covered all main components of the system. More specific the heat exchangers (Internal heat exchanger, Evaporator, Gas cooler) as well as the expansion device and the compressor were investigated. In addition, a comparison to a commercially available baseline R134a unit of the same capacity and footprint was made in order to compare performance as well as package size reduction potential.

This study examines how existing U.S. refining infrastructure matches in geography and processing capability with the needs projected from anticipated biofuels production. Key findings include:  a potential shortfall in both overall hydrotreating capacity and hydrogen production capacity in refineries to manage the conversion of certain bio-derived feedstocks having high oxygen contents;  a regional concentration of anticipated biofuel resources, placing added stress in particular refining regions (e.g. the Gulf Coast);  uncertainties surrounding the impact of bio-derived fuel intermediates on the refiner’s ability to meet product performance and product quantity demands, and the need for better and more comprehensive chemical composition information;  the need for considerably more data and experience on the behavior of projected biofuels feedstocks in refining processes (e.g. impacts on process performance and reliability);  and the need to examine the optimum capital investment locations for additional processing equipment. For example, whether it is better to further refine biofuels at the new production sites, in centralized biofuel "depots", or whether the existing refining facilities should be expanded to better handle a more 'raw' biofuel.

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A mainstay pump for tritium systems, the Normetex scroll pump, is currently unavailable because the Normetex company went out of business. This pump was an all-metal scroll pump that served tritium processing facilities very well. Current tritium system operators are evaluating replacement pumps for the Normetex pump and for general used in tritium service. An all-metal equivalent alternative to the Normetex pump has not yet been identified. 1. The ideal replacement tritium pump would be hermetically sealed and contain no polymer components or oils. Polymers and oils degrade over time when they contact ionizing radiation. 2. Halogenated polymers (containing fluorine, chlorine, or both) and oils are commonly found in pumps. These materials have many properties that surpass those of hydrocarbon-based polymers and oils, including thermal stability (higher operating temperature) and better chemical resistance. Unfortunately, they are less resistant to degradation from ionizing radiation than hydrocarbon-based materials (in general). 3. Polymers and oils can form gaseous, condensable (HF, TF), liquid, and solid species when exposed to ionizing radiation. For example, halogenated polymers form HF and HCl, which are extremely corrosive upon reaction with water. If a pump containing polymers or oils must be used in a tritium system, the system must …

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) requested that Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), via the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) contract, perform independent sampling and analysis of used oils contained within eight 55 gallon drums stored at the former IMPACT Services facility, located at the East Tennessee Technology Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. These drums were originally delivered by LATA Sharp Remediation Services (LSRS) to IMPACT Services on January 11, 2011 as part of the Bldg. K-33 demolition project, and the drums plus contents should have been processed as non-hazardous non-radiological waste by IMPACT Services. LSRS received a certificate of destruction on August 29, 2012 (LSRS 2012a). However, IMPACT Services declared bankruptcy and abandoned the site later in 2012, and eight of the original eleven K-33 drums are currently stored at the facility. The content of these drums is the subject of this investigation. The original drum contents were sampled by LSRS in 2010 and analyzed for gross alpha, gross beta, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), using both compositing and grab sampling techniques. The objective of this 2013 sample and analysis effort was to duplicate, to the extent possible, the 2010 sampling and analysis event to support final …

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The Used Fuel Disposition (UFD) Campaign within the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) Fuel Cycle Technology (FCT) program has been tasked with investigating the disposal of the nation's spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level nuclear waste (HLW) for a range of potential waste forms and geologic environments. The planning, construction, and operation of a nuclear disposal facility is a long-term process that involves engineered barriers that are tailored to both the geologic environment and the waste forms being emplaced. The UFD Campaign is considering a range of fuel cycles that in turn produce a range of waste forms. The UFD Campaign is also considering a range of geologic media. These ranges could be thought of as adding uncertainty to what the disposal facility design will ultimately be; however, it may be preferable to thinking about the ranges as adding flexibility to design of a disposal facility. For example, as the overall DOE-NE program and industrial actions result in the fuel cycles that will produce waste to be disposed, and the characteristics of those wastes become clear, the disposal program retains flexibility in both the choice of geologic environment and the specific repository design. Of course, other factors …

As a national laboratory Argonne concentrates on scientific and technological challenges that can only be addressed through a sustained, interdisciplinary focus at a national scale. Argonne's eight major initiatives, as enumerated in its strategic plan, are Hard X-ray Sciences, Leadership Computing, Materials and Molecular Design and Discovery, Energy Storage, Alternative Energy and Efficiency, Nuclear Energy, Biological and Environmental Systems, and National Security. The purposes of Argonne's Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program are to encourage the development of novel technical concepts, enhance the Laboratory's research and development (R and D) capabilities, and pursue its strategic goals. projects are selected from proposals for creative and innovative R and D studies that require advance exploration before they are considered to be sufficiently developed to obtain support through normal programmatic channels. Among the aims of the projects supported by the LDRD Program are the following: establishment of engineering proof of principle, assessment of design feasibility for prospective facilities, development of instrumentation or computational methods or systems, and discoveries in fundamental science and exploratory development.

As a national laboratory Argonne concentrates on scientific and technological challenges that can only be addressed through a sustained, interdisciplinary focus at a national scale. Argonne's eight major initiatives, as enumerated in its strategic plan, are Hard X-ray Sciences, Leadership Computing, Materials and Molecular Design and Discovery, Energy Storage, Alternative Energy and Efficiency, Nuclear Energy, Biological and Environmental Systems, and National Security. The purposes of Argonne's Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program are to encourage the development of novel technical concepts, enhance the Laboratory's research and development (R and D) capabilities, and pursue its strategic goals. projects are selected from proposals for creative and innovative R and D studies that require advance exploration before they are considered to be sufficiently developed to obtain support through normal programmatic channels. Among the aims of the projects supported by the LDRD Program are the following: establishment of engineering proof of principle, assessment of design feasibility for prospective facilities, development of instrumentation or computational methods or systems, and discoveries in fundamental science and exploratory development.

This paper describes the general characteristics of disruptions halo currents in the National Spherical Torus Experiment [M. Ono, et al. Nuclear Fusion 40, 557 (2000)]. The commonly observed types of vertical motion and resulting halo current patterns are described, and it is shown that plasma discharges developing between components can facilitate halo current flow. The halo current fractions and toroidal peaking factors at various locations in the device are presented. The maximum product of these two metrics for localized halo current measurements is always significantly less than the worst-case expectations from conventional aspect ratio tokamaks (which are typically written in terms of the total halo current). The halo current fraction and impulse is often largest in cases with the fastest plasma current quenches and highest quench rates. The effective duration of the halo current pulse is comparable to or shorter than the plasma current quench time. The largest halo currents have tended to occur in lower β and lower elongation plasmas. The sign of the poloidal halo current is reversed when the toroidal field direction is reversed.

A class of generalized Kapchinskij-Vladimirskij solutions of the nonlinear Vlasov-Maxwell equations and the associated envelope equations for high-intensity beams in a periodic lattice is derived. It includes the classical Kapchinskij-Vladimirskij solution as a special case. For a given lattice, the distribution functions and the envelope equations are specified by eight free parameters. The class of solutions derived captures a wider range of dynamical envelope behavior for high-intensity beams, and thus provides a new theoretical tool to investigate the dynamics of high-intensity beams.

Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), via the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education contract, evaluated the Enercon Services, Inc. report on site soils derived concentration guideline levels (DCGLs). The RESRAD code Version 6.5 was used in deterministic mode to consider a range of radionuclides and potential future receptors. A standard sensitivity analysis was also included, along with a probabilistic analysis to select conservative input values for the most sensitive physical parameters.

In 2009, the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) reduced the Beryllium (Be) 8-hr Time Weighted Average Threshold Limit Value (TLV-TWA) from 2.0 {micro}g/m{sup 3} to 0.05 {micro}g/m{sup 3} with an inhalable 'I' designation in accordance with ACGIH's particle size-selective criterion for inhalable mass. Currently, per the Department of Energy (DOE) requirements, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is following the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) of 2.0 {micro}g/m{sup 3} as an 8-hr TWA, which is also the 2005 ACGIH TLV-TWA, and an Action Level (AL) of 0.2 {micro}g/m{sup 3} and sampling is performed using the 37mm (total dust) sampling method. Since DOE is considering adopting the newer 2009 TLV guidelines, the goal of this study was to determine if the current method of sampling using the 37mm (total dust) sampler would produce results that are comparable to what would be measured using the IOM (inhalable) sampler specific to the application of high energy explosive work at LLNL's remote experimental test facility at Site 300. Side-by-side personal sampling using the two samplers was performed over an approximately two-week period during chamber re-entry and cleanup procedures following detonation of an explosive assembly containing Beryllium (Be). …

At the request of Jerry Sweeney, the LLNL Containment Program performed a review of nuclear test-related data for the Salut underground nuclear test in U20ak to assist in evaluating this legacy site as a test bed for application technologies for use in On-Site Inspections (OSI) under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Review of the Salut site is complicated because the test experienced a subsurface, rather than surface, collapse. Of particular interest is the stability of the ground surface above the Salut detonation point. Proposed methods for on-site verification include radiological signatures, artifacts from nuclear testing activities, and imaging to identify alteration to the subsurface hydrogeologogy due to the nuclear detonation. Sweeney's proposal requires physical access at or near the ground surface of specific underground nuclear test locations at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site (NNSS, formerly the Nevada Test Site), and focuses on possible activities such as visual observation, multispectral measurements, and shallow, and deep geophysical surveys.

Optimization of nonlinear driving terms have become a useful tool for designing storage rings, especially modern light sources where the strong nonlinearity is dominated by the large chromatic effects of quadrupoles and strong sextupoles for chromaticity control. The Lie algebraic method is well known for computing such driving terms. However, it appears that there was a lack of explicit formulas in the public domain for such computation, resulting in uncertainty and/or inconsistency in widely used codes. This note presents explicit formulas for driving terms due to sextupoles and chromatic effects of quadrupoles, which can be considered as thin elements. The computation is accurate to the 4th-order Hamiltonian and 2nd-order in terms of magnet parameters. The results given here are the same as the APS internal note AOP-TN-2009-020. This internal nte has been revised and published here as a Light Source Note in order to get this information into the public domain, since both ELEGANT and OPA are using these formulas.

This paper explores a range of high-performance equilibrium scenarios available in the NSTX-Upgrade device [J.E. Menard, submitted for publication to Nuclear Fusion]. NSTX-Upgrade is a substantial upgrade to the existing NSTX device [M. Ono, et al., Nuclear Fusion 40, 557 (2000)], with significantly higher toroidal field and solenoid capabilities, and three additional neutral beam sources with significantly larger current drive efficiency. Equilibria are computed with freeboundary TRANSP, allowing a self consistent calculation of the non-inductive current drive sources, the plasma equilibrium, and poloidal field coil current, using the realistic device geometry. The thermal profiles are taken from a variety of existing NSTX discharges, and different assumptions for the thermal confinement scalings are utilized. The no-wall and idealwall n=1 stability limits are computed with the DCON code. The central and minimum safety factors are quite sensitive to many parameters: they generally increases with large outer plasmawall gaps and higher density, but can have either trend with the confinement enhancement factor. In scenarios with strong central beam current drive, the inclusion of non-classical fast ion diffusion raises qmin, decreases the pressure peaking, and generally improves the global stability, at the expense of a reduction in the non-inductive current drive fraction; cases with …

The work described in the present report had the original goal to produce large, entangled, ring polymers that were uncontaminated by linear chains and to characterize by rheological methods the dynamics of these rings. While the work fell short of this specific goal, the outcomes of the research performed under support from this grant provided novel macromolecular synthesis methods, new separation methods for ring and linear chains, and novel rheological data on bottle brush polymers, wedge polymers and dendron-based ring molecules. The grant funded a total of 8 archival manuscripts and one patent, all of which are attached to the present report.

Non-radioactive cerium (Ce) and radioactive plutonium (Pu) anion exchange column experiments using scaled HB-Line designs were performed to investigate the feasibility of using either gadolinium nitrate (Gd) or boric acid (B as H{sub 3}BO{sub 3}) as a neutron poison in the H-Canyon dissolution process. Expected typical concentrations of probable impurities were tested and the removal of these impurities by a decontamination wash was measured. Impurity concentrations are compared to two specifications - designated as Column A or Column B (most restrictive) - proposed for plutonium oxide (PuO{sub 2}) product shipped to the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF). Use of Gd as a neutron poison requires a larger volume of wash for the proposed Column A specification. Since boron (B) has a higher proposed specification and is more easily removed by washing, it appears to be the better candidate for use in the H-Canyon dissolution process. Some difficulty was observed in achieving the Column A specification due to the limited effectiveness that the wash step has in removing the residual B after {approx}4 BV's wash. However a combination of the experimental 10 BV's wash results and a calculated DF from the oxalate precipitation process yields an overall DF sufficient …