In 1991, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories embarked on a research partnership with the U.S. photovoltaic (PV) industry by cost-sharing industry-based R&D efforts. The PV Manufacturing R&D (PVMR&D) Project, an extension of the earlier PV Manufacturing Technology (PVMaT) Project, aims at streamlining and improving the current PV manufacturing technology to enable U.S. manufacturers to compete in the global marketplace. Currently, PVMR&D has ten active subcontracts with manufacturers working in several facets of the U.S. PV industry; four subcontracts were completed within the past year.

The purpose of this report (REV04) is to document the thermal-hydrologic-chemical (THC) seepage model, which simulates the composition of waters that could potentially seep into emplacement drifts, and the composition of the gas phase. The THC seepage model is processed and abstracted for use in the total system performance assessment (TSPA) for the license application (LA). This report has been developed in accordance with ''Technical Work Plan for: Near-Field Environment and Transport: Coupled Processes (Mountain-Scale TH/THC/THM, Drift-Scale THC Seepage, and Post-Processing Analysis for THC Seepage) Report Integration'' (BSC 2005 [DIRS 172761]). The technical work plan (TWP) describes planning information pertaining to the technical scope, content, and management of this report. The plan for validation of the models documented in this report is given in Section 2.2.2, ''Model Validation for the DS THC Seepage Model,'' of the TWP. The TWP (Section 3.2.2) identifies Acceptance Criteria 1 to 4 for ''Quantity and Chemistry of Water Contacting Engineered Barriers and Waste Forms'' (NRC 2003 [DIRS 163274]) as being applicable to this report; however, in variance to the TWP, Acceptance Criterion 5 has also been determined to be applicable, and is addressed, along with the other Acceptance Criteria, in Section 4.2 of this report. …

The Design Team continued to conference this quarter. Their primary task during this timeframe was to finalize the dryer design based on information learned from the NDIC Pilot work and detailed design discussions at Barr offices in August. Heyl-Patterson was tasked with incorporating all comments and drafting drawings. They submitted a preliminary proposal which spawned detailed discussions about tube bundle, air locks, and fire suppression systems. The type of fire protection specified dictated the final structural arrangement. Three meetings were spent discussing the pro's and con's of suppression vs. ventilation systems. In the end, the dryer and bucket elevator will have suppression systems and the remaining equipment will be explosion vented. This is in agreement with GRE's current insurer, FM Global. Three inlet airlocks were reduced to two and four outlets were reduced to three. The inlet plenum was subdivided for greater flexibility and sparging air added in the outlet plenum. It was also decided to use bundles with varied material, diameter, and tube & fin spacing. This will be completed in an effort to identify for us which configuration has the best heat transfer characteristics using coal as the fluidizing medium. The dryer will also be delivered in four …

The overall purpose of this project is to evaluate the biological and economic feasibility of restoring high-quality forests on mined land, and to measure carbon sequestration and wood production benefits that would be achieved from forest restoration procedures. During the reporting period (October-December 2004) we completed the validation of a forest productivity classification model for mined land. A coefficient of determination (R{sup 2}) of 0.68 confirms the model's ability to predict SI based on a selection of mine soil properties. To determine carbon sequestration under different forest management scenarios, a field study was installed as a 3 x 3 factorial in a random complete block design with three replications at each of three locations, Ohio (Figure 1), West Virginia (Figure 2), and Virginia (Figure 3). The treatments included three forest types (white pine, hybrid poplar, mixed hardwood) and three silvicultural regimes (competition control, competition control plus tillage, competition control plus tillage plus fertilization). For hybrid poplar, total plant biomass differences increased significantly with the intensity of silvicultural input. Root, stem, and foliage biomass also increased with the level of silvicultural intensity. Financial feasibility analyses of reforestation on mined lands previously reclaimed to grassland have been completed for conversion to white …

This is the final report for Grant No. DEFGO2-98ER62691 submitted to the DOE NABR Program. This research has focused on (1) the role of natural organic matter (NOM), quinines, and complexants in enhancing the biological reduction of solid-phase crystalline ferric oxides, (2) the effect of heavy metals (specifically zinc) and NOM on ferric oxide bioreduction, (3) the sorption of Me(II) [Cu(II), Fe(II), Mn(II) and Zn(II)] to ferric oxides and subsequent Me(II)-promoted phase transformations of the ferric oxides, and (4) the development of reaction-based biogeochemical models to numerically simulate our experimental results.

Numerical modeling and field data tests are presented on the Transfer Function/Scattering Index Method for estimating fracture orientation and density in subsurface reservoirs from the ''coda'' or scattered energy in the seismic trace. Azimuthal stacks indicate that scattered energy is enhanced along the fracture strike direction. A transfer function method is used to more effectively indicate fracture orientation. The transfer function method, which involves a comparison of the seismic signature above and below a reservoir interval, effectively eliminates overburden effects and acquisition imprints in the analysis. The transfer function signature is simplified into a scattering index attribute value that gives fracture orientation and spatial variations of the fracture density within a field. The method is applied to two field data sets, a 3-D Ocean Bottom Cable (OBC) seismic data set from an offshore fractured carbonate reservoir in the Adriatic Sea and a 3-D seismic data set from an onshore fractured carbonate field in the Middle East. Scattering index values are computed in both fields at the reservoir level, and the results are compared to borehole breakout data and Formation MicroImager (FMI) logs in nearby wells. In both cases the scattering index results are in very good agreement with the well …

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Electron cooling requires small angles between the electrons and the cooled particles. In other words, the electron beam has to be of a cylindrical shape in the cooling section. How to satisfy this requirement for a specific case of a relativistic electron beam transport for the Fermilab electron cooling project? In fact, the requirement splits into two parts: for the beam centroid and its envelope. A straight centroid motion means a good field quality and zero initial conditions; this issue is not a subject of this paper. The cylindrical envelope requires proper initial conditions of the envelope at the entrance of the cooler, it is a problem of matching. A specific complex of measurements and calculations aimed at solving this problem is described here.

When supersymmetry is broken by condensates with a single condensing gauge group, there is a nonanomalous R-symmetry that prevents the universal axion from acquiring a mass. It has been argued that, in the context of supergravity, higher dimension operators will break this symmetry and may generate an axion mass too large to allow the identification of the universal axion with the QCD axion. We show that such contributions to the axion mass are highly suppressed in a class of models where the effective Lagrangian for gaugino and matter condensation respects modular invariance (T-duality).

This report is on Electrochemistry for Gordon Conference

The most important requirement for high-level waste glass acceptance for disposal in a geological repository is the chemical durability, expressed as a glass dissolution rate. During the early stages of glass dissolution in near static conditions that represent a repository disposal environment, a gel layer resembling a membrane forms on the glass surface through which ions exchange between the glass and the leachant. The hydrated gel layer exhibits acid/base properties which are manifested as the pH dependence of the thickness and nature of the gel layer. The gel layer has been found to age into either clay mineral assemblages or zeolite mineral assemblages. The formation of one phase preferentially over the other has been experimentally related to changes in the pH of the leachant and related to the relative amounts of Al{sup +3} and Fe{sup +3} in a glass. The formation of clay mineral assemblages on the leached glass surface layers ,lower pH and Fe{sup +3} rich glasses, causes the dissolution rate to slow to a long-term steady state rate. The formation of zeolite mineral assemblages ,higher pH and Al{sup +3} rich glasses, on leached glass surface layers causes the dissolution rate to increase and return to the initial high …

The Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) at the Savannah River Site (SRS) vitrifies high level liquid waste (HLLW) into borosilicate glass for stabilization and permanent disposal. The viscosity of the borosilicate glass melt as a function of temperature is the single most important variable affecting the melt rate and pour ability of the glass. The viscosity determines the rate of melting of the raw feed, the rate of glass bubble release (foaming and fining), the rate of homogenization, the adequacy of heat transfer, the devitrification rate, and thus, the quality (in terms of glass homogeneity) of the final glass product. If the viscosity is too low, excessive convection currents can occur during melting, increasing corrosion/erosion of the melter materials of construction (refractory and electrodes) and making control of the melter more difficult. The lowest glass viscosities allowed in the DWPF melter have, therefore, been determined to be approximately 20 poise. DWPF glasses must pour continuously into a large steel canister for ultimate storage in a geologic repository, but glasses with a viscosity greater than or equal to 500 poise do not readily pour. Moreover, too high a viscosity can reduce product quality by causing voids in the final glass. A …

The Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) will use cesium ion exchange to remove Cs-137 from Low Activity Waste (LAW) down to a maximum activity of 0.3 Ci/m3 in the Immobilized LAW (ILAW) product. The WTP Project baseline for cesium ion exchange is the elutable SuperLig(R) 644 (SL-644) resin (registered trademark of IBC Advanced Technologies, Inc., American Fork, UT) or a U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) approved equivalent. SL-644 is solely available through IBC Advanced Technologies. The WTP Project is conducting a three-stage process for selecting and qualifying an alternative ion exchange resin. Resorcinol formaldehyde (RF) is being pursued as a potential alternative to SL-644, to provide a backup resin supply. Resin cost relative to SL-644 is a primary driver. Phase I of the testing plan examined the viability of RF resin and recommended that a spherical form of RF resin be examined further. Phases II and III, now underway, include batch testing to determine the isotherm of this resin, kinetics to address the impacts of bead diameter and high sodium feed levels on processing Hanford waste with the resin, and multicycle column testing to determine how temperature and chemical cycling affects waste processing. Phases II and III …

Monosodium titanate is an inorganic adsorbent powder that effectively removes strontium, plutonium, neptunium, and other trace elements from alkaline high-level waste supernate. This work tested one commercial titanate and four general methods to engineer MST into particles large enough to use in adsorption columns. The most successful of the engineered products selected from batch contact and chemical stability testing succeeded in treating 2900 bed volumes of simulated salt waste containing dissolved plutonium and strontium. There was no detectable strontium breakthrough and only 6 percent plutonium breakthrough--well within the processing goal--at the end of the demonstration which operated at 5.3 BV/hour. Additional column tests at nominally 15 BV/hr demonstrated similar removal performance. Batch testing of adsorbents used both actual Savannah River Site tank supernate as well as simulated salt solutions spiked with strontium, neptunium, and plutonium. In tank waste tests, internal gelation beads produced by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory demonstrated a batch distribution coefficient of 35,000 +/- 4,000 mL/g for plutonium at a phase ratio of 1970 mL/g. In the same batch the sorbent demonstrated a batch distribution coefficient of 99,000 +/- 7,500 mL/g for strontium. These results indicate that this material should be able to process thousands of bed …

Within the scope of the Accelerator Driven System (ADS) concept for nuclear waste management applications, the burnup uncertainty estimates due to uncertainty in the activation cross sections (XSs) are important regarding both the safety and the efficiency of the waste burning process. We have applied both sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo methodology to actinides burnup calculations in a lead-bismuth cooled subcritical ADS. The sensitivity analysis is used to identify the reaction XSs and the dominant chains that contribute most significantly to the uncertainty. The Monte Carlo methodology gives the burnup uncertainty estimates due to the synergetic/global effect of the complete set of XS uncertainties. These uncertainty estimates are valuable to assess the need of any experimental or systematic reevaluation of some uncertainty XSs for ADS.

This paper extends previous results on nonlinear Schwarz preconditioning ([4]) to unstructured finite element elliptic problems exploiting now nonlocal (but small) subspaces. The non-local finite element subspaces are associated with subdomains obtained from a non-overlapping element partitioning of the original set of elements and are coarse outside the prescribed element subdomain. The coarsening is based on a modification of the agglomeration based AMGe method proposed in [8]. Then, the algebraic construction from [9] of the corresponding non-linear finite element subproblems is applied to generate the subspace based nonlinear preconditioner. The overall nonlinearly preconditioned problem is solved by an inexact Newton method. Numerical illustration is also provided.

Protein arrays are the best tool for the rapid analysis of a whole proteome thus helping to identify all the protein/protein interactions in a living cell and they can also be used as powerful biosensors. The objective of this proposal is to develop a new entropically activated ligation method based in the naturally occurring protein trans-splicing process. This method will be used for the generation of spatially addressable arrays of multiple protein components by standard photolithographic techniques. Key to our approach is the use of the protein trans-splicing process. This naturally occurring process will allow us to create a truly generic and highly efficient method for the covalent attachment of proteins through its C-terminus to any solid support.

The primary purposes of this project were to (1) improve and validate the LLNL/IMPACT atmospheric chemistry and aerosol transport model, (2) experimentally analyze size- and time-resolved aerosol measurements taken during spring 2001 in Northern California, and (3) understand the origin of dust impacting Northern California. Under this project, we (1) more than doubled the resolution of the LLNL-IMPACT global atmospheric chemistry and aerosol model (to 1 x 1 degree), (2) added an interactive dust emission algorithm to the IMPACT model in order to simulate observed events, (3) added detailed microphysics to the IMPACT model to calculate the size-distribution of aerosols in terms of mass, (4) analyzed the aerosol mass and elemental composition of the size- and time-resolved aerosol measurements made by our UC Davis collaborators, and (5) determined that the majority of the observed soil dust is from intercontinental transport across the Pacific. A detailed report on this project is in the attached document ''Impact of Long-Range Dust Transport on Northern California in Spring 2002'' (UCRL-TR-209597), except for the addition of aerosol microphysics, which is covered in the attached document ''Implementation of the Missing Aerosol Physics into LLNL IMPACT'' (UCRL-TR-209568). In addition to the technical results, this project has (1) …

It has been well documented that spectacular dust storms in Asia (e.g. the events in 1998 and 2001) can affect the USA through long-range transport of dust across the Pacific. However, our observations and modeling show that the majority of dust at sites in Lassen National Park and Trinity Alps (Northern California) in spring 2002 (a year with no spectacular Asian dust events) is still from long-range intercontinental transport across the Pacific. We implemented the interactive dust emission algorithm of Ginoux et al. (2004) into the LLNL 3-D global atmospheric chemistry and aerosol transport model (IMPACT), then ran the model using a separate tracer for each dust emission region, using hi-resolution (1 x 1 degree) meteorological data from the NASA GMAO GEOS-3 assimilation system for 2001 and 2002. We also experimentally analyzed size- and time-resolved aerosol samples at Lassen National Park and Trinity Alps in the spring of 2002, which were taken as part of NOAA's ITCT 2k2 measurement campaign. The model-predicted time-series of soil dust over Northern California agrees remarkably well with our measurements, with a strong temporal correlation between the observations and intercontinental transport of dust across the Pacific in the model. Hence, we conclude that the majority …

Reducing agricultural water use in arid regions while maintaining or improving economic productivity of the agriculture sector is a major challenge. Controlled environment agriculture (CEA, or, greenhouse agriculture) affords advantages in direct resource use (less land and water required) and productivity (i.e., much higher product yield and quality per unit of resources used) relative to conventional open-field practices. These advantages come at the price of higher operating complexity and costs per acre. The challenge is to implement and apply CEA such that the productivity and resource use advantages will sufficiently outweigh the higher operating costs to provide for overall benefit and viability. This project undertook an investigation of CEA for livestock forage production as a water-saving alternative to open-field forage production in arid regions. Forage production is a large consumer of fresh water in many arid regions of the world, including the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico. With increasing competition among uses (agriculture, municipalities, industry, recreation, ecosystems, etc.) for limited fresh water supplies, agricultural practice alternatives that can potentially maintain or enhance productivity while reducing water use warrant consideration. The project established a pilot forage production greenhouse facility in southern New Mexico based on a relatively modest and passive (no …

Monocrystalline copper samples with orientations of [001] and [221] were shocked at pressures ranging from 20 GPa to 60 GPa using two techniques: direct drive lasers and explosively driven flyer plates. The pulse duration for these techniques differed substantially: 2 ns for the laser experiments and 1.1-1.4 {micro}s for the flyer-plate experiments. The residual microstructures were dependent on orientation, pressure, and shocking method. The much shorter pulse duration in laser shock yielded recovery microstructures with no or limited dislocation motion. For the flyer-plate experiments, the longer pulse duration allow shock-generated defects to reorganize into lower energy configurations. Calculations show that the post shock cooling occurs in a time scale of 0.2 s for laser shock and 1000 s for plate-impact shock, propitiating recovery and recrystallization conditions for the latter. At the higher pressure level extensive recrystallization was observed in the plate-impact samples, while it was absent in laser shock. An effect that is proposed to contribute significantly to the formation of recrystallized regions is the existence of micro-shearbands, which increase the local temperature.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the cause of TB, is a devastating human pathogen. The emergence of multi-drug resistance in recent years has prompted a search for new drug targets and for a better understanding of mechanisms of resistance. Here we focus on the gene product of an open reading frame from M. tuberculosis, Rv1347c, which is annotated as a putative aminoglycoside N-acetyltransferase. The Rv1347c protein does not show this activity, however, and we show from its crystal structure, coupled with functional and bioinformatic data, that its most likely role is in the biosynthesis of mycobactin, the M. tuberculosis siderophore. The crystal structure of Rv1347c was determined by MAD phasing from selenomethionine-substituted protein and refined at 2.2 {angstrom} resolution (R = 0.227, R{sub free} = 0.257). The protein is monomeric, with a fold that places it in the GCN5-related N-acetyltransferase (GNAT) family of acyltransferases. Features of the structure are an acylCoA binding site that is shared with other GNAT family members, and an adjacent hydrophobic channel leading to the surface that could accommodate long-chain acyl groups. Modeling the postulated substrate, the N{sup {var_epsilon}}-hydroxylysine side chain of mycobactin, into the acceptor substrate binding groove identifies two residues at the active site, His130 and Asp168, …

U.S. DOE and National Renewable Energy Laboratory evaluated Norcal Waste Systems liquefied natural gas (LNG) waste transfer trucks. Trucks had prototype Cummins Westport ISXG engines. Report gives final data.

An experiment containing WG-MOX fuel has been designed and irradiated from 1998 to 2004 in the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL). Important neutronics parameters were computed using novel Monte Carlo methods. The purpose of this summary is to compare the Weapons-Grade Mixed Oxide fuel (WG-MOX) Zr-tube’s neutron spectrum in ATR and PWR. The results indicate that the Zrtube’s neutron spectrum in ATR are softer than in PWR.