The research conducted in this work package is aimed at taking advantage of the long term thermodynamic stability of crystalline ceramics to create more durable waste forms (as compared to high level waste glass) in order to reduce the reliance on engineered and natural barrier systems. Durable ceramic waste forms that incorporate a wide range of radionuclides have the potential to broaden the available disposal options and to lower the storage and disposal costs associated with advanced fuel cycles. Assemblages of several titanate phases have been successfully demonstrated to incorporate radioactive waste elements, and the multiphase nature of these materials allows them to accommodate variation in the waste composition. Recent work has shown that they can be successfully produced from a melting and crystallization process. The objective of this report is to explain the design of ceramic host systems culminating in a reference ceramic formulation for use in subsequent studies on process optimization and melt property data assessment in support of FY13 melter demonstration testing. The waste stream used as the basis for the development and testing is a combination of the projected Cs/Sr separated stream, the Trivalent Actinide - Lanthanide Separation by Phosphorous reagent Extraction from Aqueous Komplexes (TALSPEAK) …

With the shutdown of the Tevatron, the T-980 crystal collimation experiment at Fermilab has been successfully completed. Results of dedicated beam studies in May 2011 are described in this paper. For these studies, two multi-strip crystals were installed in the vertical goniometer and an O-shaped crystal installed in a horizontal goniometer. A two-plane CMS pixel detector was also installed in order to enhance the experiment with the capability to image the profile of crystal channeled or multiple volume reflected beam. The experiment successfully imaged channeled beam from a crystal for 980-GeV protons for the first time. This new enhanced hardware yielded impressive results. The performance and characterization of the crystals studied have been very reproducible over time and consistent with simulations.

Here we report structural and functional studies of Mms6, a biomineralization protein that can promote the formation in vitro of magnetic nanoparticles with sizes and morphologies similar to the magnetites synthesized by magnetotactic bacteria. We found the binding pattern of Mms6 to ferric ion to be two-phase and multivalent. We quantatively determined that Mms6 binds one Fe{sup 3+} with a very high affinity (K{sub d} = 10{sup -16} M). The second phase of iron binding is multivalent and cooperative with respect to iron with a K{sub d} in the {mu}M range and a stoichiometry of about 20 ferric ion per protein molecule. We found that Mms6 exists in large particles of two sizes, one consisting of 20-40 monomeric units and the other of 200 units. From proteolytic digestion, ultracentrifugation and liposome fusion studies, we found that Mms6 forms a large micellar quaternary structure with the N-terminal domain self-assembling into a uniformly sized micelle and the C-terminal domain on the surface. The two-phase iron-binding pattern may be relevant to iron crystal formation. We propose that the first high affinity phase may stabilize a new conformation of the C-terminal domain that allows interaction with other C-terminal domains leading to a structural change …

Stimuli-responsive end-capped MSN materials are promising drug carriers that securely deliver a large payload of drug molecules without degradation or premature release. A general review of the recent progress in this field is presented, including a summary of a series of hard and soft caps for drug encapsulation and a variety of internal and external stimuli for controlled release of different therapeutics, a discussion of the biocompatibility of MSN both in vitro and in vivo, and a description of the sophisticated stimuli-responsive systems with novel capping agents and controlled release mechanism. The unique internal and external surfaces of MSN were utilized for the development of a glucose-responsive double delivery system end-capped with insulin. This unique system consists of functionalized MSNs capable of releasing insulin when the concentration of sugar in blood exceeds healthy levels. The insulin-free nanoparticles are then up taken by pancreatic cells, and release inside of them another biomolecule that stimulates the production of more insulin. The in vivo application of this system for the treatment of diabetes requires further understanding on the biological behaviors of these nanoparticles in blood vessels. The research presented in this dissertation demonstrated the size and surface effects on the interaction of MSNs …

Clemson University with Chevron as an industry partner developed and applied treatment technology using constructed wetland systems to decrease targeted constituents in simulated and actual produced waters to achieve reuse criteria and discharge limits. Pilot-scale and demonstration constructed wetland treatment system (CWTS) experiments led to design strategies for treating a variety of constituents of concern (COCs) in produced waters including divalent metals, metalloids, oil and grease, and ammonia. Targeted biogeochemical pathways for treatment of COCs in pilot-scale CWTS experiments included divalent metal sulfide precipitation through dissimilatory sulfate reduction, metal precipitation through oxidation, reduction of selenite to insoluble elemental selenium, aerobic biodegradation of oil, nitrification of ammonia to nitrate, denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas, separation of oil using an oilwater separator, and sorption of ammonia to zeolite. Treatment performance results indicated that CWTSs can be designed and built to promote specific environmental and geochemical conditions in order for targeted biogeochemical pathways to operate. The demonstration system successfully achieved consistent removal extents even while inflow concentrations of COCs in the produced water differed by orders of magnitude. Design strategies used in the pilot-scale and demonstration CWTSs to promote specific conditions that can be applied to designing full-scale CWTSs include plant and …

This report provides the results of the comprehensive annulus visual inspection for tanks 241- AZ-101 and 241-AZ-102 performed in fiscal year 2013. The inspection established a baseline covering about 95 percent of the annulus floor for comparison with future inspections. Any changes in the condition are also included in this document.

For elastically noninteracting vertical-fracture sets at arbitrary orientation angles to each other, a detailed model is presented in which the resulting anisotropic fractured medium generally has orthorhombic symmetry overall. Some of the analysis methods and ideas of Schoenberg are emphasized, together with their connections to other similarly motivated and conceptually related methods by Sayers and Kachanov, among others. Examples show how parallel vertical-fracture sets having HTI (horizontal transversely isotropic) symmetry transform into orthotropic fractured media if some subsets of the vertical fractures are misaligned with the others, and then the fractured system can have VTI (vertical transversely isotropic) symmetry if all of the fractures are aligned randomly or half parallel and half perpendicular to a given vertical plane. An orthotropic example having vertical fractures in an otherwise VTI earth system (studied previously by Schoenberg and Helbig) is compared with the other examples treated and it is finally shown how fluids in the fractures affect the orthotropic poroelastic system response to seismic waves. The key result is that fracture-influence parameters are multiplied by a factor of (1-B), where 0 {le} B < 1 is Skempton's second coefficient for poroelastic media. Skempton's B coefficient is itself a measurable characteristic of fluid-saturated porous …

The goal of the Development of High Temperature Capacitor Technology and Manufacturing Capability program was to mature a production-ready supply chain for reliable 250°C FPE (fluorinated polyester) film capacitors by 2011. These high-temperature film capacitors enable both the down hole drilling and aerospace industries by enabling a variety of benefits including: − Deeper oil exploration in higher temperature and pressure environments − Enabling power electronic and control equipment to operate in higher temperature environments − Enabling reduced cooling requirements of electronics − Increasing reliability and life of capacitors operating below rated temperature − Enabling capacitors to handle higher electrical losses without overheating. The key challenges to bringing the FPE film capacitors to market have been manufacturing challenges including: − FPE Film is difficult to handle and wind, resulting in poor yields − Voltage breakdown strength decreases when the film is wound into capacitors (~70% decrease) − Encapsulation technologies must be improved to enable higher temperature operation − Manufacturing and test cycle time is very long As a direct result of this program most of the manufacturing challenges have been met. The FPE film production metalization and winding yield has increased to over 82% from 70%, and the voltage breakdown strength …

The effects of partial ionization (ni/nn ≤ 1%) on magnetic reconnection in the Hall regime have been studied systematically in the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX). It is shown that, when neutrals are added the Hall quadrupole field pattern and thus electron flow is unchanged while the ion outflow speed is reduced due to ion-neutral drag. However, in constrast to theoretical predictions, the ion diffusion layer width does not change appreciably. Therefore, the total ion outflow flux and the normalized reconnection rate are reduced.

Groundwater beneath T-Area, a former laboratory and semiworks operation at the Department of Energy (DOE) Savannah River Site (SRS), is contaminated by chlorinated solvents (cVOCs). Since the contamination was detected in the 1980s, the cVOCs at T-Area have been treated by a combination of soil vapor extraction and groundwater pump and treat. The site received approval to temporarily discontinue the active groundwater treatment and implement a treatability study of enhanced attenuation - an engineering and regulatory strategy that has recently been developed by DOE and the Interstate Technology and Regulatory Council (ITRC 2007). Enhanced attenuation uses active engineering solutions to alter the target site in such a way that the contaminant plume will passively stabilize and shrink and to document that the action will be effective, timely, and sustainable. The paradigm recognizes that attenuation remedies are fundamentally based on a mass balance. Thus, long-term plume dynamics can be altered either by reducing the contaminant loading from the source or by increasing the rate of natural attenuation processes within all, or part of, the plume volume. The combination of technologies that emerged for T-Area included: (1) neat (pure) vegetable oil deployment in the deep vadose zone in the former source area, …

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) complex has a surplus of classified legacy weapon components generated over the years with no direct path for disposal. The majority of the components have been held for uncertainty of future use or no identified method of sanitization or disposal. As more weapons are retired, there is an increasing need to reduce the amount of components currently in storage or on hold. A process is currently underway to disposition and dispose of the legacy/retired weapons components across the DOE complex.

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Clemson University with Chevron as an industry partner developed and applied treatment technology using constructed wetland systems to decrease targeted constituents in simulated and actual produced waters to achieve reuse criteria and discharge limits. Pilot-scale and demonstration constructed wetland treatment system (CWTS) experiments led to design strategies for treating a variety of constituents of concern (COCs) in produced waters including divalent metals, metalloids, oil and grease, and ammonia. Targeted biogeochemical pathways for treatment of COCs in pilot-scale CWTS experiments included divalent metal sulfide precipitation through dissimilatory sulfate reduction, metal precipitation through oxidation, reduction of selenite to insoluble elemental selenium, aerobic biodegradation of oil, nitrification of ammonia to nitrate, denitrification of nitrate to nitrogen gas, separation of oil using an oilwater separator, and sorption of ammonia to zeolite. Treatment performance results indicated that CWTSs can be designed and built to promote specific environmental and geochemical conditions in order for targeted biogeochemical pathways to operate. The demonstration system successfully achieved consistent removal extents even while inflow concentrations of COCs in the produced water differed by orders of magnitude. Design strategies used in the pilot-scale and demonstration CWTSs to promote specific conditions that can be applied to designing full-scale CWTSs include plant and …

Fermilab's Recycler ring was used as a storage ring for accumulation and subsequent manipulations of 8 GeV antiprotons destined for the Tevatron collider. To satisfy these missions, a unique electron cooling system was designed, developed and successfully implemented. The most important features that distinguish the Recycler cooler from other existing electron coolers are its relativistic energy, 4.3 MV combined with 0.1-0.5 A DC beam current, a weak continuous longitudinal magnetic field in the cooling section, 100 G, and lumped focusing elsewhere. With the termination of the Tevatron collider operation, so did the cooler. In this article, we summarize the experience of running this unique machine.

Emission of carbon dioxide from fossil-fueled power generation stations contributes to global climate change. Storage of this carbon dioxide within the pores of geologic strata (geologic carbon storage) is one approach to mitigating the climate change that would otherwise occur. The large storage volume needed for this mitigation requires injection into brine-filled pore space in reservoir strata overlain by cap rocks. One of the main concerns of storage in such rocks is leakage via faults. In the early stages of site selection, site-specific fault coverages are often not available. This necessitates a method for using available fault data to develop an estimate of the likelihood of injected carbon dioxide encountering and migrating up a fault, primarily due to buoyancy. Fault population statistics provide one of the main inputs to calculate the encounter probability. Previous fault population statistics work is shown to be applicable to areal fault density statistics. This result is applied to a case study in the southern portion of the San Joaquin Basin with the result that the probability of a carbon dioxide plume from a previously planned injection had a 3% chance of encountering a fully seal offsetting fault.

The primary purpose of this project is to develop and validate an innovative, scalable phase change salt thermal energy storage (TES) system that can interface with Infinia’s family of free-piston Stirling engines (FPSE). This TES technology is also appropriate for Rankine and Brayton power converters. Solar TES systems based on latent heat of fusion rather than molten salt temperature differences, have many advantages that include up to an order of magnitude higher energy storage density, much higher temperature operation, and elimination of pumped loops for most of Infinia’s design options. DOE has funded four different concepts for solar phase change TES, including one other Infinia awarded project using heat pipes to transfer heat to and from the salt. The unique innovation in this project is an integrated TES/pool boiler heat transfer system that is the simplest approach identified to date and arguably has the best potential for minimizing the levelized cost of energy (LCOE). The Phase 1 objectives are to design, build and test a 1-hour TES proof-of-concept lab demonstrator integrated with an Infinia 3 kW Stirling engine, and to conduct a preliminary design of a 12-hour TES on-sun prototype.

Quarterly report that represents PNNL's results of HDPE, LDPE, and industrial polymer materials testing. ASTM D638 type 3 samples were subjected to a high pressure hydrogen environment between 3000 and 4000 PSI. These samples were tested using an instron load frame and were analyzed using a proprietary set of excel macros to determine trends in data. The development of an in-situ high pressure hydrogen tensile testing apparatus is discussed as is the stress modeling of the carbon fiber tank exterior.

Storage of CO{sub 2} in saline aquifers is intended to be at supercritical pressure and temperature conditions, but CO{sub 2} leaking from a geologic storage reservoir and migrating toward the land surface (through faults, fractures, or improperly abandoned wells) would reach subcritical conditions at depths shallower than 500-750 m. At these and shallower depths, subcritical CO{sub 2} can form two-phase mixtures of liquid and gaseous CO{sub 2}, with significant latent heat effects during boiling and condensation. Additional strongly non-isothermal effects can arise from decompression of gas-like subcritical CO{sub 2}, the so-called Joule-Thomson effect. Integrated modeling of CO{sub 2} storage and leakage requires the ability to model non-isothermal flows of brine and CO{sub 2} at conditions that range from supercritical to subcritical, including three-phase flow of aqueous phase, and both liquid and gaseous CO{sub 2}. In this paper, we describe and demonstrate comprehensive simulation capabilities that can cope with all possible phase conditions in brine-CO{sub 2} systems. Our model formulation includes: (1) an accurate description of thermophysical properties of aqueous and CO{sub 2}-rich phases as functions of temperature, pressure, salinity and CO{sub 2} content, including the mutual dissolution of CO{sub 2} and H{sub 2}O; (2) transitions between super- and subcritical conditions, …

This project was a collaboration between researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Irvine to investigate the utility of a global field-aligned mesh and gyrokinetic field solver for simulations of the tokamak plasma edge region. Mesh generation software from UC Irvine was tested with specific tokamak edge magnetic geometry scenarios and the quality of the meshes and the solutions to the gyrokinetic Poisson equation were evaluated.

The dynamics of an order parameter's amplitude and phase determines the collective behaviour of novel states emerging in complex materials. Time- and momentum-resolved pump-probe spectroscopy, by virtue of measuring material properties at atomic and electronic time scales out of equilibrium, can decouple entangled degrees of freedom by visualizing their corresponding dynamics in the time domain. Here we combine time-resolved femotosecond optical and resonant X-ray diffraction measurements on charge ordered La{sub 1.75}Sr{sub 0.25}NiO{sub 4} to reveal unforeseen photoinduced phase fluctuations of the charge order parameter. Such fluctuations preserve long-range order without creating topological defects, distinct from thermal phase fluctuations near the critical temperature in equilibrium. Importantly, relaxation of the phase fluctuations is found to be an order of magnitude slower than that of the order parameter's amplitude fluctuations, and thus limits charge order recovery. This new aspect of phase fluctuations provides a more holistic view of the phase's importance in ordering phenomena of quantum matter.

This grant was $12500 for partial support of an international conference, Molecular Quantum Mechanics 2010, which was held on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, from 24 to 29 May 2010. The conference involved more than 250 participants. The conference schedule ran from as early as 8:00 AM to as late as 10:30 PM at night, in order to accommodate six historical lectures, 16 plenary lectures, 42 invited talks and two very strong poster sessions containing 143 contributed posters. Since 1989, the Molecular Quantum Mechanics (MQM) series of international conferences has show- cased the frontiers of research in quantum chemistry with a strong focus on basic theory and algorithms, as well as highlights of topical applications. Both were strongly in evidence at MQM 2010. At the same time as embracing the future, the MQM conferences also honour the lifetime contributions of some of the most prominent scientists in the field of theoretical and computational quantum chemistry. MQM 2010 recognised the work of Prof. Henry F. ‘Fritz’ Schaefer of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia, who was previously on the faculty at Berkeley The travel of invited speakers was partially covered by sponsorships from Dell …

The poly(diethylaminoethyl methacrylate) (PDEAEM) - Pluronic F127 - PDEAEM pentablock copolymer (PB) gene delivery vector system has been found to possess an inherent selectivity in transfecting cancer cells over non-cancer cells in vitro, without attaching any targeting ligands. In order to understand the mechanism of this selective transfection, three possible intracellular barriers to transfection were investigated in both cancer and non-cancer cells. We concluded that escape from the endocytic pathway served as the primary intracellular barrier for PB-mediated transfection. Most likely, PB vectors were entrapped and rendered non-functional in acidic lysosomes of non-cancer cells, but survived in less acidic lysosomes of cancer cells. The work highlights the importance of identifying intracellular barriers for different gene delivery systems and provides a new paradigm for designing targeting vectors based on intracellular differences between cell types, rather than through the use of targeting ligands. The PB vector was further developed to simultaneously deliver anticancer drugs and genes, which showed a synergistic effect demonstrated by significantly enhanced gene expression in vitro. Due to the thermosensitive gelation behavior, the PB vector packaging both drug and gene was also investigated for its in vitro sustained release properties by using polyethylene glycol diacrylate as a barrier gel …

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The Navajo Hopi Land Commission Office (NHLCO), a Navajo Nation executive branch agency has conducted activities to determine capacity-building, institution-building, outreach and management activities to initiate the development of large-scale renewable energy - 100 megawatt (MW) or larger - generating projects on land in Northwestern New Mexico in the first year of a multi-year program. The Navajo Hopi Land Commission Renewable Energy Development Project (NREP) is a one year program that will develop and market a strategic business plan; form multi-agency and public-private project partnerships; compile site-specific solar, wind and infrastructure data; and develop and use project communication and marketing tools to support outreach efforts targeting the public, vendors, investors and government audiences.