This research was conducted to investigate the feasibility of applying microbial biodegradation as a treatment technology for wastes containing radioactive elements and organic solvents (mixed wastes). In this study, we focused our efforts on the treatment of wastes generated by biomedical research as the result of purifying tritium labeled compounds by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). These wastes are typically 80 percent water with 20 percent acetonitrile or methanol or a mixture of both. The objective was to determine the potential of using biodegradation to treat the solvent component of tritiated mixed waste to a concentration below the land disposal restriction standard (1mg/L for acetonitrile). Once the standard is reached, the remaining radioactive waste is no longer classified as a mixed waste and it can then be solidified and placed in a secure landfill. This investigation focused on treating a 10 percent acetonitrile solution, which was used as a non-radioactive surrogate for HPLC waste, in a bioreactor. The results indicated that the biodegradation process could treat this solution down to less than 1 mg/L to meet the land disposal restriction standard.

Methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) has received high attention as it contributed to cleaner air and contaminated thousands of underground storage tank sites. Because MTBE is very water soluble, it is more difficult to remove from water by conventional remediation techniques. Therefore, biodegradation of MTBE has become a remediation alternative. In order to understand the transport and transformation processes, they present a closed form solution as a screening tool in this paper. The possible reaction pathways of first-order reactions are described as a reaction matrix. The singular value decomposition is conducted analytically to decouple the partial differential equations of the multi-species transport system coupled by the reaction matrix into multiple independent subsystems. Therefore, the complexity of mathematical description for the reactive transport system is significantly reduced and analytical solutions may be previously available or easily derived.

A novel, but general, arrangement of parallel sets of gratings is presented that can effectively increase the dispersion of pulse compressors and expanders by over an order of magnitude. These arrangements will dramatically reduce the footprint of the pulse compressors and expanders used in CPA.

The successful commercialization of fuel cells will depend on the achievement of competitive system costs and efficiencies. System cost directly impacts the capital equipment component of cost of electricity (COE) and is a major contributor to the O and M component. The replacement costs for equipment (also heavily influenced by stack life) is generally a major contributor to O and M costs. In this project, they worked with the SECA industrial teams to estimate the impact of general manufacturing issues of interest on stack cost using an activities-based cost model for anode-supported planar SOFC stacks with metallic interconnects. An earlier model developed for NETL for anode supported planar SOFCs was enhanced by a linkage to a performance/thermal/mechanical model, by addition of Quality Control steps to the process flow with specific characterization methods, and by assessment of economies of scale. The 3-dimensional adiabatic performance model was used to calculate the average power density for the assumed geometry and operating conditions (i.e., inlet and exhaust temperatures, utilization, and fuel composition) based on publicly available polarizations curves. The SECA team provided guidance on what manufacturing and design issues should be assessed in this Phase I demonstration of cost modeling capabilities. They considered the …

The outer can welder (OCW) in the FB-Line Facility at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is a Gas Tungsten Arc Weld (GTAW) system used to create outer canisters compliant with the Department of Energy 3013 Standard, DOE-STD-3013-2000, Stabilization, Packaging, and Storage of Plutonium-Bearing Materials. The key welding parameters controlled and monitored on the outer can welder Data Acquisition System (DAS) are weld amperage, weld voltage, and weld rotational speed. Inner 3013 canisters from the Bagless Transfer System that contain plutonium metal or plutonium oxide are placed inside an outer 3013 canister. The canister is back-filled with helium and welded using the outer can welder. The completed weld is screened to determine if it is satisfactory by reviewing the OCW DAS key welding parameters, performing a helium leak check, performing a visual examination by a qualified weld inspector, and performing digital radiography of the completed weld. Canisters with unsatisfactory welds are cut open and repackaged. Canisters with satisfactory welds are deemed compliant with the 3013 standard for long-term storage.

Saltwater, or brine, underlies fresh water in many aquifers, with a transition zone separating them. Pumping fresh water by wells located above the transition zone produces upconing of the latter, eventually salinizing the pumped water, forcing shut-off. The salinity of the pumped water depends on the pumping rate, on the location of the well's screen, on the fresh water flow regime, and on the difference in density between fresh and salt water, expressed as a dimensionless factor called density difference factor (DDF). Following the well's shut-off, the upconed saltwater mound undergoes decay, tending to return to the pre-pumping regime. In this paper, the upconing-decay processes in an axially symmetrical system are investigated to discover how they are affected by the DDF and by the dispersivities. The code FEAS-Brine, developed for the simulation of coupled density-dependent flow and salt transport, is used. In this code, the flow equation is solved by the Galer:wqkin finite element method (FEM), while the advective-dispersive salt transport equation is solved in the Eulerian-Lagrangian framework. This code does not suffer from the instability constraint on the Peclet number in the vicinity of the pumping well, where advection dominates the salt transport. Simulation results show that upconing is …

The Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) has been requested to perform sulfur (S) analysis on digested radioactive sludge and supernatant samples by Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission Spectrometry (ICP-ES). The amount of sulfur is a concern because there are sulfur limits for the incoming feed, due to glass melter, process vessel, and off-gas line corrosion concerns and limited sulfur solubility in the glass wasteform. Recent changes in the washing strategy and stream additions change the amount of sulfur in the sludge. Increasing the sulfur concentration in the sludge challenges the current limits, so accurately determining the amount of sulfur present in a sludge batch is paramount. There are two important figures of merit that need to be evaluated for this analysis. The first is the detection limit (LOD), the smallest concentration of an element that can be detected with a defined certainty. This issue is important since the sulfur concentration in these process streams is l ow. Another critical analytical parameter is the effect on the S quantitation from potential spectral interferences. Spectral interferences are caused by background emission from plasma recombination events, scattered and stray light from the line emission of high concentration elements, or molecular band emission and from …

Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) researchers modeled ion exchange removal of cesium from dissolved salt waste solutions. The results assist in evaluating proposed configurations for an ion exchange process to remove residual cesium from low curie waste streams. A process for polishing (i.e., removing small amounts) of cesium may prove useful should supernate draining fail to meet the Low Curie Salt (LCS) target limit of 0.1 Ci of Cs-137 per gallon of salt solution. Cesium loading isotherms and column breakthrough curves for Low Curie dissolved salt solutions were computed to provide performance predictions for various column designs.

The initial performance of five different types of Li-ion rechargeable batteries, from Quallion Corp, UltraLife Battery and Toshiba, was measured and compared. Cell characterization included variable-rate constant-current cycling, various USDOE pulse-test protocols and full-spectrum electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. Changes in impedance and capacity were monitored during electrochemical cycling under various conditions, including constant-current cycling over 100 percent DOD at a range of temperature and pulse profile cycling over a very narrow range of DOD at room temperature. All cells were found to maintain more than 80 percent of their rated capacity for more than 400 constant current 100 percent DOD cycles. The power fade (or impedance rise) of the cells varied considerably. New methods for interpreting the pulse resistance data were evaluated for their usefulness in interpreting performance mechanism as a function of test protocol and cell design.

The Yucca Mountain site has a dry climate and deep water table, with the repository located in the middle of an unsaturated zone approximately 600 m thick. Radionuclide transport processes from the repository to the water table are sensitive to the unsaturated zone flow field, as well as to sorption, matrix diffusion, radioactive decay, and colloid transport mechanisms. The unsaturated zone flow and transport models are calibrated against both physical and chemical data, including pneumatic pressure, liquid saturation, water potential, temperature, chloride, and calcite. The transport model predictions are further compared with testing specific to unsaturated zone transport: at Alcove 1 in the Exploratory Studies Facility (ESF), at Alcove 8 and Niche 3 of the ESF, and at the Busted Butte site. The models are applied to predict the breakthroughs at the water table for nonsorbing and sorbing radionuclides, with faults shown as the important paths for radionuclide transport. Daughter products of some important radionuclides, such as {sup 239}Pu and {sup 241}Am, have faster transport than the parents and must be considered in the unsaturated zone transport model. Colloid transport is significantly affected by colloid size, but only negligibly affected by lunetic declogging (reverse filtering) mechanisms. Unsaturated zone model uncertainties …

OAK-B135 Rate-Controlling Mechanisms in Five-Power-Law Creep. The initial grant emphasized the rate-controlling processes for five power-law creep. The effort has six aspects: (1) Theory of Taylor hardening from the Frank dislocation network in five power law substructures. (2) The dual dynamical and hardening nature of dislocations in five power law substructures. (3) Determination of the existence of long-range internal stress in five-power law creep dislocation substructures. (4) Dynamic recovery mechanisms associated with dislocation heterogeneities during five power law creep. (5) Versatility of five power law creep concept to other (hcp) crystal structures. (6) Writing of a book on ''Fundamental of Creep in Metals and Alloys'' by M.E. Kassner and Maria-Teresa Perez-Frado (postdoctoral scholar, funded by this project) Elsevier Press, 2004, in press. These areas are consistent with the original goals of this project as delineated in the original proposal to Basic Energy Sciences. The progress in each of these areas will be discussed separately and there will be an attempt to tie each aspect together so as to allow a summary regarding the conclusions with respect to the rate-controlling mechanisms of five power-law creep.

Audio information stored in the undulations of grooves in a medium such as a phonograph disc record or cylinder may be reconstructed, without contact, by measuring the groove shape using precision optical metrology methods and digital image processing. The viability of this approach was recently demonstrated on a 78 rpm shellac disc using two dimensional image acquisition and analysis methods. The present work reports the first three dimensional reconstruction of mechanically recorded sound. The source material, a celluloid cylinder, was scanned using color coded confocal microscopy techniques and resulted in a faithful playback of the recorded information.

I would like to determine how accurately a variety of neutron transport code packages (code and cross section libraries) can calculate simple integral parameters, such as K{sub eff}, for systems that are sensitive to thermal neutron scattering. Since we will only consider theoretical systems, we cannot really determine absolute accuracy compared to any real system. Therefore rather than accuracy, it would be more precise to say that I would like to determine the spread in answers that we obtain from a variety of code packages. This spread should serve as an excellent indicator of how accurately we can really model and calculate such systems today. Hopefully, eventually this will lead to improvements in both our codes and the thermal scattering models that they use in the future. In order to accomplish this I propose a number of extremely simple systems that involve thermal neutron scattering that can be easily modeled and calculated by a variety of neutron transport codes. These are theoretical systems designed to emphasize the effects of thermal scattering, since that is what we are interested in studying. I have attempted to keep these systems very simple, and yet at the same time they include most, if not …

The sulfur found on the surfaces of stainless steel 303 (SS303) after nitric acid passivation originated from the MnS inclusions in the steel. The nitric acid attacked and dissolved these MnS inclusions, and redeposited micron-sized elemental sulfur particles back to the surface. To develop an alternative passivation procedure for SS303, citric and phosphoric acids have been evaluated. The experimental results show neither acid causes a significant amount of sulfur deposit. Thus, these two acids can be used as alternatives to nitric acid passivation for NIF applications. For SS303 previously passivated by nitric acid, NaOH soak can be used as a remedial cleaning process to effectively remove the sulfur deposits.

Metal oxide nanocrystals deposited on metal surfaces have novel electronic properties due to interface and nanoscale effects. Crystals and nanoscale ribbons of MoO{sub 3} are highly effective catalysts and field emitters. This renders MoO{sub 3} an interesting prototype. Whilst MoO{sub 3} exists as bilayers in the bulk crystal5, in this work, monolayer MoO{sub 3} nanocrystals were grown epitaxially on Au(111). Ab initio calculations reveal that Au stabilizes the MoO{sub 3} monolayer through electronic charge redistribution at the interface. The Mo-O bonds are able to rotate about one another, allowing the MoO{sub 3} monolayer to adjust to the Au lattice. As a result, the monolayer is semimetallic, unlike bulk MoO{sub 3} which is semiconducting. This remarkable flexibility of the oxide lattice suggests the possibility of tuning electronic properties of transition metal oxides via interface interactions. The overall surface pattern obtained is affected by an interplay between the Au(111) surface reconstruction and the edges of the deposited MoO{sub 3} islands.

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Laser peening is an emerging modern process that impresses a compressive stress into the surface of metals or alloys. This treatment can reduce the rate of intergranular stress corrosion cracking and fatigue cracking in structural metals or Alloy 600 needed for nuclear power plants.

This document summarizes the activities performed and progress made in FY-03. Various approaches for automating the particle fuel production QC process using on-line nondestructive methods for higher reliability were evaluated. In this first-year of a three-year project, surrogate fuel particles made available for testing included leftovers from initial coater development runs. These particles had a high defect fraction and the particle properties spanned a wide range, providing the opportunity to examine worst-case conditions before refining the inspection methods to detect more subtle coating features. Particles specifically designed to evaluate the NDE methods being investigated under this project will be specified and fabricated at ORNL early next reporting period. The literature was reviewed for existing inspection technology and to identify many of the fuel particle conditions thought to degrade its performance. A modeling study, including the electromagnetic and techniques, showed that the in-line electromagnetic methods should provide measurable responses to missing layers, kernel diameter, and changes in coating layer thickness, with reasonable assumptions made for material conductivities. The modeling study for the ultrasonic methods provided the resonant frequencies that should be measured using the resonant ultrasound technique, and the results from these calculations were published in the proceedings for two conferences. …

In a recent paper it has been shown that the nuclear Ramsauer model does not do well in representing details of the angular distribution of neutron elastic scattering for incident energies of less than 60 MeV for {sup 208}Pb. We show that the default angular bin dispersion most widely used in Monte Carlo transport codes is such that the observed differences in angular shapes are on too fine a scale to affect transport calculations. The effect of increasing the number of Monte Carlo angle bins is studied to determine the dispersion necessary for calculations to be sensitive to the observed discrepancies in angular distributions. We also show that transport calculations are sensitive to differences in the elastic scattering cross section given by recent fits of {sup 208}Pb data compared with older fits.

We have successfully developed a practical approach to predicting the location of skin surface dose at potential biopsy sites that receive 1 cGy and 10 cGy, respectively, in support of in vivo biologic dosimetry in humans. This represents a significant technical challenge as the sites lie on the patient surface out side the radiation fields. The PEREGRINE Monte Carlo simulation system was used to model radiation dose delivery and TLDs were used for validation on a phantom and confirmation during patient treatment. In the developmental studies the Monte Carlo simulations consistently underestimated the dose at the biopsy site by approximately 15% for a realistic treatment configuration, most likely due to lack of detail in the simulation of the linear accelerator outside the main beam line. Using a single, thickness-independent correction factor for the clinical calculations, the average of 36 measurements for the predicted 1 cGy point was 0.985 cGy (standard deviation: 0.110 cGy) despite patient breathing motion and other real world challenges. Since the 10 cGy point is situated in the region of high dose gradient at the edge of the field, patient motion had a greater effect and the six measured points averaged 5.90 cGy (standard deviation: 1.01 cGy), …

The growing gap between sustained and peak performance for scientific applications is a well-known problem in high performance computing. The recent development of parallel vector systems offers the potential to reduce this gap for many computational science codes and deliver a substantial increase in computing capabilities. This project examines the performance of the cacheless vector Earth Simulator (ES) and compares it to superscalar cache-based IBM Power3 system. Results demonstrate that the ES is significantly faster than the Power3 architecture, highlighting the tremendous potential advantage of the ES for numerical simulation. However, vectorization of a particle-in-cell application (GTC) greatly increased the memory footprint preventing loop-level parallelism and limiting scalability potential.