This project involves the design and synthesis of receptors for oxoanions of environmental importance, including emphasis on high level and low activity waste. Target anions have included primarily oxoanions and a study of the basic concepts behind selective binding of target anions. A primary target has been sulfate because of its deleterious influence on the vitrification of tank wastes

A report for a cultural resources survey for the proposed Huck Finn Trail to be placed east of Prairie Creek in Richardson, Texas.

For years, farmers in the United States have looked with envy on their European counterparts' ability to profitably farm the wind through ownership of distributed, utility-scale wind projects. Only within the past few years, however, has farmer- or community-owned wind power development become a reality in the United States. The primary hurdle to this type of development in the United States has been devising and implementing suitable business and legal structures that enable such projects to take advantage of tax-based federal incentives for wind power. This article discusses the limitations of such incentives in supporting farmer- or community-owned wind projects, describes four ownership structures that potentially overcome such limitations, and finally conducts comparative financial analysis on those four structures, using as an example a hypothetical 1.5 MW farmer-owned project located in the state of Oregon. We find that material differences in the competitiveness of each structure do exist, but that choosing the best structure for a given project will largely depend on the conditions at hand; e.g., the ability of the farmer(s) to utilize tax credits, preference for individual versus ''cooperative'' ownership, and the state and utility service territory in which the project will be located.

Contaminating clouds of electrons are a common concern for accelerators of positive-charged particles, but there are some unique aspects of heavy-ion accelerators for fusion and high-energy density physics which make modeling such clouds especially challenging. In particular, self-consistent electron and ion simulation is required, including a particle advance scheme which can follow electrons in regions where electrons are strongly, weakly, and un-magnetized. We describe our approach to such self-consistency, and in particular a scheme for interpolating between full-orbit (Boris) and drift-kinetic particle pushes that enables electron time steps long compared to the typical gyro period in the magnets. We present tests and applications: simulation of electron clouds produced by three different kinds of sources indicates the sensitivity of the cloud shape to the nature of the source; first-of-a-kind self-consistent simulation of electron-cloud experiments on the High-Current Experiment (HCX) at LBNL, in which the machine can be flooded with electrons released by impact of the ion beam on an end plate, demonstrate the ability to reproduce key features of the ion-beam phase space; and simulation of a two-stream instability of thin beams in a magnetic field demonstrate the ability of the large-timestep mover to accurately calculate the instability.

We examined the potential use of standard optimization algorithms as implemented in the inverse modeling code iTOUGH2 (Finsterle, 1999abc) for the solution of aquifer remediation problems. Costs for the removal of dissolved or free-phase contaminants depend on aquifer properties, the chosen remediation technology, and operational parameters (such as number of wells drilled and pumping rates). A cost function must be formulated that may include actual costs and hypothetical penalty costs for incomplete cleanup; the total cost function is therefore a measure of the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed remediation scenario. The cost function is then minimized by automatically adjusting certain decision or operational parameters. We evaluate the impact of these operational parameters on remediation using a three-phase, three-component flow and transport simulator, which is linked to nonlinear optimization routines. We demonstrate that the methods developed for automatic model calibration are capable of minimizing arbitrary cost functions. An example of co-injection of air and steam makes evident the need for coupling optimization routines with an accurate state-of-the-art process simulator. Simplified models are likely to miss significant system behaviors such as increased downward mobilization due to recondensation of contaminants during steam flooding, which can be partly suppressed by the co-injection …

This report contains a summary of work conducted and results produced under the auspices of award DE-FC26-00NT40921, ''DOE Three-Dimensional Structure and Physical Properties of a Methane Hydrate Deposit and Gas Reservoir, Blake Ridge.'' This award supported acquisition, processing, and interpretation of two- and three-dimensional seismic reflection data over a large methane hydrate reservoir on the Blake Ridge, offshore South Carolina. The work supported by this project has led to important new conclusions regarding (1) the use of seismic reflection data to directly detect methane hydrate, (2) the migration and possible escape of free gas through the hydrate stability zone, and (3) the mechanical controls on the maximum thickness of the free gas zone and gas escape.

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The present paper reviews the use of expressed protein ligation for the biosynthesis of backbone cyclic polypeptides. This general method allows the in vivo and in vitro biosynthesis of cyclic polypeptides using recombinant DNA expression techniques. Biosynthetic access to backbone cyclic peptides opens the possibility to generate cell-based combinatorial libraries that can be screened inside living cells for their ability to attenuate or inhibit cellular processes.

High-energy-density (HED) physics refers broadly to the study of macroscopic collections of matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density. The experimental facilities most widely used for these studies are high-power lasers and magnetic-pinch generators. The HED physics pursued on these facilities is still in its infancy, yet new regimes of experimental science are emerging. Examples from astrophysics include work relevant to planetary interiors, supernovae, astrophysical jets, and accreting compact objects (such as neutron stars and black holes). In this paper, we will review a selection of recent results in this new field of HED laboratory astrophysics and provide a brief look ahead to the coming decade.

On August 19, 2004, three operators [employees of Washington TRU Solutions Central Characterization Project (CCP)] and one Health and Safety Technician [(H&ST), an employee of the University of California (UC)] were working in the mobile characterization unit, known as the Mobile Visual Examination and Repackaging Unit (MOVER). The unit, which was located in the Decontamination and Waste Treatment Facility (DWTF) Yard, uses a glovebox to repackage Transuranic (TRU) drums. Work was in progress on the last set of drums to be repackaged. Work had been completed on a TRU drum that was on its way out of the unit. Work had begun on a 0.6-plutonium-equivalent curie (PE Ci) TRU container. During the bag-in process for the 0.6-PE Ci container, operators encountered contamination measuring 6,000 counts per minute (cpm), or approximately 12,000 disintegrations per minute (dpm) on the exposed area of the drum port. The operators decontaminated the exposed, contaminated area of the drum port, and this exposed area was swiped again. The area was declared clean. During bag-out of the previous drum, operators noticed that the retaining band was not tightened optimally; therefore, the retaining band was replaced with a new one on this drum. The three operators and LLNL …

A reasonable description of the hydraulic conductivity structure is a prerequisite for modeling contaminant transport. However, formulations of hydrogeological inverse problems utilizing hydrogeological data only often fail to reliably resolve features at a resolution required for accurately predicting transport. Incorporation of geophysical data into the inverse problem offers the potential to increase this resolution. In this study, we invert hydrological tracer test data using the shape and relative magnitude variations derived from geophysical tomographic data to regionalize a hydrogeological inverse problem in order to estimate the hydraulic conductivity structure. Our approach does not require that the petrophysical relationship be known a-priori, but that it is linear and stationary within each geophysical anomaly. However, tomograms are imperfect models of geophysical properties and geophysical properties are not necessarily strongly linked to hydraulic conductivity. Therefore, we focus on synthetic examples where the correlation between radar velocity and hydraulic conductivity, as well as the geophysical data acquisition errors, are varied in order to assess what aspects of the hydraulic conductivity structure we can expect to resolve under different conditions. The results indicate that regularization of the tracer inversion procedure using geophysical data improves estimates of hydraulic conductivity. We find that even under conditions of …

Two points in our recent article on Edward Teller's scientific life (Physics Today, August 2004, page 45) require correction. In our description of Teller's students, we incorrectly stated that Arthur Kantrowitz's thesis was on the generation of hypersonic molecular beams. Actually, his thesis was on heat capacity lags in gas dynamics. Kantrowitz's invention of high intensity sources for molecular beams came later in his career. Maurice Goldhaber has emphasized that the situation with respect to possible nuclear resonances in ({gamma},n) or ({gamma},fission) reactions was quite unclear at the time of George C. Baldwin and G. Stanley Klaiber's papers on these reactions. This was because the rapid rise of their yield to a prominent peak with increasing energy, followed by a slower fall off was then thought to have been due to the competition between the rapidly rising density of nuclear states and the eventual domination of other reaction channels at higher energies. Goldhaber realized, however, that there could be an analogy between a possible collective nuclear resonance and the restrahl resonance (essentially the transverse optical phonon mode) in polar crystals. Goldhaber sought out Teller because of his paper with Russell Lyddane and Robert Sachs, relating the restrahl frequency to the …

SRS uses the Thermal Cycling Absorption Process (TCAP) to separate isotopes of hydrogen. The frequency of thermal cycles is a limit of the productivity of the process and that frequency is largely determined by the thermal diffusivity of the absorbent material. For a given tube diameter, a larger thermal diffusivity decreases the time required for each cycle. In 1998, the Engineering Development Laboratory measured thermal diffusivity and thermal conductivity for three TCAP materials in helium.

The temperature dependence of the photoluminescence (PL) transitions associated with various excitons and their phonon replicas in high-purity bulk ZnO has been studied at temperatures from 12 K to above room temperature (320 K). Several strong PL emission lines associated with LO phonon replicas of free and bound excitons are clearly observed. The room temperature PL spectrum is dominated by the phonon replicas of the free exciton transition with the maximum at the first LO phonon replica. The results explain the discrepancy between the transition energy of free exciton determined by reflection measurement and the peak position obtained by the PL measurement.

The radiocarbon calibration curve, IntCal04, extends back to 26 cal kBP. While several high resolution records exist beyond this limit, these data sets exhibit discrepancies one to another of up to several millennia. As a result, no calibration curve for the time range 26-50 cal kBP can be recommended as yet, but in this paper the IntCal04 working group compares the available data sets and offers a discussion of the information that they hold.

The development of high performance, massively parallel computers and the increasing demands of computationally challenging applications have necessitated the development of scalable solvers and preconditioners. One of the most effective ways to achieve scalability is the use of multigrid or multilevel techniques. Algebraic multigrid (AMG) is a very efficient algorithm for solving large problems on unstructured grids. While much of it can be parallelized in a straightforward way, some components of the classical algorithm, particularly the coarsening process and some of the most efficient smoothers, are highly sequential, and require new parallel approaches. This chapter presents the basic principles of AMG and gives an overview of various parallel implementations of AMG, including descriptions of parallel coarsening schemes and smoothers, some numerical results as well as references to existing software packages.

Previously, we reported preliminary results for commercial thin borosilicate glass sheets evaluated for use as a frequently-replaced optic to separate the radiation and contamination produced by the inertial confinement fusion experiments in the National Ignition Facility target chamber from the expensive precision laser optics which focus and shape the 351-nm laser beam. The goal is identification of low cost substrates that can deliver acceptable beam energy and focal spots to the target. The two parameters that dominate the transmitted beam quality are the transmitted wave front error and 351-nm absorption. Commercial materials and fabrication processes have now been identified which meet the beam energy and focus requirements for all of the missions planned for the National Ignition Facility. We present the first data for use of such an optic on the National Ignition Facility laser.

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Several peptide libraries containing up to 2 million unique peptide ligands have been synthesized. The peptides are attached onto a 80 micron resin and the length of these peptide ligands ranges from 5 to 9 amino acid residues. Using a novel calorimetric assay, the libraries were screened for binding to the ganglioside-binding domain of Clostridium Tetanus Toxin, a structural similar analog of the Clostridium Botulinum toxin. Several binding peptide sequences were identified, in which the detailed binding kinetics are currently underway using the Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) technique.

We present results from an investigation into the stability of underground structures in response to explosive loading. Field tests indicate that structural response can be dominated by the effect of preexisting fractures and faults in the rock mass. Consequently, accurate models of underground structures must take into account deformations across fractures and not simply within the intact portions of the rock mass. The distinct element method (DEM) is naturally suited to simulating such systems because it can explicitly accommodate the blocky nature of natural rock masses. We will discuss details specific to our implementation of the DEM and summarize recent results.

We demonstrate single-shot x-ray laser induced time-of-flight photoelectron spectroscopy on semiconductor and metal surfaces with picosecond time resolution. The LLNL COMET compact tabletop x-ray laser source provides the necessary high photon flux (>10{sup 12}/pulse), monochromaticity, picosecond pulse duration, and coherence for probing ultrafast changes in the city, chemical and electronic structure of these materials. Static valence band and shallow core-level photoemission spectra are presented for ambient temperature Ge(100) and polycrystalline Cu foils. Surface contamination was removed by UV ozone cleaning prior to analysis. In addition, the ultrafast nature of this technique lends itself to true single-state measurements of shocked and heated materials. Time-resolved electron time-of-flight photoemission results for ultra-thin Cu will be presented.