Energy and economic analysis comparing the current Michigan residential energy efficiency code to the 2009 IECC.

Model and experimental estimates of the Multi-Isotope Process Monitor performance for determining burnup after dissolution and acid concentration during solvent extraction steps during reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel are presented.

The Greenidge Multi-Pollutant Control Project was conducted as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's Power Plant Improvement Initiative to demonstrate an innovative combination of air pollution control technologies that can cost-effectively reduce emissions of SO{sub 2}, NO{sub x}, Hg, acid gases (SO{sub 3}, HCl, and HF), and particulate matter from smaller coal-fired electric generating units (EGUs). There are about 400 units in the United States with capacities of 50-300 MW that currently are not equipped with selective catalytic reduction (SCR), flue gas desulfurization (FGD), or mercury control systems. Many of these units, which collectively represent more than 55 GW of installed capacity, are difficult to retrofit for deep emission reductions because of space constraints and unfavorable economies of scale, making them increasingly vulnerable to retirement or fuel switching in the face of progressively more stringent environmental regulations. The Greenidge Project sought to confirm the commercial readiness of an emissions control system that is specifically designed to meet the environmental compliance requirements of these smaller coal-fired EGUs by offering a combination of deep emission reductions, low capital costs, small space requirements, applicability to high-sulfur coals, mechanical simplicity, and operational flexibility. The multi-pollutant control system includes a NO{sub x}OUT CASCADE{reg_sign} hybrid …

The digital full text of this report is divided into two parts. This part of the report contains five and a half of the twelve appendices of the report.

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This report provides information about the Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities and Issues for Congress on China Naval Modernization since Concern has grown in congress about the china military modernization.

Many properties of nanostructures depend on the atomicconfiguration at the surface. One common technique used for determiningthis surface structure is based on the low energy electron diffraction(LEED) method, which uses a high-fidelity physics model to compareexperimental results with spectra computed via a computer simulation.While this approach is highly effective, the computational cost of thesimulations can be prohibitive for large systems. In this work, wepropose the use of a direct search method in conjunction with an additivesurrogate. This surrogate is constructed from a combination of asimplified physics model and an interpolation that is based on thedifferences between the simplified physics model and the full fidelitymodel.

This paper provides a brief history of the U.S. Type B 6M specification container, its introduction into U.S. Code of federal regulations and its scheduled elimination three decades later. The paper also presents development, testing and deployment by the Department of Energy (DOE) of an enhanced drum closure called the 'Blanton Clamshell' (patent pending) that was designed to replace the standard open-head C-ring closure for the 55- and 85-gallon drums described in the 6M specification to extend their safe use. Nuclear Filter Technology has the Exclusive License for Clamshell production. Drum packages utilizing the standard C-ring closure have been a main-stay for over a half of a century in the national and international nuclear industry for shipping radioactive materials and will remain so in the foreseeable future. Drum package use in the U.S. increased heavily in the 1950's with development of the Weapons Complex and subsequently the commercial nuclear reactor industry.

The dielectric wall accelerator (DWA) is a compact pulsed power device where the pulse forming lines, switching, and vacuum wall are integrated into a single compact geometry. For this effort, we initiated a extensive compact pulsed power development program and have pursued the study of switching (gas, oil, laser induced surface flashover and photoconductive), dielectrics (ceramics and nanoparticle composites), pulse forming line topologies (asymmetric and symmetric Blumleins and zero integral pulse forming lines), and multilayered vacuum insulator (HGI) technology. Finally, we fabricated an accelerator cell for test on ETAII (a 5.5 MeV, 2 kA, 70 ns pulsewidth electron beam accelerator). We review our past results and report on the progress of accelerator cell testing.

We discuss the energy dependence of the total charm cross section and some of its theoretical uncertainties including the quark mass, scale choice and the parton densities. We compare the next-to-leading order calculation of the total cross section with results obtained using PYTHIA.

The investigation reported here was conducted by the Commodity Credit Corporation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (CCC/USDA) in 2006. The investigation addressed carbon tetrachloride contamination on the former CCC/USDA grain storage facility at Ramona, Kansas. The results clearly demonstrate that only minimal contamination is associated with the past use of carbon tetrachloride on the former CCC/USDA property. No soil contamination was detected at concentrations above Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) risk-based screening level (RBSL) Tier 2 standard of 200 {micro}g/kg for the soil-to-groundwater protection pathway. Carbon tetrachloride concentrations in groundwater above the RBSL and maximum contaminant level (MCL) value of 5.0 {micro}g/L were detected in only two samples, collected at adjacent locations on the southeast part of the property. The relatively low concentrations detected and the limited areal extent of the contamination demonstrate that no imminent threat exists on the former CCC/USDA property to warrant remediation. The soil and groundwater contamination detected on the former CCC/USDA property is clearly separate from contamination detected at off-site locations. The carbon tetrachloride and chloroform contamination in groundwater (at concentrations above the RBSL and MCL value) associated with past activities on the former CCC/USDA property is contained within the property boundaries. …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Intellectual property plays a significant role in the U.S. economy, and the United States is an acknowledged leader in its creation. Industries that relied on IP protection were estimated to account for over half of all U.S. exports and employed about 18 million Americans in 2006. However, legal protection of IP varies greatly around the world, and several countries are havens for the production of counterfeit and pirated goods. Counterfeit products raise serious public health and safety concerns, and the annual losses that companies face from IP violations are substantial. Eight federal agencies undertake a wide range of activities in support of protecting IP rights, and two mechanisms coordinate protection efforts: the National Intellectual Property Law Enforcement Coordination Council (NIPLECC) and the Strategy for Targeting Organized Piracy (STOP). GAO was asked to address: (1) the nature of the risks that U.S. corporations face in protecting IP, particularly in countries such as China, and (2) U.S. methods for implementing and coordinating domestic IP enforcement activities. This testimony is based on issued GAO reports that focused on IP protection and related trade matters."

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's New Architectures Testbed recently evaluated Exegy's Text Miner appliance to assess its applicability to high-performance, automated native language analysis. The evaluation was performed with support from the Computing Applications and Research Department in close collaboration with Global Security programs, and institutional activities in native language analysis. The Exegy Text Miner is a special-purpose device for detecting and flagging user-supplied patterns of characters, whether in streaming text or in collections of documents at very high rates. Patterns may consist of simple lists of words or complex expressions with sub-patterns linked by logical operators. These searches are accomplished through a combination of specialized hardware (i.e., one or more field-programmable gates arrays in addition to general-purpose processors) and proprietary software that exploits these individual components in an optimal manner (through parallelism and pipelining). For this application the Text Miner has performed accurately and reproducibly at high speeds approaching those documented by Exegy in its technical specifications. The Exegy Text Miner is primarily intended for the single-byte ASCII characters used in English, but at a technical level its capabilities are language-neutral and can be applied to multi-byte character sets such as those found in Arabic and Chinese. The system is …

This report describes the technical results of tasks and activities conducted in FY07 to support the DOE-CEA collaboration on the OSMOSE program. The activities are divided into five high-level tasks: reactor modeling and pre-experiment analysis, sample fabrication and analysis, reactor experiments, data treatment and analysis, and assessment for relevance to high priority advanced reactor programs (such as GNEP and Gen-IV).

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The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) is considering a list of reactors and nuclear fuels as part of its chartered initiative. Because many of the candidate materials have not been explored experimentally under the conditions of interest, and in order to economize on program costs, analytical support in the form of combined first principle and mechanistic modeling is highly desirable. The present work is a compilation of mechanistic models developed in order to describe the fission product behavior of irradiated nuclear fuel. The mechanistic nature of the model development allows for the possibility of describing a range of nuclear fuels under varying operating conditions. Key sources include the FASTGRASS code with an application to UO{sub 2} power reactor fuel and the Dispersion Analysis Research Tool (DART ) with an application to uranium-silicide and uranium-molybdenum research reactor fuel. Described behavior mechanisms are divided into subdivisions treating fundamental materials processes under normal operation as well as the effect of transient heating conditions on these processes. Model topics discussed include intra- and intergranular gas-atom and bubble diffusion, bubble nucleation and growth, gas-atom re-solution, fuel swelling and ?scion gas release. In addition, the effect of an evolving microstructure on these processes (e.g., irradiation-induced recrystallization) …

Laser-induced breakdown in the bulk of transparent dielectric materials is associated with the generation of extreme localized conditions of temperatures and pressures. In this work, we perform pump and probe damage testing experiments to investigate the evolution of transient absorption by the host material arising from modifications following confined laser energy deposition in fused silica and DKDP materials. Specifically, we measure the size of the damage sites observed in the region of spatial overlap between the pump and probe pulses versus probe time delay and energy. Results of this proof-of-principle experimental work confirm that material modifications under extreme conditions created during a damage event include transient optical absorption. In addition, we found that the relaxation times of the induced absorption are very distinct for DKDP and SiO{sub 2} even under identical excitation conditions, on the order of 100 ns and 100 {micro}s, respectively.

Aluminum is a principal element in alkaline nuclear sludge waste stored in high level waste (HLW) tanks at the Savannah River Site. The mass of sludge in a HLW tank can be reduced through the caustic leaching of aluminum, i.e. converting aluminum oxides (gibbsite) and oxide-hydroxides (boehmite) into soluble hydroxides through reaction with a hot caustic solution. The temperature limits outlined by the chemistry control program for HLW tanks to prevent caustic stress corrosion cracking (CSCC) in concentrated hydroxide solutions will potentially be exceeded during the sludge mass reduction (SMR) campaign. Corrosion testing was performed to determine the potential for CSCC under expected conditions. The experimental test program, developed based upon previous test results and expected conditions during the current SMR campaign, consisted of electrochemical and mechanical testing to determine the susceptibility of ASTM A516 carbon steel to CSCC in the relevant environment. Anodic polarization test results indicated that anodic inhibition at the temperatures and concentrations of interest for SMR is not a viable, consistent technical basis for preventing CSCC. However, the mechanical testing concluded that CSCC will not occur under conditions expected during SMR for a minimum of 35 days. In addition, the stress relief for the Type III/IIIA …

This report provides an overview of the international investment position on the United States as a net debtor nation.

This report reviews the types of air emissions from livestock and poultry operations and their human health and environmental impacts. It then discusses provisions of several federal laws concerned with environmental impacts, beginning with the Clean Water Act, because protecting water resources has been the primary regulatory focus regarding livestock and animal operations.

The toxicological source terms used for potential accident assessment in the Hanford Tank Farms DSA are based on toxicological sums-of-fractions (SOFs) that were calculated based on the Best Basis Inventory (BBI) from May 2002, using a method that depended on thermodynamic equilibrium calculations of the compositions of liquid and solid phases. The present report describes a simplified SOF-calculation method that is to be used in future toxicological updates and assessments and compares its results (for the 2002 BBI) to those of the old method.