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The Melt Attack and Coolability Experiments (MACE) program at Argonne National Laboratory addressed the issue of the ability of water to cool and thermally stabilize a molten core-concrete interaction when the reactants are flooded from above. These tests provided data regarding the nature of corium interactions with concrete, the heat transfer rates from the melt to the overlying water pool, and the role of noncondensable gases in the mixing processes that contribute to melt quenching. The Melt Coolability and Concrete Interaction (MCCI) program is pursuing separate effect tests to examine the viability of the melt coolability mechanisms identified as part of the MACE program. These mechanisms include bulk cooling, water ingression, volcanic eruptions, and crust breach. At the second PRG meeting held at ANL on 22-23 October 2002, a preliminary design1 for a separate effects test to investigate the melt eruption cooling mechanism was presented for PRG review. At this meeting, NUPEC made several recommendations on the experiment approach aimed at optimizing the chances of achieving a floating crust boundary condition in this test. The principal recommendation was to incorporate a mortar sidewall liner into the test design, since data from the COTELS experiment program indicates that corium does not …

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Chinese translation of the Using Waste Heat for External Processes fact sheet. Provides suggestions on how to use waste heat in industrial applications. The temperature of exhaust gases from fuel-fired industrial processes depends mainly on the process temperature and the waste heat recovery method. Figure 1 shows the heat lost in exhaust gases at various exhaust gas temperatures and percentages of excess air. Energy from gases exhausted from higher temperature processes (primary processes) can be recovered and used for lower temperature processes (secondary processes). One example is to generate steam using waste heat boilers for the fluid heaters used in petroleum crude processing. In addition, many companies install heat exchangers on the exhaust stacks of furnaces and ovens to produce hot water or to generate hot air for space heating.

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The increasing use of wind power as a source of electricity poses new challenges with regard to both power production and load balance in the electricity grid. This new source of energy is volatile and highly variable. The only way to integrate such power into the grid is to develop reliable and accurate wind power forecasting systems. Electricity generated from wind power can be highly variable at several different timescales: sub-hourly, hourly, daily, and seasonally. Wind energy, like other electricity sources, must be scheduled. Although wind power forecasting methods are used, the ability to predict wind plant output remains relatively low for short-term operation. Because instantaneous electrical generation and consumption must remain in balance to maintain grid stability, wind power's variability can present substantial challenges when large amounts of wind power are incorporated into a grid system. A critical issue is ramp events, which are sudden and large changes (increases or decreases) in wind power. This report presents an overview of current ramp definitions and state-of-the-art approaches in ramp event forecasting.

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Since 1987 the U.S. has focused research and development activities relevant to the disposal of commercial used nuclear fuel and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) owned spent nuclear fuel and high level waste on the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. At the same time, the U.S. successfully deployed a deep geologic disposal facility for defense-related transuranic waste in bedded salt at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In 2009 the DOE established the Used Fuel Disposition Campaign (UFDC) within the Office of Nuclear Energy. The Mission of the UFDC is to identify alternatives and conduct scientific research and technology development to enable storage, transportation and disposal of used nuclear fuel and wastes generated by existing and future nuclear fuel cycles. The U.S. national laboratories have participated on these programs and has conducted research and development related to these issues to a limited extent. However, a comprehensive research and development (R&D) program investigating a variety of geologic media has not been a part of the U.S. waste management program since the mid 1980s. Such a comprehensive R&D program is being developed in the UFDC with a goal of meeting the UFDC Grand Challenge to provide a sound technical basis for absolute …

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Water issues continue to play an important role in producing natural gas from shale formations. This report examines water issues relating to shale gas production in the Fayetteville Shale. In particular, the report focuses on how gas producers obtain water supplies used for drilling and hydraulically fracturing wells, how that water is transported to the well sites and stored, and how the wastewater from the wells (flowback and produced water) is managed. Last year, Argonne National Laboratory made a similar evaluation of water issues in the Marcellus Shale (Veil 2010). Gas production in the Marcellus Shale involves at least three states, many oil and gas operators, and multiple wastewater management options. Consequently, Veil (2010) provided extensive information on water. This current study is less complicated for several reasons: (1) gas production in the Fayetteville Shale is somewhat more mature and stable than production in the Marcellus Shale; (2) the Fayetteville Shale underlies a single state (Arkansas); (3) there are only a few gas producers that operate the large majority of the wells in the Fayetteville Shale; (4) much of the water management information relating to the Marcellus Shale also applies to the Fayetteville Shale, therefore, it can be referenced from …

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The Commodity Credit Corporation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (CCC/USDA) operated a grain storage facility at the western edge of Everest, Kansas, from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. Sampling by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) in 1997 resulted in the detection of carbon tetrachloride in one domestic well (the Nigh well) northwest of the former facility. On behalf of the CCC/USDA, Argonne National Laboratory subsequently conducted a series of investigations to characterize the contamination (Argonne 2003, 2006a,b,c). Automatic, continuous monitoring of groundwater levels began in 2002 and is ongoing at six locations. The results have consistently indicated groundwater flow toward the north-northwest from the former CCC/USDA property to the Nigh property, then west-southwest from the Nigh property to the intermittent creek. Sitewide periodic groundwater and surface water sampling with analysis for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) began in 2008. Argonne's combined data indicate no significant downgradient extension of contamination since 2000. At present, the sampling is annual, as approved by the KDHE (2009) in response to a plan developed for the CCC/USDA (Argonne 2009). This document presents a plan for collecting indoor air samples in homes located along and adjacent to the defined extent of …

A literature review and evaluation has been conducted on cradle-to-gate life-cycle inventory studies of lead-acid, nickel-cadmium, nickel-metal hydride, sodium-sulfur, and lithium-ion battery technologies. Data were sought that represent the production of battery constituent materials and battery manufacture and assembly. Life-cycle production data for many battery materials are available and usable, though some need updating. For the remaining battery materials, lifecycle data either are nonexistent or, in some cases, in need of updating. Although battery manufacturing processes have occasionally been well described, detailed quantitative information on energy and material flows is missing. For all but the lithium-ion batteries, enough constituent material production energy data are available to approximate material production energies for the batteries, though improved input data for some materials are needed. Due to the potential benefit of battery recycling and a scarcity of associated data, there is a critical need for life-cycle data on battery material recycling. Either on a per kilogram or per watt-hour capacity basis, lead-acid batteries have the lowest production energy, carbon dioxide emissions, and criteria pollutant emissions. Some process-related emissions are also reviewed in this report.

Get a GRiP (Gravitational Risk Procedure) on risk by using an approach inspired by the physics of gravitational forces between body masses! In April 2010, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Special Events staff (Protective Security Advisors [PSAs]) expressed concern about how to calculate risk given measures of consequence, vulnerability, and threat. The PSAs believed that it is not 'right' to assign zero risk, as a multiplicative formula would imply, to cases in which the threat is reported to be extremely small, and perhaps could even be assigned a value of zero, but for which consequences and vulnerability are potentially high. They needed a different way to aggregate the components into an overall measure of risk. To address these concerns, GRiP was proposed and developed. The inspiration for GRiP is Sir Isaac Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation: the attractive force between two bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the squares of the distance between them. The total force on one body is the sum of the forces from 'other bodies' that influence that body. In the case of risk, the 'other bodies' are the components of risk (R): consequence, vulnerability, and threat (which …

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The Advanced Modeling and Simulation Office within the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE) has been charged with revolutionizing the design tools used to build nuclear power plants during the next 10 years. To accomplish this, the DOE has brought together the national laboratories, U.S. universities, and the nuclear energy industry to establish the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) Program. The mission of NEAMS is to modernize computer modeling of nuclear energy systems and improve the fidelity and validity of modeling results using contemporary software environments and high-performance computers. NEAMS will create a set of engineering-level codes aimed at designing and analyzing the performance and safety of nuclear power plants and reactor fuels. The truly predictive nature of these codes will be achieved by modeling the governing phenomena at the spatial and temporal scales that dominate the behavior. These codes will be executed within a simulation environment that orchestrates code integration with respect to spatial meshing, computational resources, and execution to give the user a common 'look and feel' for setting up problems and displaying results. NEAMS is building upon a suite of existing simulation tools, including those developed by the federal Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing and …

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