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Radioactive zinc, {sup 65}Zn, was detected after a thermal vacuum process that extracted a desired product from articles out of a commercial light water reactor. While the facility is designed to handle radioactive materials, the location of the {sup 65}Zn was in an area that is not designed for gamma emitting contaminants. A series of experiments were conducted to entrain the contaminant in an easily replaceable trap within the process piping. The experiments were conducted with increasing levels of complexity. Initially a simple apparatus was developed to determine the effect of substrate temperature on the vapor capture, this was followed by experiments to determine the effect of filter pore size on pumping and trapping, finally the interactive effects of both pore size and temperature were evaluated. The testing was conducted on a system that used a roughing vacuum pump using model and prototypic materials. It was determined that heating the substrate to nominally 200°C resulted in effective trapping on the model as well as prototypic material.

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Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) analyzed solvent samples from the Modular Caustic-Side Solvent Extraction Unit (MCU) in support of continuing operations. A quarterly analysis of the solvent is required to maintain solvent composition within specifications. Analytical results of the analyses of Solvent Hold Tank (SHT) samples MCU-13-1403, MCU-13-1404, MCU-13-1405, MCU-13-1406, MCU-13-1407, and MCU-13-1408 received on September 17, 2013 are reported. This sample was taken after the addition of the Next Generation Solvent (NGS) cocktail to produce a NGS-MCU blended solvent. The results show that the solvent contains a slight excess of Isopar� L and a deficit concentration of modifier and TiDG when compared to the target composition. Addition of TiDG trim is recommended. SRNL also analyzed the SHT sample for {sup 137}Cs content and determined the measured value is within tolerance and that the value has returned to levels observed in 2011. In contrast to what was observed in the heel prior to adding the NGS cocktail, no organic impurities were detected in these solvent samples.

In software running on distributed computing clusters, time spent on communication between nodes in the cluster can be a significant portion of the overall computation time; background operating system tasks and other computational �noise� on the nodes of the system can have a significant impact on the amount of time this communication takes, especially on large systems. The research completed in this period has improved understanding of when such noise will have a significant impact. Specifically, it was demonstrated that not just noise on the nodes, but also noise on the network between nodes can have a significant impact on computation time. It was also demonstrated that noise patterns matter more than noise intensity: very regular noise can cause less disruption than lighter (on average) but less regular noise. It was also demonstrated that the effect of noise is more prominent as the speed of the network between nodes is increased. Furthermore, a tracing tool, Netgauge, was improved via our work, and a system simulator, LogGOPSim, was developed; they can be used by application developers to improve performance of their program and by system designers to mitigate the effects of noise by adjusting the noise characteristics of the operating system. …

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One metric for comparing con nement properties of di erent magnetic fusion energy con gurations is the linear critical gradient of drift wave modes. The critical gradient scale length determines the ratio of the core to pedestal temperature when a plasma is limited to marginal stability in the plasma core. The gyrokinetic turbulence code GS2 was used to calculate critical temperature gradients for the linear, collisionless ion tem- perature gradient (ITG) mode in the National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) and a prototypical shaped tokamak, based on the pro les of a JET H-mode shot and the stronger shaping of ARIES-AT. While a concern was that the narrow cross section of NCSX at some toroidal locations would result in steep gradients that drive instabilities more easily, it is found that other stabilizing e ects of the stellarator con guration o set this so that the normalized critical gradients for NCSX are competitive with or even better than for the tokamak. For the adiabatic ITG mode, NCSX and the tokamak had similar critical gradients, though beyond marginal stability, NCSX had larger growth rates. However, for the kinetic ITG mode, NCSX had a higher critical gradient and lower growth rates until a/LT ≈#25; …

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of River Protection (ORP) is responsible for management and completion of the River Protection Project (RPP) mission, which comprises both the Hanford Site tank farms operations and the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). The RPP mission is to store, retrieve and treat Hanford's tank waste; store and dispose of treated wastes; and close the tank farm waste management areas and treatment facilities by 2047. The WTP is currently being designed and constructed by Bechtel National Inc. (BNI) for DOE-ORP. BNI relies on a number oftechnical services from other Hanford contractors for WTP's construction and commissioning. These same services will be required of the future WTP operations contractor. The WTP interface management process has recently been improved through changes in organization and technical issue management documented in an Interface Management Plan. Ten of the thirteen active WTP Interface Control Documents (ICDs) have been revised in 2012 using the improved process with the remaining three in progress. The value of the process improvements is reflected by the ability to issue these documents on schedule.

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This catalog is intended to be a comprehensive listing of repair parts, components, kits, and consumable items used on the equipment deployed at SLD sites worldwide. The catalog covers detection, CAS, network, ancillary equipment, and tools. The catalog is backed by a Master Parts Database which is used to generate the standard report views of the catalog. The master parts database is a relational database containing a record for every part in the master parts catalog along with supporting tables for normalizing fields in the records. The database also includes supporting queries, database maintenance forms, and reports.

During Fiscal Year 2012, a team from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) conducted an assessment and analysis of the Second Line of Defense (SLD) Sustainability spare parts program. Spare parts management touches many aspects of the SLD Sustainability Program including contracting and integration of Local Maintenance Providers (LMP), equipment vendors, analyses and metrics on program performance, system state of health, and maintenance practices. Standardized spares management will provide better data for decisions during site transition phase and will facilitate transition to host country sustainability ownership. The effort was coordinated with related SLD Sustainability Program initiatives, including a configuration items baselining initiative, a metrics initiative, and a maintenance initiative. The spares study has also led to pilot programs for sourcing alternatives that include regional intermediate inventories and partnering agreements that leverage existing supply chains. Many partners from the SLD Sustainability program contributed to and were consulted in the course of the study. This document provides a description of the findings, recommendations, and implemented solutions that have resulted from the study.

The Office of the Second Line of Defense (SLD) is part of the Department of Energy‘s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The SLD Program accomplishes its critical global security mission by forming cooperative relationships with partner countries to install passive radiation detection systems that augment traditional inspection and law enforcement measures by alerting border officials to the presence of special nuclear or other radiological materials in cross-border traffic. An important tenet of the program is to work collaboratively with these countries to establish the necessary processes, procedures, infrastructure and conditions that will enable them to fully assume the financial and technical responsibilities for operating the equipment. As the number of operational deployments grows, the SLD Program faces an increasingly complex logistics process to promote the timely and efficient supply of spare parts.

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Structures of nanoparticles in Fe-16Cr-4.5Al-0.3Ti-2W-0.37Y2O3 (K3) and Fe-20Cr-4.5Al-0.34Ti-0.5Y2O3 (MA956) oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) ferritic steels produced by mechanical alloying (MA) and followed by hot extrusion have been studied using high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) techniques to gain insight about the formation mechanism of nanoparticles in MA/ODS steels. The observations of Y-Al-O complex-oxide nanoparticles in both ODS steels imply that decomposition of Y2O3 in association with internal oxidation of Al occurred during mechanical alloying. While the majority of oxide nanoparticles formed in both steels is Y4Al2O9, a few oxide particles of YAlO3 are also occasionally observed. These results reveal that Ti (0.3 wt %) plays an insignificant role in forming oxide nanoparticles in the presence of Al (4.5 wt %). HRTEM observations of crystalline nanoparticles larger than {approx}2 nm and amorphous or disordered cluster domains smaller than {approx}2 nm provide an insight into the formation mechanism of oxide nanoparticle in MA/ODS steels, which we believe from our observations involves a solid-state amorphous precursor followed by recrystallization. Dual ion-beam irradiations using He{sup +} + Fe{sup +8} ions were employed to gain more detailed insight about the role of nanoparticles in suppressing radiation-induced swelling. This is elaborated through TEM examinations of cavity distributions …

We have performed comprehensive studies of optical, thermoelectric and electrical properties of Mg doped InN with varying Mg doping levels and sample thicknesses. Room temperature photoluminescence spectra show a Mg acceptor related emission and the thermopower provides clear evidence for the presence of mobile holes. Although the effects of the hole transport are clearly observed in the temperature dependent electrical properties, the sign of the apparent Hall coefficient remains negative in all samples. We show that the standard model of two electrically well connected layers (n-type surface electron accumulation and p-type bulk) does not properly describe Hall effect in p-type InN.