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At least 433 records · Page 24

FY 2021 Mid-Year HPC Utilization Report M3UF-21IN0701018

Idaho National Laboratory (INL), supported by the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) through the Nuclear Science User Facilities, provides access to supercomputer systems and data storage along with support staff for system management, software installation, cybersecurity and user support to the broader DOE-NE user community. Users include individuals at universities, industry, and government laboratories enabling a wide range of research and development and mission-supporting activities. The availability of high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities is a key foundation of collaboration and innovation in nuclear energy systems research. HPC resources and INL directly support the mission and objectives of DOE-NE. From October 2020 through March 2021, INL HPC capabilities were utilized by a diverse set of computing and applied researchers, for a wide range of research and engineering activities. This report focuses on current INL HPC systems and utilization from October 1, 2020 through March 31, 2021.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

An Integrated ML/AI Framework for Digitizing, Structuring and Searching DOE U-TRU-Fuels Data with Gap Analysis of Non-DOE Records

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Fuels Campaign (AFC) is advancing transmutation fuel technologies to reduce long-lived radioactive waste by converting minor actinides into shorter-lived or stable elements through irradiation in sodium-cooled fast reactors. Key experiments such as AFC-1, AFC-2, FUels for the transmutation of Trans-URanium elements In phéniX (FUTURIX)-Fortes Teneurs en Actinides (FTA), and Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) X501 have provided fuel fabrication, irradiation, and performance data on various transuranic-bearing fuel forms. This report documents the creation of an artificial-intelligence assisted database, which has consolidated all DOE-owned data related to Transuranic (TRU)-bearing fuel experiments and stored across it across both the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Nuclear Data Management and Analysis System and the INL high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. A dedicated webpage, hosted on the INL HPC system, has been developed to support role-based access and data interaction. The database architecture allows researchers to navigate large, heterogeneous archives with far greater speed and accuracy than manual search and lays the foundation for future expansion into multimodal nuclear materials analysis environments. The database represents a major step towards a nationally integrated fuels database utilizing artificial intelligence tools.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Real-time and Autonomous Water Quality Monitoring System Based on Remotely Operated Vehicle

Existing water quality monitoring systems near hydropower facilities are limited by the lack of mobility of the sensors’ carrier platform. Most systems use a buoy, a mounting fixture attached to a solid structure, or a human worker, which significantly limits the selection of the sampling sites and poses safety risks during data collection and equipment maintenance. To improve on this technology, we developed an autonomous water quality monitoring system that can operate in dangerous water environments near hydropower facilities for water sampling at multiple locations. The goal is to enable safe, timely, and comprehensive water-quality data collection; maximize power generation revenue with improved operational control; and reduce Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and state water quality monitoring costs for compliance. The system incorporates a remotely operated vehicle as the mobile monitoring platform, a dissolved oxygen sensor for monitoring water quality, a tether management system for automatically winding the tether, a solar mobile docking platform for suppling power to the ROV, and a web-based graphical user interface for data post-processing and visualization. In addition, preliminary field research are presented to demonstrate the system capabilities.

Salalila, Aljon L.↗

Fusion Energy Sciences Network Requirements Review. Final Report, April - October 2021

The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is the high-performance network user facility for the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science (SC) and delivers highly reliable data transport capabilities optimized for the requirements of data-intensive science. In essence, ESnet is the circulatory system that enables the DOE science mission by connecting all of its laboratories and facilities in the US and abroad. ESnet is funded and stewarded by the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program and managed and operated by the Scientific Networking Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). ESnet is widely regarded as a global leader in the research and education networking community. Throughout 2021, ESnet and the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) of the DOE SC organized an ESnet requirements review of FES-supported activities. Preparation for these events included identification of key stakeholders: program and facility management, research groups, and technology providers. Each stakeholder group was asked to prepare formal case study documents about their relationship to the FES program to build a complete understanding of the current, near-term, and long-term status, expectations, and processes that will support the science going forward.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Prognostics and Health Management in Nuclear Power Plants: An Updated Method-Centric Review With Special Focus on Data-Driven Methods

In a carbon-constrained world, future uses of nuclear power technologies can contribute to climate change mitigation as the installed electricity generating capacity and range of applications could be much greater and more diverse than with the current plants. To preserve the nuclear industry competitiveness in the global energy market, prognostics and health management (PHM) of plant assets is expected to be important for supporting and sustaining improvements in the economics associated with operating nuclear power plants (NPPs) while maintaining their high availability. Of interest are long-term operation of the legacy fleet to 80 years through subsequent license renewals and economic operation of new builds of either light water reactors or advanced reactor designs. Recent advances in data-driven analysis methods—largely represented by those in artificial intelligence and machine learning—have enhanced applications ranging from robust anomaly detection to automated control and autonomous operation of complex systems. The NPP equipment PHM is one area where the application of these algorithmic advances can significantly improve the ability to perform asset management. This paper provides an updated method-centric review of the full PHM suite in NPPs focusing on data-driven methods and advances since the last major survey article was published in 2015. The main approaches and the state of practice are described, including those for the tasks of data acquisition, condition monitoring, diagnostics, prognostics, and planning and decision-making. Research advances in non-nuclear power applications are also included to assess findings that may be applicable to the nuclear industry, along with the opportunities and challenges when adapting these developments to NPPs. Finally, this paper identifies key research needs in regard to data availability and quality, verification and validation, and uncertainty quantification.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Finalizing Construction of a New Data Center at BNL

Computational science, data management and analysis have been key factors in the success of Brookhaven National Laboratory's scientific programs at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), and in biological, atmospheric, and energy systems science, Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) and Materials Science, as well as our participation in international research collaborations, such as the ATLAS experiment at Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Switzerland) and the Belle II experiment at KEK (Japan). The construction of a new data center is an acknowledgement of the increasing demand for computing and storage services at BNL in the near term and enable the Lab to address the needs of the future experiments at the High-Luminosity LHC at CERN and the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at BNL in the long term.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

AmeriFlux FLUXNET-1F US-NC5 NC Butner Farm

This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site US-NC5 NC Butner Farm. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site US-NC5 NC Butner Farm produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - The US-NC5 flux tower is located within an 80-year-old mixed pine-hardwood forest at the Umstead Research Farm in Butner, North Carolina. The northern section of this 20-hectare Fall Lake Watershed of the Neuse River Basin in the Piedmont of North Carolina, USA. The Northern portion is currently a managed cattle farm, which is slated for expansion—necessitating forest clearing in the flux site. To establish a reference baseline, a year-long, all-season eddy covariance flux monitoring campaign will be conducted from April 2025 to March 2026. This effort aims to capture the carbon flux dynamics of the mature forest ecosystem prior to a planned land-use conversion. The site will be transitioned into a silvopasture, maintained through prescribed burning and cattle grazing to promote an open-canopy watershed structure. Flux measurements will continue after the conversion.

Sun, Ge [USDA Forest Service]↗

Evaluating Production Implications of Pressure Maintenance in Unconventional Oil and Gas Wells using a Machine Learning Modeling Approach: Case Study in the Permian Basin

This study implements the proprietary machine learning-based model (model) developed under the 2022 study titled “Evaluating the Impact of Proprietary Oil & Gas Data on Machine Learning Model Performance Using a Quasi-Experimental Analytical Approach” for forecasting unconventional oil and gas production using well data from the Permian Basin. The model, developed using an exclusive dataset that includes time series production data from an operator in the Permian Basin, is designed to jointly predict daily oil, gas, and water production for horizontal wells as a function of bottomhole pressure drawdown, spatial placement across the study domain, and well-completion attributes. In this study, the model was explicitly applied to explore its utility to evaluate the impact of varying drawdown strategies on the production forecast of a well in the Permian Basin dataset. Managing pressure drawdown has been identified as a way to improve estimated ultimate recovery (EUR) from unconventional shale wells due to the stress-dependent nature of fractures in shale reservoirs. Research has shown that applying a lower pressure drawdown helps to maintain the reservoir conductivity, resulting in higher productivity over the life of a well. Historic bottomhole pressure data from the well over time was used as a benchmark from which to set more and less aggressive pressure decline rates as bounding modeling cases. All pressure decline rates/strategies were forecasted over 5 years, and the model was used to generate oil, water, and gas prediction over the same timeframe. This report presents the results from the production forecast and discusses potential operational and economic implications, with contrasting perspectives between well productivity and profitability given typical oil and gas economics and the volatility in the oil and gas market.

02 PETROLEUM↗

Galen View

This is software lets one explore the data released as part of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge. It downloads and analyzes the natural language text of the data set and then creates a 2D visualization that can be used to explore it. SAND2020-12185 M Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Bauer, Travis↗

MIQS v0.6

In this research, we propose a novel Metadata Indexing and Querying for Self-describing formats (MIQS), which removes the external DBMS and utilizes in-memory index to achieve efficient metadata searching. MIQS follows the self-contained data management paradigm and provides portable and schema-free metadata indexing and querying functionalities for self-describing file formats. We have evaluated MIQS with the state-of-the-art MongoDB-based metadata indexing solution. MIQS achieved up to 99% time reduction in index construction and up to 172,000X search performance improvement with up to 75% reduction in memory footprint.

Byna, Suren↗

MIQS v0.6

In this research, we propose a novel Metadata Indexing and Querying for Self-describing formats (MIQS), which removes the external DBMS and utilizes in-memory index to achieve efficient metadata searching. MIQS follows the self-contained data management paradigm and provides portable and schema-free metadata indexing and querying functionalities for self-describing file formats. We have evaluated MIQS with the state-of-the-art MongoDB-based metadata indexing solution. MIQS achieved up to 99% time reduction in index construction and up to 172,000X search performance improvement with up to 75% reduction in memory footprint.

Byna, Suren↗

Critical and Californium Source-Driven Noise Analysis Subcritical Measurements with an Unreflected Cylindrical Tank of Mixed Uranium-Plutonium Nitrate Solution

The reported experiments were performed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) at the Battelle Northwest Laboratory’s (now Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) critical experiments facility at Hanford, Washington in 1981 and used 16 days of critical facility time, not including 10 days for setup and removal of ORNL equipment. These measurements were to assess the capability of the Cf source-driven noise analysis (CSDNA) method to measure the subcriticality (keff) of mixed U-Pu nitrate solutions. In addition to the CSNDA measurements, measurements were also performed near delayed criticality where CSDNA measurements cannot be performed. This report documents the experiments that were not reported at that time by presenting the ORNL experimental results and any online analysis performed during and shortly after the measurements. The mixed nitrate solution had a U concentration at 188 grams per liter (g/L), a Pu concentration of 280 g/L, free acid normality of 2.80, H ion molarity of 5.9 and a specific gravity of 1.754 g/cm 3 , a 240 Pu isotopic content of 7.981 wt. %, and a 235 U isotopic content of 0.724 wt. %. The stainless-steel tank for the solution had an inside diameter of 35.38 cm, an outside diameter of 35.53 cm, a height of 56.72 cm, and bottom thickness of 0.9525 cm. A Zircaloy pipe with a 3.1496 cm outside diameter, a 2.7788 cm inside diameter, and bottom thickness of 0.635 cm was available for insertion of the Cf source in the center of the fissile solution. The Cf source was also located at the outside surface of the tank (solution height varied from 10 to 53 cm) and in the center of the solution (solution height varied from 10 to 60.7 cm). The CSDNA measurements were not analyzed online to determine the subcritical neutron multiplication factors. At all subcritical states, the break frequency noise analysis data was fitted to obtain the prompt neutron decay constant. The neutron multiplication factors were determined for the two configurations of the measurements near delayed criticality. The subcritical neutron multiplication factors from the CNSDA measurements can be obtained with further analysis. However, the near delayed critical configuration, the prompt neutron decay constants, the count rates, and the measured cross and auto power spectral densities can be calculated directly for benchmarking. Much of data presented in this report are from ORNL notes—not in the ORNL logbooks. For the final benchmark analysis, the data from the Battelle Northwest Laboratory (which operated the critical facility in 1981) critical facility logbook should be consulted and be incorporated where appropriate. The purpose of this report is to document the experimental information for the measurements performed so that at a later date researchers could perform the required uncertainty and calculational analyses and documentation to use these data for an International Criticality Safety Benchmark Program (ICSBEP) or Nuclear Energy Agency benchmark. The data from these measurements are available from the ORNL Records Management Services Department, and the logbook is available from ICSBEP at Idaho National Laboratory. Preparation of the present report is part of a larger cooperative effort between Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to document more than 15 undocumented critical and subcritical experiments enumerated in ORNL/TM-2019/18 and performed by ORNL at ORCEF and other USDOE critical experiments facilities using more than 500 operational days of critical facility time.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

2024 Annual Site Environmental Report for Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore, California

Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sandia Field Office administers the Prime Contract and oversees contractor operations at Sandia National Laboratories, California. Activities at this multi-program engineering and science laboratory support the nuclear weapons stockpile program, energy and environmental research, homeland security, micro- and nanotechnologies, and basic science and engineering research. The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and its management and operating contractor are committed to fulfilling regulatory obligations, safeguarding the environment, assessing sustainability practices, and ensuring the validity and accuracy of the monitoring data presented in this annual site environmental report (ASER). This report provides a summary of environmental monitoring and compliance activities that occurred at Sandia National Laboratories, California, during calendar year 2024, unless noted otherwise. General site and environmental program information is also included. This report was prepared in accordance with DOE Order 231.1B, Admin Change 1, Environment, Safety and Health Reporting.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Remaining Useful Strength (RUS) Prediction of SiCf-SiCm Composite Materials Using Deep Learning and Acoustic Emission

Prognosis techniques for prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) are of crucial importance to the management of complex systems for they can lead to appropriate maintenance interventions and improvements in reliability. While various data-driven methods have been introduced to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of machinery systems or batteries, no research has been reported on the remaining useful strength (RUS) prediction of silicon carbide fiber reinforced silicon carbide matrix (SiCf-SiCm) materials with pivotal role in its potential usage as a structural material in nuclear reactors and turbine engines. Knowledge of its degradation process is of the utmost importance to the manufacturers. For this purpose, two approaches based on the machine-learning techniques of random-forest (RF) and convolutional neural network (CNN) are proposed to predict the RUS of SiCf-SiCm using only acoustic emission (AE) signals generated during the material’s stress applying process. Experimental results show that the CNN models achieved better predictive performance than the RF models but the latter with expert-engineered features achieves better prediction for AE signals in the early stage of degradation. Additionally, our results demonstrate that both models can correctly predict the SiCf-SiCm RUS as evaluated by our robust testing method from which the best average root mean square error (RMSE) and Pearson correlation coefficient of 3.55 ksi units and 0.85 were obtained.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Precursor Analysis Report: Conti Ransomware Attack on the Health Service Executive of Ireland 2021

The Conti Ransomware Attack on the Health Service Executive (HSE) of Ireland 2021 Precursor Analysis Report leverages publicly available information about the attack and catalogs anomalous observables for each technique employed by the adversary. This analysis is based upon the methodology of the Cybersecurity for the Operational Technology Environment (CyOTE) program. The HSE provides public healthcare corporate services and operational services throughout Ireland, with critical functions including the acute national ambulance service, acute hospital service, and community healthcare service. On 14 May 2021, Conti ransomware encrypted 80 percent of the HSE’s Information Technology (IT) infrastructure across corporate, hospital, community, and electronic health record services. Conti is a ransomware-as-a-service operation that encrypts local files, uses double extortion against victims, and is facilitated by many intrusion tools. The attack forced the HSE to shut down its entire IT infrastructure to contain the ransomware, forcing employees to revert to pen and paper recordkeeping and leading to the cancellation of many appointments and procedures. The adversary also exfiltrated 700 GB of data, compromising the confidentiality of patients’ protected health information. Had the adversary targeted the COVID-19 cloud systems or operational technology assets, such as Internet of Medical Things medical devices or smart building management systems, the impact of the attack would almost certainly have been far more severe. Researchers and analysts identified 21 unique techniques (used in a sequence of 23 steps) likely utilized during the attack with a total of 1,185 observables using MITRE ATT&CK® for Industrial Control Systems. The CyOTE program assesses observables accompanying techniques used prior to the triggering event to identify opportunities to detect malicious activity. If observables accompanying the attack techniques are perceived and investigated prior to the triggering event, earlier comprehension of malicious activity can take place. Twenty-one of the identified techniques used during the attack on the HSE were precursors to the triggering event. Analysis identified 1,086 observables associated with these precursor techniques, 850 of which were assessed to have an increased likelihood of being perceived in the 57 days preceding the triggering event. The response and comprehension time could have been reduced if the observables had been identified earlier. The information gathered in this report contributes to a library of observables tied to a repository of artifacts, data sources, and technique detection references for practitioners and developers to support the comprehension of indicators of attack. Asset owners and operators can use these products if they experience similar observables or to prepare for comparable scenarios.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗

Understanding and Improving Energy Efficiency of Regional Mobility Systems Leveraging System-Level Data

Increased congestion required urban Americans to travel 6.8 billion hours more and purchase 3.1 billion gallons of fuel for a congestion cost of $\$$153 billion, according to the 2019 Urban Mobility Report. How to effectively manage the regional mobility system and improve the energy efficiency presents a big challenge to public agencies. Recent years have witnessed massive multi-jurisdictional multi-modal system-level data from various sources, which provides an unprecedented opportunity to improve the mobility system and its energy efficiency. However, implications of system-level data for mobility and energy efficiency are unclear. Those system-level data sets are siloed, spatially and temporally sparse, biased, not unified, and lacking of insights for system management. Consequently, there is a real need to acquire, fuse, mine and learn from multi-source system-level data to prepare public agencies to deal more effectively with large-scale energy efficiency modeling, management and planning. This project proposes to intensively review inexpensive, replicable and openly-accessible data from multi-modal systems, develop a data-driven system-level modeling framework enabled and validated by data, identify the energy inefficiencies of mobility systems from infrastructure, vehicles, passenger systems, and quantify the benefits of system-level strategies to improve mobility/energy efficiency. In addition, this research develops models to effectively estimate energy consumption and emissions from various types of vehicles on the roadway networks, with high granularity and high fidelity. Traditional models often heavily rely on aggregated infrastructure or vehicle/passenger data, for example, the census survey, land-use, and traffic counts of one or several classes, which may lead to research gaps considering the emerging vehicle technologies. Those models do not contain individual vehicular information. We propose an integrated data-driven method that combines multiple network modeling components, featuring the utilization of state-wide vehicle registration data. The additional vehicle registration data improve the model performance, and produce high-resolution vehicle-specific estimates of emissions and network performance metrics. Two case studies on the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia regional network show that the proposed method can efficiently and effectively estimate the emissions of a large-scale network, and provide valuable information for evaluating common management strategies.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Meteorological services annual data report for 2019

This document presents the meteorological data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) by Meteorological Services (Met Services) for the calendar year 2019. The purpose is to publicize the data sets available to emergency personnel, researchers and facility operations. Met services has been collecting data at BNL since 1949. Data from 1994 to the present is available in digital format. Data is presented in monthly plots of one-minute data. This allows the reader the ability to peruse the data for trends or anomalies that may be of interest to them. Full data sets are available to BNL personnel and to a limited degree outside researchers. The full data sets allow plotting the data on expanded time scales to obtain greater details (e.g., daily solar variability, inversions, etc.).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

2022 Prentice Award Lecture: Advancing Retinal Imaging and Visual Function in Patient Management and Disease Mechanisms

Patient-based research plays a key role in probing basic visual mechanisms. Less-well recognized is the role of patient-based retinal imaging and visual function studies in elucidating disease mechanisms, which are accelerated by advances in imaging and function techniques and are most powerful when combined with the results from histology and animal models. A patient's visual complaints can be one key to patient management, but human data are also key to understanding disease mechanisms. Unfortunately, pathological changes can be difficult to detect. Before advanced retinal imaging, the measurement of visual function indicated the presence of pathological changes that were undetectable with existing clinical examination. Over the past few decades, advances in retinal imaging have increasingly revealed the unseen. This has led to great strides in the management of many diseases, particularly diabetic retinopathy and macular edema, and age-related macular degeneration. It is likely widely accepted that patient-based research, as in clinical trials, led to such positive outcomes. Both visual function measures and advanced retinal imaging have clearly demonstrated differences among retinal diseases. Contrary to initial thinking, sight-threatening damage in diabetes occurs to the outer retina and not only to the inner retina. This has been clearly indicated in patient results but has only gradually entered the clinical classifications and understanding of disease etiology. There is strikingly different pathophysiology for age-related macular degeneration compared with photoreceptor and retinal pigment epithelial genetic defects, yet research models and even some treatments confuse these. It is important to recognize the role that patient-based research plays in probing basic visual mechanisms and elucidating disease mechanisms, combining these findings with the concepts from histology and animal models. Thus, this article combines sample instrumentation from my laboratory and progress in the fields of retinal imaging and visual function.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗