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At least 649 records · Page 36

Herding Cats: Firm Non-Compliance in China’s Industrial Energy Efficiency Program

Here we study firm responses to a large-scale energy efficiency program in China, focusing on the quality of reporting and compliance outcomes. Using statistical methods to detect data manipulation in compliance reports, we find evidence that firms deliberately exaggerated performance during the first phase of the program (2006-2010), suggesting the high compliance rate was overstated. In its second phase (2011-2015), the number of firms in the program expanded by an order of magnitude, and the compliance rate decreased. We develop a simple model to show how the observed increase in non-compliance is consistent with reduced misreporting. Statistical tests find no evidence of manipulation in the second phase. Larger firms, especially those not controlled by the state, and firms in cities with relatively low growth were more likely to report non-compliance, which suggests a role for state control and local protectionism in shaping compliance decisions. Based on our findings, we offer several lessons for future program design.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

A customizable model for chronic disease coordination: Lessons learned from the coordinated chronic disease program

In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided funding and technical assistance to all states and territories to implement the Coordinated Chronic Disease Program, marking the first time that all state health departments had federal resources to coordinate chronic disease prevention and control programs. This article describes lessons learned from this initiative and identifies key elements of a coordinated approach. We analyzed 80 programmatic documents from 21 states and conducted semistructured interviews with 7 chronic disease directors. Six overarching themes emerged: 1) focused agenda, 2) identification of functions, 3) comprehensive planning, 4) collaborative leadership and expertise, 5) managed resources, and 6) relationship building. Furthermore, these elements supported 4 essential activities: 1) evidence-based interventions, 2) strategic use of staff, 3) consistent communication, and 4) strong program infrastructure. On the basis of these elements and activities, we propose a conceptual model that frames overarching concepts, skills, and strategies needed to coordinate state chronic disease prevention and control programs.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Method and computer program product for maintenance and modernization backlogging

According to one embodiment, a computer program product for determining future facility conditions includes a computer readable medium having computer readable program code stored therein. The computer readable program code includes computer readable program code for calculating a time period specific maintenance cost, for calculating a time period specific modernization factor, and for calculating a time period specific backlog factor. Future facility conditions equal the time period specific maintenance cost plus the time period specific modernization factor plus the time period specific backlog factor. In another embodiment, a computer-implemented method for calculating future facility conditions includes calculating a time period specific maintenance cost, calculating a time period specific modernization factor, and calculating a time period specific backlog factor. Future facility conditions equal the time period specific maintenance cost plus the time period specific modernization factor plus the time period specific backlog factor. Other embodiments are also presented.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Generating and executing programs for a floating point single instruction multiple data instruction set architecture

Mechanisms for generating and executing programs for a floating point (FP) only single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instruction set architecture (ISA) are provided. A computer program product comprising a computer recordable medium having a computer readable program recorded thereon is provided. The computer readable program, when executed on a computing device, causes the computing device to receive one or more instructions and execute the one or more instructions using logic in an execution unit of the computing device. The logic implements a floating point (FP) only single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instruction set architecture (ISA), based on data stored in a vector register file of the computing device. The vector register file is configured to store both scalar and floating point values as vectors having a plurality of vector elements.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Human Reliability Program Workshop

A Human Reliability Program (HRP) is designed to protect national security as well as worker and public safety by continuously evaluating the reliability of those who have access to sensitive materials, facilities, and programs. Some elements of a site HRP include systematic (1) supervisory reviews, (2) medical and psychological assessments, (3) management evaluations, (4) personnel security reviews, and (4) training of HRP staff and critical positions. Over the years of implementing an HRP, the Department of Energy (DOE) has faced various challenges and overcome obstacles. During this 4-day activity, participants will examine programs that mitigate threats to nuclear security and the insider threat to include HRP, Nuclear Security Culture (NSC) Enhancement, and Employee Assistance Programs. The focus will be to develop an understanding of the need for a systematic HRP and to discuss challenges and best practices associated with mitigating the insider threat.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗

Maine PACE Program Final Technical Report

The ARRA EECBG BetterBuilding helped augment the existing Home Energy Savings Programs (HESP) and incentives with financing through a subordinate lien PACE and HUD PowerSaver programs. The program was designed to document innovative techniques to dramatically increase the number of homes participating in weatherization programs in participating towns. Maine will support new energy efficiency retrofit pilots throughout the state, designed to motivate a large number of homeowners to invest in comprehensive home energy efficiency upgrades to bring real solutions to market.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

The Cementitious Barriers Partnership Experimental Programs and Software Advancing DOE’s Waste Disposal/Tank Closure Efforts – 15436

The U.S. Department of Energy Environmental Management (DOE-EM) Office of Tank Waste Management-sponsored Cementitious Barriers Partnership (CBP) is chartered with providing the technical basis for implementing cement-based waste forms and radioactive waste containment structures for long-term disposal. DOE needs in this area include the following to support progress in final treatment and disposal of legacy waste and closure of High-Level Waste (HLW) tanks in the DOE complex: long-term performance predictions, flow sheet development and flow sheet enhancements, and conceptual designs for new disposal facilities. The DOE-EM Cementitious Barriers Partnership is producing software and experimental programs resulting in new methods and data needed for end-users involved with environmental cleanup and waste disposal. Both the modeling tools and the experimental data have already benefited the DOE sites in the areas of performance assessments by increasing confidence backed up with modeling support, leaching methods, and transport properties developed for actual DOE materials. In 2014, the CBP Partnership released the CBP Software Toolbox –“Version 2.0” which provides concrete degradation models for 1) sulfate attack, 2) carbonation, and 3) chloride initiated rebar corrosion, and includes constituent leaching. These models are applicable and can be used by both DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for service life and long-term performance evaluations and predictions of nuclear and radioactive waste containment structures across the DOE complex, including future SRS Saltstone and HLW tank performance assessments and special analyses, Hanford site HLW tank closure projects and other projects in which cementitious barriers are required, the Advanced Simulation Capability for Environmental Management (ASCEM) project which requires source terms from cementitious containment structures as input to their flow simulations, regulatory reviews of DOE performance assessments, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission reviews of commercial nuclear power plant (NPP) structures which are part of the overall US Energy Security program to extend the service life of NPPs. In addition, the CBP experimental programs have had a significant impact on the DOE complex by providing specific data unique to DOE sodium salt wastes at Hanford and SRS which are not readily available in the literature. Two recent experimental programs on cementitious phase characterization and on technetium (Tc) mobility have provided significant conclusions as follows: recent mineralogy characterization discussed in this paper illustrates that sodium salt waste form matrices are somewhat similar to but not the same as those found in blended cement matrices which to date have been used in long-term thermodynamic modeling and contaminant sequestration as a first approximation. Utilizing the CBP generated data in long-term performance predictions provides for a more defensible technical basis in performance evaluations. In addition, recent experimental studies related to technetium mobility indicate that conventional leaching protocols may not be conservative for direct disposal of Tc-containing waste forms in vadose zone environments. These results have the potential to influence the current Hanford supplemental waste treatment flow sheet and disposal conceptual design.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

2015 Stewardship Science Academic Programs Annual

The Stockpile Stewardship Academic Programs (SSAP) are essential to maintaining a pipeline of professionals to support the technical capabilities that reside at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) national laboratories, sites, and plants. Since 1992, the United States has observed the moratorium on nuclear testing while significantly decreasing the nuclear arsenal. To accomplish this without nuclear testing, NNSA and its laboratories developed a science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program to maintain and enhance the experimental and computational tools required to ensure the continued safety, security, and reliability of the stockpile. NNSA launched its academic program portfolio more than a decade ago to engage students skilled in specific technical areas of relevance to stockpile stewardship. The success of this program is reflected by the large number of SSAP students choosing to begin their careers at NNSA national laboratories.

Stone, Terri↗

2012 DOE Vehicle Technologies Program Annual Merit Review

The 2012 DOE Hydrogen Program and Vehicle Technologies Program Annual Merit Review and Peer Evaluation Meeting was held May 14-18, 2012 in Crystal City, Virginia. The review encompassed all of the work done by the Hydrogen Program and the Vehicle Technologies Program: a total of 309 individual activities were reviewed for Vehicle Technologies, by a total of 189 reviewers. A total of 1,473 individual review responses were received for the technical reviews.

merit review↗

A County-Level Program to Assess Farming System Ecosystem Services

The survival of Florida’s biodiversity and economy is dependent on finding ways to balance farm economics with proper management of water and other natural resources. Taking on this challenge of maximizing the delivery of ecosystems services from agricultural production systems is the mandate of the Hendry County Sustainable Biofuels Center. Given that sea level rise is the overarching, long-term threat to the south Florida and its ecosystems, the most valuable ecosystems services for the state of Florida are those that mitigate climate change. Biofuels are put forward as one approach to forestalling climate change, but its value as an industry in providing this and other ecosystem services is unproven. The Sustainable Biofuels Center has developed a set of programs to both document and enhance the ecosystems services values of the evolving Florida biofuels industry. The Center engages in agricultural systems evaluation, sustainability indexing and sustainability research. Methods employed for documenting ecosystems services and costs include Life Cycle Assessment, Emergy Analysis, and optimization of cost-benefit functions. Radically new farming and economic compensation systems must be created and implemented if we are to achieve a successful agricultural business model built upon balanced revenue streams from these varied services. Accordingly, the Center also supports field research and demonstration projects to document the capacity for innovative farming systems to deliver ecosystems services such as water storage. To help promote the inclusion of ecosystems services considerations in farm operations, the program includes curriculum development at both the K-12 and college level, as well as programs to bring diverse stakeholders in to collaborative visioning process. Lastly, since county governments are often the level where new industry seek entry to the landscape, the Center is also developing metrics and tools through which economic development officers can evaluate business developer requests for tax breaks, land use changes and various other permissions and incentives against the economic and ecological benefits as well as any natural resource costs. Solving the underlying problem requires that agricultural lands provide society with a more balanced set of values in the form of food, energy, and ecosystem services through proper water, nutrient, and soil management. County-level programs can help realize that vision.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

XACC - eXtreme-scale Accelerator Programming Framework

Hybrid programming models for beyond-CMOS technologies will prove critical for integrating new computing technologies alongside our existing infrastructure. Unfortunately the software infrastructure required to enable this is lacking or not available. XACC is a programming framework for extreme-scale, post-exascale accelerator architectures that integrates alongside existing conventional applications. It is a pluggable framework for programming languages developed for next-gen computing hardware architectures like quantum and neuromorphic computing. It lets computational scientists efficiently off-load classically intractable work to attached accelerators through user-friendly Kernel definitions. XACC makes post-exascale hybrid programming approachable for domain computational scientists.

McCaskey, Alexander J.↗

Data Center Energy Practitioner (DCEP) Program

The main objective for the DCEP program is to raise the standards of those involved in energy assessments of data centers to accelerate energy savings. The program is driven by the fact that significant knowledge, training, and skills are required to perform accurate energy assessments. The program will raise the confidence level in energy assessments in data centers. For those who pass the exam, the program will recognize them as Data Center Energy Practitioners (DCEPs) by issuing a certificate. Hardware req.: PC, MAC; Software Req.: Windows; Related/Auxiliary software--MS Office; Type of files: executable modules, user guide; Documentation: e-user manual; Documentation: http://www.1.eere.energy.gov/industry/datacenters/ 12/10/15-New Documentation URL: https://datacenters.lbl.gov/dcep

Traber, Kim↗

THE USA’S ADVANCED REACTOR TECHNOLOGIES (ART) GRAPHITE R&D PROGRAM

The USA DOE Advanced Reactor Technologies (ART) graphite R&D program supporting HTR design is one of the longest running nuclear graphite R&D programs. Significant progress has been made in several areas of research within this extensive program including unirraidated and irradiated testing of nuclear graphite, oxidation results and modeling, fracture behavior, irradiation damage studies, and several international collaboration studies. The latest results in these research areas as well as a discussion of a new direction in nuclear graphite irradiation for the USA program will be presented. Recently, the USA made a decision to support moderate to high dose irradiation of nuclear graphite (0.5 to 15 dpa). This will provide irradiation data for graphite HTR core components up to 15 dpa for numerous nuclear graphite grades. The irradiation plan and a tentative schedule for this new irradiation direction will be presented in detail.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

An Overview of the United States Department of Energy's Nuclear Criticality Safety Program and Future Challenges

The United States (US) Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP) was formally established in January 1998 as part of the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB) Recommendation 97-2 implementation plan. The NCSP was initially focused on seven NCSP tasks: Critical Experiments, Benchmarking, Analytical Methods, Nuclear Data, Training and Qualification, Information Preservation and Dissemination, and Applicable Ranges of Bounding Curves and Data. The first NCSP 5-year plan was published in August 1999. Now, more than 20 years later, NCSP continues to serve the United States and the nuclear criticality safety (NCS) community around five technical program elements (TPEs): Analytical Methods, Information Preservation and Dissemination, Integral Experiments, Nuclear Data, and Training and Education. NCSP has three chartered support groups, the Criticality Safety Support Group, the Nuclear Data Advisory Group, and the DOE Criticality Safety Coordinating Team, all of which provide technical advisement to the NCS community, to DOE, and to the NCSP manager. NCSP has a comprehensive mission and vision document that provides technical and budget priorities for TPE attributes and goals to ensure that the needs of the NCS community and DOE NCS are prioritized appropriately to meet the goals defined by the 1998 DNFSB recommendation. Like any DOE/NNSA program, NCSP faces significant challenges in the future that involves program funding, rising nuclear facility costs, aging critical assembly infrastructure, knowledge retention, and other issues. This paper discusses NCSP and provides some insights into these and other challenges moving into the future.

Bowen, Douglas G.↗

A Scalable Graph Analytics Framework for Programming with Big Data in R (pbdR)

Many disciplines such as biology, economics, engineering, physics, and the social sciences represent their data as graphs to capture patterns, trends, and associations. There are are many commercially available graph libraries in different programming languages to analyze these complex graphs. But there is no distributed graph library package in R - the popular statistical programming language to analyze graphs that bigger than a single machine's memory. Many domain experts prefer R over the numerous other alternatives. Towards this, we present a distributed graph analytics framework for R called programming with big graph using R (pBGR.) Our proposed framework leverages the Programming with Big Data in R (pbdR) ecosystem that provides scalable R packages for distributed computing in data science. We present an early prototype implementation of this framework using the distributed-memory parallel graph library CombBLAS and evaluate the framework's performance on leadership class computing platforms. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of performing large-scale parallel graph mining through the easyto-use R language. This enhanced graph processing capability coupled with other statistical tools already available in R, should be valuable to many domain experts.

Hasan, S M Shamimul↗

The Italian Summer Students Program at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and other US Laboratories

Since 1984 INFN scientists performing experiments at Fermilab have been running a two month summer training program for Italian students at the lab. In 1984 the program involved only a few physics students from the Pisa group, but it was later extended to other groups and to engineering students. Since 2004 the program has been supported in part by DOE in the frame of an exchange agreement with INFN. The Fermilab training programs spanned from data analysis to design and construction of particle detectors and accelerator components, research on superconductive elements, theory of accelerators, and analysis of astrophysical data. At the other US laboratories the offered training was on Space Science.

Luongo, Carmela↗

System Retrofits in Efficiency Programs: Track Record and Outlook

Commercial building retrofits are often limited to simple upgrades of individual building components such as equipment or lamp replacements. These equipment- or component-level retrofits have been shown to have less potential for whole building energy savings (50% less in studied cases) compared to comprehensive system-based approaches. System retrofits with their potential for much greater savings are critical to achieving aggressive energy reduction goals in the existing building stock but to date there has been little deep analysis of the track record and trends for systems retrofits in commercial buildings. This paper addresses several questions: 1. To what extent are systems retrofits taking place in the building retrofit marketplace today? 2. Do current systems retrofits in fact save more energy than component retrofits? 3. What kinds of efficiency measures are currently most prevalent in system retrofits? 4. Does systems adoption vary across different retrofit programmatic approaches (e.g. utility incentive programs, federal retrofit programs, ESCOs)? Findings, based on an analysis of retrofit data from 12,000 projects across the U.S. from custom utility incentive programs, federal retrofit programs, and Energy Service Companies (ESCOs), indicate the state of the current market with respect to adoption of systems technologies. A wide range of stakeholders were also interviewed to define the challenges and opportunities for greater deployment. A range of barriers is presented including technical and structural (i.e. programmatic, policy), along with recommendations to accelerate deployment of these strategic approaches.

Regnier, Cynthia↗

Promoting Domestic and International Consensus - Program Area 1: Carbon Capture & Storage & Clean Energy Systems

This is the Final Report for the U.S. Department of Energy Cooperative Agreement DE-FE-0024159, Promoting Domestic and International Consensus on Fossil Energy Technologies: Carbon Capture and Storage and Clean Energy Systems carried out by the United States Energy Association. It is a compendium of each quarterly report submitted over the 7-year period of the agreement accounting for all accomplishments, including major activities, significant results, major findings or conclusions, key outcomes or other achievements. Changes in approach or aims, and reasons for those changes, are included as well as any problems or delays and actions taken and planned to resolve them. It also summarizes budget statuses and any changes in key personnel throughout the life of the agreement. Originally planned for 5 years, the agreement was extended twice through back-to-back no-cost extensions, one to enable full completion of tasks critical to the program’s success and the other due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. The goals of the program were to provide increased knowledge regarding Carbon, Capture, and Storage (CCS) and Clean Energy Systems (CES) to Industry and Government decision makers, technology developers, educators, policymakers, environmental and other stakeholders, and the public by sharing research, technologies, and best practices with domestic and international partners. Increasing such knowledge was key to the other goals of the program of building of a broad consensus among domestic and international decision makers, stakeholders, and the public to take action to support and implement CCS and CES technologies and systems to ensure clean, secure, and affordable energy while enhancing environmental protection. The program accomplished these goals through a series of activities including hosting of conferences and workshops, in-person briefings, virtual webinars, reports and white papers, and keeping stakeholders informed of industry happenings through email distribution lists. It is the belief of the authors of this report, that these activities can be considered to have been successful in their goals.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗