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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

Radioisotope production at the advanced test reactor: process and lessons learned

The mission of the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) focuses on creating irradiation facilities for nuclear materials and fuels research. While radioisotope production is not a core part of the ATR mission, it is important for providing a U.S. domestic source of critical radioisotopes such as cobalt-60 (Co-60). Here, this paper gives an overview for radioisotopes currently being produced in ATR as well as other potential radioisotopes that can be produced in ATR. It also provides guidance on radioisotope production that can be applied to other test reactors.

ATR↗
DOE OSTI2023

Measuring Q₀ in LCLS-II Cryomodules Using Helium Liquid Level

The nitrogen-doped cavities used in the Linac Coherent Light Source II (LCLS-II) cryomodules have shown an unprecedented high Q₀ in vertical and cryomodule testing compared with cavities prepared with standard methods. While demonstration of high Q₀ in the test stand has been achieved, maintaining that performance in the linac is critical to the success of LCLS-II and future accelerator projects. The LCLS-II cryomodules required a novel method of measuring Q₀, due to hardware incompatibilities with existing procedures. Initially developed at Jefferson Lab during cryomodule acceptance testing before being used in the tunnel at SLAC, we use helium liquid level data to estimate the heat generated by cavities. We first establish the relationship between the rate of helium evaporation from known heat loads using electric heaters, and then use that relationship to determine heat from an RF load. Here we present the full procedure along with the development process, lessons learned, and reproducibility while demonstrating for the first time that world record Q₀ can be maintained within the real accelerator environment.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Procurement Process Challenges, Issues, and Lessons Learned from IER 305 and IER 441 [Slides]

This presentation includes a IER 441 assembly overview and the difference between IER 305 AND IER 441 with central test region assembly and hex pitch. Next this presentation looks at IER 441 procurement issues and delays and new hardware. additionally conducted was a SPRF/CX: IER 441 hardware test fit (Success)). This presentation concludes with lessons learned and acknowledgements.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2025

Preparation and Qualification of Preproduction SSR2 Jacketed Cavities for PIP-II

The qualification of 325 MHz Single Spoke Resonators type 2 (SSR2) jacketed cavities to meet technical requirements represents a significant milestone in the development of the SSR2 cryomodules for the PIP-II Project at Fermilab. This poster reports the procedures and lessons learned in processing and preparing these cavities for horizontal cold testing prior to integration into a cavity string assembly, with a focus on addressing the field emission issues observed during the cold testing. A comprehensive root cause analysis identified critical fabrication, processing, and handling factors impacting field emission onset. New techniques were successfully developed and implemented to achieve field emission-free SSR2 cavities, and efforts were made to correlate radiation levels measured at the test stand with expected levels in the LINAC tunnel. Additionally, the evolution of field emission through assembly steps was thoroughly investigated, leading to a reassessment of design choices and enhancing our understanding of their effects on cavity performance.

Grassellino, L. [Fermilab]↗
DOE OSTI2025

Domestic and international consensus standards for nuclear criticality safety – overview & status [Abstract]

The domestic and international consensus standards for nuclear criticality safety (NCS) were developed as the lessons-learned from process criticality accidents. These consensus standards were developed to reduce the rate of process criticality accidents in facilities that process, store, handle or transport fissionable materials by hand. After a significant increase in criticality accidents through the mid-1960’s, the rate of criticality accidents decreased due to these standards and the criticality accident rate is extremely low from an industrial safety perspective.

ANS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Domestic and International Consensus Standards for Nuclear Criticality Safety - Overview & Status

The domestic and international consensus standards for nuclear criticality safety (NCS) were developed based on the lessons-learned from process criticality accidents. These consensus standards were developed to reduce the rate of process criticality accidents in facilities that process, store, handle, or transport fissionable materials by hand. After a significant increase in criticality accidents through the mid-1960s, the rate of criticality accidents decreased as a result of these standards, and the criticality accident rate is extremely low from an industrial safety perspective. The last known criticality accident inside the United States was in 1978 (nearly 47 years ago) at the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant, and outside the United States, an accident occurred at Tokai-mura, Japan, in 1999 (almost 26 years ago). The domestic consensus standards for NCS include the American National Standards (ANS) that are prepared and published by the American Nuclear Society and approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The ANS Standards Board, the NCS Consensus Committee, and the ANS-8 Subcommittee oversee the development and maintenance of these standards. There are currently 18 standards in the ANS-8 series. Nine ANS-8 standards are either in revision mode or planned for revision. A new standard for the use of nondestructive assay measurements (ANSI/ANS-8.28-2024) for NCS was approved in March of 2024. The international consensus standards for NCS calculations, procedures, and practices are maintained and developed within the International Organization for Standardization, Technical Committee 85 “Nuclear Energy,” Subcommittee 5, “Nuclear Fuel Technology,” and Working Group 8, “Nuclear Criticality Safety.” Eleven standards are currently available, four standards are proposed for revision, and four standards are at various stages of development. This paper provides the NCS community with a high-level overview and status report of domestic and international NCS consensus standards to stimulate interest and to support their continued development.

Bowen, Douglas G [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000212460026)↗
DOE OSTI2020

November 2019 Initial Deployment of LiDAR in the H-Canyon Exhaust Tunnel

The H-Canyon Exhaust Tunnel (CAEX) structure is periodically inspected under the Structural Integrity Program using camera equipped crawlers or poles to remotely perform visual inspections. To explore the use of enhanced inspection methods a “Proof of Concept” using the Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology was performed over a 2-day period in November 2019. The purpose of the “Proof of Concept” deployment was to confirm whether a commercially available LiDAR unit could successfully operate and remotely transmit data from the tunnel CAEX environment and whether the data would provide quantitative information to establish baseline measurements. The LiDAR performance requirement was a measurement accuracy of ± 0.25-inches over a 30-foot distance. This report documents the work activities leading to the deployment, the deployment and processing of data, lessons learned from the deployment and the post data processing methods that will be applied to future deployments.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2023

Safety-Related Instrumentation and Control Upgrade Pilot Project: NUREG- 0711 Process Development, Planning and Analysis Activities, and Lessons Learned

Constellation Energy and the United States Department of Energy (DOE) have established a public/private partnership to implement a pilot digital upgrade to replace legacy analog, safety-related reactor protection and emergency safety feature actuation systems (RPS/ESFAS) with modern digital systems. This effort is occurring at Constellation’s Limerick Generating Station. This project is being performed in accordance with industry processes that have been adapted to better support digital upgrades. These processes include IP-ENG-001, Standard Design Process, NISP-EN-04, Standard Digital Engineering Process and Electric Power Research Institute Report 3002011816, Digital Engineering Guide. The Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has been supporting this effort. Latest INL HFE efforts in support of this project have focused on definition and implementation of the Human Factors Engineering (HFE) Program in support of Constellation design and related licensing efforts. This paper presents the development execution of the HFE Program through completion of the Planning and Analysis Phase as defined by NUREG-0711 as well as HFE lessons learned.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Demonstration and Automation of Reflected Target Optical Measurement for Heliostats

Accurate optical surfaces are a primary driver of concentrated solar power plant performance. Errors in pointing and tracking mirrors, the canting of individual mirror facets, and the surface slope of the mirror itself can be caused by errors during assembly, transportation, wind loading, gravity, and many other sources. The tools that exist to measure these error sources today largely rely on fringe deflectometry (SOFAST, QDec, others), or photogrammetry with targets attached to the mirror surface. Since 2022, NREL has been developing a measurement method called the Reflected Target Non-intrusive Assessment (ReTNA) system. This system differs from most established methods in that we perform deflectometry with a pattern of coded targets, identified in space with photogrammetry. Reflected target systems have several advantages over traditional fringe deflectometry systems. Firstly, they can be operated in bright or ambient lighting, a challenge for fringe systems that use a projector and screen. Reflected target systems also can use a much lighter and less expensive target than projector-based systems. Lastly, 2D slope measurement can be solved from a single image, which leads to several advantages for accommodating faster measurements and smaller sized targets. These advantages make ReTNA particularly well-suited for applications where there are space or lighting constraints, like performing heliostat quality assurance on an assembly line. It's also useful when a lightweight, flexible system is needed, like for heliostat developers to quickly measure a new heliostat design at different orientations, to observe gravitational effects on the mirror surface shape. In the last year, significant improvements were made to this tool to make it more useful for these applications. These improvements were focused around validation of the ReTNA measurement system, and automation of the setup and measurement process. First, we present an improved ReTNA layout, for use on the heliostat assembly line. Next, we detail the various changes to the ReTNA software and computer vision methods to automate data collection in this new setup, and lessons learned from this process. The goal with this new setup is to perform a full heliostat surface characterization without removing the mirror from the assembly line. Lastly, we share results from several ReTNA validation studies undertaken over the last year. These include repeated ReTNA measurement on demonstration mirror facets, comparisons with other optical measurement tools, and some studies aimed at quantifying the uncertainty of ReTNA measurement under various constraints (mirror-target spacing, camera resolution, etc.). These results are compared with 2024 HelioCon performance targets, and our planned next steps for the ReTNA measurement system are presented.

CSP↗
DOE OSTI2023

Accelerating Machine Learning Inference with GPUs in ProtoDUNE Data Processing

Abstract We study the performance of a cloud-based GPU-accelerated inference server to speed up event reconstruction in neutrino data batch jobs. Using detector data from the ProtoDUNE experiment and employing the standard DUNE grid job submission tools, we attempt to reprocess the data by running several thousand concurrent grid jobs, a rate we expect to be typical of current and future neutrino physics experiments. We process most of the dataset with the GPU version of our processing algorithm and the remainder with the CPU version for timing comparisons. We find that a 100-GPU cloud-based server is able to easily meet the processing demand, and that using the GPU version of the event processing algorithm is two times faster than processing these data with the CPU version when comparing to the newest CPUs in our sample. The amount of data transferred to the inference server during the GPU runs can overwhelm even the highest-bandwidth network switches, however, unless care is taken to observe network facility limits or otherwise distribute the jobs to multiple sites. We discuss the lessons learned from this processing campaign and several avenues for future improvements.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2020

A Database for Radwaste Management in Germany-30 Years of Experience by TUV NORD - 20461

From the very beginning in the late 1980's TUV NORD EnSys is involved as an independent expert in quality assurance processes concerning interim storage facilities and the disposal for radioactive waste with negligible heat generation in Germany. A database has been developed since these times by TUV NORD EnSys. The development of this database over a long time will be discussed as well as the lessons learned within this process. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2024

Colorado State University (CSU) X-Band Precipitation Radar Plan Position Indicator Data Processed with Corrected Moments in Antenna Coordinates (CMAC) Value-Added Product Report

In 2010 the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility procured 3- and 5-cm wavelength radars for documenting the macrophysical, microphysical, and dynamical structure of precipitating systems. To maximize the scientific impact, ARM supported the development of an application chain to correct for various phenomena in order to retrieve the “point” values of moments of the radar spectrum and polarimetric measurements. We have now used the lessons learned from the processing of the 3- and 5-cm wavelength radars obtained by ARM to help process X-band radar data from the Surface Atmospheric Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) field campaign. This report details the motivation, science, and progress to date as well as charting a path forward.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

From Theory to Large-Scale Simulations, or Living Without “The Paradox of Choice”

Navigating the challenges we face at work and in life is often difficult, and can even make us question our past decisions. This dilemma is even worse nowadays because of the many options available to us, leaving us not enough time to explore them all: the paradox of choice. My life experience offers another perspective on how to make choices; wherein I had to rely more on serendipity, coincidence, and embracing risks. This paper presents a brief description of my career path in space science—from a small village in the countryside to one of the top science Laboratories in the world—and lessons learned through the process of becoming a more resilient scientist. I came to the United States from Bulgaria about 30 years ago, seeking a better education and job opportunities. Navigating a career of research scientist, not only did I find jobs that motivated me every day, I also met amazing people to work with along the way. As a woman in science, I hope my story can inspire and attract young researchers (girls and boys alike) to our community, helping to grow and diversify the next generation of space scientists.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Sputter sample preparation for ion beam delivery of radium-223 at ATLAS

A radium-223 ion beam was delivered to an experiment from the electron cyclotron resonance ion source, ECR2, at the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS). Here, the radium-223 material was in a nitrate salt form within a vial, prior to being converted to a usable sputter sample. The sputter sample was produced using a new sample preparation method, where the radium nitrate was dissolved into a solution and pipetted onto pressed aluminum powder. This sample was then allowed to dry, distributing the radium-223 material throughout the sputter sample. Ion source operation using the radium sputter sample is described with the operating parameters listed. The intensity and energy requirements for this ion beam were 1 × 10 6 particles/s and 1.07 GeV, respectively. Because the intensity is relatively low compared to most experiments at ATLAS, previously developed accelerator mass spectrometry methods were used Scott et al. to avoid the need for tuning of the low-intensity beam of interest. Handling of the radium material, as well as loading and unloading of the sputter sample from ECR2, required collaboration with Health Physics. Procedures were used and dry runs were carried out before, during, and after the experiment to ensure the safety of the workers. The processes used and lessons learned are described within.

07 ISOTOPE AND RADIATION SOURCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Pseudonymization at Scale: OLCF’s Summit Usage Data Case Study

The analysis of vast amounts of data and the processing of complex computational jobs have traditionally relied upon high performance computing (HPC) systems, which offer reliable and efficient management of large-scale computational and data resources. Understanding these analyses’ needs is paramount for designing solutions that can lead to better science, and similarly, understanding the characteristics of the user behavior on those systems is important for improving user experiences on HPC systems. A common approach to gathering data about user behavior is to extract workload characteristics from system log data available only to system administrators. Recently at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), however, we unveiled user behavior about the Summit supercomputer by collecting data from a user’s point of view with ordinary Unix commands.In this paper, we discuss the process, challenges, and lessons learned while preparing this dataset for publication and submission to an open data challenge. The original dataset contains personal identifiable information (PII) about the users of OLCF which needed be masked prior to publication, and we determined that anonymization, which scrubs PII completely, destroyed too much of the structure of the data to be interesting for the data challenge. We instead chose to pseudonymize the dataset, which reduced the linkability of the dataset to the users’ identities. Pseudonymization is significantly more computationally expensive than anonymization, and the size of our dataset, which is approximately 175 million lines of raw text, necessitated the development of a parallelized workflow that could be reused on different HPC machines. We demonstrate the scaling behavior of the workflow on two leadership class HPC systems at OLCF, and we show that we were able to bring the overall makespan time from an impractical 20+ hours on a single node down to around 2 hours. As a result of this work, we release the entire pseudonymized dataset and make the workflows and source code publicly available.

Maheshwari, Ketan↗
DOE OSTI2020

Energy Storage Control Capability Expansion: Achieving Better Technoeconomic Benefits at Portland General Electric's Salem Smart Power Center

This article reports a transformative project aimed at enhancing the control capabilities of a Portland General Electric (PGE) owned 5 MW/1.25 MWh ESS located at Salem Smart Power Center (SSPC), Salem, Oregon, USA toward achieving better techno-economic benefit. Steps for developing a value-driven control capability is illustrated starting from evaluation of economic opportunities that drive the coordination of multiple services to be delivered by an ESS to implementation and testing. Lessons learned during critical processes are identified for the benefit of the ESS industry.

Alam, Md Jan E.↗
DOE OSTI2022

Design, Construction, and Testing of 0.5-m, 18-mm Period Nb 3 Sn Superconducting Undulator Magnets

We report design and fabrication of a new Nb 3 Sn-based superconducting undulator (SCU) are underway at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) of Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. To develop a robust and reliable fabrication process, the magnet development consists of several steps. First, magnetic and mechanical simulations were performed to optimize the magnet design; then, the design matured further by fabricating and testing a series of very short prototypes, ~8 cm long with a period length of 18 mm. These short prototype studies were previously reported. Second, the design was scaled to an intermediate length of ~0.5 m. These two steps led to the final design of ~1.1–m-long magnets, which are currently being fabricated. The quench behavior of each 0.5-m-long undulator magnet, as well as undulator assemblies from these magnets, was studied. The first SCU magnet assembly did not meet the design specifications due to the breakdown of the insulation. With an improved design and fabrication process based on lessons learned, the second SCU assembly achieved the design undulator field of 1.2 T. The design was further optimized, and the third set of magnets was fabricated and successfully tested.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗