Results for “DEVELOP Project Summary” — Page 2

DOE OSTI2022

Signal-Based Fast Tripping Protection Schemes for Electric Power Distribution System Resilience

This report is a summary of a 3-year LDRD project that developed novel methods to detect faults in the electric power grid dramatically faster than today’s protection systems. Accurately detecting and quickly removing electrical faults is imperative for power system resilience and national security to minimize impacts to defense critical infrastructure. The new protection schemes will improve grid stability during disturbances and allow additional integration of renewable energy technologies with low inertia and low fault currents. Signal-based fast tripping schemes were developed that use the physics of the grid and do not rely on communication to reduce cyber risks for safely removing faults.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2021

Demonstrate the Out-of-Pile Performance of a Real-Time Measurement System to Measure Thermal Conductivity Based on Photo Thermal Radiometry

SUMMARY The goal of this project is to develop a fiber-based instrument to perform in-reactor thermal conductivity measurements of fuels and materials. This instrument is based on photothermal radiometry (PTR) and involves heating a sample locally and measuring the induced temperature gradient by collecting blackbody radiation [2]. Thermal conductivity of the sample is extracted by comparing experimental results with a continuum-based model [3,4]. As a laser-based technique, PTR is a non-contact measurement technique that can be performed remotely and non-destructively. In addition, it has several advantages over other photothermal techniques, making it an ideal approach for in-situ measurement of thermal conductivity of nuclear fuels. Because blackbody radiation increases with emissivity and temperature, the PTR technique works well with unprepared surfaces, and measurement accuracy increases with temperature. Moreover, this approach is capable of measuring samples with irregular or poorly defined boundary conditions, which is a common situation for friable spent fuels.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

DOE OSTI2024

Introduction and Status of Fermilab's ACORN Project

Modernizing the Fermilab accelerator control system is essential to future operations of the laboratory's accelerator complex. The existing control system has evolved over four decades and uses hardware that is no longer available and software that uses obsolete frameworks. The Accelerator Controls Operations Research Network (ACORN) Project will modernize the control system and replace end-of-life power supplies to enable future accelerator complex operations with megawatt particle beams. An overview of the ACORN Project and a summary of recent research and development activities will be presented.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

DOE OSTI2024

Enhanced Models for the Simulation of Two-Phase Boiling Flow and Critical Heat Flux with the STAR-CCM+ and NEK-2P CFD Codes: Executive Summary (Final Report)

The goal of the project was to develop, verify and validate an advanced two-phase boiling flow modeling capability that enhances the existing two-phase flow modeling of the STAR-CCM+ Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code. The project focused on the simulation of two phase flow and heat transfer phenomena that occur in Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) and Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) fuel bundles under various operating conditions. The extended STAR-CCM+ two-phase flow models implemented during the project follow the approach similar to the Extended Boiling Framework [1-6] previously developed at Argonne but include more fundamental physical models of boiling phenomena. The development and validation of the extended two-phase models is supported by the U.S. DOE GAIN program and performed in collaboration with Framatome U.S. Inc.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

DOE OSTI2025

Site-Directed Research and Development Annual Report Overview FY2024

Annual SDRD Report including project summaries for FY 2024.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2026

Developing a Process for Collaboration-Based Siting of a Federal Consolidated Interim Storage Facility in the United States: Learning from Communities Living with Legacy Waste

In June of 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Nuclear Energy (NE) announced the selection of its Collaboration-Based Siting (CBS) Consortia, a group of 12 awardees, including the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP) (led by Vanderbilt University) to assist DOE-NE with the development of its process for siting a federal consolidated interim storage facility (FCISF) for spent nuclear fuel (SNF) storage. At this time, DOE NE is not soliciting interested host communities, rather the CBS Consortia are tasked with in-depth engagement, mutual learning, and capacity building to provide DOE NE with feedback on the CBS process. CRESP’s objective is to engage communities in two regions (the Pacific Northwest and the Southeast) with sites currently storing defense- and research-related SNF to foster learning concerning the best and worst practices in community participation in risk-informed decision making. This includes learning from existing structures for public input in radioactive waste management decision making [e.g. citizen advisory boards (CABs)] and other local parties about how to build and sustain trust among the parties. CRESP has been working to engage stakeholders and Tribes surrounding two DOE sites historically differing in receptiveness to engaging with DOE and trusting in DOE to accomplish its missions. CRESP’s approach to date has consisted of (1) engaging voluntarily members and former members of the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s CABs to develop a mutual understanding of their perspectives, values, and experiences related to risk and participatory decision making; (2) engaging members of those communities that would likely be part of any radioactive waste management discussions and who may provide valuable feedback for the development of the CBS process; and in the longer term, (3) engaging communities to foster knowledge sharing on understanding and definitions of risk and how risk is factored into community decision making. Our emphasis is to identify opportunities for improving risk communication frameworks, strategies, and decision making. The selection of a future FCISF site is likely to result in the creation of a structure similar to a CAB composed of members of the local community. We anticipate that these insights can help DOE NE learn from existing participatory risk communication structures in place at sites storing defenseor research-related SNF to understand best practices for fostering enduring and participatory relationships with future CABs. Within this paper, we (1) describe CRESP’s overall approach to assisting DOE NE with maturing the CBS process; (2) present a summary of preliminary phase 1 project results, including the development of a body of knowledge (describing available resources to support community engagement, risk communica tion, and participatory decision making) and community ecosystem information (leveraging demographic, social, economic, and environmental attribute mapping and advanced sentiment analysis of social media data); and (3) based on these results, provide observations for future research opportunities to support the development of CBS processes for radioactive waste management facilities, generally.

collaboration-based siting↗

DOE OSTI2024

Summary of Developing a Hanford Grout Modeling Framework Initial Workshop

The “Development of the Hanford Grout Modeling Framework” project as part of the Network of National Laboratories for Environmental Management and Stewardship (NNLEMS) funding program is underway. An initial project team workshop was held in Richland, WA on June 4 and 5, 2024 with participants from PNNL, SRNL, SNL, WRPS and CRESP (VU and UCF). The workshop covered an overview of the current state of the art in grout modeling tools provided by the team. Based on a focus on liquid waste immobilization grout and encapsulation grout for solid wastes and tank closure grout at Hanford, the team identified preliminary conceptual models for these three applications which will be used to form the basis of the Hanford Grout Modeling Framework. The key processes that can drive mechanisms impacting the grout performance were identified for each test case. The programmatic plan was also identified with five core Themes being selected that will form the focus of the project. Within each theme, individual tasks for Year 1 were planned in support of the development of an updated Hanford Grout Modeling Framework. This report presents a summary of the information presented during the workshop.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

DOE OSTI2022

Radiation-Hardened GaN HEMT and Cell Design, Modeling, and Fabrication for Nuclear Instrumentation Applications

Recent advances in nuclear power generation technologies show great promise for efficient, safe generation of carbon-free power in the near future. Consequently, many new generation reactor designs are being pursued by government and industry groups, including both fission- and fusion-based technologies. Radiation- and temperature-tolerant sensor technology continues to advance, yet development of the electronics/instrumentation technologies suitable for these environments have fallen behind. Industry has adequately addressed harsh environment electronics needs for low earth orbit satellites, but the much more extreme conditions associated with electronics placed near or in a reactor core remain unaddressed. This project investigates the use of gallium nitride (GaN) circuit technology to address the unique needs for sensor interface electronics and communications in reactor environments. This report provides a summary of the first year’s project activities related to developing and optimizing devices and circuits for this GaN high electronic mobility transistor (HEMT) process. Activities reported include multiple analog and digital circuit designs simulated using custom Verilog-A models generated from measured GaN devices fabricated in the target process. Digital circuit designs included fundamental logic circuits such as an inverter, NAND, NOR, AND and OR gates, as well as a 5-stage ring oscillator. Each design was simulated using an open-source SPICE simulator, and an integrated circuit layout was produced of each design for use in future fabrication. Analog circuit designs focused on the fundamental building blocks to be used to construct sensor interface and communications circuits. These included current mirrors, matched differential pairs, and a Gilbert cell mixer design, each with an associated integrated circuit layout. Layout tools used for these designs included two open-source packages—KLayout and Magic—which were customized for specific use with the OSU GaN process layers. Design rules and preliminary device extraction capabilities were built for the Magic tool to enable device extraction and subsequent netlist generation for SPICE simulation. Finally, future research directions for year two are summarized. When the year-two directions are implemented, the project will be in position to advance the state of the art in electronics for near- or in-reactor sensor interfacing and communications.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

DOE OSTI2025

Summary of Graphite Data Stored within NDMAS

The Graphite Technology Development Project provides data to support the design of graphite core components within specific reactor service conditions of the next generation of high-temperature, gas-cooled nuclear reactors. Physical, mechanical, and thermal properties of nuclear grade graphite were characterized for specimens that were unirradiated, irradiated, and irradiated under various stress conditions. The material properties include diameter, length, mass, density, compressive strength, tensile strength, flexural strength, modulus, resistivity, thermal diffusivity, and thermal expansion coefficient. Baseline graphite specimens are unirradiated from different grades (2114, IG-110, NBG-17, NBG-18, and PCEA) and different types used in different characterization tests (compressive, flexural, tensile, one-inch cylinder, and quarter-inch cylinder). The Advanced Graphite Creep (AGC) irradiation specimens are from a much larger number of grades and cylinder types (creep, piggyback, and pencil). For baseline graphite, characterization data for 7,756 specimens extracted from thirteen graphite billets were captured to the NDMAS database. For AGC experiments, four irradiation campaigns have been completed: AGC-1, AGC-2, AGC-3, and AGC-4. The ongoing HDG-1 (High-Dose Graphite) experiment, which began irradiation with Cycle 168B on August 26, 2020, includes specimens previously irradiated in AGC-2 in addition to the specimens originally destined for AGC-5.. Besides the characterization data, the AGC data includes irradiation monitoring and physics data representing the irradiation conditions of AGC specimens. Currently, all data for AGC-1, AGC-2, and AGC-3 have been captured to the NDMAS database. Only AGC-4 pre-irradiation and irradiation monitoring data have been captured, and HDG-1 pre-irradiation data are in process of being captured for unirradiated specimens. To date, a total of 38,149 material property records have been captured into NDMAS database for baseline and AGC specimens. All characterization data are qualified for use according to their perspective data verification reports. For the AGC irradiation campaigns, a total of 41,502 qualified physics calculation records were added for AGC-1, AGC-2, and AGC-3. Finally, a total of 173,698,505 AGC irradiation monitoring data records (thermocouple temperature, gas flow rate, gas pressure, gas moisture, applied load, and specimen displacement) have been captured to NDMAS; the majority of those records (~94%) are qualified data records.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2025

Deliverable 6.7-Final Technical Report: Development Summary and Evaluation of the Solar Uncertainty Integrator (SUNI) Software

The Data Quality and Uncertainty Integration Project was a three-year effort to address stakeholder needs for assessing solar radiation resource data quality based on existing tools for estimating radiometer measurement uncertainties and assessing post-measurement data quality. The annual research objectives for the project addressed a logical progression of effort needed to achieve the ultimate project goal of developing the Solar Uncertainty Integrator (SUNI) software. This final technical report summarizes the development process for achieving these key research objectives and addresses the outreach and code development efforts in the final year of the project to develop a new solar irradiance data uncertainty integration software package.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Materials Characterization, Prediction, and Control Project: Summary Report on Material Characterization, Part 1

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) undertook the Materials Characterization, Prediction, and Control (MCPC) Laboratory Directed Research and Development Project to advance understanding of nuclear material processing and enable multifold acceleration in the development and qualification of new material systems in national security and advanced energy applications (Smith 2021). The MCPC Project executed research across three scientific vertices—material characterization, predictive modeling, and data analytics—with extensive support by a data curation and management team. The central technical objective in the MCPC Project was to improve the prediction and characterization of the process-structure-property relationships within the microstructurally refined region of stainless-steel samples prepared utilizing friction stir processing (FSP). Application of the FSP technique is well established at PNNL within the Solid Phase Processing capability through many years of investment across a range of materials and applications (PNNL 2024). Three distinct rounds of FSP experiments were performed by the experimental team, producing replicate samples utilizing across different nominal processing conditions (Condition IDs) listed in Table 1. The starting material on which FSP was applied was commercially available unprocessed stainless-steel type 316L material. Chosen processing conditions were very diverse, and some were intentionally chosen to produce defects. Several samples experienced tool breakage during experimentation, so a full set of three replicates was not produced for every nominal processing condition.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2024

Materials Characterization, Prediction, and Control Project: Summary Report on Material Characterization, Part 2

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) undertook the Materials Characterization, Prediction, and Control (MCPC) Laboratory Directed Research and Development Project to advance understanding of nuclear material processing and enable multifold acceleration in the development and qualification of new material systems in national security and advanced energy applications (Smith 2021). The MCPC Project executed research across three scientific vertices—material characterization, predictive modeling, and data analytics—with extensive support by a data curation and management team. The central technical objective in the MCPC Project was to improve the prediction and characterization of the process-structure-property relationships within the microstructurally refined region of stainless-steel samples prepared utilizing friction stir processing (FSP). Application of the FSP technique is well established at PNNL within the Solid Phase Processing capability through many years of investment across a range of materials and applications (PNNL 2024).

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2024

Materials Characterization, Prediction, and Control Project: Summary Report on Material Characterization, Part 3

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) undertook the Materials Characterization, Prediction, and Control (MCPC) Laboratory Directed Research and Development Project to advance understanding of nuclear material processing and enable multifold acceleration in the development and qualification of new material systems in national security and advanced energy applications (Smith 2021). The MCPC Project executed research across three scientific vertices—material characterization, predictive modeling, and data analytics—with extensive support by a data curation and management team. The central technical objective in the MCPC Project was to improve the prediction and characterization of the process-structure-property relationships within the microstructurally refined region of stainless-steel samples prepared utilizing friction stir processing (FSP). Application of the FSP technique is well established at PNNL within the Solid Phase Processing capability through many years of investment across a range of materials and applications (PNNL 2024).

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2024

Materials Characterization, Prediction, and Control Project: Summary Report on Material Characterization, Part 4

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) undertook the Materials Characterization, Prediction, and Control (MCPC) Laboratory Directed Research and Development Project to advance understanding of nuclear material processing and enable multifold acceleration in the development and qualification of new material systems in national security and advanced energy applications (Smith 2021). The MCPC Project executed research across three scientific vertices—material characterization, predictive modeling, and data analytics—with extensive support by a data curation and management team. The central technical objective in the MCPC Project was to improve the prediction and characterization of the process-structure-property relationships within the microstructurally refined region of stainless-steel samples prepared utilizing friction stir processing (FSP). Application of the FSP technique is well established at PNNL within the Solid Phase Processing capability through many years of investment across a range of materials and applications (PNNL 2024).

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2025

2024 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Annual Report

This summary report provides an overview of all LDRD projects at Argonne National Laboratory that concluded in Fiscal Year 2024. Many projects are funded for multiple years, the fiscal year for each project is indicated by the first four digits of the LDRD project number.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2025

Baseline Cost Model for Hydropower: Documentation (2025)

Hydropower currently contributes about 80 GW of conventional and 23 GW of pumped storage capacity to the United States (US) power grid. Previous studies have estimated a considerable amount of remaining US hydropower resources, including non-powered dams (NPD) (Hadjerioua et al., 2012), new stream-reach developments (NSD) (Kao et al., 2014), pumped storage hydropower (PSH) and canal/conduit (Kao et al., 2022). The combined theoretical capacity potential of these various hydropower resources is comparable to the existing US hydropower capacity. There is a continuing interest in developing this hydropower potential, particularly to help meet the increasing demand for electricity. However, available data (Sasthav and Oladosu, 2022) show that the rate of new hydropower development has slowed considerably over time despite the interest of industry stakeholders. This is partly due to the competition from other energy resources and from the highly dispersed nature of remaining hydropower resources, which lead to high information requirements for evaluating the feasibility of potential projects. Cost information provides the most succinct summary of the feasibility of a potential hydropower project required by stakeholders, including developers, investors, policymakers, consumer groups, etc., considering investment options. The best estimates of hydropower costs can be obtained through detailed engineering design and cost assessments of individual projects. However, this approach has high data and resource (time, funds, cross-disciplinary expertise) requirements that render it inapplicable for rapid cost estimation with limited data. Although innovative approaches can overcome some of these impediments (see Oladosu and Ma, 2024 for such an application to potential NPD projects), the development of such approaches still requires significant amounts of resources and are not generally applicable to all hydropower project types. Therefore, statistical and parametric methods using simpler cost specifications remain of significant utility to hydropower stakeholders and are, at the least, complementary to more detailed approaches, particularly when evaluating many potential projects.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2023

Compaction of crushed salt for safe containment – a summary of the KOMPASS projects

Abstract. For the underground disposal of high-level nuclear waste in rock salt formations, the safety concept includes the backfilling of open cavities with crushed salt. For the prognosis of the sealing function of the backfill for the safe containment of the radioactive waste, it is crucial to have a comprehensive process understanding of the crushed-salt compaction behavior. The crushed-salt compaction process is influenced by internal properties (e.g., grain size, mineralogy, and moisture content) and boundary conditions (e.g., temperature, stress state, and compaction rate) and, therefore, involves several coupled thermal–hydro–mechanical (THM) processes (Hansen et al., 2014; Kröhn et al., 2017). With the paradigm shift from the limited release of radionuclides to safe containment due to the German Repository Site Selection Act passed in 2017, the importance of crushed salt as geotechnical barrier has increased, with a focus on the evolution of its hydraulic properties. Based on the knowledge gaps in the current process understanding, the “Compaction of crushed salt for safe containment” (KOMPASS) projects were initiated to improve the scientific basis behind using crushed salt for the long-term isolation of high-level nuclear waste within rock salt repositories. The efforts to improve the prediction of crushed-salt compaction begun during the first phase of the KOMPASS projects (Czaikowski et al., 2020) and were followed up in a second phase ending in June 2023. The primary achievements of the projects are as follows (Czaikowski et al., 2020; Friedenberg et al., 2022): specification of the KOMPASS reference material, an easily available and reproducible synthetic crushed-salt material, for generic investigations; development of pre-compaction methods and successful production of samples in the short term and under in situ loading conditions; formulation of an extended laboratory program addressing the isolated investigation of known relevant factors influencing the compaction behavior of crushed salt (Düsterloh et al., 2022); execution of long-term compaction tests addressing isotropic and deviatoric load changes, temperature, and compaction state; construction of a backfill body using the KOMPASS reference material in the Sondershausen mine through collaboration with the SAVER (Entwicklung eines salzgrusbasierten Versatzkonzepts unter der Option Rückholbarkeit) project (Schaarschmidt and Friedenberg, 2022); advancement of the tools for microstructure investigation methods (Svensson and Laurich, 2022); generation (first stages) of a microphysical process list combining literature research with our own findings; benchmarking of long-term compaction test for model development and optimization of various existing models as well as the development of new models; application of a virtual demonstrator (2D model representing a backfilled drift in rock salt) for the visualization of developments and the quantification of the models (Rabbel, 2022). In summary, the KOMPASS projects contributed to the reduction of uncertainties and the strengthening of the safety case for using crushed salt within rock salt repositories.

Friedenberg, Larissa↗

DOE OSTI2025

Investigation into the Performance Benefits of Exposing Network Backpressure in UPC++ and GASNet-EX

This document is a brief summary of the research, and supporting development efforts, conducted by the project "Investigation into Improving Dynamic Adaptivity to System-Level Asynchrony in UPC++". We tested the hypothesis "The UPC++ and GASNet-EX runtimes can expose information from the network stack that enables applications to dynamically adapt to congestion, improving total throughput". We present experimental results from both a microbenchmark and an application benchmark that support this hypothesis.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗