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Geochemical characterization of floodplain sediments from Meander C and O in the East River Watershed, CO, USA

This data package is part of the Watershed Function SFA data collection and contains geochemical characterization of sediments as a function of depth in the pumphouse vicinity, including Meander C and Meander O (oxbow). This data was used in the manuscript "Fox, P.M., Bill, M., Heckman, K., Conrad, M., Anderson, C., Keiluweit, M., and Nico, P.S.Shale as a Source of Organic Carbon in Floodplain Sediments of a Mountainous Watershed" published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. Data includes sieving, total organic carbon (TOC), total inorganic carbon (TIC), total nitrogen (TN), carbon isotopes (14C and 13C) of whole sediment. Sediment density fractionation data is also included, with measurements of TOC, TN, 14C and 13C on density fractions. Metal and carbon concentrations from various sediment extractions (HCl, dithionite, oxalate, water, and pyrophosphate) are included. Characterization of extracted carbon by fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and UV-Visible light spectroscopy. Characterization of density fractionated (light fractions) organic carbon by FTIR. Carbon X-ray spectroscopy (C near edge X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy [NEXAFS] and scanning transmission X-ray microscopy [STXM]) is also included for shale samples and sediment samples.Additional acknowledgements:1. M.K. and C.A. were supported by the Department of Energy, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Subsurface Biosphere Research program (award no. DE-SC0016544).2. STXM and NEXAFS data was collected at the Canadian Light Source, which is supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the University of Saskatchewan, the Government of Saskatchewan, Western Economic Diversification Canada, the National Research Council Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.3. Radiocarbon analysis was supported in part by the Radiocarbon Collaborative, which is jointly sponsored by the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station, the KCCAMS Facility at UC Irvine, and Michigan Technological University.Update 11/06/2019: An .kml file was added with the GPS locations for all the sampling sites.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Collaborative Defense of Transmission and Distribution Protection and Control Devices Against Cyber Attacks (CODEF) DE-OE0000674. ABB Inc. Final Scientific/Technical Report

This report summarizes the activities conducted under the DOE-OE funded project DEOE0000674, where ABB Inc. (ABB), in collaboration with University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), and Ameren-Illinois (Ameren-IL) pursued the development of a system of collaborative defense of electrical substation’s intelligent electronic devices against cyber-attacks (CODEF). An electrical substation with CODEF features will be more capable of mitigating cyber-attacks especially those that seek to control switching devices. It leverages the security extensions of IEC 61850 to empower existing devices to collaborate in identifying and blocking malicious intents to trip circuit breakers, mis-coordinate devices settings, even though the commands and the measurements comply with correct syntax. The CODEF functions utilize the physics of electromagnetic systems, electric power engineering principles, and computer science to bring more in depth cyber defense closer to the protected substation devices.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

U.S. Building Stock Characterization Study: A National Typology for Decarbonizing U.S. Buildings

To support the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Advanced Building Construction (ABC) Collaborative, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has been tasked with characterizing the U.S. building stock and developing a national typology of buildings. The potential use cases of such a typology are flexible and evolving, but in this initial phase, the primary intention is to help identify technology requirements and engineering solutions for moving the U.S. building stock toward a zero-carbon future by mid-century. This typology will also support the development of appropriate ABC research goals for existing buildings, such as cost targets for new technology development, and in a later phase, the typology can be used to support the implementation of ABC solutions by informing market aggregation and business model development. The ABC Initiative invests in new technologies that enable high building performance, can be deployed quickly with minimal onsite construction time, and are affordable and appealing to building owners, investors, and occupants. Funding awardees use many innovations, including new building materials, 3D printing, offsite manufacturing, robotics, and digital art-to-part. Although the goals of ABC cover a broad range of objectives around energy, comfort, and health, the primary ABC-related application of this national building characterization study is the development of retrofit packages that can be applied to reduce thermal loads in buildings. Retrofit packages will be determined collaboratively by the DOE and the ABC Collaborative. We anticipate a range of upgrade measures covering envelope-, HVAC-, and water-heating-related loads.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Argonne National Laboratory Annual Report of Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program Activities FY 2012

Our plans to upgrade the Advanced Photon Source are proceeding on schedule, and we hope to receive CD-2 approval sometime in spring 2013. When complete, the APS Upgrade will equip this vital facility for continued scientific leadership in the 21st century, providing the 5,000-plus members of our user community with greatly increased time, energy and spatial resolution. We also have successfully installed “Mira,” the new IBM Blue Gene/Q system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. The world’s fourth-fastest supercomputer, Mira is now providing leading-edge computational power across all scientific disciplines. I am also pleased to report that Argonne’s new Energy Sciences Building is proceeding on schedule; we expect it to be finished and ready for occupancy by June 30, 2013. When complete, the ESB will be one of the most modern and most flexible energy labs in the world, creating a new home for researchers focused on a wide range of energy science challenges. Research is under way at the new multidisciplinary Institute for Molecular Engineering (IME), a joint program of the University of Chicago and Argonne. Over the past year, four new faculty members, including IME’s director, – all pre-eminent researchers who hold joint appointments at Argonne – have joined the IME. We look forward to working in collaboration with the IME to find new ways to address the interfaces between molecular-level science and powerful new technologies. In FY 2012, we continued support for the final year of the “Beyond Lithium-Ion” Director’s Grand Challenge LDRD project. That project enabled significant work on the performance of lithium-based energy storage systems, pointing the way to new high-energy-density lithium-air batteries. I believe this Grand Challenge contributed significantly to our successful bid to win designation of the Argonne-based Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) as the DOE’s new Batteries and Energy Storage Hub. JCESR, which brings together a world-class “dream team” of national laboratories, universities and private sector partners, strongly benefited from LDRD program investments, both in FY2012 and in previous years. As we move forward in FY2013, the Director’s Grand Challenge is now focused on new ways to address the challenges of “big data” – the acquisition, storage, transfer, and analysis of both experimental and simulated data at scales approaching the limits of our current computational capacities. In managing Argonne’s LDRD program, we have adhered to the requirements of DOE Order 413.2b and associated guidelines. Our program management continually strives for increased efficiency. In addition to meeting all reporting requirements during FY 2012, our LDRD Program Office continues to implement intranet-based process enhancements to better serve all LDRD stakeholders, including our DOE Site Office colleagues. As the following individual project reports demonstrate, Argonne’s researchers are pursuing projects at the leading edge of science and engineering, and making significant contributions to the advancement of our laboratory’s major strategic initiatives. Evidence of the continuing strength of this program is found in the follow-on sponsorship won by many of these research projects, as well as in the numbers of publications, invited presentations, inventions, and new staff hires that are direct results of LDRD. LDRD enables exploration of new scientific directions and makes it possible to adapt quickly to a changing landscape with unexpected opportunities, while enhancing the capabilities of our researchers and our scientific facilities. For these reasons, LDRD remains an invaluable resource to address the future science and technology needs of DOE, and of our nation.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Building a Computational and Experimental Rapid Response Pipeline to Counter the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Outbreak and Emerging Biothreats

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the promise of monoclonal antibody-based prophylactic and therapeutic drugs, especially where protective candidates can be rapidly identified or developed for emerging biothreats and escape variants. Current cutting-edge technologies for this purpose still rely on pathogen-exposed convalescent volunteers and a large screening effort to find a proverbial needle in a haystack. Computational design of protective antibodies based on pre-existing templates skips those requirements and allows for greater control over the breadth and target epitope, while also co-optimizing for potency and developability or other biophysical characteristics. We approached this problem by building and expanding an in vitro experimental rapid antibody production and characterization pipeline to support development of an autonomous, closed loop, active learning software system based on structural simulation and ground truth experimental data to design and evaluate antibody antigen interactions. Starting from early in the pandemic, we targeted SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, by re-purposing neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-1 that had been identified in the wake of that outbreak in the early 2000’s. We successfully re-targeted three different anti-SARS-CoV-1 antibodies to neutralize SARS-CoV-2 in vitro, where the antibodies were generated externally and tested through conventional binding and neutralization assays internally or with collaborators. As antibodies were identified from the blood of humans infected with SARS-CoV-2, we shifted to collaborate with academic partners to develop improved versions of their human-derived antibodies. This work reached its most important stage in rapid response to the emergence of the Omicron variant of concern (VOC) in late 2021. In a matter of weeks, enabled by on demand innovation to our screening pipeline, we computationally designed and experimentally characterized derivative antibodies of COV2-2130, one of two antibodies from Vanderbilt that form the basis of the AstraZeneca Evusheld prophylactic drug product. This drug product suffers a serious loss of efficacy against Omicron BA.1 and BA.1.1, the first Omicron strains. Due to tight integration of computational design and experimental evaluation, we were able to identify a pair of designs with potent neutralization of the main targets Omicron BA.1 and BA.1.1; but also the earlier Delta variant, and subsequent Omicron strains including BA.2, BA.4, BA.5, and BA.2.75, demonstrating that our multi-target design process can, by its nature, produce robust antibody designs that strictly improve over the parental antibody. These results, recognized by a 2022 Director’s Science and Technology award, have enabled the follow-on GUIDE program, to commence in FY23. While earlier design campaigns were substantially outsourced, we have engineered better and faster processes internally to better compliment, calibrate, and speed computational designs. As part of the follow-on GUIDE program, we will stand up a rapid and high-throughput antibody production and characterization facility staffed with the expertise and capabilities to foster our current collaboration across PLS and ENG as well as other partnerships toward computational design of biologics.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Tools for Water Ingress Testing

The Safety Storage and Engineering Team, as part of the Production Support Services division (PSS-2), is tasked with ensuring the safety of containers used for handling and storage of nuclear materials. As part of this work, water ingress tests are conducted to evaluate the water-tightness of containers intended for in-glovebox use. In collaboration, the statistics group of the Computer and Computational Sciences Division (CCS-6) provided support in developing a statistically defensible approach for determining appropriate sample sizes for water ingress testing. Water ingress testing involves multiple measurements on multiple containers. Our approach uses a simple random effects model to analyze a pilot data set, implementing prediction limits to evaluate the efficacy of collecting additional data. Although this study capitalizes on available data, our approach can be used with estimates of the ratio of between and within variability and average values, often available from past testing or expert knowledge. An interactive Shiny tool was developed as a final user-friendly product for future testing. The Shiny interface is an open-source package providing a framework for building web applications. Raw data exploration and prediction interval-based sample size assessments can quickly be conducted by the engineering team without needing to interact with the underlying code.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

SAM: A Modern System Code for Advanced Non-LWR Safety Analysis

The System Analysis Module (SAM), developed at Argonne National Laboratory and by collaborators at other organizations, is for advanced non–light water reactor safety analysis. SAM aims to provide fast-running, modest-fidelity, whole-plant transient analysis capabilities that are essential for fast-turnaround design scoping and engineering analyses of advanced reactor concepts. To facilitate code development, SAM utilizes the MOOSE object-oriented application framework, its underlying finite element library, and linear and nonlinear solvers to leverage modern advanced software environments and numerical methods. SAM aims to solve tightly coupled physical phenomena, including fission reaction, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and thermal-mechanical responses in advanced reactor structures, systems, and components with high accuracy and efficiency. Finally, this paper gives an overview of the SAM code development, including goals and functional requirements, physical models, current capabilities, verification and validation, software quality assurance, and examples of simulations for advanced nuclear reactor applications.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

A Procedure for Determination of Degradation Acceptance Criteria for Structures and Passive Components in Nuclear Power Plants

The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) has been collaborating with Brookhaven National Laboratory since 2007 to develop a realistic seismic risk evaluation system which includes the consideration of aging of structures and components in nuclear power plants (NPPs). This collaboration program aims at providing technical support to a five-year KAERI research project, which includes three specific areas that are essential to seismic probabilistic risk assessment: (1) probabilistic seismic hazard analysis, (2) seismic fragility analysis including the effects of aging, and (3) a plant seismic risk analysis. The understanding and assessment of age-related degradations of structures, systems, and components and their impact on plant safety is the major goal of this KAERI-BNL collaboration. Four annual reports have been published before this report as a result of the collaboration research.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Advanced Outage and Control Center: Strategies for Nuclear Plant Outage Work Status Capabilities

The research effort is a part of the Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program. LWRS is a research and development program sponsored by the Department of Energy, performed in close collaboration with industry to provide the technical foundations for licensing and managing the long-term, safe and economical operation of current nuclear power plants. The LWRS Program serves to help the US nuclear industry adopt new technologies and engineering solutions that facilitate the continued safe operation of the plants and extension of the current operating licenses. The Outage Control Center (OCC) Pilot Project was directed at carrying out the applied research for development and pilot of technology designed to enhance safe outage and maintenance operations, improve human performance and reliability, increase overall operational efficiency, and improve plant status control. Plant outage management is a high priority concern for the nuclear industry from cost and safety perspectives. Unfortunately, many of the underlying technologies supporting outage control are the same as those used in the 1980’s. They depend heavily upon large teams of staff, multiple work and coordination locations, and manual administrative actions that require large amounts of paper. Previous work in human reliability analysis suggests that many repetitive tasks, including paper work tasks, may have a failure rate of 1.0E-3 or higher (Gertman, 1996). With between 10,000 and 45,000 subtasks being performed during an outage (Gomes, 1996), the opportunity for human error of some consequence is a realistic concern. Although a number of factors exist that can make these errors recoverable, reducing and effectively coordinating the sheer number of tasks to be performed, particularly those that are error prone, has the potential to enhance outage efficiency and safety. Additionally, outage management requires precise coordination of work groups that do not always share similar objectives. Outage managers are concerned with schedule and cost, union workers are concerned with performing work that is commensurate with their trade, and support functions (safety, quality assurance, and radiological controls, etc.) are concerned with performing the work within the plants controls and procedures. Approaches to outage management should be designed to increase the active participation of work groups and managers in making decisions that closed the gap between competing objectives and the potential for error and process inefficiency.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Cyber security evaluation of II&C technologies

The Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program is a research and development program sponsored by the Department of Energy, which is conducted in close collaboration with industry to provide the technical foundations for licensing and managing the long-term, safe and economical operation of current nuclear power plants The LWRS Program serves to help the US nuclear industry adopt new technologies and engineering solutions that facilitate the continued safe operation of the plants and extension of the current operating licenses. Within the LWRS Program, the Advanced Instrumentation, Information, and Control (II&C) Systems Technologies Pathway conducts targeted research and development (R&D) to address aging and reliability concerns with the legacy instrumentation and control and related information systems of the U.S. operating light water reactor (LWR) fleet. The II&C Pathway is conducted by Idaho National Laboratory (INL). Cyber security is a common concern among nuclear utilities and other nuclear industry stakeholders regarding the digital technologies that are being developed under this program. This concern extends to the point of calling into question whether these types of technologies could ever be deployed in nuclear plants given the possibility that the information in them can be compromised and the technologies themselves can potentially be exploited to serve as attack vectors for adversaries. To this end, a cyber security evaluation has been conducted of these technologies to determine whether they constitute a threat beyond what the nuclear plants already manage within their regulatory-required cyber security programs. Specifically, the evaluation is based on NEI 08-09, which is the industry’s template for cyber security programs and evaluations, accepted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as responsive to the requirements of the nuclear power plant cyber security regulation found in 10 CFR 73.54. The evaluation was conducted by a cyber security team with expertise in nuclear utility cyber security programs and experience in conducting these evaluations. The evaluation has determined that, for the most part, cyber security will not be a limiting factor in the application of these technologies to nuclear power plant applications.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Washington State University Algae Biofuels Research

The goal of this project was to advance algal technologies for the production of biofuels and biochemicals by establishing the Washington State Algae Alliance, a collaboration partnership among two private companies (Targeted Growth, Inc. (TGI), Inventure Chemicals (Inventure) Inc (now Inventure Renewables Inc) and Washington State University (WSU). This project included three major components. The first one was strain development at TGI by genetically engineering cyanobacteria to yield high levels of lipid and other specialty chemicals. The second component was developing an algal culture system at WSU to produce algal biomass as biofuel feedstock year-round in the northern states of the United States. This system included two cultivation modes, the first one was a phototrophic process and the second a heterotrophic process. The phototrophic process would be used for algae production in open ponds during warm seasons; the heterotrophic process would be used in cold seasons so that year-round production of algal lipid would be possible. In warm seasons the heterotrophic process would also produce algal seeds to be used in the phototrophic culture process. Selected strains of green algae and cyanobacteria developed by TGI were tested in the system. The third component was downstream algal biomass processing by Inventure that included efficiently harvesting the usable fuel fractions from the algae mass and effectively isolating and separating the usable components into specific fractions, and converting isolated fractions into green chemicals.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

International Collaboration on Spent Fuel Disposition in Crystalline Media: FY17 Progress Report

Active participation in international R&D is crucial for achieving the Spent Fuel Waste Science & Technology (SFWST) long-term goals of conducting “experiments to fill data needs and confirm advanced modeling approaches” and of having a “robust modeling and experimental basis for evaluation of multiple disposal system options” (by 2020). DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy (NE) has developed a strategic plan to advance cooperation with international partners. The international collaboration on the evaluation of crystalline disposal media at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) in FY17 focused on the collaboration through the Development of Coupled Models and their Validation against Experiments (DECOVALEX-2019) project. The DECOVALEX project is an international research and model comparison collaboration, initiated in 1992, for advancing the understanding and modeling of coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical (THMC) processes in geological systems. SNL has been participating in three tasks of the DECOVALEX project: Task A. Modeling gas injection experiments (ENGINEER), Task C. Modeling groundwater recovery experiment in tunnel (GREET), and Task F. Fluid inclusion and movement in the tight rock (FINITO).

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Mesoscale Science at Extreme Conditions Workshop: a Momentum Initiative Workshop

In early August 2018, experts in both modeling approaches and experimental techniques active at the mesoscale gathered in Los Alamos and Santa Fe, New Mexico to discuss the current state-of-the-art for modeling, simulation, and experiments available at the mesoscale, information that can be used to inform and/or validate both mesoscale and larger-length scale models, and opportunities for future work and collaboration. The overarching goal was to identify needs within LANL’s community that mesoscale science (models or experiments) could address. In addition, the workshop intended to identify gaps that exist within this field that could inform future research directions and the formation of advantageous collaborative efforts.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Beamline for E-beam processing at UITF

Electron beam irradiation is a method that has shown a good potential to reduce several pollutants in wastewater. One of the main challenges towards wider adoption of this method is the need for compact, reliable, cost-effective, high-power accelerators. Jefferson Lab is working on the design and prototyping of accelerator components, based on superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) technology, aiming at accelerators for industrial applications. The LDRD project aimed at designing, procuring, installing, and commissioning a beamline at the Upgraded Injector Test Facility (UITF) accelerator to allow electron-beam irradiation studies of different materials, beginning with wastewater. The availability of such beamline allows exploring the ability of electron-beam radiation to reduce or eliminate so-called “forever chemicals” that can be found in wastewater or industrial sites. After successful commissioning, the beamline was used to irradiate wastewater samples with different concentrations of 1,4-dioxane, in collaboration with Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD).

42 ENGINEERING↗

Minority Serving Institutions Partnership Program (MSIPP) - 18108

The DOE-EM recognizes that successfully completing its legacy environmental cleanup mission will require maintaining a well-trained, technically skilled, and diverse workforce. Minority representation in critical science and engineering fields is an important part of EM's vision for the future workforce. The Minority Serving Institutions Partnership Program (MSIPP) has been created and designed to increase the numbers of minorities with science and engineering experience in areas important to the success of the DOE-EM mission. MSIPP will provide financial assistance for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activities at Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) engaged in research and related STEM efforts supporting EM's needs. The program offers research internship opportunities at DOE National Laboratories across the DOE complex. MSIPP also encourages research collaborations between MSI Universities and DOE National Laboratories by funding research in areas relevant to DOE-EM needs. Based on current DOE-EM missions, there are two research focus areas: Tank Waste and Site Restoration. Tank Waste includes priority areas of current DOE tank waste and waste processing approaches, alternative DOE tank waste processing options, and tank management and closure. Site Restoration research concentrates in the areas of Soil and Groundwater with priority areas of attenuation-based remedies for the subsurface, deep vadose zone, remediation of mercury and industrial contaminants, and advanced simulation capability for environmental management; and, in the areas of Deactivation and Decommissioning, with priority areas of unique sensor networks for remote monitoring of entombed facilities and tanks, interactions between radiological and chemical contaminants of concern to DOE and facility materials, incombustible fixatives and decontamination agents, acceptability of DeconGel and various contaminant mixtures and robotics, remote systems with plug-and-play interchangeable components, and models for facility decommissioning. This paper gives an overview of the opportunities available to MSI students and universities and outlines the progress this program has made since its inception, and the path forward to further enhance efforts to create a pipeline into the DOE-EM workforce. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

FCC-ee: The Lepton Collider

Particle physics has arrived at an important moment of its history. The discovery of the Higgs boson, with a mass of 125 GeV, completes the matrix of particles and interactions that has constituted the “Standard Model” for several decades. This model is a consistent and predictive theory, which has so far proven successful at describing all phenomena accessible to collider experiments. On the other hand, several experimental facts do require the extension of the Standard Model and explanations are needed for observations such as the domination of matter over antimatter, the evidence for dark matter and the non-zero neutrino masses. Theoretical issues that need to be addressed include the hierarchy problem, the neutrality of the Universe, the stability of the Higgs boson mass upon quantum corrections and the strong CP problem. This report contains the description of a novel research infrastructure based on a highest-luminosity energy frontier electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) to address the open questions of modern physics. It will be a general precision instrument for the continued in-depth exploration of nature at the smallest scales, optimised to measure precisely the properties of the Higgs boson at the per-cent level, the Z and W bosons, the top quark and the Higgs coupling to the Z at the per-mil level. FCC-ee will provide unprecedented sensitivity to signs of new physics appearing either in the form of small deviations from the Standard Model or as rare decay processes. This collider will be implemented in stages, successively spanning the entire energy range from the Z pole over the WW threshold and H production peak to the t"t" ̅ threshold. Most of the infrastructure (e.g. underground structures, surface sites, electrical distribution, cooling & ventilation, RF systems) can be directly re-used for a subsequent highest-energy hadron collider (described in the FCC conceptual design report volume 3), serving the world-wide particle-physics community in a highly synergetic and cost-effective manner throughout the 21st century. The European Strategy for Particle Physics (ESPP) update 2013 stated “To stay at the forefront of particle physics, Europe needs to be in a position to propose an ambitious post-LHC accelerator project at CERN by the time of the next Strategy update”. The FCC study has implemented the ESPP recommendation by developing a long-term vision for an “accelerator project in a global context”. This document describes the detailed design and preparation of a construction project for a post-LHC circular lepton collider “in collaboration with national institutes, laboratories and universities worldwide”, and enhanced by a strong participation of industrial partners. Now, a coordinated preparation effort can be based on a core of an ever-growing consortium of already more than 135 institutes worldwide. The technology for constructing a high-energy, highest-luminosity circular lepton collider exists today. The FCC-ee concept comprises a power-saving twin-aperture magnet system, a continuous top-up injection scheme for stable operation and maximum integrated luminosity. Combined with an energy staging scheme, the FCC-ee represents the most efficient and most sustainable route for executing the research required to discover signs of new physics beyond the Standard Model. The step-wise energy increase of the FCC-ee does not require any additional civil engineering activities. Strategic R&D for FCC-ee aims at minimising construction cost and energy consumption, while maximising the socio-economic impact. It will mitigate residual technology-related risks and ensure that industry can benefit from an acceptable economic utility. Concerning the implementation, a preparatory phase of about eight years is both necessary and adequate to establish the project governance and organisation structures, building the international machine and experiment consortia, developing a territorial implementation plan in agreement with the host-states’ requirements, optimising the disposal of land and underground volumes and preparing the civil engineering project. Such a large-scale, international fundamental research infrastructure, tightly involving industrial partners and providing training at all education levels, will be a strong motor of economic and societal development in all participating nations. The FCC study has implemented a set of actions towards a coherent vision for the world-wide high-energy and particle physics community, providing a collaborative framework for topically complementary and geographically well-balanced contributions. This conceptual design report lays the foundation for a subsequent infrastructure preparatory and technical design phase.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program: Digital Architecture Requirements

The Digital Architecture effort is a part of the Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored Light-Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program conducted at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The LWRS program is performed in close collaboration with industry research and development (R&D) programs that provides the technical foundations for licensing and managing the long-term, safe, and economical operation of current nuclear power plants (NPPs). One of the primary missions of the LWRS program is to help the U.S. nuclear industry adopt new technologies and engineering solutions that facilitate the continued safe operation of the plants and extension of the current operating licenses. Therefore, a major objective of the LWRS program is the development of a seamless digital environment for plant operations and support by integrating information from plant systems with plant processes for nuclear workers through an array of interconnected technologies. In order to get the most benefits of the advanced technology suggested by the different research activities in the LWRS program, the nuclear utilities need a digital architecture in place to support the technology. A digital architecture can be defined as a collection of information technology (IT) capabilities needed to support and integrate a wide-spectrum of real-time digital capabilities for nuclear power plant performance improvements. It is not hard to imagine that many processes within the plant can be largely improved from both a system and human performance perspective by utilizing a plant wide (or near plant wide) wireless network. For example, a plant wide wireless network allows for real time plant status information to easily be accessed in the control room, field workers’ computer-based procedures can be updated based on the real time plant status, and status on ongoing procedures can be incorporated into smart schedules in the outage command center to allow for more accurate planning of critical tasks. The goal of the digital architecture project is to provide a long-term strategy to integrate plant systems, plant processes, and plant workers. This include technologies to improve nuclear worker efficiency and human performance; to offset a range of plant surveillance and testing activities with new on-line monitoring technologies; improve command, control, and collaboration in settings such as outage control centers and work execution centers; and finally to improve operator performance with new operator aid technologies for the control room. The requirements identified through the activities in the Digital Architecture project will be used to estimate the amount of traffic on the network and hence estimating the minimal bandwidth needed.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Results from an international interlaboratory study on light‐ and elevated temperature‐induced degradation in solar modules

Abstract This paper reports the results of an international interlaboratory comparison study on light‐ and elevated temperature‐induced degradation (LETID) on crystalline silicon photovoltaic (PV) modules. A large global network of PV module manufacturers and PV testing laboratories collaborated to design a protocol for LETID detection and screen a large and diverse set of prototype modules for LETID. Results across labs indicate the reproducibility of LETID testing is likely within ±1% of maximum power (P MP ). In intentionally engineered LETID‐sensitive modules, mean degradation after the prescribed detection stress is roughly 6% P MP . In other module types the LETID sensitivity is smaller, and in some we observe essentially negligible degradation attributable to LETID. In LETID‐sensitive modules, both open‐circuit voltage (V OC ) and short‐circuit current (I SC ) degrade by a roughly similar magnitude. We observe, as do previous studies, that LETID affects each cell in a module differently. An investigation of the potential mismatch losses caused by nonuniform LETID degradation found that mismatch loss is insignificant compared to the estimated loss of cell I SC , which drives loss of module I SC . Overall, this work has helped inform the creation of a forthcoming standard technical specification for LETID testing of PV modules, IEC TS 63342 ED1, and should aid in the interpretation of results from that and other LETID tests.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗