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Representations of Precipitation Diurnal Cycle in the Amazon as Simulated by Observationally Constrained Cloud‐System Resolving and Global Climate Models

Abstract The ability of an observationally‐constrained cloud‐system resolving model (Weather Research and Forecasting; WRF, 4‐km grid spacing) and a global climate model (Energy Exascale Earth System Model; E3SM, 1‐degree grid spacing) to represent the precipitation diurnal cycle over the Amazon basin during the 2014 wet season is assessed. The WRF model coupled with a 3‐D variational data assimilation scheme reproduces the spatial variability of the precipitation diurnal cycle over the basin and the lifecycle of westward propagating MCSs initiated by the coastal sea‐breeze front. In contrast, a single morning peak in rainfall is produced by E3SM for simulations despite the nudging of large‐scale winds toward global reanalysis, indicating precipitation in E3SM is largely controlled by local convection associated with diurnal heating. The role of propagating MCS on the environment are discussed by using a multivariate perturbation analysis. We also find that the advection of moisture perturbations from ocean to inland regions have a higher correlation with the occurrence of MCSs in the Amazon than the intensity of colder air intrusion associated with sea breezes along the coast. Moreover, the presence of large cold pools over the central Amazon basin are responsible for the maintenance of propagating deep convection.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Hydrogen for Maritime Applications

The maritime industry is investigating a number of fuel options for reducing emissions, including liquefied natural gas (LNG), biofuels, and electrical drive systems powered by batteries and/or hydrogen-fueled fuel cells. Hydrogen-fueled ships offer the potential to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, regulated and unregulated pollutants in maritime applications. Argonne National Laboratory conducted preliminary comparisons of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of several classes of ships to determine how fuel cell technology compares to the current diesel technology, what advancements are needed for hydrogen fuel cell technology to be competitive in the future, and what applications may be appropriate for introducing fuel cells into the maritime industry. These studies included feeder container ships, harbor tugboats, river pushboats, and auto/passenger ferries. For this study, TCO was defined to include the cost of fuel, propulsion system, and fuel storage system, the levelized cost of propulsion/auxiliary engines, and the cost of annual maintenance and consumables. It did not include the cost of the vessel frame or other components, aside from the propulsion system, that the fuel cell and diesel ships have in common. A 10% internal rate of return (IRR) was applied to the initial capital investment and an installation cost factor of 20% was applied to the capital cost. The capital cost of each component (e.g., engine, fuel tank, motor, etc.) was amortized over a period of 20 years, except for the fuel cell system, which was amortized over 6 or 10 years depending on ship class. The initial comparisons for container ships indicate that fuel costs are by far the dominant contributor to the TCO. With the current low cost of low-sulfur marine gasoil (LSMGO) and relatively high cost of hydrogen, it is difficult for hydrogen to compete with LSMGO in container ship applications. The large energy demand for container ships also favors the use of the higher volumetric energy density LSMGO fuel, especially for longer voyages. The space required to store enough hydrogen for the same journey is larger than that needed to store diesel fuels and can reduce the available cargo carrying and revenue generating space available on the ship.

08 HYDROGEN↗

AI Model Benchmarking for Nonproliferation Applications: Steel Thread Benchmarking Task Force Technical Report (Rev. 2)

Steel Thread is a NA-22 venture that seeks to build trustworthy, reliable AI models that can be used in a wide variety of nonproliferation tasks. A key aspect of building these models is developing appropriate benchmarks and evaluation methods, which will enable the venture to identify and adapt models to provide the most value in the nonproliferation domain. Benchmarks must be relevant to key tasks in this domain, such as question answering, information retrieval, document summarization and classification, consensus analysis, and image and data analysis. This report 1) provides an overview of benchmark design, evaluation, and challenges; 2) reviews a variety of open benchmarks, with a focus on language models and tasks; and 3) identifies benchmarks that are most relevant to Steel Thread. This report is intended to serve as a basis for further efforts to classify and evaluate benchmarks and their correlation with success on nonproliferation-specific tasks. The Steel Thread venture has defined benchmarks to be a particular combination of a dataset (or datasets) and a metric (or metrics) conceptualized as representing one or more specific tasks or sets of abilities for a specific modality. It is adopted by a research community as a shared framework for comparing methods.1 It includes 1) Data: Labeled (a designated subset not used for training, which could be all the data), 2) Metric: A way to quantify performance, 3) Task/Ability: What the benchmark is testing, 4) Protocol: A structured and repeatable evaluation process, 5) Baseline/Reference Model: For comparison; could be statistical, rule-based, SME-derived, or another model, and 6) Maintenance Plan: to update with new information over time; important for long-term utility. For further clarity, the definition includes what a benchmark, in this context, is not. It is not a corpus of training data, specific to a model (it is intended to apply to a range of models), a universal evaluation of performance, a guarantee that the ‘top’ model on the leaderboard will be the best fit for every specific use case, an all-encompassing proof of a model’s universal quality, nor is it a one-size-fits-all measure of success. It does not cover every real-world constraint (like operational, ethical, or cost considerations), a systems integration test, or a unit test. This definition was inspired by and resulted from discussions within the Steel Thread Benchmarking Task Force. This group was formed to define what we would mean as a benchmark within Steel Thread but persisted as the need to develop a thorough understanding of the large and expanding existing benchmarking space. This technical report is a result of the group’s divide and conquer approach to exploring this space. The release of benchmarks might not be progressing as quickly as model development, but it is moving very fast, as many benchmarks quickly become saturated, when state-of-the-art models score so close to the benchmark’s ceiling that their results are virtually indistinguishable. At that point, the test no longer differentiates between new systems, so researchers usually stop reporting scores as the benchmark no longer informs about improvements from the next generation of models. In the OpenAI announcement of GPT-5, they reported results on six flagship public benchmarks (AIME 2025, SWE-bench Verified, Aider Polyglot, MMMU, HealthBench Hard, GPQA) but the full system-card covers roughly thirty-five separate evaluations, comprising hundreds of test task items in total. There have been some efforts to summarize benchmarks in specific fields, like for text-to-image generation, but these surveys have had a narrow methodology scope. Therefore, a comprehensive survey of all benchmarks or even all benchmarks that could be relevant to Steel Thread is outside of the scope of this report. We chose some specific benchmarks to investigate in detail.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

AmeriFlux FLUXNET-1F US-Lin Lindcove Orange Orchard

This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site US-Lin Lindcove Orange Orchard. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site US-Lin Lindcove Orange Orchard produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - The experimental site was a citrus orchard about three km west of the UC Lindcove Research and Experiment Station. The site is characterized by a Mediterranean climate typical of Central California, with warm dry summers and cool wet winters. The soil texture for the upper horizon (0-33 cm) was loam with a particle size distribution of 42% sand, 38% silt, and 20% clay (Kearney Ag Center). Soil pH was 7.4 (Valley Tech Soil Agricultural Laboratory Services). The orchard was drip-irrigated with water applied twice per week in the warm season to ensure water avail- ability close to field capacity. The site was kept clean from understory vegetation and mechanical pruning operations took place twice a year to limit the size ofthe orange trees for harvesting and site maintenance. The block of trees in which the tower and instruments were located was ‘Valencia’ orange on trifoliate rootstock, with a planting date in the 1960’s. The square 4 ha block had dimensions of 200 m NeS and EeW. At the end of the study, we harvested a ‘Valencia’ citrus tree from within the study block to measure citrus leaf area index (LAI) and biomass density. The tree height was 3.7 m as measured with a telescoping pole. We measured canopy radii in the four cardinal directions to calculate a planar area (as seen from above) of 12.2 m2. The mean specific leaf area (SLA) of citrus leaves was 85.4 cm2 g-1 obtained by measuring leaf area of five groups of leaf samples with a LiCor Leaf area meter (mod. LI-3100C) followed by drying and weighing. LAI for the orchard was 3.00, derived using the SLA value and the total dry mass of leaves from the harvested tree, multiplied by the plant population of 237 plants per ha as obtained from spacing measurements and Google Maps imagery.

Fares, Silvano↗

AI-Enabled Robotic NDE for Structural Damage Assessment and Repair

The aim of this paper is to develop the concept and a prototype of an intelligent mobile robotic platform that is integrated with nondestructive evaluation (NDE) capabilities for autonomous live inspection and repair. In many industrial environments, such as the application of power plant boiler inspection, human inspectors often have to perform hazardous and challenging tasks. There is a significant chance of injury, considering the confined spaces and limited visibility of the inspection environment and hazards such as pressurization and improper water levels. In order to provide a solution to eliminate these dangers, the concept of a new robotic system was developed and prototyped that is capable of autonomously sweeping the region to be inspected. The robot design contains systematic integration of components from robotics, NDE, and artificial intelligence (AI). A magnetic track system is used to navigate over the vertical steel structures required for examination. While moving across the inspection area, the robot uses an NDE sensor to acquire data for inspection and repair. This paper presents a design of a portable NDE scanning system based on eddy current array probes, which can be customized and installed on various mobile robot platforms. Machine learning methods are applied for semantic segmentation that will simultaneously localize and recognize defects without the need of human intervention. Experiments were conducted that show the NDE and repair capabilities of the system. Improvements in human safety and structural damage prevention, as well as lowering the overall costs of maintenance, are possible through the implementation of this robotic NDE system.

Materials Science↗

Verification and validation of developed short-term forecasting models

Recent advancements in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies provide an opportunity for leveraging data-driven algorithms to predict future nuclear power plant (NPP) operating conditions by using recorded plant process data. Successfully implementing these models can lead to cost-reducing, conditioned-based predictive maintenance through optimized maintenance schedules and a reduction of unnecessary maintenance activities. This report discusses the verification and validation of short-term forecasting processes (i.e., data cleaning, feature selection, model optimization, and forecasting) developed in previous reports. The verification and validation (V&V) process demonstrates the expected precision and accuracy when the ML model encounters new datasets from different systems. Shapley additive explanations were used as the primary means of feature selection across these different data set. Individual models were trained for each data set, then validated through a cross-validation procedure. In this report, two different ML models were tasked to predict variables from three different plant process data sets with varying prediction horizons. The results indicate that support vector regression (SVR) outperformed long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks in regard to each data set and each prediction horizon in this study, but further tuning and optimization could improve long short-term memory results. However, each forecasting model showed reduced performance as the prediction horizon was extended from 1 hour to 1 day ahead. Research is ongoing to evaluate the optimal input variable space, which is based on a given set of process parameters, to further improve forecasting accuracy.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

LLNL Response to the DOE ASCR RFI, "Stewardship of Software for Scientific and High-Performance Computing"

For decades, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been engaged in significant research, development, and support for software to enable scientific computing and, particularly, the use of high performance computing (HPC) in the NNSA mission space. In particular, the move in the mid-1990’s to simulation as a leading component of stockpile stewardship through the ASCI and the successor ASC programs, as well as the need for reliable data acquisition and control software for the National Ignition Facility, have been important drivers in building expertise in production-quality software development at LLNL. LLNL has also been a leader in the DOE SciDAC FASTMath Institute and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP), both of which have striven to make scientific computing software – in particular, the enabling technologies underpinning simulation capabilities – more widely adopted and sustainable. As such, we believe that our experience can inform the broader goal of software stewardship for scientific and high-performance computing. LLNL strongly supports the formation of a new DOE ASCR program element in software stewardship and sustainment. Historically, DOE ASCR has funded applied mathematics and computer science research that has led to the development of important new capabilities and algorithms that are expressed as artifacts in research software. Such frameworks, libraries, and tools have seldom been directly funded to address the important issues of code maintenance, documentation, robustness, and community building. Software engineering and support have typically been done on the side in support of the ASCR-driven research products. DOE funding priorities have been slow to recognize that good software engineering, the kind that ensures research investments have more adoption and longevity, requires significant resources. Based upon our experiences, we have prepared this response to highlight the concerns and issues we believe to be important as DOE ASCR considers its role in scientific software stewardship. We believe that role is important and will require a significant investment of new funding to legitimately support the technologies past and future DOE ASCR investments have and will produce to facilitate their uptake and adoption in the broader scientific computing community. Following a summary of our involvement in scientific software development, the remainder our response is organized around the nine topics specifically identified in the RFI.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Solar Energy Development on the FSST Reservation

FSST undertook this project to install PV solar with the goal of reducing retail power consumption at 11 Tribal buildings. A combined total of 318kW has been installed over these sites and power savings are being recorded on a regular basis. The Tribe entered into the project with several specific objectives that made this a unique effort. First of all, all of the systems were installed by Tribal maintenance personnel with some technical support. This model had been developed with previous projects that Nebraska Renewable Energy Systems (NRES) had completed and had shown great success. This approach helped to ensure we met the DOE goal of ‘building capacity’ within the Tribe. There was some skepticism about this model in Flandreau at the onset of discussions, but the excellent final results spoke for themselves! A second objective was to overcome the sore lessons that were learned after FSST invested in early deployment of pole mounted solar systems that were not sturdy enough for SD winds. It was a very courageous decision to move forward again with solar pole mounts (and other types) in this very high wind area. We shall report that the Tribe was fully successful in achieving what they set out to do there. The final major objective was to deploy the PV Solar systems in such a way as to integrate them into their surroundings wherever possible. In some cases the mounting choice was clear, but in several locations, the system was designed to be a functional and aesthetically enhancing part of their surroundings. These elevated systems allowed the PV system to act as a shade structure and create useful space under them as well as making power. FSST had these elevated ground mount systems specially designed for our application by Ironridge and were rated for the tough winds of South Dakota (120MPH+).

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Genomics of sorghum local adaptation to a parasitic plant

Host–parasite coevolution can maintain high levels of genetic diversity in traits involved in species interactions. In many systems, host traits exploited by parasites are constrained by use in other functions, leading to complex selective pressures across space and time. Here, we study genome-wide variation in the staple crop Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench and its association with the parasitic weed Striga hermonthica (Delile) Benth., a major constraint to food security in Africa. We hypothesize that geographic selection mosaics across gradients of parasite occurrence maintain genetic diversity in sorghum landrace resistance. Suggesting a role in local adaptation to parasite pressure, multiple independent loss-of-function alleles at sorghum LOW GERMINATION STIMULANT 1 (LGS1) are broadly distributed among African landraces and geographically associated with S. hermonthica occurrence. However, low frequency of these alleles within S. hermonthica-prone regions and their absence elsewhere implicate potential trade-offs restricting their fixation. LGS1 is thought to cause resistance by changing stereochemistry of strigolactones, hormones that control plant architecture and below-ground signaling to mycorrhizae and are required to stimulate parasite germination. Consistent with trade-offs, we find signatures of balancing selection surrounding LGS1 and other candidates from analysis of genome-wide associations with parasite distribution. Experiments with CRISPR–Cas9-edited sorghum further indicate that the benefit of LGS1-mediated resistance strongly depends on parasite genotype and abiotic environment and comes at the cost of reduced photosystem gene expression. Our study demonstrates long-term maintenance of diversity in host resistance genes across smallholder agroecosystems, providing a valuable comparison to both industrial farming systems and natural communities.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

New Virtual Test Bed Capabilities: Virtual DOME Model and New Updates to Repository

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy National Reactor Innovation Center accelerates the deployment of novel reactor concepts by establishing both physical and virtual spaces for building and testing various components, systems, and complete pilot plants. The Virtual Test Bed represents the virtual arm of the National Reactor Innovation Center and is a joint effort with the DOE Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation Program. The Virtual Test Bed mission is to accelerate the deployment of advanced reactors by facilitating the adoption of cutting-edge DOE advanced modeling and simulation tools to design, evaluate, and license reactors. This is primarily achieved by storing example challenge problems in an externally available repository and by developing models to fill the M&S gaps needed for potential demonstrators. Activities conducted this fiscal year focused on developing of a Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments shield model to help accelerate the confirmatory analysis required for the reactor demonstration. This model and workflow will allow developers to leverage advanced modeling and simulation tools to ensure their reactor demonstration concept will meet dose requirements and that the surrounding shield will stay within concrete temperature limits during steady-state and transient operation conditions. An initial model has been developed to evaluate the temperature distribution in the concrete shield during steady-state operation, including neutron and gamma heating effects. Various modeling strategies have been examined to understand their applicability and limitations with different reactor designs to make the workflow as reactor-agnostic as possible and computationally effective to maximize its usability. In addition to describing the Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments shield model and associated results, this report summarizes other accomplishments regarding repository maintenance and improvement and new external models hosted on the repository.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

DIF3D-VARIANT 12.0: Updates and New Features

The DIF3D code has been a workhorse of fast reactor analysis work at Argonne National Laboratory for over 40 years. In 1995, a transport option called VARIANT was added to DIF3D to improve the flux solutions for fast reactor problems which we term DIF3D-VARIANT today. DIF3D-VARIANT performs nodal neutron transport calculations using P N or SP N theory in Cartesian and hexagonal two- and three-dimensional geometries. The limited computing capabilities of the time restricted DIF3D-VARIANT to use at most a 6 th order spatial approximation combined with a P3 flux approximation and P1 scattering kernel for a 33 group structure on most studied reactor problems. Computer capabilities have increased steadily since 1995 and today much larger space-angle-energy approximations are possible. This manuscript serves as an update to the theory section of the original DIF3D-VARIANT manual and details more than twenty years of changes made to DIF3D to make version 12 which was released on November 1 st , 2024. The primary focus of the initial work was to extend the space-angle approximations available in DIF3D-VARIANT such that the error due to transport approximations could be better understood. This work was started and completed in 2002 and marked the official version 10. Unfortunately, those higher order approximations could not be used at that time due to the memory constraints of the BPOINTER part of DIF3D (limited to 2 GB). In version 11, completed in 2012, BPOINTER was circumvented in DIF3D-VARIANT for the largest arrays by introducing a Fortran 90 module called LMA (Large Memory Array). This seamlessly replaces all of the functionality of the BPOINTER concept, but it allows 64 bit addressing for every array such that they can be larger than 2 GB. It is now common for DIF3D-VARIANT jobs to consume 50 GB of memory on modern workstations when using high order space-angle approximations and a large number of groups. Many improvements were made to version 11 from 2012 to 2022 when work to create version 12 started. For version 12, several parts of DIF3D were updated to improve performance and thread parallelism was introduced to further reduce the runtime. Numerous minor bugs were discovered in DIF3D-VARIANT as part of the process of creating the perturbation and sensitivity code PERSENT. All of these algorithmic problems were identified in the transition from version 10 to version 11 which prevented DIF3D-VARIANT from running efficiently and reliably. Firstly, the coarse mesh rebalance scheme would routinely diverge and a study detailed in this report demonstrates how it was also typically not effective. This is not a failure of the coarse mesh rebalance methodology, but a failure of its implementation in DIF3D-VARIANT for hexagonal geometries. The fission source extrapolation algorithm was also found to be unreliable on larger group structure problems, leading to divergence in some cases and a negligible improvement in performance overall. Finally, the “Omega” acceleration applied to the partial current solver routine of DIF3D-VARIANT was found to cause DIF3D-VARIANT to converge to the wrong answer. To resolve these issues, both the coarse mesh rebalance and fission source extrapolation were permanently disabled in version 11. The Tchebychev acceleration was put in as a temporary reliable alternative but it is generally inferior to coarse mesh rebalance or coarse mesh finite difference. For the Omega acceleration, the factor was restricted to guarantee that it would not cause follow-on errors in PERSENT. Due to limited funding to support maintenance and development of DIF3D in the last 10 years, no effort was spent since to resolve the outer iteration acceleration. Except for the threading work, all of the changes discussed in this manuscript refer to changes made between version 10 and version 11. Performance comparisons are done to demonstrate the improvements from version 9 to version 12. As will be demonstrated, the updated versi

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Intelligent Process Visualization through Nuclear Operation Process Modeling, Reasoning, and Object Detection from Field Videos (Final Report)

This report is a deliverable for the “Final Report” task of DOE NEET Project 19-16790, "Context-Aware Safety Information Display for Nuclear Field Workers." This project's overall goal is to test the hypothesis that integrating computer vision and process reasoning methods will enable proactive visualization of the safe operation and maintenance processes of Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) for field workers. Augmented Reality (AR) glasses adopting such proactive safety information visualization techniques can significantly increase personnel safety and reduce the NPP’s operating costs. The current practice of monitoring NPPs requires workers to switch between digital models, data, and physical workspaces in identifying relevant but potentially occluded objects and in assessing the risks of operation and maintenance processes. On the other hand, frequently changed field conditions require field workers to report to supervisors for real-time guidance. Such guidance is essential to ensure that changing conditions will not invalidate or endanger the work order and other ongoing processes that may jeopardize NPP operations. Additionally, incorrect recognition of equipment objects can result in communication errors and safety problems. AR techniques can assist engineers in viewing the physical workspaces with objects labeled with detailed operation procedures and safety reminders during field operations. The project team developed an “Intelligent Context-Aware Safety Information Display” (ICAD) for supporting Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) field workers in achieving safe and efficient execution of a series of operational tasks in uncertain and changing workspaces of an NPP. Before designing the ICAD-AR prototype, the project team synthesized NPP operational knowledge models through literature review studies, surveys, interviews with domain experts, and knowledge modeling. The project team conducted an extensive study of the operational procedures of various NPPs, and digital technologies that can support the safe and efficient execution of those procedures in different NPP operational contexts. This literature review helped the project team conduct surveys and interviews with nuclear engineers and field workers to identify three categories of information. The NPP knowledge modeling efforts reveal that the three categories of information identified have different levels of importance in a typical procedure of carrying out a series of tasks to achieve a specific NPP operation goal (e.g., shutdown, mode changes). These three categories of information include 1) Workspace dynamics – the changing spatial arrangements of workspaces, tools, protection equipment, and supporting materials, 2) Workflow prognostics – the dynamic dependencies between different parts of an NPP that functionally support and influence each other in terms of safety and efficiency, and 3) Hazards – objects and spaces that contain hazardous materials or physical conditions that can pose risks to workers or mechanical systems. The project team has profiled the importance levels of these categories of information into a knowledge model. This knowledge model specifies what types of information are more critical for a given task in a given workspace so that computers can automatically identify critical objects and sensors in a scene for delivering context-ware safety information to field workers through AR devices. Significant research development of this project results in technical research outcomes and a prototyping system that illustrates the technical feasibility of establishing an ICAD-AR system supporting the proactive safety information display for nuclear field workers. This final report summarizes the project team’s technological achievements in the past three years. Overall, the project team completed the development and integration of five techniques into a prototype ICAD Augmented Reality (ICAD-AR) system and demonstrated the developed system’s real-time execution in a mechanical room. The project team completed the analysis of using this prototype in other types of workspaces based on 3D image data and digital design models collected from two additional workspaces (a water treatment plant and a flow loop training facility). The integrated techniques include 1) Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms supporting the generation and updates of nuclear fieldwork process models based on text analysis of work packages and operation manuals; 2) sensor log analysis for predicting control actions in given sensor reading contexts; 3) computer vision algorithms for automatic localization and navigation of workers; 4) object detection algorithms for identifying task-related objects and correlated sensors for safety checking; 5) AR technique as a platform for supporting the integration. The testing results of these five techniques have shown that 1) the sensor log analysis model can predict the next control action with an accuracy of 0.883; 2) the trained natural language processing model can extract more than 80% of the critical information from paper-based procedures (PBPs); 3) the navigation algorithm with the integration of Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) and Non-Recursive Bayesian Filter methods make operator’s trajectory estimation resilient to drift error; 4) the computer vision algorithm can detect task-specific and safety-critical objects with an average accuracy of 95.3%. The project team used work procedures collected from a flow loop training facility and two datasets collected from two mechanical rooms simulating the workspaces of NPPs to demonstrate the technical capabilities of the developed ICAD-AR prototype. The demonstration validated the technical feasibility of establishing the ICAD-AR system for nuclear field workers and identified the challenges in 1) automatic text analysis of work packages; 2) use of limited samples of sensor logs for predicting the proper timings of control actions; 3) reliably tracking workers and their task progress in mechanical rooms with many similar objects.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

IDAES-PSE 2.1.0 Release

The Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (IDAES) Integrated Platform is a versatile computational environment offering extensive process systems engineering (PSE) capabilities for optimizing the design and operation of complex, interacting technologies and systems. IDAES enables users to efficiently search vast, complex design spaces to discover the lowest cost, most environmentally sustainable solutions while supporting the full process modeling lifecycle, from conceptual design to dynamic optimization and control. The extensible, open platform empowers users to create models of novel processes and rapidly develop custom analyses, workflows, and end-user applications. IDAES-PSE 2.1.0 Release Highlights New IDAES Examples Repository Starting with this release, the IDAES examples are developed in the new IDAES/examples repository. Along with many content and usability improvements, the most significant changes are: To install the examples, after installing IDAES, run pip install idaes-examples The idaes get-examples command, previously used for this, has been removed The HTML version is now available at https://idaes-examples.readthedocs.io The previous URL, https://idaes.github.io/examples-pse, will not be updated and may be removed at some point in the future For more details, refer to the resources available at IDAES/examples. Removal of Non-Functional Apps A review of the code in the idaes/apps and idaes/models_extra folders was undertaken, and a number of tools were identified as being outdated or non-functional and no longer supported by their development teams. Due to this, the following tools have been removed: idaes/apps/alamopy_depr (note that the new ALAMOpy interface remains avaialble in idaes/core/surrogates) idaes/apps/helmet idaes/apps/ripe idaes/apps/roundingRegression idaes/models_extra/carbon_capture Pyomo 6.6 This version of IDAES is the first requiring Pyomo 6.6. This version of Pyomo contains multiple internal improvements and refactorings. While for the majority of cases this should have positive or no impact on solvability of IDAES models, we are aware of a small number of models that have been affected as a result of these changes. For more information, refer to the Pyomo 6.6.1 release notes. Other highlights Model Initialization A prototype API for a new approach to initializing IDAES models is now available which makes available some new techniques for initializing models. This is documented in the Initializing Models Reference Guide Modular Properties Framework Support for some transport properties Helmholtz Equation of State properties Better error checking for case where unit models are set to include phase equilibrium but the property package is set to support only a single phase Multi-Stream Contactor model: a new base model for systems involving contacting of two or more streams with mass transfer. This model is intended to be used as the foundation for models such as membrane separators, solvent extraction and other similar processes. This is documented in the Multi-Stream Contactor Reference Guide idaes/models_extra/power_generation report() methods for unit models using Helmholtz equation of state General Code Maintenance Streamlining of dependencies and creation of new optional dependency groupings to support non-core tools General linting of codebase to ensure compliance with most pylint checks Spell checking of all code and doc strings Removal of backward compatibility code for Python 2

IDAES↗

U.S. Industrial and Commercial Motor System Market Assessment Report Volume 1: Characteristics of the Installed Base

Motor systems are an integral part of our industrial and commercial facilities. They provide the motive force behind the fans, pumps, compressors, chillers, and conveyors in these facilities. Given their centrality to any facility’s operations, they are a critical energy end use to understand, particularly when developing technologies and policies to meet sustainability goals, improve productivity, and enhance resilience. In the late 1990s, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) conducted two seminal studies to better understand the installed stock and energy savings opportunities of industrial and commercial motor systems. In the industrial sector, The United States Industrial Electric Motor Systems Market Opportunities Assessment used primary data collected through onsite assessments and led to a greater understanding of the installed base of motor systems, their characteristics, and the opportunities for energy savings (U.S. Department of Energy, 2002). Notable findings included the following: Industrial motor systems consumed 679 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 1994, representing 23 percent of U.S. electricity consumption. Cost-effective energy efficiency measures could result in 62-104 billion kWh of energy savings annually. Sixty-two percent of the energy savings potential was from fan, pump, and compressor end use equipment. Nearly half of motor system electricity consumption was attributable to approximately 3,500 facilities, or 1.5 percent of U.S. manufacturing facilities. Opportunities for Energy Savings in the Residential and Commercial Sectors with High Efficiency Electric Motors provided an evaluation of the installed stock of motor driven equipment in U.S. commercial and residential buildings and opportunities for utilization of high efficiency motors and variable speed technologies (Arthur D. Little, 1999). Notable findings included the following: Commercial motor systems consumed 343 billion kWh in 1995, with refrigeration and space conditioning constituting 93 percent of the total. Cost-effective energy efficiency measures could result in 51 billion kWh of energy savings annually. Due in no small part to these seminal studies, motor system technologies and usage characteristics have changed drastically since the late 1990s. Greater awareness of cost-effective strategies for reducing motor system electricity consumption have been developed and deployed. This includes several software tools, literature, and utility and government programs promoting energy efficiency improvements in motor driven systems. Additionally, several rounds of energy efficiency standards have been enacted, resulting in improved installed motor efficiency. The cost of variable speed drives has dropped substantially, and combined with utility rebate programs, has led to their greater adoption. Further, since these results were published, the U.S. manufacturing sector has undergone a massive transformation. Due to global competition, some sectors have relocated operations overseas. Others have brought operations onshore to avail low cost and abundant natural gas. Additionally, automation and robotics have pervaded the entire sector. Consequently, these two reports likely do not represent the current state of motor driven systems in U.S. industrial and commercial facilities. As cited in recent studies, the lack of current information on motor system electricity consumption and use characteristics limits the ability to conduct analysis on energy savings potential, develop technologies to address energy and productivity gaps, and develop programs to promote energy efficiency practices and technologies for motor systems (International Energy Agency, 2007; UNIDO, 2010; McKane and Hasanbeigi, 2011; Waide and Brunner, 2011). Specifically, the lack of information affects a range of stakeholders: Governments must rely on outdated information when setting research agendas, developing policies, and designing energy efficiency programs and offerings. Utilities and energy efficiency programs cannot identify the current market needs or potential impact when designing rebate and energy efficiency programs. Electric grid planners cannot identify motor system usage characteristics when developing plans to support the resilience of the electric grid. Manufacturers of motors, motor driven equipment, and drives are hampered when developing technologies to meet the needs of their market. Motor system end users are limited in their ability to identify energy saving opportunities within their own facilities because they do not have reliable benchmark information. In response to the lack of current information and analysis on industrial and commercial motor systems, the DOE initiated an update to these two studies. Launched in 2016 and led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the Motor System Market Assessment (MSMA) provides an updated, more comprehensive assessment of the installed stock of motor systems in both the industrial and commercial sectors, a review of the supply chains supporting motor and drives in the U.S., and the performance improvement opportunity available from using best available technologies and maintenance and operation practices. The outcomes of the MSMA are documented in three U.S. Industrial and Commercial Motor System Market Assessment reports, with this report being the first listed: 1. Volume 1: Characteristics of the Installed Base (this report) documents the findings on the installed base of motor systems in the U.S. industrial and commercial sectors. Quantification of energy savings potential is not documented in this report but in Volume 3. 2. Volume 2: Motors and Drives Supply Chain Review reviews the state of supply chains for motors and drives installed in U.S. industrial and commercial facilities, focusing on advanced motor and drive technologies and their constituent materials. 3. Volume 3: Energy Savings Opportunity analyzes the energy performance improvement opportunity for the installed base of U.S. industrial and commercial motor systems. This report has been prepared as a reference for motor system stakeholders. It provides factual information as could be best determined by the assessment results and avoids speculating on any findings.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

How initial conditions-, structural-, and parameter-based model uncertainty interact and influence predictions in permafrost ecosystems: Modeling Archive

This dataset contains model output and input data, as well as source code examples for the Terrestrial Ecosystem Model with the Dynamic Vegetation Model and Dynamic Organic Soil (DVM-DOS-TEM) for the field sites Imnavait creek and the Bonanza creek Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER). The data covers simulations from the last glacial maximum (LGM) until 2100 for a selection of paleo scenarios, setting the mean temperature of the LGM up to 10°C lower than pre-industrial conditions. The model structure was modulated to represent various model versions, and this dataset contains the relevant changes in the source code. The raw output data, the processed statistical data, the setup and processing scripts as well as parameter value distribution files from a parameter sensitivity analysis are included as well. Model outputs include active layer depth, organic soil carbon, soil layer depths, gross primary productivity (GPP) with and without nitrogen limitation, net primary productivity (NPP), soil liquid water content, heterotrophic, maintenance, and growth respiration, soil temperature, and vegetation carbon (*.nc files). The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments in the Arctic (NGEE Arctic) project is a research effort to reduce uncertainty in the Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) by developing a predictive understanding of Arctic tundra ecosystems underlain by permafrost and to quantify feedbacks from the Arctic tundra to the Earth system. NGEE Arctic is supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research.Over Phases 1–3, observations made by the NGEE Arctic team across a gradient of permafrost landscapes in Arctic Alaska improved the representation of tundra processes in the land surface component of E3SM (the E3SM Land Model, ELM). Model improvements emphasized unique aspects of permafrost environments and explored reductions in model complexity while retaining predictive power. The Arctic-informed ELM developed by NGEE Arctic has been used to make novel predictions on processes ranging from permafrost thaw to soil biogeochemical cycling to Earth system feedbacks associated with the unique characteristics of tundra plants. In Phase 4, the NGEE Arctic team is evaluating our new predictive understanding under novel conditions across the Arctic domain. In collaboration with partners at long-term pan-Arctic research sites we are examining whether an Arctic-informed ELM can faithfully simulate interactions among surface and subsurface processes at site, regional, and pan-Arctic scales. In turn, we are using variety of tools to dynamically extend and evaluate ELM inference, with an emphasis on data synthesis and pan-Arctic model evaluation, reintegration of code with an evolving E3SM, scaling across heterogeneous Arctic landscapes, and the appropriate representation of the impacts of increasingly frequent Arctic disturbances.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗