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

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At least 19 records

A Facilitator's Perspective on Government Public Meetings on the Environmental and Energy Issues: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Example - 20428

Many Federal, and State agencies, are required by policy or regulation, to hold a public meeting on a proposed regulatory action. These may be on a specific licensing issue or they may be to obtain public advice on generic issues, such as a proposed rulemaking or policy issue. Environmental or energy issues may often involve emotional behavior on the part of the public, and sometimes anger or protests. Consequently, trained facilitators are often used to 'facilitate' the meeting to reduce the tension and to help the meeting run smoothly. The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission ('NRC') has had considerable experience with public meetings, emotional behavior by the public, and the use of facilitators. This paper will describe the history of the NRC with public meetings and public engagement, the issues that raise concerns by certain segments of the public, and how a facilitator will attempt to reduce the concern and anxiety at the meeting and to run a fair and constructive meeting. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Summary of Nuclear Regulatory Commission Flood Barrier Testing Strategies Workshop

The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Idaho National Laboratory (INL) organized a half-day workshop on flood barrier testing strategies (FBTS) at NRC Headquarters in Rockville, MD, via a webinar as well, on March 12, 2020. The workshop was a public meeting attended by members of the public and staff from NRC, INL, and other agencies. The workshop served multiple objectives: (1) present preliminary research results from the FBTS research project conducted by INL for NRC, and (2) engage industry stakeholders and technical experts to provide inputs and insights on testing strategies. This letter report documents the materials presented, participant questions and answers, and summaries of an open discussion during this FBTS workshop.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

A Safety and Management Framework to Enable Automated Mobility Districts in Urban Areas

Automated mobility technology is beginning to emerge as a viable means to create sustainable and effective public mobility systems within denser urban environments. Automated mobility districts (AMDs) describe major urban districts or activity centers in which deployments of multiple automated vehicle (AV) transit and ride-hailing fleets are supported to meet public mobility needs. The authors put forward a framework to enable AMDs and their governing and management jurisdictional authorities to manage safety of AV operations based on lessons learned from the last century of automated guideway transit and roadway intersection traffic control systems. The essential concept is that of operational management and safety-critical control of multiple AV fleets using a “system-of-systems” approach to system safety analysis. The safety analysis would focus on safe passage of the AV fleet vehicles through complex roadway intersections and junctions, especially in the presence of other non-automated modes such as pedestrians and manually operated vehicles.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

EDX ClaiMM

EDX ClaiMM is a centralized data & analytical platform designed to revolutionize U.S. critical minerals and materials (CMM) activities. By providing a robust digital infrastructure, ClaiMM will accelerate the combination, leveraging, and rapid utilization of vital data, advanced tools, and cutting-edge research advancements in CMM. This adaptive digital research hub connects the CMM community to essential knowledge products and offers access to interoperable datasets, databases, models, software, and tools from the National Energy Technology’s (NETL’s) Energy Data eXchange (EDX) and other authoritative sources, serving both public and private sectors. EDX ClaiMM delivers AI-informed solutions to address fundamental knowledge gaps and fosters the innovation of new techniques for enhanced characterization and recovery of CMMs within the U.S. By leveraging cloud-hosted, scalable digital infrastructure, ClaiMM meets public–private applied energy needs. It equips the CMM community with priority digital resources that harness on-site and cloud compute capabilities, enabling big data storage, advanced processing, analytics, and visualization.

Critical Materials; Critical Minerals; Rare Earth ↗

gamut: A Geospatial R Package to Analyze Multisectoral Urban Teleconnections

Most cities in the United States withdraw surface water to meet public water supply needs. The lands on which this water is generated are often developed for human activities -- such as agriculture, mining, and industry -- that may compete for water resources or contaminate water supplies. Cities are thereby connected to other sectors through their water supply catchments. This connection is an example of an multisectoral urban teleconnection. The Geospatial Analytics for Multisectoral Urban Teleconnections (``gamut``) package provides national-scale information on these teleconnections by combining land use data with hydrological analysis to characterize urban source watershed human interactions across the conterminous United States.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Joint Comments from the Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE NNSA) Los Alamos Field Office and Triad National Security, LLC on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s New Mexico State-Wide Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System Strawman General Permit

In December 2020 and March 2021, EPA issued two MS4 strawman permit drafts specific to the Los Alamos area. EPA made text changes in the 2 nd strawman permit based on stakeholder comments related to the initial draft. During the public meeting on the Los Alamos area designation decision held on February 13, 2024, EPA staff stated that comments from the past strawman permits would be incorporated into the new MS4 permit to be issued state-wide. However, it does not appear that any of the text changes from the 2 nd Los Alamos area strawman permit were included in this state-wide general MS4 strawman permit. For reference, the 2 nd Los Alamos area revised strawman permit is included with these comments as Attachment 2. Many of the following comments refer to or state EPA’s updated text included in the 2 nd Los Alamos area strawman permit. The updated text from this 2 nd strawman permit that are referenced in the following comments should be applicable state-wide and it is suggested that this past work be reconsidered and incorporated.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Technical Issues that Need to Be Addressed in Preparing a Large Program to Transport SNF and HLW - 20093

The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (Board) has been interested for many years in the Department of Energy (DOE) activities related to transporting spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW). The Board has conducted several public meetings and issued associated reports on this topic. In September 2019, the Board issued a report entitled Preparing for Nuclear Waste Transportation-Technical Issues that Need to Be Addressed in Preparing for a Nationwide Effort to Transport Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste [1] that focuses on the issues DOE will need to address to plan and implement an integrated transportation program. In its report, the Board describes 30 broad technical issues that DOE needs to address and offers three sets of findings and recommendations to DOE. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Public water supply infrastructure extensification and diversification in surface waters is insufficient to meet future demands in Texas

The data were developed to evaluate the capacity of existing and potential new surface water supply infrastructure to meet projected public water demands across districts in Texas under multiple future socioeconomic and climate scenarios. The database integrates hydrologic, water quality, infrastructure, energy, cost, demographic, and demand-projection information for candidate surface water supply locations. Candidate sites include stream reaches, waterbodies, reservoir surplus locations, and potential new reservoir sites. Water availability is characterized using historical and projected flow conditions, while site suitability is evaluated using five indicators: Water Availability Index (WAI), Water Quality Index (WQI), Energy Requirement Index (ERI), Water Treatment Cost (WTC), and Water Infrastructure Cost (WIC). The datasets include statewide candidate-site information, district-level demand projections under Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), runoff-based allocation constraints, climate-stress metrics, and optimization outputs evaluating alternative infrastructure planning strategies. Optimization results compare Business-as-Usual (BAU) and All Surface Water (AllSW) demand-management approaches under both scaled and fixed cost-cap strategies. Associated validation datasets provide district-level feasibility assessments, infrastructure selection outcomes, cost-cap utilization, demand satisfaction metrics, and constraint diagnostics. Additional datasets quantify projected changes in storage and flow conditions as well as water availability stress for both existing and newly selected intake locations under the SSP5 scenario for mid-century and late-century climate conditions. Together, these datasets support assessment of the extent to which surface-water infrastructure expansion and diversification strategies can satisfy future public water demands while accounting for hydrologic, economic, and planning constraints across Texas. Dataset(s) Description Dataset_preoptimization.xlsx Comprehensive pre-optimization dataset containing candidate water-supply sites and associated hydrologic, water-quality, infrastructure, climate, demographic, runoff, and demand-projection variables used as inputs to the optimization analyses. Includes variable descriptions and the full statewide candidate-site database. District_level_site_selection.zip - Compressed archive containing all SSP-specific district-level optimization result files MESIO_ssp1_results.xlsx District-level site selection results for SSP1 (MESIO). Includes variable descriptions, BAU and AllSW site-selection results under scaled and fixed cost strategies, and district-level validation diagnostics. MESID_ssp2_results.xlsx District-level site selection results for SSP2 (MESID). Includes variable descriptions, BAU and AllSW site-selection results under scaled and fixed cost strategies, and district-level validation diagnostics. LCMRD_ssp3_results.xlsx District-level site selection results for SSP3 (LCMRD). Includes variable descriptions, BAU and AllSW site-selection results under scaled and fixed cost strategies, and district-level validation diagnostics. IRDev-Low_ssp4l_results.xlsx District-level site selection results for SSP4-Low (IRDev-Low). Includes variable descriptions, BAU and AllSW site-selection results under scaled and fixed cost strategies, and district-level validation diagnostics. IRDev-High_ssp4h_results.xlsx District-level site selection results for SSP4-High (IRDev-High). Includes variable descriptions, BAU and AllSW site-selection results under scaled and fixed cost strategies, and district-level validation diagnostics. RSIM_ssp5_results.xlsx District-level site selection results for SSP5 (RSIM). Includes variable descriptions, BAU and AllSW site-selection results under scaled and fixed cost strategies, and district-level validation diagnostics. tx_hydrological_stress.xlsx Hydrological stress dataset for existing and newly selected intake locations. Includes projected mid-century and late-century changes, gain/loss classifications, planning strategy information, and accompanying variable descriptions. Also includes water-stress metrics derived from historical and projected low-flow conditions.

Okoye, Perpetua I. (ORCID:0000000215545033)↗

Decision and Control of Complex Systems – A Data-Drive Framework

During the project period, we have collaborated with other team members and developed novel algorithms for novelty detection, continual learning, and graph learning algorithms for dynamic systems. The results are documented in publications and meeting notes. Moreover, we leverage virtual collaboration tools (such as Basecamp, Microsoft Teams and Zoom) for technical exchanges. Our research on novelty detection was published at AAAI 2022 and Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer Nature. The newly developed algorithms were successfully applied to realistic cases, including thermal data from buildings at Pacific Northwest National Lab and microelectronic data provided by GlobalFoundries. Multiple publications have been produced from this project, in collaboration with other team members. Three PhD students were supported in this project to conduct their research.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Neutralizing Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 Selected from a Human Antibody Library Constructed Decades Ago

Combinatorial antibody libraries not only effectively reduce antibody discovery to a numbers game, but enable documentation of the history of antibody responses in an individual. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has prompted a wider application of this technology to meet the public health challenge of pandemic threats in the modern era. Herein, a combinatorial human antibody library constructed 20 years before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is used to discover three highly potent antibodies that selectively bind SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and neutralize authentic SARS-CoV-2 virus. Compared to neutralizing antibodies from COVID-19 patients with generally low somatic hypermutation (SHM), these three antibodies contain over 13–22 SHMs, many of which are involved in specific interactions in their crystal structures with SARS-CoV-2 spike receptor binding domain. The identification of these somatically mutated antibodies in a pre-pandemic library raises intriguing questions about the origin and evolution of these antibodies with respect to their reactivity with SARS-CoV-2.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗