[en] The NMT-1 and NMT-3 organizations within the Chemical and Metallurgical Research (CMR) facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is working to achieve Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) certification to enable them to transport their TRU waste to WIPP. In particular, the NMT-1 management is requesting support from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) to assist them in making the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) software WIPP certifiable. Thus, LIMS must be compliant with the recognized software quality assurance (SQA) requirements stated within the QAPD. Since the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) has achieved WIPP certification, INEEL personnel can provide valuable assistance to LANL by sharing lessons learned and recommendations. Thus, this white paper delineates the particular software quality assurance requirements required for WIPP certification

[en] MCNP4BW was released in February 1997 with significant enhancements to electron/photon transport methods. These enhancements have been verified against a wide range of published electron/photon experiments, spanning high energy bremsstrahlung production to electron transmission and reflection. The impact of several MCNP tally options and physics parameters was explored in detail. The agreement between experiment and simulation was usually within two standard deviations of the experimental and calculational errors. Furthermore, sub-step artifacts for bremsstrahlung production were shown to be mitigated. A detailed suite of electron depth dose calculations in water is also presented. Areas for future code development have also been explored and include the dependence of cell and detector tallies on different bremsstrahlung angular models and alternative variance reduction splitting schemes for bremsstrahlung production

[en] Canada's hydro potential in the North American energy market was discussed. Canada is a net exporter of electricity in North America, and since 1990, has exported an average of 28 Terawatt hours/year to the United States. More than 65 per cent of these exports were generated from hydro power plants. It was emphasized that significant reductions in greenhouse gases can be achieved if Canadian hydroelectricity is substituted for coal power generation. It was also noted that although there may not be enough hydro capacity to meet all of North America's energy requirements, development of new large hydro resources in Canada could help meet the growing demand for electricity in the United States. Hydro can also complement other renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. The factors that will determine if Canadian hydropower will contribute to the energy demand are market mechanisms such as greenhouse gas credit trading systems which provide incentive for renewable energy projects. In addition, the existing infrastructure must be expanded both east and west within Canada and north and south between Canada and the United States. 5 figs

[en] The Nuclear Materials Technology (NMT) organizations 1 and 3 within the Chemical and Metallurgical Research (CMR) facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are working to achieve Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) certification to enable them to transport their TRU waste to WIPP. This document is intended to provide not only recommendations to address the necessary software quality assurance activities to enable the NMT-1 and NMT-3 organizations to be WIPP compliant but is also meant to provide a template for the final Software Quality Assurance Plan (SQAP). This document specifically addresses software quality assurance for all software used in support of waste characterization and analysis. Since NMT-1 and NMT-3 currently have several operational software products that are used for waste characterization and analysis, these software quality assurance recommendations apply to the operations, maintenance and retirement of the software and the creation and development of any new software required for waste characterization and analyses

[en] The Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) treatment planning process of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center-M.I.T team relies on MCNP to determine dose rates in the subject's head for various beam orientations. In this time consuming computational process, four or five potential beams are investigated. Of these, one or two final beams are selected and thoroughly evaluated. Recent advances greatly decreased the time needed to do these MCNP calculations. Two modifications to the new MCNP4B source code, lattice tally and tracking enhancements, reduced the wall-clock run times of a typical one million source neutrons run to one hour twenty five minutes on a 200 MHz Pentium Pro computer running Linux and using the GNU FORTRAN compiler. Previously these jobs used a special version of MCNP4AB created by Everett Redmond, which completed in two hours two minutes. In addition to this 30% speedup, the MCNP4B version was adapted for use with Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) on personal computers running the Linux operating system. MCNP, using PVM, can be run on multiple computers simultaneously, offering a factor of speedup roughly the same as the number of computers used. With two 200 MHz Pentium Pro machines, the run time was reduced to forty five minutes, a 1.9 factor of improvement over the single Linux computer. While the time of a single run was greatly reduced, the advantages associated with PVM derive from using computational power not already used. Four possible beams, currently requiring four separate runs, could be run faster when each is individually run on a single machine under Windows NT, rather than using Linux and PVM to run one after another with each multiprocessed across four computers. It would be advantageous, however, to use PVM to distribute the final two beam orientations over four computers

[en] The transport of protons through matter is characterized by many interactions which cause small deflections and slight energy losses. The few which are catastrophic or cause large angle scattering can be viewed as extinction for many applications. The transport of protons at this level of approximation can be described by a Fokker Planck Equation. This equation is solved using a deterministic multigroup differencing scheme with a highly resolved set of discrete ordinates centered around the beam direction which is adequate to properly account for deflections and energy losses due to multiple Coulomb scattering. Comparisons with LAHET for a large variety of problems ranging from 800 MeV protons on a copper step wedge to 10 GeV protons on a sandwich of material are presented. The good agreement with the Monte Carlo code shows that the solution method is robust and useful for approximate solutions of selected proton transport problems

[en] This is the final report of a one-year, Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The objective of this project was to develop a validated end-to-end radiographic model that could be applied to both x-rays and protons. The specific objectives were to link hydrodynamic, transport, and magneto-hydrodynamic simulation software for purposes of modeling radiographic systems. In addition, optimization and analysis algorithms were to be developed to validate physical models and optimize the design of radiographic facilities

[en] A frequent complication of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is AIDS dementia complex (ADC). The authors evaluated seven patients with AIDS (aged 28-55 years, all male) for ADC by psychiatric evaluation, neuropsychological testing, CT scanning, and IMP-SPECT. Six of seven patients exhibited cognitive or behavioral abnormalities. Neuropsychological testing showed general deficits but no cases of explicit dementia. SPECT showed marked abnormalities in two cases: posterior temporal-parietal diminution of tracer uptake in one case (posterior/anterior=0.81) and marked right/left subcortical asymmetry (1.17) in the other. In three additional cases there was asymmetric tracer uptake in the subcortical and parietal regions. CT findings were normal in all seven cases. The authors conclude that functional imaging with the use of IMP-SPECT may be a useful method to follow ADC progression and response to therapy

[en] CESR has produced e⁺e^- collisions for high energy physics in the very productive UPSILON region (4.7 to 5.7 GeV per beam) since the fall of 1979. The peak luminosity recorded during physics data taking over that period is shown. The dramatic increase in the luminosity has resulted from the reduction of β /SUB y/ * from 11 cm to 3 cm, an increase in sigma /SUB x/ *, and increases in the vertical aperture. Furthermore, observations of the beam-beam interaction show that the luminosity increases as the square of the beam current at low currents and linearly with current at high currents. These observations are consistent with a vertical beam size which is constant at low currents and increases linearly at high currents. A linearly increasing vertical beam size implies a constant vertical tune shift. The luminosity and the beam lifetime are limited by nongaussian tails which reach the physical aperture of CESR

[en] C57B1 mice were treated with thoracic irradiation to doses in the range 12.0 to 18.9 gray. Few deaths were observed in the period 80 to 160 days after irradiation (an end-point of lung damage used by other investigators) and the median survival times ranged from 200 to 310 days. CBA mice treated under identical conditions predominantly died between 80 to 160 days and it is therefore concluded that C57B1 mice show unusually prolonged survival following this treatment. Six chemotherapeutic agents were given to C57B1 mice together with thoracic irradiation, in most cases two weeks beforehand. Adriamycin, bleomycin and cyclo-phosphamide enhanced the mortality of the mice. Most agents had little effect on radiation-induced skin damage. (author)