[en] This presentation analyzed the current global wood pellet market and evaluated some of the forces currently driving market expansion. Global wood pellet production statistics were also presented. Large forest companies are now expanding into the energy sector and seeking to produce processing heat from biomass in addition to creating value-added products such as wood pellets, ethanol and electricity. The European biomass action plan has promised to increase production of energy from biomass from 4 per cent to 8 per cent by 2010. Various biomass boiler eco-directives have been established internationally, and some countries in Europe are now aggressively promoting the use of combined heat and power (CHP) systems. Biofuels mixing quotas have been established in various countries as well as tax relief plans for users of bio-fuels. As a result of these developments, along with various new directives, wood pellet consumption in Europe has increased from approximately 1 million tonnes in 2000 to 5 million tonnes in 2005. Consumption of wood pellets in Canada has increased only marginally in the same time period. While Canada currently exported 330,000 tonnes of wood pellets to Europe in 2006, it is expected that exports will increase to 800,000 tonnes by 2010. Other potential markets for Canadian wood pellets include South America, South Africa, Japan, and China. Production of wood pellets in China is expected to increase from current negligible production figures to approximately 50 million tonnes by 2020. Biomass research and development activities in Europe and North America are continuing to improve the calorific value of wood pellets and improve their mechanical strength. Researchers are also investigating methods of lowering wood pellet production costs. refs., tabs., figs

[en] Extract: Reflectively, smoothness and geometry of several types of food packaging board were studied in relation to the effectiveness of decontamination treatments involving ultraviolet (UV-C, 254 nm) irradiation. Surfaces containing aluminum in the laminate reflected more light in the 325 to 550 nm rangeand showed a lower lethal effect when Bacillus subtilis spores were irradiated. Visible light of wavelengths between 325 and 550 nm is known to cause photoreactivation of UV damage in vegetative cells. It was suggested that a similar phenomenon might occur in spores on reflective surfaces. Smoothness of the board surface was not an important factor in the extent or the variability of the lethal effect. The geometry of the irradiated surface was shown to be important for aluminum/polyethylene laminate-lined surfaces only, as more spores were killed on board normal to incident UV-C irradiation than in cartons with reflective angles. Spores on the inner sides of this type of carton may have received more reflected light of photoreactivation wavelengths

[en] Decommissioning of retired nuclear plants and components demands the proper management of the process, both for economic reasons and for retaining public confidence in the continued use of nuclear power for electricity generation. The cost and ease of management of radioactively contaminated components can be greatly assisted by the application of decontamination technology. EPRI initiated a program of research and development work in collaboration with Bradtec, which has led to the ''EPRI DFD'' (Decontamination for Decommissioning) Process. The Process has been patented and licensed to six companies worldwide. The purpose of this process is to achieve efficient removal of radioactivity with minimum waste from retired nuclear components and plant systems. The process uses dilute fluoroboric acid with controlled oxidation potential. By removing all the outer scale and a thin layer of base metal from the surfaces, contamination can in many cases be reduced below the levels required to allow clearance (free-release) or recycle to form new components for the nuclear industry. This reduces the need for on-site storage or burial of large amounts of contaminated material at low level radioactive disposal facilities. An additional benefit is that residual radiation fields can be reduced by a large factor, which reduces the worker radiation exposure associated with decommissioning. Furthermore, this dose rate reduction improves the viability of early dismantlement following plant closure, as opposed to waiting for a prolonged period for radioactive decay to occur. The results obtained in early applications of the EPRI DFD process demonstrated the benefits of taking this approach (reference 1)

[en] Both nuclear power and nuclear weapons programs should have (related) economic signatures which are detectible at some scale. We evaluated this premise in a series of studies using national economic input/output (IO) data. Statistical discrimination models using economic IO tables predict with a high probability whether a country with an unknown predilection for nuclear weapons proliferation is in fact engaged in nuclear power development or nuclear weapons proliferation. We analyzed 93 IO tables, spanning the years 1993 to 2005 for 37 countries that are either members or associates of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The 2009 OECD input/output tables featured 48 industrial sectors based on International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) Revision 3, and described the respective economies in current country-of-origin valued currency. We converted and transformed these reported values to US 2005 dollars using appropriate exchange rates and implicit price deflators, and addressed discrepancies in reported industrial sectors across tables. We then classified countries with Random Forest using either the adjusted or industry-normalized values. Random Forest, a classification tree technique, separates and categorizes countries using a very small, select subset of the 2304 individual cells in the IO table. A nation's efforts in nuclear power, be it for electricity or nuclear weapons, are an enterprise with a large economic footprint -- an effort so large that it should discernibly perturb coarse country-level economics data such as that found in yearly input-output economic tables. The neoclassical economic input-output model describes a country's or region's economy in terms of the requirements of industries to produce the current level of economic output. An IO table row shows the distribution of an industry's output to the industrial sectors while a table column shows the input required of each industrial sector by a given industry.

[en] Pentafluoropyridine,2,3,4,6-tetrafluoropyridine, 2,6-difluoropyridine, and 2-fluoropyridine anion radicals were produced by x irradiation of an adamantane matrix which was doubly doped with the aromatic precursors and Me₃NBH₃ and their EPR spectra obtained. The large fluorine hyperfine splitting constants (hfsc) of penta- and 2,3,4,6-tetrafluoropyridine anions and the small fluorine hfsc's of 2,6-di- and 2-fluoropyridine anions suggest that the former two are sigma radicals while the latter two are π radicals. The sigma*-π* orbital crossover phenomenon observed in these fluorinated pyridine anions is explained in terms of the combined effects of stabilization of sigma* orbitals and destabilization of π* orbitals. The EPR results show that nitrogen has a negligible contribution to the unpaired electron sigma* orbitals. INDO calculations were performed for the various states and the results compared with experiment

[en] The production of defect-free mask blanks, and the development of techniques for inspecting and qualifying EUV mask blanks, remains a key challenge for EUV lithography. In order to ensure a reliable supply of defect-free mask blanks, it is necessary to develop techniques to reliably and accurately detect defects on un-patterned mask blanks. These inspection tools must be able to accurately detect all critical defects whilst simultaneously having the minimum possible false-positive detection rate. There continues to be improvement in high-speed non-actinic mask blank inspection tools, and it is anticipated that these tools can and will be used by industry to qualify EUV mask blanks. However, the outstanding question remains one of validating that non-actinic inspection techniques are capable of detecting all printable EUV defects. To qualify the performance of non-actinic inspection tools, a unique dual-mode EUV mask inspection system has been installed at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) synchrotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In high-speed inspection mode, whole mask blanks are scanned for defects using 13.5-nm wavelength light to identify and map all locations on the mask that scatter a significant amount of EUV light. In imaging, or defect review mode, a zone plate is placed in the reflected beam path to image a region of interest onto a CCD detector with an effective resolution on the mask of 100-nm or better. Combining the capabilities of the two inspection tools into one system provides the unique capability to determine the coordinates of native defects that can be used to compare actinic defect inspection with visible light defect inspection tools under commercial development, and to provide data for comparing scattering models for EUV mask defects

No abstract available

[en] This is the final report on LDRD SI-funded research to determine the Effect of Magnetic Field Configurations on Spheromak Performance for the years FY2000-FY2001, during which a new set of bias magnetic field coils was used to change the vacuum magnetic field configuration of the SSPX spheromak at LLNL. The USDOE Office of Fusion Energy Science funded the routine operation of the SSPX facility during FY00 and FY01. A photo of the SSPX facility as it appeared in mid-FY01, appears in this report. The main distinctive feature of the spheromak is that currents in the plasma itself produce the confining toroidal magnetic field, rather than a complex set of external coils. The Sustained Spheromak Physics Experiment (SSPX) device was designed and built study how well the spheromak can contain plasma energy while dynamo processes in the plasma maintain the confining magnetic fields. The spheromak potentially offers advantages over other fusion reactor concepts because it is compact, has no field coils linking the vacuum vessel, and can be operated in a steady state with voltage applied to external electrodes. It is predicted that the ability of the SSPX to contain the plasma thermal energy will increase with increasing plasma electron temperature; that is, the hotter it is, the better it will work. Our near-term goal for the SSPX facility is to determine which of several magnetic field configurations works best to produce hot, well-confined spheromak plasmas. We also want to verify the predicted inverse relation between plasma temperature and heat loss, and to use these results to design an even higher-temperature follow-on experiment that will push closer to fusion conditions. New features of the SSPX spheromak include a large-radius coaxial plasma injector to improve efficiency, a conformal flux conserver to minimize open field lines around the plasma, a divertor to aid in cold-particle exhaust, and the programmable-bias magnetic field coils to vary the magnetic geometry. The effect of operating SSPX with the bias magnetic-field coils is the subject of this LDRD research project

[en] The Fokker-Planck code is applied to the problem of heat conduction down steep thermal gradients. The results are compared with those obtained with other codes based on the Fokker-Planck equation in which various simplifying assumptions are made in the calculation of the Rosenbluth potentials. The particular problem considered is that of heat flow between spherical shells at different temperatures. The difference between the heat flows resulting from isotropic and anisotropic distributions is specially emphasized. The results show that, for calculating temperature, the usual Legendre polynomial expansion for the angular dependence of the distribution function gives reasonable results even when it is limited to two terms. However, the heat fluxes can differ by a factor of two when the Rosenbluth potentials are calculated from angular averages of the distribution function even when in the rest of the calculation the Legendre expansion is retained to all orders. (author)

[en] VIP was labeled with sodium [¹²⁵I]iodide, and ¹²⁵I-VIP was purified by reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography. Optimal separations of ¹²⁵I-VIP and unlabeled VIP were obtained using two C18- Novapak columns in series and a gradient of acetonitrile in triethylamine phosphate for elution. The specific activity of the ¹²⁵I-VIP was 1.99 +/- 0.21 Ci/mumole, approaching the maximum specific activity of monoiodinated VIP (2.26 Ci/mumole). Radioimmunoassay and radioreceptorassay for VIP were more sensitive (2.6-fold, and 2.5-fold, respectively) using ¹²⁵I-VIP purified by HPLC compared to ¹²⁵I-VIP obtained from an open-end cellulose column. These results demonstrate the advantage of preparing purified ¹²⁵I-VIP by HPLC for the accurate assay of VIP and VIP-receptors in tissues and biological fluids