Contaminant Plumes of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and their Interrelation to Faults, Landslides, and Streams in Strawberry Canyon, Berkeley and Oakland, California

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), initially called the UC Radiation Laboratory, was originally located on the University of California Berkeley (UCB) central campus in Alameda County during 1932. By 1940, it was relocated to its present site in the steep hills of Strawberry Canyon east of the Hayward Fault and the central UCB campus. The first major facility, the 184-inch synchrocyclotron was built with funds from both private and university sources, and was used in the Manhattan Project in the development of the world’s first nuclear bomb. Beginning in 1948 the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and then its successor agency, the Department of Energy (DOE) funded the lab while it continued to expand its facilities in Strawberry Canyon. For over 60 years radioactive and chemical releases and accidents have contaminated the once beautiful, pristine watershed of the Strawberry Canyon and nearby wild lands. In 1991 the DOE\u27s Tiger Team assessment found 678 violations of DOE regulations covering management practices at LBNL finding Berkeley-Oakland air, soil, and water contaminated with tritium and other radioactive substances and toxic chemicals. The report addresses the need to compile and develop publicly accessible maps of Strawberry Canyon, which show the geologic and geomorphic characteristics that might influence ground and surface water movement near known LBNL contaminant sites. The intent of this map compilation project is to show where there is or is not agreement among the various technical reports and scientific interpretations of Strawberry Canyon. This research was completed money allocated during Round 6 of the Citizens’ Monitoring and Technical Assessment Fund (MTA Fund). Clark University was named conservator of these works. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at [email protected]://commons.clarku.edu/toxicwaste/1001/thumbnail.jp

Double Bubbles Minimize

The classical isoperimetric inequality in R^3 states that the surface of smallest area enclosing a given volume is a sphere. We show that the least area surface enclosing two equal volumes is a double bubble, a surface made of two pieces of round spheres separated by a flat disk, meeting along a single circle at an angle of 120 degrees.Comment: 57 pages, 32 figures. Includes the complete code for a C++ program as described in the article. You can obtain this code by viewing the source of this articl

Circles Minimize most Knot Energies

We define a new class of knot energies (known as renormalization energies) and prove that a broad class of these energies are uniquely minimized by the round circle. Most of O'Hara's knot energies belong to this class. This proves two conjectures of O'Hara and of Freedman, He, and Wang. We also find energies not minimized by a round circle. The proof is based on a theorem of G. Luko on average chord lengths of closed curves.Comment: 15 pages with 3 figures. See also http://www.math.sc.edu/~howard

Which BPS Baryons Minimize Volume?

A BPS 3-cycle in a Sasaki-Einstein 5-manifold in general does not minimize volume in its homology class, as we illustrate with several examples of non-minimal volume BPS cycles on the 5-manifolds Y(p,q). Instead they minimize the energy of a wrapping D-brane, extremizing a generalized calibration. We present this generalized calibration and demonstrate that it reproduces both the Born-Infeld and the Wess-Zumino parts of the D3-brane energy.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figure; citation added, references correcte

Environmental Monitoring of Present and Reconstruction of Past Tritium Emissions from the National Tritium Labeling Facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California

The National Tritium Labeling Facility (NTLF) was located on the eastern edge of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Building 75. Just to the north of the NTLF is the Lawrence Hall of Science, a popular children\u27s science museum that is visited by thousands of children every year. The research effort reported on here has three primary objectives: 1) to monitor tritium activity levels in rainfall near the Lawrence Hall of Science, and creeks draining the watersheds close to the NTLF stack; 2) to date wood samples from Eucalyptus trees growing between the NTLF stack and the Lawrence Hall of Science; and, 3) to determine the organically bound tritium content of the dated samples as a means of reconstructing tritium emissions from the NTLF stack. These three objectives are covered in Part A, Part B, and Part C of this report. This research was completed money allocated during Round 1 of the Citizens’ Monitoring and Technical Assessment Fund (MTA Fund). Clark University was named conservator of these works. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at [email protected]://commons.clarku.edu/toxicwaste/1000/thumbnail.jp

Augmenting graphs to minimize the diameter

We study the problem of augmenting a weighted graph by inserting edges of bounded total cost while minimizing the diameter of the augmented graph. Our main result is an FPT 4-approximation algorithm for the problem.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

Degreasing of titanium to minimize stress corrosion

Stress corrosion of titanium and its alloys at elevated temperatures is minimized by replacing trichloroethylene with methanol or methyl ethyl ketone as a degreasing agent. Wearing cotton gloves reduces stress corrosion from perspiration before the metal components are processed

Folding a Paper Strip to Minimize Thickness

In this paper, we study how to fold a specified origami crease pattern in order to minimize the impact of paper thickness. Specifically, origami designs are often expressed by a mountain-valley pattern (plane graph of creases with relative fold orientations), but in general this specification is consistent with exponentially many possible folded states. We analyze the complexity of finding the best consistent folded state according to two metrics: minimizing the total number of layers in the folded state (so that a "flat folding" is indeed close to flat), and minimizing the total amount of paper required to execute the folding (where "thicker" creases consume more paper). We prove both problems strongly NP-complete even for 1D folding. On the other hand, we prove the first problem fixed-parameter tractable in 1D with respect to the number of layers.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure