Final results of double-shell tank 241-AN-105 ultrasonic inspection

This document presents the results and documentation of the nondestructive ultrasonic examination of tank 241-AN-105. A tank inspection supplier was retained to provide and use an ultrasonic examination system (equipment, procedures, and inspectors) to scan a limited area of double-shell tank 241-AN-105 primary tank wall primary knuckle, and secondary tank bottom. The inspection found some indication of general and local wall thinning with no cracks detected

1998 242-A interim evaporator tank system integrity assessment plan

Portions of the 242-A Evaporator on the Hanford Site must be assessed to meet the requirements of the Washington State Department of Ecology`s Dangerous Waste Regulation, Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 173-303. The assessment is limited to the provisions of Section 173-303-640. This Integrity Assessment Plan (IAP) identifies tasks which will be performed during the assessment phase and describes the intended assessment techniques. The 242-A Evaporator facility processes waste solutions from most of the operating laboratories and plants of the Hanford Site. The waste solutions are concentrated in the evaporator to a slurry of liquid and crystallized salts. This concentrated slurry is returned to the Tank Farms at a significantly reduce volume. The water vapor from the evaporation process is condensed, filtered, and can be pumped through an ion exchange bed before transfer to a retention basin. The non-condensable portion of the vapor is filtered and continuously monitored before venting to the atmosphere. The 242-A Evaporator will be assessed as seven subsystems. Four of the subsystems store, transport or treat Washington State Dangerous wastes, the other three subsystems are integral parts of the process, however, they do not directly store, transfer, or treat listed dangerous wastes. The facility will be inspected, tested, and analyzed through this assessment. The seven subsystems, defined in detail in Appendix B, are: Evaporator Process and Slurry Subsystem; Vapor Condenser Subsystem; Vessel Vent Subsystem; Process Condensate Subsystem; Steam Condensate Subsystem; Raw Water Disposal Subsystem; and Building and Secondary Containment Subsystem

1998 interim 242-A Evaporator tank system integrity assessment report

This Integrity Assessment Report (IAR) is prepared by Fluor Daniel Northwest (FDNW) under contract to Lockheed-Martin Hanford Company (LMHC) for Waste Management Hanford (WMH), the 242-A Evaporator (facility) operations contractor for Fluor Daniel Hanford, and the US Department of Energy, the system owner. The contract specifies that FDNW perform an interim (5 year) integrity assessment of the facility and prepare a written IAR in accordance with Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 173-303-640. The WAC 173-303 defines a treatment, storage, or disposal (TSD) facility tank system as the ``dangerous waste storage or treatment tank and its ancillary equipment and containment.`` This integrity assessment evaluates the two tank systems at the facility: the evaporator vessel, C-A-1 (also called the vapor-liquid separator), and the condensate collection tank, TK-C-100. This IAR evaluates the 242-A facility tank systems up to, but not including, the last valve or flanged connection inside the facility perimeter. The initial integrity assessment performed on the facility evaluated certain subsystems not directly in contact with dangerous waste, such as the steam condensate and used raw water subsystems, to provide technical information. These subsystems were not evaluated in this IAR. The last major upgrade to the facility was project B-534. The facility modifications, as a result of project B-534, were evaluated in the 1993 facility interim integrity assessment. Since that time, the following upgrades have occurred in the facility: installation of a process condensate recycle system, and installation of a package steam boiler to provide steam for the facility. The package boiler is not within the scope of the facility TSD

Bipolar querying of valid-time intervals subject to uncertainty

Databases model parts of reality by containing data representing properties of real-world objects or concepts. Often, some of these properties are time-related. Thus, databases often contain data representing time-related information. However, as they may be produced by humans, such data or information may contain imperfections like uncertainties. An important purpose of databases is to allow their data to be queried, to allow access to the information these data represent. Users may do this using queries, in which they describe their preferences concerning the data they are (not) interested in. Because users may have both positive and negative such preferences, they may want to query databases in a bipolar way. Such preferences may also have a temporal nature, but, traditionally, temporal query conditions are handled specifically. In this paper, a novel technique is presented to query a valid-time relation containing uncertain valid-time data in a bipolar way, which allows the query to have a single bipolar temporal query condition

Scheduling Irrigations Using Climate-Crop-Soil Data

Recent studies of surface irrigation systems (16,21,29) 4 indicate that irrigation scheduling practices, tithing and amount applied, have not changed significantly from those observed about 25 yr ago by Israelson, et al. (11). Attempts to relate observed irrigation efficiencies to field, soil, crop, and management characteristics generally have not been successful because the factors causing the large variations in timing and amount of water applied at each irrigation are so diverse that the resulting irrigation efficiencies appear to be random events with a broad, uniform distribution. The potential for better irrigation water management has; however, increased substantially during the past 15 yr because of better water control and measurement facilities (24), improved system design criteria (2), more reliable methods for estimating evapotranspiration (13), increased knowledge of each crop's response to soil moisture levels (9), and commercially available soil moisture instrumentation for timing irrigations (10)

Changes in the immune landscape of TNBC after neoadjuvant chemotherapy: correlation with relapse

Introduction: Patients with high-risk, triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) often receive neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) alone or with immunotherapy. Various single-cell and spatially resolved techniques have demonstrated heterogeneity in the phenotype and distribution of macrophages and T cells in this form of breast cancer. Furthermore, recent studies in mice have implicated immune cells in perivascular (PV) areas of tumors in the regulation of metastasis and anti-tumor immunity. However, little is known of how the latter change during NAC in human TNBC or their impact on subsequent relapse, or the likely efficacy of immunotherapy given with or after NAC. Methods: We have used multiplex immunofluorescence and AI-based image analysis to compare the immune landscape in untreated and NAC-treated human TNBCs. We quantified changes in the phenotype, distribution and intercellular contacts of subsets of tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs), CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, and regulatory T cells (Tregs) in PV and non-PV various areas of the stroma and tumor cell islands. These were compared in tumors from patients who had either developed metastases or were disease-free (DF) after a three-year follow up period. Results: In tumors from patients who remained DF after NAC, there was a marked increase in stromal CD163+ TAMs, especially those expressing the negative checkpoint regulator, T-cell immunoglobulin and mucin domain 3 (TIM-3). Whereas CD4+ T cells preferentially located to PV areas in the stroma of both untreated and NAC-treated tumors, specific subsets of TAMs and Tregs only did so only after NAC. Distinct subsets of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells formed PV clusters with CD163+ TAMs and Tregs. These were retained after NAC. Discussion: Quantification of stromal TIM-3+CD163+ TAMs in tumor residues after NAC may represent a new way of identifying patients at high risk of relapse. PV clustering of immune cells is highly likely to regulate the activation and function of T cells, and thus the efficacy of T cell-based immunotherapies administered with or after NAC

Measurements of the Q2Q^2-Dependence of the Proton and Neutron Spin Structure Functions g1p and g1n

The structure functions g1p and g1n have been measured over the range 0.014 < x < 0.9 and 1 < Q2 < 40 GeV2 using deep-inelastic scattering of 48 GeV longitudinally polarized electrons from polarized protons and deuterons. We find that the Q2 dependence of g1p (g1n) at fixed x is very similar to that of the spin-averaged structure function F1p (F1n). From a NLO QCD fit to all available data we find $\Gamma_1^p - \Gamma_1^n =0.176 \pm 0.003 \pm 0.007$ at Q2=5 GeV2, in agreement with the Bjorken sum rule prediction of 0.182 \pm 0.005.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to Physics Letters

A mathematical framework for critical transitions: normal forms, variance and applications

Critical transitions occur in a wide variety of applications including mathematical biology, climate change, human physiology and economics. Therefore it is highly desirable to find early-warning signs. We show that it is possible to classify critical transitions by using bifurcation theory and normal forms in the singular limit. Based on this elementary classification, we analyze stochastic fluctuations and calculate scaling laws of the variance of stochastic sample paths near critical transitions for fast subsystem bifurcations up to codimension two. The theory is applied to several models: the Stommel-Cessi box model for the thermohaline circulation from geoscience, an epidemic-spreading model on an adaptive network, an activator-inhibitor switch from systems biology, a predator-prey system from ecology and to the Euler buckling problem from classical mechanics. For the Stommel-Cessi model we compare different detrending techniques to calculate early-warning signs. In the epidemics model we show that link densities could be better variables for prediction than population densities. The activator-inhibitor switch demonstrates effects in three time-scale systems and points out that excitable cells and molecular units have information for subthreshold prediction. In the predator-prey model explosive population growth near a codimension two bifurcation is investigated and we show that early-warnings from normal forms can be misleading in this context. In the biomechanical model we demonstrate that early-warning signs for buckling depend crucially on the control strategy near the instability which illustrates the effect of multiplicative noise.Comment: minor corrections to previous versio

Role of carbonate burial in Blue Carbon budgets

Calcium carbonates (CaCO 3 ) often accumulate in mangrove and seagrass sediments. As CaCO 3 production emits CO 2 , there is concern that this may partially offset the role of Blue Carbon ecosystems as CO 2 sinks through the burial of organic carbon (C org ). A global collection of data on inorganic carbon burial rates (C inorg , 12% of CaCO 3 mass) revealed global rates of 0.8 TgC inorg yr −1 and 15–62 TgC inorg yr −1 in mangrove and seagrass ecosystems, respectively. In seagrass, CaCO 3 burial may correspond to an offset of 30% of the net CO 2 sequestration. However, a mass balance assessment highlights that the C inorg burial is mainly supported by inputs from adjacent ecosystems rather than by local calcification, and that Blue Carbon ecosystems are sites of net CaCO 3 dissolution. Hence, CaCO 3 burial in Blue Carbon ecosystems contribute to seabed elevation and therefore buffers sea-level rise, without undermining their role as CO 2 sinks. © 2019, The Author(s)

Different W cluster deposition regimes in pulsed laser ablation observed by in situ Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

We report on how different cluster deposition regimes can be obtained and observed by in situ Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) by exploiting deposition parameters in a pulsed laser deposition (PLD) process. Tungsten clusters were produced by nanosecond Pulsed Laser Ablation in Ar atmosphere at different pressures and deposited on Au(111) and HOPG surfaces. Deposition regimes including cluster deposition-diffusion-aggregation (DDA), cluster melting and coalescence and cluster implantation were observed, depending on background gas pressure and target-to-substrate distance which influence the kinetic energy of the ablated species. These parameters can thus be easily employed for surface modification by cluster bombardment, deposition of supported clusters and growth of films with different morphologies. The variation in cluster mobility on different substrates and its influence on aggregation and growth mechanisms has also been investigated.Comment: 12 pages (3 figures); Surface Science (accepted