Use of the Hewlett-Packard 9810 Calculator System in Water Quality Analysis

Introduction: It is the purpose of this manual to illustrate the utilization of the Hewlett-Packard, Model 9810A calculator for analyzing water quality data. Familiarization of each program\u27s capabilities is essential for successful application, thus the user should read over the section used before beginning. Each section is complete with instructions and illustrative examples

AMS measurements of cosmogenic and supernova-ejected radionuclides in deep-sea sediment cores

Samples of two deep-sea sediment cores from the Indian Ocean are analyzed with accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) to search for traces of recent supernova activity around 2 Myr ago. Here, long-lived radionuclides, which are synthesized in massive stars and ejected in supernova explosions, namely 26Al, 53Mn and 60Fe, are extracted from the sediment samples. The cosmogenic isotope 10Be, which is mainly produced in the Earths atmosphere, is analyzed for dating purposes of the marine sediment cores. The first AMS measurement results for 10Be and 26Al are presented, which represent for the first time a detailed study in the time period of 1.7-3.1 Myr with high time resolution. Our first results do not support a significant extraterrestrial signal of 26Al above terrestrial background. However, there is evidence that, like 10Be, 26Al might be a valuable isotope for dating of deep-sea sediment cores for the past few million years.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the Heavy Ion Accelerator Symposium on Fundamental and Applied Science, 2013, will be published by the EPJ Web of conference

Frequency Domain Reflectometry NDE for Aging Cables in Nuclear Power Plants

Degradation of the cable jacket, electrical insulation, and other cable components of installed cables within nuclear power plants (NPPs) is known to occur as a function of age, temperature, radiation, and other environmental factors. System tests verify cable function under normal loads; however, demonstration of some cable’s ability to perform under exceptional loads associated with design-basis events is essential to assuring plant integrity. The cable’s ability to perform safely over the initial 40-year planned and licensed life has generally been demonstrated and there have been very few age-related cable failures.With greater than 1000 km of power, control, instrumentation, and other cables typically found in an NPP, replacing all the cables would be a severe cost burden. Justification for life extension to 60 and 80 years requires a cable aging management program to justify cable performance under normal operation as well as accident conditions. A variety of tests are available to assess various aspects of electrical and mechanical cable performance, but none of these tests are suitable for all cable configurations nor does any single test confirm all features of interest. One particularly powerful test that is beginning to be used more and more by utilities is frequency domain reflectometry (FDR). FDR is a nondestructive electrical inspection technique used to detect and localize faults in power and communication system conductors along the length of a cable from a single connection point. For the measurement, two conductors in the cable system are treated as a transmission line, which propagates a low-voltage swept-frequency waveform to interrogate the cable length. Note that because the applied signal is low-voltage (\u3c5 volts), the test is completely nondestructive and poses no special safety concerns to operators. An inverse Fourier transform is used to convert the resulting frequency-domain data into a time-domain format, which can determine the physical location of signal reflections if the signal propagation velocity is known. FDR detects discontinuities in the electrical impedance that arise due to cable splices or similar changes along the path of the conductor pair. In addition, FDR has the potential to provide sensitivity to insulation degradation by detecting small changes in capacitance between the cable conductors being examined. Example changes that impact the insulation capacitance include exposure to heat, radiation, water damage, corrosion, or mechanical fatigue. The technique is also sensitive to cable bends, the particular lay of the cable in tray, proximity to other cable, and other factors that bear consideration when interpreting these tests. This paper examines various influences on the FDR approach and compares results of three different instruments capable of producing the FDR to assess accelerated aging cable damage among several NPP representative cables

Inter-digital capacitive sensor for evaluating cable jacket and insulation aging

An inter-digital capacitive (TDC) sensor has previously been used to measure dielectric properties of cable insulation polymer material when placed in direct contact with the insulation. Often cable insulation is covered by a polymer jacket. The dielectric properties of many cable jacket and insulation polymers are known to change due to thermal and radiation exposure-related damage. These dielectric properties frequently track with other measures of cable aging, such as tensile elongation-at-break and indenter modulus that have been broadly established as cable insulation polymer assessment methods. The external jacket of a cable is likely to have a different permittivity from the underlying insulation, and frequently the jacket material exhibits more severe damage than the insulation material due to environmental exposure. Because the jacket serves primarily to guard the cable during installation, as long as the underlying insulation condition is acceptable, the jacket condition is relatively unimportant in service. As part of a continuing program to develop and evaluate nondestructive examination methods that may be applied to cable condition assessment, a set of tools has been developed including (1) a parallel-plate sensor to directly measure the permittivity spectrum of flat sheet material and (2) an TDC and fixture to measure the effect of cable polymer dielectric property change on the sensor response. The TDC consists of two fork-like electrodes facing each other with the fork tines interspersed and separated by a small gap. The electrodes are printed on one side of a flexible substrate that can be conformed to the surface of a cylindrical cable, with tines parallel to the cable axis. The electrodes are connected to a broad-frequency-spectral impedance meter that senses the capacitance between the narrowly gapped electrode tines. This capacitance is known to vary as a function of the permittivity of any material in close proximity to the electrodes. By finite element modeling (FEM) and experimentation, this study investigates the effect of tine spacing and other design parameters associated with the TDC on the voltage (potential) distribution and electric field depth of penetration. The TDC measurement of an unshielded ethylene-propylene rubber (EPR)-insulated cable is shown to track with the degree of aging and quantities obtained by established methods. For jacketed cable systems, the TDC response is dominated by the jacket but, by analyzing measurements from TDC sensors with different depths-of-field penetration into the cable under test, the influence of the chlorinated polyethylene (CPE) cable jacket material degradation can be separated from an assessment of the cable insulation thereby enabling assessment of the insulation beneath/through the jacket

Interdigital Capacitance Local Non-Destructive Examination of Nuclear Power Plant Cable for Aging Management Programs

This Pacific Northwest National Laboratory milestone report describes progress to date on the investigation of non-destructive test methods focusing on local cable insulation and jacket testing using an interdigital capacitance (IDC) approach. Earlier studies have assessed a number of non-destructive examination (NDE) methods for bulk, distributed, and local cable tests. A typical test strategy is to perform bulk assessments of the cable response using dielectric spectroscopy, Tan , or partial discharge followed by distributed tests like time domain reflectometry or frequency domain reflectometry to identify the most likely defect location followed by a local test that can include visual inspection, indenter modulus tests, or Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) or Near Infrared Spectroscopy FTIR (FTNIR). If a cable is covered with an overlaying jacket, the jacket’s condition is likely to be more severely degraded than the underlying insulation. None of the above local test approaches can be used to evaluate insulation beneath a cable jacket. Since the jacket’s function is neither structural nor electrical, a degraded jacket may not have any significance regarding the cable’s performance or suitability for service. IDC measurements offer a promising alternative or complement to these local test approaches including the possibility to test insulation beneath an overlaying jacket

High expression of TROP2 characterizes different cell subpopulations in androgen-sensitive and androgenindependent prostate cancer cells

Progression of castration-resistant tumors is frequent in prostate cancer. Current systemic treatments for castration-resistant prostate cancer only produce modest increases in survival time and self-renewing Tumor-Initiating Cells (TICs) are suspected to play an important role in resistance to these treatments. However it remains unclear whether the same TICs display both chemo-resistance and self-renewing abilities throughout progression from early stage lesions to late, castration resistant tumors. Here, we found that treatment of mice bearing LNCaP-derived xenograft tumors with cytotoxic (docetaxel) and anti-androgen (flutamide) compounds enriched for cells that express TROP2, a putative TIC marker. Consistent with a tumor-initiating role, TROP2high cells from androgen-sensitive prostate cancer cell lines displayed an enhanced ability to re-grow in culture following treatment with taxane-based chemotherapy with or without androgen blockade. TROP2 down-regulation in these cells reduced their ability to recur after treatment with docetaxel, in the presence or absence of flutamide. Accordingly, in silico analysis of published clinical data revealed that prostate cancer patients with poor prognosis exhibit significantly elevated TROP2 expression level compared to low-risk patients, particularly in the case of patients diagnosed with early stage tumors. In contrast, in androgen-independent prostate cancer cell lines, TROP2high cells did not exhibit a differential treatment response but were characterized by their high self-renewal ability. Based on these findings we propose that high TROP2 expression identifies distinct cell sub-populations in androgen-sensitive and androgenindependent prostate tumors and that it may be a predictive biomarker for prostate cancer treatment response in androgen-sensitive tumors.Jinhan Xie, Christina Mølck, Sophie Paquet-Fifield, Lisa Butler, Erica Sloan, Sabatino Ventura, Frédéric Holland

Pre-Impoundment Water Quality Study for the San Miguel Project

Introduction: Scope of Study: The United State Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) is currently evaluating plans to construct a multipurpose reservoir on the San Miguel River 32 kilometers (20 miles) below Telluride, Colorado. As part of the environmental assessment for this project, the Utah Water Research Laboratory (UWRL) was contracted to conduct an intensive water quality study on the San Miguel River and its tributaries in the vicinity of the project area. In this study water samples were collected during the period from May, 1977, to August, 1978, on a monthly basis from three sites on the San Miguel River and from Leopard Creek. Samples were analyzed for 49 water quality parameters. The data collected during this period were used to evaluate the existing quality of water at each site with respect to various water uses. Project description: The plans for this project had not been finalized at the time of this writing, but a tentative plan is described in a USBR planning report (USBR, 1978). In this plan, the Saltado Damsite was to be located in the San Miguel Canyon 32 km downstream from Telluride, Colorado (Figure 1). The reservoir will have a total capacity of 3.20 x 10^7 m^3 (26,000 A. F.) and a surface area of about 154 hectares (380 acrea). The project will provide 47 z 10^6 m^3 (38,211 A.F.) of water for irrigation and 37 x 10^6 m^3 (30,081 A. F.) for municipal and industrial use per year. In addition to the reservoir, the project will include a nine mile long pipeline to Norwood Hill, a lift station at Norwood Hill and a canal on the Wright\u27s Mesa to conduct water to farmlands. Project features are summarized in Table 1

Pre-Impoundment Water Quality Study for the Mancos Project

Introduction: The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is currently in the process of evaluating a number of water development projects in Southwest Colorado. As a part of the planning process the Bureau has conducted a water quality investigation, in cooperation with the UWRL, of the stream segments that will be affected by each project. The data collected in this study were used to evaluate the water quality of each stream segment with respect to various beneficial uses of water (agriculture, raw municipal water supply, protection of the aquatic biota) and will provide a baseline by which to assess the impact of each project. in addition, these data will be used in the process of site location, design and operation planning for reservoirs and other project features. This report includes only the results of the water quality study of the Mancos River, associated with the Mancos Project. Water quality data were collected during the period from May, 1977, through August, 1978, One sample was collected and analyzed during each month except during June, 1977, in which two samples were collected from some sites. The concentration of 49 water quality constituents was determined for each sample at the UWRL