DOE Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) system studies digest

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) has sponsored system studies to support the evaluation of alternative configurations and operations for the Civilian Radioactive Waste Management System (CRWMS) and the development of system requirements and design specifications. These studies are generally directed toward evaluating the impacts of alternatives to the monitored retrievable storage (MRS) and fuel rod consolidation, waste form and characteristics sequences, cask and canister concepts, allocation of waste acceptance rights, and system throughput rates. The objectives of this document are: To present major system issues and related system element issues in a structured manner; to discuss key results of major system studies and explain the basis for certain current system assumptions; to summarize the scope and results of completed system studies that are still relevant at the time this document is published; and to provide the background needed for identifying and prioritizing system issues to be resolved. Consistent with the objectives, the document does not include low-level subsystem studies addressing system element issues that do not interact with overall system issues. The document is expected to be updated as major new system studies are completed and significant new results are available

Dimensions of "Spirituality:" The Semantics of Subjective Definitions

Eisenmann C, Klein C, Swhajor A, Drexelius U, Streib H, Keller B. Dimensions of "Spirituality:" The Semantics of Subjective Definitions. In: Streib H, Hood RW, eds. Semantics and Psychology of "Spirituality". A Cross-cultural Analysis. Cham, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht: Springer International Publishing Switzerland; 2016: 125-151.As part of the semantic analyses in the Bielefeld-based Cross-cultural Study of “Spirituality,” this chapter presents the analysis of 1039 English and 740 German subjective free-text-entry definitions of “spirituality” in response to the question: “How would you define the term ‘spirituality’?” The entire corpus of 1779 cases was rated using 44 categories which have been inductively developed from the material, leaning on Content analysis, Ethnosemantics and Grounded Theory methodology, and validated inter-subjectively in group sessions. Besides testing frequency distributions with the Χ²-Test, Principal Component Analyses were performed for dimension reduction, from which we regard the solution with 10 components explaining 42.11% of the variance as optimal. Thus 10 semantic dimensions of “spirituality” emerge from this analysis. Results from a second-order PCA suggest three components of the semantics of “spirituality”: mystical vs. humanistic transcending, theistic vs. non-theistic transcendence, and individual “lived” religion vs. dogmatism. Thus this chapter demonstrates that a wide range as well as clear differences in understanding “spirituality” emerge when analysed in a decisively idiographic approach