Central Storage Facility Research Articles

Improving post-thaw quality management standards in sperm cryobanking to enhance client satisfaction

Improving post-thaw quality management standards in sperm cryobanking to enhance client satisfaction

Design and performance of the South Pole Acoustic Test Setup

The South Pole Acoustic Test Setup (SPATS) was built to evaluate the acoustic characteristics of the South Pole ice in the 10–100kHz frequency range, for the purpose of assessing the feasibility of an acoustic neutrino detection array at the South Pole. The SPATS hardware consists of four vertical strings deployed in the upper 500m of the South Pole ice cap. The strings form a trapezoidal array with a maximum baseline of 543m. Each string has seven stages equipped with one transmitter and one sensor module (glaciophone). Sound is detected or generated by piezoelectric ceramic elements inside the modules. Analogue signals are sent to the surface on electric cables where they are digitized by a PC-based data acquisition system. The data from all strings are collected on a central computer in the IceCube Laboratory from where they are sent to a central data storage facility via a satellite link or stored locally on tape. A technical overview of SPATS and its performance is presented.

The Spanish Radioactive Waste Management and the associated research ensuring its development from sound technical and scientific basis

ABSTRACTSpanish Radioactive Waste Management policy is established by the Government and implemented by ENRESA. The General Plan (GRWP) covers the analysis of the actual and foreseen inventories of spent fuel and all categories of radioactive waste, their present situation, the management strategy and actions identified, as well as funding and financial provisions. Very Low (VLLW) and Low and Intermediate Level Waste (LILW) are disposed of at El Cabril facility, which has two separate disposal areas: one intended for VLLW, based on clay and polyethylene and started up in 2006; and one for LILW conditioned in retrievable concrete containers, commissioned in 1992. Spent fuel (SF) is being stored in pools and in two dry storage installations. The priority is the development of the SF and HLW centralized storage facility. In 2009, the Government launched a call for candidate municipalities, in a public, participative process. In September 2010 a report was sent to the Cabinet, proposing eight volunteer communities, four of them deemed preferred. In the 90’s a deep geological repository (DGR) site identification program was carried out. DGR basic designs and associated performance assessments were developed in three rock types. ENRESA has set a research program that includes research projects in order to strengthen the link between management and scientific basis and improve the performance assessment, directed to the behavior of barriers, fuel or waste forms in different storage and final disposal conditions, and characterization techniques. There is also a participation in connected fields or supporting decision-making, such as advanced separation and transmutation.

No Substantial Penalty for Withdrawal: The PALCI Shared Print Journal Archive

The Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium (PALCI) has developed a shared print archive, an archive that promises to maintain rarely used print journals from noted scientific society publishers for a ten year period. The goals for this collaborative project are to ensure access to commonly held print journal titles, to allow libraries to withdraw materials so they may re-purpose valuable space, and to share the responsibility of storing print titles at individual institutions instead of requiring a centralized storage facility. This paper discusses the grassroots origins for this project and the process decisions involved in turning the archive from vision into reality.

Modeling storage and demand management in power distribution grids

Storage devices and demand control may constitute beneficial tools to optimize electricity generation with a large share of intermittent resources through inter-temporal substitution of load. This paper quantifies the related cost reductions in a simulation model of a simplified stylized medium-voltage grid (10 kV) under uncertain demand and wind output. Benders Decomposition Method is applied to create a two-stage stochastic optimization program. The model informs an optimal investment sizing decision as regards specific ‘smart’ applications such as storage facilities and meters enabling load control. Model results indicate that central storage facilities are a more promising option for generation cost reductions as compared to demand management. Grid extensions are not appropriate in any of the scenarios. A sensitivity analysis is applied with respect to the market penetration of uncoordinated Plug-In Electric Vehicles which are found to strongly encourage investment into load control equipment for ‘smart‘ charging and slightly improve the case for central storage devices.

Panel urges centralized storage facility and permanent repository for nuclear waste

A recommendation has been made by the commission formed to advise the Obama administration on what to do with the spent nuclear fuel from the nation's commercial reactors: The ... A recommendation has been made by the commission formed to advise the Obama administration on what to do with the spent nuclear fuel from the nation's commercial reactors: The ...

Modeling Storage and Demand Management in Electricity Distribution Grids

Storage devices and demand control may constitute beneficial tools to optimize electricity generation with a large share of intermittent resources through inter-temporal substitution of load. We quantify the related cost reductions in a simulation model of a simplified stylized medium-voltage grid (10kV) under uncertain demand and wind output. Benders Decomposition Method is applied to create a two-stage stochastic program. The model informs an optimal investment sizing decision as regards specific 'smart grid' applications such as storage facilities and meters enabling load control. Model results indicate that central storage facilities are a more promising option for generation cost reductions as compared to demand management. Grid extensions are not appropriate in any of our scenarios. A sensitivity analysis is applied with respect to the market penetration of uncoordinated Plug-In Electric Vehicles which are found to strongly encourage investment into load control equipment for `smart` charging and slightly improve the case for central storage devices.

Redesigning a closed-loop supply chain exposed to risks

Supply chain management includes coordination and motivation of independently operating partners. Therefore, it is important to align logistics structures, processes and incentives, especially when making major changes involving those components. Traditionally, cost, quality, and service have served as prioritized performance indicators for supply chains, but lately risk is also taken into consideration (Tang, 2006), especially when studying risk-exposed supply chains. This paper presents a case study of a cash supply chain (CSC). A CSC provides society with notes and coins (Rajamani et al., 2006), which typically involves two parties working together: a central bank and a group of private actors (private banks and logistics service/security providers). Together, they form a closed-loop supply chain (see Guide and Van Wassenhove, 2006), which through their storage facilities and transport means supply cash to their customers (ATMs, bank branches, and retailers), whom in turn enables society's cash consumption. The CSC studied in this paper has during the last couple of years gone through several design changes in network structure (e.g. reducing number of storage facilities), processes (outsourcing), and incentive mechanisms (payment schemes and policies). Most design changes were carried out in order to decrease number of transports from and to central bank storage facilities, nevertheless some of them led to unintended effects (so-called misalignments). Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present a model that determines effects caused by design changes in a CSC. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Comparison of the transportation risks for the spent fuel in Korea for different transportation scenarios

According to the long term management strategy for spent fuels in Korea, they will be transported from the spent fuel pools in each nuclear power plant to the central interim storage facility (CISF) which is to start operation in 2016. At the start of the operation of the final repository (FR), by the year 2065, transport will then take place between the CISF and the FR. Therefore, we have to determine the safe and economical logistics for the transportation of these spent fuels by considering their transportation risks and costs. In this study, we developed four transportation scenarios for a maritime transportation by considering the type of transportation casks and transport means in order to suggest safe and economical transportation logistics for the spent fuels in Korea. And, we estimated and compared the transportation risks for these four transportation scenarios. Also, we estimated and compared the transportation risks resulting from accidents during the transportation of PWR and PHWR spent fuels by road trailers from the CISF and the FR. From the results of this study, we found that risks resulting from accidents during the transportation of the spent fuels have a very low radiological risk activity with a manageable safety and health consequences. The results of this study can be used as basic data for the development of safe and economical logistics for a transportation of the spent fuels in Korea by considering the transportation costs for the four scenarios which will be needed in the near future.

Synthesis of water-using network with central reusable storage in batch processes

The starting and finishing times of water-using operations in batch plants are dependent on the production planning and scheduling. For maximizing the possibility of water reuse/recycle, or for minimizing the freshwater consumption, central storage facilities in a batch water-using system can collect the reusable water from the earlier operations and then supply the remaining water to the later operations. For a predefined production schedule, this paper presents a mathematical formulation for the synthesis of batch water-using networks with central storage tank(s). Superstructures that incorporate all possible flow connections are built to facilitate the problem modeling. The design problem is formulated as a nonlinear program (NLP) if there is no limitation to water reuse/recycle, or a mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) when forbidding water reuse between assigned water-using units and water recycle of certain water-using units is considered. A published literature example and some adaptation examples are provided to demonstrate the good expectation of the proposed, superstructure-based NLP and MINLP formulations. As supported by the results, superstructures with the design scheme can effectively accomplish the objective of solving the design problem for minimum freshwater consumption and offering the optimal network configuration.

The Data-Logging System of the Trigger and Data Acquisition for the ATLAS Experiment at CERN

The ATLAS experiment is getting ready to observe collisions between protons at a centre of mass energy of 14 TeV. These will be the highest energy collisions in a controlled environment to-date, to be provided by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN by mid 2008. The ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition (TDAQ) system selects events online in a three level trigger system in order to keep those events promising to unveil new physics at a budgeted rate of ~200 Hz for an event size of ~1.5 MB. This corresponds to a reduction of O(105) from the initial bunch-crossing rate of 40 MHz at nominal operating conditions. This paper focuses on the data-logging system on the TDAQ side, the so-called Sub-Farm Output (SFO) system. It takes data from the Event Filter farm, which is the third level trigger, and it streams and indexes the events into different files, according to each event's trigger path. The data files are moved to CASTOR, the central mass storage facility at CERN. The final TDAQ data-logging system has been installed using 6 Linux PCs, holding 24 disks of 500 GB each, managed by three RAID controllers on each PC. The data-writing is managed in a controlled round-robin way among three independent filesystems associated to a distinct set of disks, managed by a distinct RAID controller. This design allows fast I/O, which together with a high speed network permits to minimize the number of SFO nodes. We report here on the functionality and performance requirements on the system, our experience with commissioning it and on the performance achieved,

THE COLLECTION CARE AND ACCESS PROJECT: BALANCING DEMANDS ON COLLECTIONS

In 2003 Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales obtained funding for a project that aimed to alleviate congestion in its stores through the building of a centralized storage facility. The collections were assessed using criteria that considered only their long-term preservation needs. While the seductive logic of this approach would have matched the museum's aspirations to “develop flourishing collections that are sustained and growing”, the proposed location of the facility potentially compromised their ability to be “well-used”. This factor, in combination with prohibitive costs, prompted a re-evaluation of the project. This paper describes how the newly appointed project leader introduced a new set of criteria that balanced all the demands that are made on collections and demonstrated a range of potential solutions. As a consequence, a total of £4400000 has now been invested in a suite of new build and refurbishment schemes at four museum sites across Wales.

A Computer Scientist's Reactions to NPfIT

This paper contains a set of personal views relating to NHS Connecting for Health's National Programme for IT (NPfIT), and in particular its Care Records Service, written from the point of view of a computer scientist, not a medical informatics expert. The principal points made are as follows: Centralisation: Pulling lots of data together (for individual patients and then for large patient populations) harms safety and privacy – it is one byproduct of excessive use of identification when in fact all that is usually needed is authentication. Large centralized data storage facilities can be useful for reliability, but risk exchanging lots of small failures for a lesser number of much larger failures. A much more decentralised approach to electronic patient record (EPR) data and its storage should be investigated. Evolutionary acquisition: Specifying, implementing, deploying and evaluating a sequence of ever more complete IT systems is the best way of ending up with well-accepted and well-trusted systems – especially when this process is controlled by the stakeholders who are most directly involved, rather than by some distant central bureaucracy. Thus authority as well as responsibility should be left with hospital and general practitioner trusts to acquire IT systems that suit their environments and priorities – subject to adherence to minimal interoperability constraints – and to use centralized services (e.g., for system support and back-up) as if and when they choose. Socio-technical issues: Ill-chosen imposed medical IT systems impede patient care, are resisted, result in lots of accidental faults, and lose user support and trust. All these points are attested to by rigorous studies involving expertise from the social sciences (psychology, ethnography, etc.) as well as by technical (medical and computer) experts – much more attention needs to be paid to such studies, and more such studies encouraged. Constructive reviews: A constructive expert review, working closely with Connecting for Health, could be very helpful, but should be evidently independent and open and thus essentially different in nature to past and current inquiries. A review of this nature could not just recommend appropriate changes of plan, and speed progress. It could also contribute to the vital task of helping to restore the trust and confidence of the public and the media in the programme and in the government officials involved.

SCALE analysis of CLAB decay heat measurements for LWR spent fuel assemblies

A set of decay heat measurements for spent fuel assemblies recently carried out at the Swedish central interim storage facility for spent fuel, CLAB, was analyzed with the SCALE code system. The measurements include a variety of light water reactor assemblies that cover a large burnup range – up to 51 GWd/MTU – and a cooling time domain of interest to spent fuel storage and transportation applications. The results of the analysis show a good agreement between measured and predicted decay heat, with the calculated decay heat in general within the range of the uncertainty of the measured value. The effect of various assembly data on the calculated decay heat is analyzed and discussed. Uncertainties that may arise from various approaches and assumptions in the computational model are identified and examined.

Design and Operation of a Future Hydrogen Supply Chain: Snapshot Model

Much of the early research in the hydrogen supply chain area was focused on individual technologies of the supply chain, such as production, storage, or distribution, rather than dealing with the supply chain as a whole. The motivation behind this paper is the need to: (1) design a hydrogen supply chain that integrates the previously mentioned components within a single framework, (2) understand the important trade-offs in such a supply chain, and (3) have a full understanding of the data requirements and uncertainties in such an exercise. Optimization techniques were implemented to develop the hydrogen supply chain for the transport sector, therefore, determining the optimum infrastructural and operational costs. Of course, cost is not likely to be the sole determinant of performance in practice. The network of interest was formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem. Also, the network is presented as a steady state ‘snapshot’ problem using Great Britain as a backdrop. The model and assumptions presented in this paper reveal that the optimum future hydrogen supply chain might consist of medium-to-large, centralized methane steam reforming plants. The hydrogen produced from these plants will then be delivered as a liquid via tanker trucks and stored in centralized storage facilities.

Wastewater minimisation using central reusable water storage in batch plants

This paper presents a continuous-time mathematical formulation for freshwater and wastewater minimisation in multipurpose batch plants with and without a central reusable water storage facility. The minimisation of wastewater is achieved through the exploitation of recycle and reuse opportunities. A superstructure that entails all the possible recycle and reuse possibilities is used as the basis for the formulation. Initially, the formulation is based on a predefined schedule characterized by a priori specification of starting or finishing times. The formulation is then extended to embed wastewater minimisation within an established scheduling framework in which starting and finishing times become optimization variables. In both forms the formulation can readily be extended to multiple contaminant media, although this will be the subject of another publication. Fixing the outlet concentration and the contaminant mass load for each water using operation in the absence of central reusable water storage initially renders the formulation a nonconvex mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP) which is linearized exactly to yield a convex mixed integer linear program (MILP). On the other hand, allowing the outlet concentration to vary within predefined bounds while fixing both the water requirement and contaminant mass load yields a MINLP formulation for which global optimality cannot be guaranteed in complex problems. The developed formulation is applied to a published literature example as well as case studies involving production scheduling.

Safety Aspects of Long-term Dry Interim Storage Of Type-b Spent Fuel and Hlw Transport Casks

Based on the German decision to minimise transport of spent fuel casks between nuclear power plants, reprocessing plants and central storage facilities several on-site storage facilities were licensed until the end of 2003. Because of the large amount of Type B(U) transport casks which are going to be used for long-term interim storage the question of timelimited Type B(U) licence maintenance during the storage period of up to 40 years has been discussed under different aspects. This paper describes present technical aspects of the discussion. A main aspect of qualification of transport casks for interim storage is the long-term behaviour of the metallic seal–lid system. Here results are presented from current long-term experimental tests with metallic 'Helicoflex' seals in which pool water is enclosed. This series of tests has been performed by the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) on behalf of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) since 2001. Finally, the paper presents a German concept for an exchange of experience, know-how and state-of-the-art between authorities and technical experts with regard to cask dispatch in nuclear facilities. BAM has taken over a central role in this so-called 'coordinating institution for cask dispatching information' ('KOBAF') which entails management of an online database of cask-specific documents and a technical working group meeting twice a year. The goal is to keep comparable technical standards for all nuclear sites and storage facilities which are going to load and dispatch casks of the same or similar types under the responsibility of different German state governments for the coming decades.

Cord blood units collected at a remote site: a collaborative endeavor to collect umbilical cord blood through the Hawaii Cord Blood Bank and store the units at the Puget Sound Blood Center

Umbilical cord blood is a useful source of hematopoietic stem cells, especially because compared to equivalent HLA-matched stem cells from unrelated adult donors. A network of community collection sites targeted at particular ethnic groups and serviced by a central processing and storage facility can maximize the genetic diversity of banked cord blood units (CBUs) in a cost-effective fashion. The present study compared CBUs collected near the Puget Sound Blood Center in Seattle, WA, with those collected in Honolulu, HI, and processed in Seattle. Evaluated variables include collection volume, total nucleated cell count, cellular viability, CD34+ cell count, clonogenic activity, and donor race for a total of 1646 CBUs received from July 1998 through November 2002. CBUs from the two sites did not differ with regard to volume or total nucleated cells. Those from Hawaii had significantly longer transit times (p < 0.001) and lower whole cord blood cell viability. However, the numbers of CFU and viable CD34+ cells were not affected by remote collection. CBUs screened from Seattle were largely from Caucasian donors, whereas over 85 percent of those from Honolulu were from donors of Asian-Pacific Islander or mixed ethnicity. These studies demonstrate the feasibility of long-distance umbilical cord blood banking. Arrangements such as those described here could be used to help target cost-effective collection from minority populations and increase the HLA and ethnic diversity for CBUs.

Application of two-level factorial design to sensitivity analysis of keyblock statistics from fracture geometry

A stochastically modeled fracture network offers potential for more realistic assessment of stability status in underground excavations than predictions based entirely on deterministic features. The reliability of probabilistic models, however, depends strongly on an accurate estimation of the model's variables, i.e., the fracture network properties from the field and laboratory observations. In this study, predictions of keyblocks by implementing stochastically generated fractures in the Central Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel (CLAB 2 Centralt Lager Använt Bränsle) located in southeast Sweden are presented. The fracture network model is built by using fracture mapping in the floor of the facility and incorporates fracture size, shape, orientations, termination mode, spatial arrangement and fracture mechanical properties. The predicted volume of individual keyblocks is best-fitted with the Pareto probability distribution function. Subsequently, a statistical two-level factorial analysis is performed to examine the impact of both single fracture properties and their interactions on the predictions made. In the factorial experiments, the block predictions are made for eight different fracture models where three factors: fracture radii, orientation and termination are each assigned two levels intentionally departing from the best estimates found for the CLAB 2 site. This allows us to express the experiment results as the degree to which each of the eight computed block statistics deviated from the most likely prediction. It is found that fracture orientation is the only statistically significant factor influencing the keyblock statistics while the input from other variables/fracture properties and their interactions is less significant. The results of our study yield a prospective approach for improving the effectiveness of the stochastic model variable estimation and for more optimal field mapping strategies.

Dial‐In Flow Cytometry Data Analysis

As listmode data files continue to grow larger, access via any kind of network connections becomes more and more trouble because of the enormous traffic generated. The limited speed of transmission via modem makes analysis almost impossible. This unit presents a solution to these problems, one that involves installation at the central storage facility of a small computer program called a Web servlet. Operating in concert with a Web server, the servlet assists the analysis by extracting the display array from the data file and organizing its transmission over the network to a remote client program that creates the data display. The author discusses a recent implementation of this solution and the results for model transmission of two typical data files. The system greatly speeds access to remotely stored data yet retains the flexibility of manipulation expected with local access.