Fuel qualification timelines for new fuel technology under ideal conditions can take between 20-25 years to be fully qualified from initial concept to deployment as full fuel assemblies. To reduce the timeline and costs, new separate-effects test and integral-effects test experiments, advanced instrumentation, and advanced modeling and simulation tools are...
We do not know how to align a very intelligent AI agent's behavior with human interests. I investigate whether—absent a full solution to this AI alignment problem—we can build smart {\ai} agents which have limited impact on the world, and which do not autonomously seek power. In this thesis, I...
Distance estimation is a key process for movement and spatial cognition. However, this process is hindered when navigating virtual environments in virtual reality (VR) due to the movement being exclusively visually simulated. In order to contribute to the understanding of how this hinderance effects our ability to estimate distances in...
Accurately describing drag and virtual mass forces in two-phase flows is crucial for high fidelity modeling of nuclear thermal hydraulic safety systems. This study compares existing drag coefficient correlations commonly used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications for air bubbles to experimental data collected for ellipsoidal air bubbles of varying...
Native American traditional foodways serve as one of the most important resources for indigenous communities because these resources provide a variety of non-physical cultural assets and health benefits to Native groups through the medium of food. The demolition of North America’s foodways through colonization has had adverse effects on indigenous...
In the last decade, there has been renewed interest in the use of granulocyte transfusions to treat infections in individuals with compromised immune systems. However, granulocytes only remain functional for about a day after isolation and this short shelf life is a significant drawback. Cryopreservation would allow long term storage...
Indigenous knowledge (creation of human well-being with a modicum of Earth resources) in India was augmented in the twentieth century with new technologies. The new technologies have raised Indian well-being, but these
improvements has been insufficient to motivate Indians to choose families small enough to achieve human sustainability.
Fortunately, within...
The number of wind turbines and wind farms in the Pacific Northwest has increased dramatically in the past six years, which represents a significant amount of electrical generation capacity connected to the public electric grid. However, the variable nature of wind sometimes introduces excessive power, or conversely shortages, in power...
A linearized baroclinic, spectral-in-time tidal inverse model has been developed for assimilation of surface currents from coast-based high-frequency (HF) radars. Representer functions obtained as a part of the generalized inverse solution show that for superinertial flows information from the surface velocity measurements propagates to depth along wave characteristics, allowing internal...
The Oregon Coastal Transition Zone (OCTZ) extends several hundred
kilometers offshore where shelf flows interact with the northern California Current. A
primitive-equation numerical ocean model is used to study the upwelling circulation in this
region from 1 May to 1 November 2001. This OCTZ model obtains initial and boundary
conditions...