Understanding virulence mechanisms of bacterial pathogens is vital to anticipating biological threats and to improving detectors, vaccines, and treatments. This project will characterize factors responsible for virulence of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague and a biothreat agent, which has an inducible Type III secretion virulence mechanism also found in other animal, plant, and human pathogens. Our approach relies on genomic and proteomic characterization of Y. pestis in addition to a bioinformatic infrastructure. Scientific and technical capabilities developed in this project can be applied to other microbes of interest. This work will establish a significant new direction for biodefense at LLNL and expand our national and international scientific collaborations.

Mainly due to the method of chirped pulse amplification, laser intensities have grown remarkably during recent years. However, the attaining of very much higher powers is limited by the material properties of gratings. These limitations might be overcome through the use of plasma, which is an ideal medium for processing very high power and very high total energy. A plasma can be irradiated by a long pump laser pulse, carrying significant energy, which is then quickly depleted in the plasma by a short counterpropagating pulse. This counterpropagating wave effect has already been employed in Raman amplifiers using gases or plasmas at low laser power. Of particular interest here are the new effects which enter in high power regimes. These new effects can be employed so that one high-energy optical system can be used like a flashlamp in what amounts to pumping the plasma, and a second low-power optical system can be used to extract quickly the energy from the plasma and focus it precisely. The combined system can be very compact. Thus, focused intensities more than 10{sup 25} W/cm{sup 2} can be contemplated using existing optical elements. These intensities are several orders of magnitude higher than what is currently available …

The objective of this project was to characterize the fluid properties and fluid-rock interactions which are needed for formation evaluation by NMR well logging. NMR well logging is finding wide use in formation evaluation. The formation parameters commonly estimated were porosity, permeability, and capillary bound water. Special cases include estimation of oil viscosity, residual oil saturation, location of oil/water contact, and interpretation on whether the hydrocarbon is oil or gas.

This report describes the results made in fulfillment of contract DE-FG26-02NT15451, ''Multicomponent Seismic Analysis and Calibration to Improve Recovery from Algal Mounds: Application to the Roadrunner/Towaoc Area of the Paradox Basin, Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, Colorado''. Optimizing development of highly heterogeneous reservoirs where porosity and permeability vary in unpredictable ways due to facies variations can be challenging. An important example of this is in the algal mounds of the Lower and Upper Ismay reservoirs of the Paradox Basin in Utah and Colorado. It is nearly impossible to develop a forward predictive model to delineate regions of better reservoir development, and so enhanced recovery processes must be selected and designed based upon data that can quantitatively or qualitatively distinguish regions of good or bad reservoir permeability and porosity between existing well control. Recent advances in seismic acquisition and processing offer new ways to see smaller features with more confidence, and to characterize the internal structure of reservoirs such as algal mounds. However, these methods have not been tested. This project will acquire cutting edge, three-dimensional, nine-component (3D9C) seismic data and utilize recently-developed processing algorithms, including the mapping of azimuthal velocity changes in amplitude variation with offset, to extract attributes that relate …

A report of an environmental assessment and alternative route analysis for the proposed 69kV transmission line.

This report provides the results of detailed hydrologic characterization tests conducted within newly constructed Hanford Site wells during FY 2002. Results from the tests provide hydrologic information that supports the needs of RCRA waste management characterization and sitewide groundwater monitoring and modeling programs and reduces the uncertainty of groundwater flow conditions at selected Hanford locations.