A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO examined the extent to which agencies' efforts and federal laws ensure the: (1) safety of functional foods and dietary supplements; and (2) accuracy of health-related claims on product labels and in advertising."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Science to Achieve Results (STAR) grants program, focusing on: (1) whether funding amounts awarded for the grants align with EPA's strategic goals, EPA's Office of Research and Development's (ORD) research priorities, and program office priorities; (2) the extent to which the completed focused grants have provided research that is being used by EPA's program offices; and (3) ways in which ORD could enhance its management of the program to help ensure that it meets its objectives."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board's management problems, focusing on: (1) the status of the Board's organization and operations; (2) the Board's efforts to update and develop plans, policies, and procedures for accomplishing the Board's mission, including those aimed at ensuring the objectivity of its investigative activities; and (3) whether the Board would benefit from the independent oversight of an inspector general."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO: (1) assessed the Navy's progress since 1996 in improving the self-defense capability of surface ships against cruise missiles; and (2) evaluated Navy plans for meeting future anti-cruise missile self-defense requirements."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO provided information on real-time disclosure of foreign automated teller machine (ATM) fees levied by the card-issuing bank, focusing on: (1) alterations to the ATM system that would be needed to support real-time foreign fee disclosure; (2) estimated costs and timeframes associated with implementing real-time foreign fee disclosure; (3) potential competitive impact on ATM industry participants, defined to include various sized banks, ATM networks, ATM owners, and third-party processors; (4) potential impact on consumers; and (5) alternatives to real-time foreign fee disclosure."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Department of Defense's (DOD) efforts to identify functions that could be studied for potential competition between the public and private sectors, focusing on: (1) whether DOD has improved the identification of commercial activities that could be studied under Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76; and (2) the likelihood that DOD will increase the number of functions and positions studied under A-76."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed security protection for selected officials from all of the civilian executive branches from fiscal years 1997 through 1999, focusing on: (1) how many federal government officials were protected, who protected them, and how many security personnel protected them; (2) the cost to protect these officials; (3) under what legal authorities were agencies providing security protection; (4) under what circumstances were officials protected; (5) how agencies were preparing threat assessments, and what are the implications of standardizing and centralizing threat assessments; (6) what training did protective personnel receive, and what the implications of standardizing and centralizing security protection training are; (7) the implications of centralizing protection services under one agency; and (8) the views of the protected officials regarding the need for and adequacy of their protection."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) efforts to reduce children's exposure to pesticides by implementing the requirements of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), focusing on the: (1) approach EPA has developed for making decisions about applying the new safety factor; (2) progress that has been made in considering aggregate exposure and cumulative effects; and (3) progress that has been made in reassessing tolerances for pesticide residues."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the progress towards achieving the goals of the Energy Policy Act's petroleum replacement programs, focusing on the: (1) progress made in acquiring alternative fuel vehicles and using alternative fuels to meet the act's fuel replacement goals; (2) impediments to using alternative fuel vehicles; and (3) measures that can be taken to address those impediments to using alternative fuel vehicles and alternative fuels to help reach the act's replacement goals."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program's (SCHIP) efforts to make dental care more available to low-income people, focusing on: (1) factors that explain low dental service use by Medicaid and SCHIP beneficiaries; and (2) the role of other federal safety-net programs in improving access to dental care."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO tested the effectiveness of general and application controls that support the Army Corps of Engineers' key financial system. This system processes military engineering, construction, and real estate projects and civil works projects involving the investigation, development, and maintenance of the nation's waters and related environmental resources. GAO found pervasive weaknesses in computer controls at the Corps' data processing centers. Other Corps sites revealed serious vulnerabilities that would allow both hackers and legitimate users with valid access privileges to improperly modify, inappropriately disclose, or destroy sensitive and financial data, including social security numbers and other personal information. These weaknesses undermine the Corps' ability to ensure the confidentiality and availability of data in the financial system."

Accurate and efficient simulation of chemical transport processes in the unsaturated zone of Yucca Mountain is important to evaluate the performance of the potential repository. The scale of the unsaturated zone model domain for Yucca Mountain (50 km{sup 2} area with a 600 meter depth to the water table) requires a large gridblock approach to efficiently analyze complex flow & transport processes. The conventional schemes based on finite element or finite difference methods perform well for dispersion-dominated transport, but are subject to considerable numerical dilution/dispersion for advection-dominated transport, especially when a large gridblock size is used. Numerical dispersion is an artificial, grid-dependent chemical spreading, especially for otherwise steep concentration fronts. One effective scheme to deal with numerical dispersion is the random walk particle method (RWPM). While significant progress has been made in developing RWPM algorithms and codes for single continuum systems, a random walk particle tracker, which can handle chemical transport in dual-continua (fractured porous media) associated with irregular grid systems, is still absent (to our knowledge) in the public domain. This is largely due to the lacking of rigorous schemes to deal with particle transfer between the continua, and efficient schemes to track particles in irregular grid systems. The …

The cracking resistance of Alloy 600, Alloy 690 and their welds, EN82H and EN52, was characterized by conducting J{sub IC} rising load tests in air and hydrogenated water and cooldown testing in water under constant-displacement conditions. All test materials displayed excellent toughness in air and high temperature water, but Alloy 690 and the two welds were severely embrittled in low temperature water. In 54 C water with 150 cc H{sub 2}/kg H{sub 2}O, J{sub IC} values were reduced by 70% to 95%, relative to their air counterpart. The toughness degradation was associated with a fracture mechanism transition from microvoid coalescence to intergranular fracture. Comparison of the cracking response in water with that for hydrogen-precharged specimens tested in air demonstrated that susceptibility to low temperature crack propagation (LTCP) is due to hydrogen embrittlement of grain boundaries. The effects of water temperature, hydrogen content and loading rate on LTCP were studied. In addition, testing of specimens containing natural weld defects and as-machined notches was performed to determine if low temperature cracking can initiate at these features. Unlike the other materials, Alloy 600 is not susceptible to LTCP as the toughness in 54 C water remained high and a microvoid coalescence mechanism was …

A wireless link was designed using a patch antenna. In the process, several different models were tested. Testing proved a patch antenna was a viable solution for building a wireless link within the design specifications. Also, this experimentation provided a basis for future patch antenna design.

Linear stability analysis of a two-cylinder approximation to gun injection--one cylinder to represent the confined spheromak and another to represent the gun--is shown to yield equilibria in which tearing modes exist simultaneously at the magnetic axis and at the geometric (gun) axis, as might be required to sustain helicity injection. These equilibria are MHD stable at the two axes but may have localized MHD instability at an interior minimum in the q profile. The theory predicts two tearing thresholds with successively deeper q minima as the gun current is increased at constant bias flux.

The Social Security system is projected to have long-range funding problems. Although the system’s income currently exceeds its expenditures, its trust funds are projected to be depleted in 2037. Concern about the problem and a belief that the remedy lies partly in economic growth that could be bolstered by changes to the system have led to introduction of a number of bills incorporating varying degrees of reform. This report describes the funding problem in some detail, summarizes many of the reform bills introduced in the 106th Congress, and provides a list of other related CRS reports.

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This document presents the climatological data measured at the Hanford Site for claendar year 1999. The information contained includes updated historical climatologies for temperature, precipitation, normal and extreme values of temperature and precipitaion and other meteorological parameters.

PNNL conducted independent site evaluations for four sites at Fort Lewis, Washington, to determine their suitability for closure on behalf of the installation. These sites were recommended for "No Further Action" by previous invesitgators and included the Storm Water Outfalls/Industrial Waste Water Treatment Plant (IWTP), the Pesticide Rinse Area, the Old Fire Fighting Training Pit, and the Illicit PCB Dump Site.

The objective of this calculation is to evaluate the structural response of the waste package during the horizontal and vertical lifting operations in order to support the waste package lifting feature design. The scope of this calculation includes the evaluation of the 21 PWR UCF (pressurized water reactor uncanistered fuel) waste package, naval waste package, 5 DHLW/DOE SNF (defense high-level waste/Department of Energy spent nuclear fuel)--short waste package, and 44 BWR (boiling water reactor) UCF waste package. Procedure AP-3.12Q, Revision 0, ICN 0, calculations, is used to develop and document this calculation.

Evaluations of the Weatherization Assistance Program (the Program) serve three major purposes: (1) to document the energy savings and cost effectiveness of the Program, (2) to attract and maintain funding, and (3) to identify opportunities for improving the Program's performance. State managers need detailed and specific information about the performance of their own Program if they are to conduct and market it as effectively as possible. In this evaluation guide, we focus almost entirely on the issues related to the measurement of energy savings. Because the Program's main goal is to reduce the energy use and energy burden of low-income households, the minimum output of an evaluation study should be an estimate of energy savings. If resources are limited, the first priority is to obtain this estimate of savings. Some states may be interested in other issues such as determining Program cost effectiveness, testing the value of various audit types, or identifying the best opportunities for increasing energy savings. Because of limited resources, most will focus only on measuring energy savings.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Pollution Prevention (EM-77) created a successful internally competed program to fund innovative projects based on projected returns. This is called the Return-on-Investment (ROI) program. EM-77 conducted a successful ROI pilot, developed and implemented sound management practices, and successfully transferred the program to several Operations Offices. Over the past 4 years sites have completed 262 ROI projects (costing $18.8 million) with claimed first-year savings of $88 million and claimed life cycle savings exceeding $300 million. EM-77 requested that Oak Ridge National Laboratory perform an independent evaluation of the site-led, DOE-HQ-funded pollution prevention (P2) ROI program to assist the Department in determining whether claimed savings are real. The approach for conducting this evaluation was to analyze a sample of P2 projects to identify actual project cost savings and other actual benefits--e.g., amount of waste avoided. To determine the projects for review, EM-77 provided a list of EM-funded projects at two Operations Offices: Oak Ridge and Richland. Sixteen projects (eight from each Operations Office) were selected at random from this list for review. Project documentation was requested from the sites, and this was followed by face-to-face interviews with project personnel. of the 16 projects selected …

A brief study was conducted to roughly estimate the availability of a superconducting (SC) linear accelerator (LINAC) as compared to a normal conducting (NC) one. Potentially, SC radio frequency cavities have substantial reserve capability, which allows them to compensate for failed cavities, thus increasing the availability of the overall LINAC. In the initial SC design, there is a klystron and associated equipment (e.g., power supply) for every cavity of an SC LINAC. On the other hand, a single klystron may service eight cavities in the NC LINAC. This study modeled that portion of the Spallation Neutron Source LINAC (between 200 and 1,000 MeV) that is initially proposed for conversion from NC to SC technology. Equipment common to both designs was not evaluated. Tabular fault-tree calculations and computer-event-driven simulation (EDS) computer computations were performed. The estimated gain in availability when using the SC option ranges from 3 to 13% under certain equipment and conditions and spatial separation requirements. The availability of an NC LINAC is estimated to be 83%. Tabular fault-tree calculations and computer EDS modeling gave the same 83% answer to within one-tenth of a percent for the NC case. Tabular fault-tree calculations of the availability of the SC LINAC …

A Total System Performance Assessment for Site Recommendation (TSPA-SR) has recently been completed (CRWMS M&O, 2000b) for the potential high-level waste repository at the Yucca Mountain site. The TSPA-SR is an integrated model of scenarios and processes relevant to the postclosure performance of the potential repository. The TSPA-SR scenarios and model components in turn include representations of all features, events, and processes (FEPs) identified as being relevant (i.e., screened in) for analysis. The process of identifying, classifying, and screening potentially relevant FEPs thus provides a critical foundation for scenario development and TSPA analyses for the Yucca Mountain site (Swift et al., 1999). The objectives of this paper are to describe (a) the identification and classification of the comprehensive list of FEPs potentially relevant to the postclosure performance of the potential Yucca Mountain repository, and (b) the development, structure, and use of an electronic database for storing and retrieving screening information about the inclusion and/or exclusion of these Yucca Mountain FEPs in TSPA-SR. The FEPs approach to scenario development is not unique to the Yucca Mountain Project (YMP). General systematic approaches are summarized in NEA (1992). The application of the FEPs approach in several other international radioactive waste disposal programs is …