A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Congress and the Health Care Financing Administration recognized that certain services needed to be excluded from the skilled nursing facility (SNF) prospective payment system (PPS) rate to help ensure beneficiary access to appropriate care and to financially protect the SNFs that take care of high-cost patients. The criteria used to identify services--high cost, infrequently provided during a SNF stay and likely to be overprovided--and the services currently excluded appear reasonable. Even so, questions remain about whether beneficiaries have appropriate access to services that are covered in the rate or whether additional services should have been excluded. A second concern is that Medicare coverage for excluded facility services has been shifted from part A to part B, which will increase beneficiary liability. and program spending might increase because certain services are excluded only when provided in hospital settings, thus discouraging the use of less expensive, clinically appropriate sites of service. Finally, excluding services from the PPS rate when they are provided in emergency rooms may lead to overuse of emergency rooms, unnecessarily increasing Medicare spending. The Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS) does not plan to …

This report provides an overview of the immigration legalization and status adjustment legislation.

This annual progress and performance evaluation report discusses the groundwater remedial actions in the 100 Area, including the interim actions at the 100-HR-3 and 100-KR-4 Operable Units, and also discusses the expedited response action in the 100-NR-2 operable unit.

The DOE National Center of Excellence for Metals Recycle (NMR) proposes to define and implement a complex-wide directed reuse strategy for surplus radiologically impacted lead (Pb) as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's commitment to the safe and cost-effective recycle or reuse of excess materials and equipment across the DOE complex. NMR will, under this proposal, act on behalf of the DOE Office of Environmental Management, Office of Technical Program Integration (specifically EM-22), as the Department's clearinghouse for DOE surplus lead and lead products by developing and maintaining a cost-effective commercially-based contaminated lead recycle program. It is NMR's intention, through this directed reuse strategy, to mitigate the adverse environmental and economic consequences of managing surplus lead as a waste within the complex. This approach would promote the safe and cost-effective reuse of DOE's scrap and surplus lead in support of the Department's goals of resource utilization, energy conservation, pollution prevention and waste minimization. This report discusses recommendations for supplemental radiological limits for the directed reuse of contaminated lead and lead products by the DOE within the nuclear industry. The limits were selected--with slight modification--from the recently published American National Standards Institute and Health Physics Society standard N13.12 titled Surface …

This annual progress and performance evaluation report discusses the groundwater remedial actions in the 100 Area, including the interim actions at the 100-HR-3 and 100-KR-4 Operable Units, and also discusses the expedited response action in the 100-NR-2 operable unit.

This annual progress and performance evaluation report discusses the groundwater remedial actions in the 100 Area, including the interim actions at the 100-HR-3 and 100-KR-4 Operable Units, and also discusses the expedited response action in the 100-NR-2 operable unit.

This annual progress and performance evaluation report discusses the groundwater remedial actions in the 100 Area, including the interim actions at the 100-HR-3 and 100-KR-4 Operable Units, and also discusses the expedited response action in the 100-NR-2 operable unit.

Atomic mixing in multicomponent gases and plasmas is usually described as a diffusional process. The diffusional description is an approximation to a more general dynamical description in which the motion of each individual species or material is governed by its own momentum equation, with appropriate coupling terms to represent the exchange of momentum between different species. These equations are not new, but they are scattered in the literature. Here we summarize the form of these species momentum equations, and the coupling coefficients therein, in sufficient detail to facilitate their inclusion and use to simulate atomic mixing in hydrodynamics codes.

This annual progress and performance evaluation report discusses the groundwater remedial actions in the 100 Area, including the interim actions at the 100-HR-3 and 100-KR-4 Operable Units, and also discusses the expedited response action in the 100-NR-2 operable unit.

This report provides an overview of the registry as means of obtaining lawful permanent residence on immigration.

This report discusses the postulated loss of 115 kV power. Continuous electrical power to Savannah River Plant reactors is necessary to maintain water flow for heat removal and essential monitoring and control. Should power supplied to the plant 115 kV system from offsite be lost, on-site generation is sufficient to maintain all reactors in a safe shutdown mode for an indefinite period. Should on-site generators for the 115 kV grid also be lost, diesel-electric generators within each reactor building are also sufficient to maintain safe shutdown for a finite period. In all cases DC power for necessary monitoring and control would be available from battery systems with AC converter backup.

Argonne has developed a series of automated protocols to generate bacterial expression clones by using a robotic system designed to be used in procedures associated with molecular biology. The system provides plate storage, temperature control from 4 to 37 C at various locations, and Biomek and Multimek pipetting stations. The automated system consists of a robot that transports sources from the active station on the automation system. Protocols for the automated generation of bacterial expression clones can be grouped into three categories (Figure 1). Fragment generation protocols are initiated on day one of the expression cloning procedure and encompass those protocols involved in generating purified coding region (PCR).

The purpose of this report is to discuss the chemistry of nitrous acid, the Savannah River Plant application of nitrogen, environmental effects, and outline a development program for nitrogen replacement of sodium nitrite.

This report describes the performance of this prototype y-monitor of 235 Uranium enrichment. In this proposed method y-rates associated with 235U and 232U are correlated with enrichment. Instrumentation for appraising fuel tubes with this method has been assembled and tested.

This document discusses performance characteristics of an isothermal freeze valve. A freeze valve has been specified for draining the DWPF melter at the end of its lifetime. Two freeze valve designs have been evaluated on the Small Cylindrical Melter-2 (SCM-2). In order to size the DWPF freeze valve, the basic principles governing freeze valve behavior need to be identified and understood.

The Bush Administration outlined its proposals for addressing the nation’s energy problems in May 2001 with a 170-page report by the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPD) titled National Energy Policy (NEP). In June, the President transmitted to Congress a summation of the report’s concepts and strategies that call for legislative action.