A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Medicare program is the nation's largest health insurer with almost 40 million beneficiaries and outlays of over $219 billion annually. Because of the susceptibility of the program to fraud and abuse, Congress enacted the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control (HCFAC) Program as part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPAA) of 1996. HCFAC, which is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), established a national framework to coordinate federal, state, and local law enforcement efforts to detect, prevent, and prosecute health care fraud and abuse in the public and private sectors. HIPPAA requires HHS and DOJ to issue a joint annual report no later than January 1 of each year to Congress for the proceeding fiscal year. The joint HCFAC reports included deposits of $210 million for fiscal year 2000 and $464 million for fiscal year 2001, pursuant to the act. In testing at DOJ, GAO found errors in the recording of criminal fines deposits to the Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund in fiscal year 2001 that resulted …

Monthly report written by the Texas Daily Newspaper Association's (TDNA's) office manager, Darla Thompson, to Phil Berkebile providing a summary of revenues and account balances, programs, meetings, and other activities in the office during the previous month.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation's executive director may adopt, as standards for installing, altering, operating, and inspecting elevators, escalators, and related equipment, the current version of safety codes A17.1 and A17.3, adopted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and related questions (RQ-0479-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the Texas Health Care Information Council may use certain data to prepare reports (R-0480-JC)

Accurate multi-dimensional modeling of detonation waves in solid HE materials is a difficult task. To treat applied problems which contain detonation waves one must consider reacting flow with a wide range of length-scales, non-linear equations of state (EOS), and material interfaces at which the detonation wave interacts with other materials. To be useful numerical models of detonation waves must be accurate, stable, and insensitive to details of the modeling such as the mesh spacing, and mesh aspect ratio for multi-dimensional simulations. Studies we have performed show that numerical simulations of detonation waves can be very sensitive to the form of the artificial viscosity term used. The artificial viscosity term is included in our ALE hydrocode to treat shock discontinuities. We show that a monotonic, second order artificial viscosity model derived from an approximate Riemann solver scheme can strongly damp unphysical oscillations in the detonation wave reaction zone, improving the detonation wave boundary wall interaction. These issues are demonstrated in 2D model simulations presented of the 'Bigplate' test. Results using LX-I 7 explosives are compared with numerical simulation results to demonstrate the affects of the artificial viscosity model.

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We present studies of space-charge-induced beam profile broadening at high intensities in the Proton Storage Ring (PSR) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Previous work has associated the observed broadening in the vertical direction with the coherent half integer resonance. Here, we study the effect of the space charge environment on this resonance; specifically, we investigate the strength of the resonance versus beam intensity, longitudinal bunching factor, transverse lattice tune, and two different beam injection scenarios. For each case, detailed particle-in-cell simulations are combined with experimental results to elucidate the behavior and sensitivity of the beam resonance response.

In current waste packaging design, Alloy 22 (Ni-22Cr-13Mo-3W-3Fe) has been chosen as the candidate materials to fabricate a 2 cm outer layer of the high-level nuclear waste containers, as part of proposed geological repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. During the repository period, the container materials will be subject to the corrosion due to its exposure to the multi-ionic aqueous environments. Although Alloy 22 has demonstrated excellent corrosion resistance, but accumulation of small yearly corrosion rate for 10,000 or more years can be significant enough. The goal of this research is to seek alternative techniques to obtain a reasonably confident corrosion rate determination, since the conventional weight loss technique requires many years to achieve a detectable weight loss in Alloy 22 samples. This paper will discuss the latest experiment results in using potentiostatic technique to determine passive dissolution rates.

The Rapid Cycling Medical Synchrotron (RCMS) accelerator is under conceptual design at BNL. We report the results of the beam dynamics studies in the current design RCMS ring lattice with simulation program ORBIT++. In this paper, the designed RCMS ring lattice, the important physical parameters and the simulation program employed in this study are overviewed. The major elements and the numerical parameters included in the simulations are listed and discussed. The evolution of longitudinal beam properties, such as bunch length, bunch height and particle distributions, under RF voltage ramping are studied. The simulation results of the 6D beam dynamics during acceleration including phase space and emittance evolution are presented. Finally, the space charge effects such as tune shift and emittance growth in the RCMS ring are investigated and discussed.

The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) extraction kicker system brings the proton beam from the accumulator ring through a beam transfer line into the target area. The 14 kicker magnets are located in one straight section. The kicker magnets are energized by 14 Blumlein type Pulse Forming Networks (BPFN). The first article of the SNS extraction kicker BPFN was assembled and tested at this laboratory. This paper describes the kicker BPFN system arrangement and parameters. The first article BPFN design and its main components used are explained. High voltage BPFN test results and the load current waveform are illustrated in this paper. Temperature measurements of the kicker ferrite blocks at full power showed only small or no heating. This paper discusses the modifications to the BPFN design, such as a saturating inductor and 25 Q termination, to minimize the transverse coupling impedance.

We study the influence of space charge on the crossing of the second-order resonance and the associated space-charge limit in high-intensity rings. Two-dimensional simulation studies are compared and found to agree with the envelope models in the finding of an increased intensity limit due to the coherent frequency shift. We also discuss application of this effect to bunched beams and multi-turn injection painting, and the effect of high-order resonances and issues of the envelope instability.

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The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) Accumulator ring extraction system includes 14 modules of ferrite kicker magnets with window-frame geometry. Among all ring components, the extraction kickers make the single largest contribution to the coupling impedance budget. A prototype was constructed and various design options impacting the transverse coupling impedance have been thoroughly studied. Bench as well as system measurements were performed to determine the benefits from an external circuit resistance, from using different ferrites material, and from adding a novel ferrite winding. The results presented in this paper confirm that a resistive termination in the external circuit yields a solution with sufficiently reduced transverse coupling impedance. In order to determine the total contribution of all modules, an equivalent circuit and a simple scaling law was derived from measurements of full and half size magnets.

The accumulator ring of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) is designed to accept high-intensity H{sup -} beam of 1 GeV kinetic energy from the injecting LINAC, and to accumulate, in a time interval of 1 msec, 2 x 10{sup 14} protons in a single bunch of 700 nsec. In order to optimize the effective straight-section spaces for beam-injection, extraction and collimation, we have minimized the width of the large aperture quadrupoles which are located in the same straight sections of the accumulator ring with the injection and extraction systems. By minimizing the width of the quadrupoles to {+-}40.4 cm, the beam-injection and extraction angles are lowered to 8.75{sup o} and 16.8{sup o} respectively. Further optimization of the narrow quadrupole, minimizes the strength of the dodecapole multipole component of the quadrupole, thus reducing the width of the 12pole structure resonance and allowing a larger tune space for stability of the circulating beam. In this paper we present results derived from magnetic field calculations of 2D and 3D modeling, and discuss the method of optimizing the size of the quadrupole and minimizing its dodecapole multipole component.

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The SNS Ring off-line parallel simulation environment based on the Unified Accelerator Libraries (UAL) has been implemented and used for extensive full-scale beam dynamics studies arising in high-intensity rings. The paper describes the structure of this environment and its application to the development and analysis of the SNS accumulator ring beam loss model including a complex combination of several physical effects.

Both interstitial water and plant tissue associated with the DC-A substrate exhibited low metal concentrations. Also in agreement with the previous study, plant performance in the DC-A substrate was found to be comparable to plant performance in the dredge spoil and topsoil substrates. This was extremely important because it indicated that the drill cuttings themselves served as an excellent substrate for wetland plant growth, but that the processing and stabilization techniques and drilling fluid formulations required further refinement.

One of the primary tasks in the design of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) ring is to control collective effects including space charge, transverse and longitudinal instabilities, and electron cloud. Transverse painting is used to alleviate space charge force; longitudinal painting along with chromatic sextupoles are used to enhance Landau damping; injection kicker vacuum pipes are carefully shielded, and extraction kicker impedances are measured in detail and optimized; beam halo, beam loss and electron production are minimized; finally, damping systems at various frequencies are planned. This paper summarizes these design implementations.

In the past, passive Nuclear Materials Identification System (NMIS) measurements on plutonium metal shells at VNIIEF have shown the sensitivity of the acquired covariance functions to shell mass and thickness for a variety of shell thicknesses from 6 to 30 mm and masses varying from 1829 to 4468g. The technique acquires the time-dependent coincidence distribution between plastic scintillators detecting radiation from the Pu. The measurements showed the sensitivity of the acquired signature to the different spontaneous emission, attenuation, and multiplication properties of the shells. In this work, the MCNP-POLIMI neutron and photon transport code was used to simulate passive measurements on plutonium metal and oxide. The code is a modified version of MCNP, which attempts to calculate more correctly quantities that depend on the second moment of the neutron and gamma distributions, and attempts to model detector pulses as closely as possible. MCNP-POLIMI, together with a post-processing code, can simulate all the time-dependent coincidence distributions measured by NMIS. In particular, the simulations evaluate the time-dependent coincidence distributions between detectors for plutonium samples having mass 2 and 4 kg, in metal and oxide form. This work shows that the time-dependent coincidence distributions between two scintillators measured by NMIS can be used …

Proton therapy is a treatment modality of increasing utility in clinical radiation oncology mostly because its dose distribution conforms more tightly to the target volume than x-ray radiation therapy. One important feature of proton therapy is that it produces a small amount of positron-emitting isotopes along the beam-path through the non-elastic nuclear interaction of protons with target nuclei such as {sup 12}C, {sup 14}N, and {sup 16}O. These radioisotopes, mainly {sup 11}C, {sup 13}N and {sup 15}O, allow imaging the therapy dose distribution using positron emission tomography (PET). The resulting PET images provide a powerful tool for quality assurance of the treatment, especially when treating inhomogeneous organs such as the lungs or the head-and-neck, where the calculation of the dose distribution for treatment planning is more difficult. This paper uses Monte Carlo simulations to predict the yield of positron emitters produced by a 250 MeV proton beam, and to simulate the productions of the image in a clinical PET scanner.

We are developing a computer code, ORBIT, specifically for beam dynamics calculations in high-intensity rings. Our approach allows detailed simulation of realistic accelerator problems. ORBIT is a particle-in-cell tracking code that transports bunches of interacting particles through a series of nodes representing elements, effects, or diagnostics that occur in the accelerator lattice. At present, ORBIT contains detailed models for strip-foil injection including painting and foil scattering; rf focusing and acceleration; transport through various magnetic elements; longitudinal and transverse impedances; longitudinal, transverse, and three-dimensional space charge forces; collimation and limiting apertures; and the calculation of many useful diagnostic quantities. ORBIT is an object-oriented code, written in C++ and utilizing a scripting interface for the convenience of the user. Ongoing improvements include the addition of a library of accelerator maps, BEAMLINE/MXYZPTLK the introduction of a treatment magnet errors and fringe fields; the conversion of the scripting interface to the standard scripting language, Python; and the parallelization of the computations using MPI. The ORBIT code is an open source, powerful, and convenient tool for studying beam dynamics in high-intensity rings.

A proposal for an experiment to detect and measure with an array infrared detector either the infrared radiation from the beam-beam coherent bremsstrahlung or from the synchrotron light from the edge effect of large DX RHIC magnet is described. Predictions for the 100 GeV/nucleon gold and 250 GeV proton signals from both bremsstrahlung and synchtrotron radiation magnet edge effect are shown.

The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) is a proof-of-principle experiment designed to study the physics of Spherical Tori (ST), i.e., low-aspect-ratio toroidal plasmas. Important issues for ST research are whether the high-eta stability and reduced transport theoretically predicted for this configuration can be realized experimentally. In NSTX, the commissioning of a digital real-time plasma control system, the provision of flexible heating systems, and the application of wall conditioning techniques were instrumental in achieving routine operation with good confinement. NSTX has produced plasmas with R/a {approx} 0.85 m/0.68 m, A {approx} 1.25, Ip * 1.1 MA, BT = 0.3-0.45 T, k * 2.2, d * 0.5, with auxiliary heating by up to 4 MW of High Harmonic Fast Waves, and 5 MW of 80 keV D0 Neutral Beam Injection (NBI). The energy confinement time in plasmas heated by NBI has exceeded 100 ms and a toroidal beta (bT = 2m0<p>/BT02, where BT0 is the central vacuum toroidal magnetic field) up to 22% has be en achieved. HHFW power of 2.3 MW has increased the electron temperature from an initial 0.4 keV to 0.9 keV both with and without producing a significant density rise in the plasma. The early application of both …