Yucca Mountain, a ridge of Miocene volcanic rocks in southwest Nevada, is being characterized as a site for a potential high-level radioactive waste repository. One issue of concern for the future performance of the potential repository is the movement of water in and around the potential repository horizon. Past water movement in this unsaturated zone is indicated by fluid inclusions trapped in calcite coatings on fracture footwall surfaces and in some lithophysal cavities. Some of the fluid inclusions have homogenization temperatures above the present-day geotherm (J.F. Whelan, written communication), so determining the ages of the calcite associated with those fluid inclusions is important in understanding the thermal history of the potential repository site. Calcite ages have been constrained by uranium-lead dating of silica polymorphs (opal and chalcedony) that are present in most coatings. The opal and chalcedony ages indicate that deposition of the calcite and opal coatings in the welded part of the Topopah Spring Tuff (TSw hydrogeologic unit) spanned nearly the entire history of the 12.8-million-year-old rock mass at fairly uniform overall long-term rates of deposition (within a factor of five). Constraining the age of a layer of calcite associated with specific fluid inclusions is complicated. Calcite is commonly …

This paper provides a review and synthesis of current knowledge about the associations of ventilation system types in office buildings with sick building syndrome symptoms and discusses potential explanations for the associations. Relative to natural ventilation, air conditioning, with or without humidification, was consistently associated with a statistically significant increase in the prevalence of one or more SBS symptoms. Prevalences were typically higher by approximately 30% to 200% in the air conditioned buildings. In two of three assessments from a single study, symptom prevalences were also significantly higher in air conditioned buildings than in buildings with simple mechanical ventilation and no humidification. In approximately half of assessments, SBS symptom prevalences were significantly higher in buildings with simple mechanical ventilation than in buildings with natural ventilation. Insufficient information was available for conclusions about the potential increased risk of SBS symptoms with humidification. The statistically significant associations of mechanical ventilation and air conditioning with SBS symptoms are much more frequent than expected from chance and also not likely to be a consequence of confounding by several potential personal, job, or building related confounders. The reasons for the increases in symptom prevalences with mechanical ventilation and particularly with air conditioning remain unclear. Multiple …

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This paper describes the Sets and Fields (SAF) scientific data modeling system. It is a revolutionary approach to interoperation of high performance, scientific computing applications based upon rigorous, math-oriented data modeling principles. Previous technologies have required all applications to use the same data structures and/or meshes to represent scientific data or lead to an ever expanding set of incrementally different data structures and/or meshes. SAF addresses this problem by providing a small set of mathematical building blocks--sets, relations and fields--out of which a wide variety of scientific data can be characterized. Applications literally model their data by assembling these building blocks. A short historical perspective, a conceptual model and an overview of SAF along with preliminary results from its use in a few ASCI codes are discussed.

The low-lying eigenmodes of the Dirac operator associated with typical gauge field configurations in QCD encode, among other low-energy properties, the physics behind the solution to the U{sub A}(1) problem (i.e. the origin of the {eta}{prime} mass), the nature of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, and the physics of string-breaking, quark-antiquark pair production, and the OZI rule. Moreover, the space-time chiral structure of these eigenmodes reflects the space-time topological structure of the underlying gauge field. We present evidence from lattice QCD on the local chiral structure of low Dirac eigenmodes leading to the conclusion that topological charge fluctuations of the QCD vacuum are not instanton-dominated. The result supports Witten's arguments that topological charge is produced by confinement-related gauge fluctuations rather than instantons.

Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies (FM&T) engineers John Zimmerman and Tom Bender directed separate projects within this CRADA. This Project Accomplishments Summary contains their reports independently. Zimmerman: In 1998 Honeywell FM&T partnered with the Demand Activated Manufacturing Architecture (DAMA) Cooperative Business Management Program to pilot the Supply Chain Integration Planning Prototype (SCIP). At the time, FM&T was developing an enterprise-wide supply chain management prototype called the Integrated Programmatic Scheduling System (IPSS) to improve the DOE's Nuclear Weapons Complex (NWC) supply chain. In the CRADA partnership, FM&T provided the IPSS technical and business infrastructure as a test bed for SCIP technology, and this would provide FM&T the opportunity to evaluate SCIP as the central schedule engine and decision support tool for IPSS. FM&T agreed to do the bulk of the work for piloting SCIP. In support of that aim, DAMA needed specific DOE Defense Programs opportunities to prove the value of its supply chain architecture and tools. In this partnership, FM&T teamed with Sandia National Labs (SNL), Division 6534, the other DAMA partner and developer of SCIP. FM&T tested SCIP in 1998 and 1999. Testing ended in 1999 when DAMA CRADA funding for FM&T ceased. Before entering the partnership, FM&T discovered …