Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO responded to concerns regarding its previous recommendations proposing that Department of Defense (DOD) pharmacy programs charge copayments for prescription drugs."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO assessed the effectiveness of information system general controls at the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) Austin Automation Center (AAC)."

The Savannah River Site (SRS) teamed with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and ITT Flygt Corporation to conduct a test program evaluating shrouded axial propeller mixers (Flygt mixers) for heel removal in SRS Tank 19. SRS is identifying and investigating techniques to remove sludge heels from waste tanks such as Tank 19.

The food ingestion consequences due to radioactive particulates of an accidental release, scenario 1-RD-3, are evaluated for Savannah River Technology Center. The sizes of land areas requiring the protective action of food interdiction are calculated. The consequences of the particulate portion of the release are evaluated with the HOTSPOT model and an EXCEL spreadsheet for particulates.

The purpose of this analysis is to systematically identify and evaluate hazards related to the design of the Yucca Mountain Project Exploratory Studies Facility (ESF) East-West Cross Drift. This analysis builds upon prior ESF System Safety Analyses and incorporates TS Main Drift scenarios, where applicable, into the East-West Drift scenarios. This System Safety Analysis (SSA) focuses on the personnel safety and health hazards associated with the engineered design of the East-West Drift. The analysis also evaluates other aspects of the East-West Drift, including purchased equipment (e.g., scientific mapping platform) or Systems/Structures/Components (SSCs) and out-of-tolerance conditions. In addition to recommending design mitigation features, the analysis identifies the potential need for procedures, training, or Job Safety Analyses (JSAs). The inclusion of this information in the SSA is intended to assist the organization(s) (e.g., constructor, Safety and Health, design) responsible for these aspects of the East-West Drift in evaluating personnel hazards and augment the information developed by these organizations. The SSA is an integral part of the systems engineering process, whereby safety is considered during planning, design, testing, and construction. A largely qualitative approach is used which incorporates operating experiences and recommendations from vendors, the constructor and the operating contractor. The risk assessment …

In February, 1999, we conducted a small-scale characterization effort to support future remediation decisions for the Southern Sector of the upper Three Runs watershed. The study concentrated on groundwater adjacent to the seepline at Tim's Branch above and below Steed's Pond. the primary compounds of interest were the volatile organic contaminants (VOCs), trichlorethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE). Due to the site topography and hydrogeology, samples collected north of Steed's Pond were from the M-Area (water table) aquifer; while those locations south of Steed's Pond provided samples from the Lost Lake aquifer. Results of the study suggest that the leading edge of the A/M Area plume in the Lost Lake aquifer may be approaching the seepline at Tim's Branch below Steed's Pond, south of Road 2. Neither TCE nor PCE were detected int he samples targeting the seepline of the water table aquifer. The concentrations found for both TCE and PCE associated with the Lost Lake aquifer outcrop region were slightly above the detection limit of the analytical instrument used. The findings of this study are consistent with the conceptual model for the organic contaminant plume in the A/M Area of the Savannah River Site (SRS) -- the plume in the …

Waste Processing Technology personnel routinely prepare 0.5 to 10 L batches of salt solutions simulating Savannah River Site (SRS) soluble waste. This report describes the compositions and preparation methods.

Historiexecy the SRS swamp was largely composed of bald cypress and tupelo forest with lesser amounts of hardwoods. Upstream impacts from dam construction have altered the composition of the forest through changes in the flooding regimes. Pumping of hot water in to Pen Branch resulted in destruction of several hundred acres of the native forest. Overflow of the forest redistributed sediment, eroded the channel and deposition of silt. No natural regeneration of hardwoods or cypress were observed following cessation of reactor operations. Research was conducted to test various strategies for reforesting these areas.

Photograph of the Texas A&M-Commerce: President's House (Herilage House) in Commerce, Texas.

An article, written by Chris Bull for The Advocate, about hopes for George W. Bush's future actions and policies on gay and lesbian rights. It highlights Bush's friendship with Charles C. Francis and includes the words of other activists and people interested in the topic.

The medical applications for ultra short pulse lasers (USPLs) and their associated commercial potential are reviewed. Short pulse lasers offer the surgeon the possibility of precision cutting or disruption of tissue with virtually no thermal or mechanical damage to the surrounding areas. Therefore the USPL offers potential improvement to numerous existing medical procedures. Secondly, when USPLs are combined with advanced tissue diagnostics, there are possibilities for tissue-selective precision ablation that may allow for new surgeries that cannot at present be performed. Here we briefly review the advantages of short pulse lasers, examine the potential markets both from an investment community perspective, and from the view. of the technology provider. Finally nominal performance and cost requirements for the lasers, delivery systems and diagnostics and the present state of development will be addressed.

Solid state bonds like the diffusion bond are attractive techniques for joining dissimilar materials since they are not prone to the defects that occur with fusion welding. Ultrasonic methods can detect the presence of totally unbonded regions but have difficulty sensing poor bonded areas where the substrates are in intimate contact. Standard ultrasonic imaging is based on amplitude changes in the signal reflected from the bond interface. Unfortunately amplitude alone is not sensitive to bond quality. We demonstrated that there is additional information in the ultrasonic signal that correlates with bond quality. In our approach we interrogated a set of dissimilar diffusion bonded samples with broad band ultrasonic signals. The signals were digitally processed and the characteristics of the signals that corresponded to bond quality were determined. These characteristics or features were processed with pattern recognition algorithms to produce predictions of bond quality. The predicted bond quality was then compared with the destructive measurement to assess the classification capability of the ultrasonic technique

The Department of Energy (DOE) inventory of spent nuclear fuel contains a wide variety of oxide fuel types that may be unsuitable for direct repository disposal in their current form. The molten-salt electrometallurgical treatment technique developed by Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) has the potential to simplify preparing and qualifying these fuels for disposal by converting them into three uniform product streams: uranium metal, a metal waste form, and a ceramic waste form. This paper describes the major steps in the electrometallurgical treatment process for oxide fuels and provides the results of recent experiments performed to develop and scale up the process.

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Semiweekly newspaper from Boerne, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Harper, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This report describes the activities of the nuclear physics group at Mississippi State University, which were performed under contract DE-FG05-92ER40726 with the Department of Energy. Under the contract, the nuclear physics group at MSU provided leadership for the Gammasphere Software Working Group (SWG) and developed software and software standards. The SWG held four workshops during the term of the contract to inform committee members and interested parties of development in software and computer technologies and summaries of the presentations and discussions were compiled for distribution. These summaries have been distributed to interested members of the nuclear physics community and copies are included with this report. SWG subcommittees were organized to address specific issues and reports were given to the full SWG at each meeting. The subcommittee on a ''standard format for histogram data'' developed a format that was presented to the Gammasphere Users' Group and has been provided to interested parties. Other subcommittees were organized to address issues of parallel computing and graphical user interfaces at GammaSphere. We worked closely with Robert Varner and Bill Milner at ORNL in adapting and testing the ORNL histogram display software (UPAK) for use on SPARC-based workstations. The software was ported by ORNL staff …

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Emory, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

We present simulations of quasiparticle creation, propagation, and loss in the superconducting electrode of a normal-insulator-superconductor tunnel junction refrigerator. We calculate the electronic temperature in the superconducting electrode from self-consistent solutions to the diffusion equation. We then calculate the power load on the normal electrode due to recombination phonons and the reduction in cooling power due to the elevated temperature of the superconductor. Our calculations explain the degraded cooling performance observed in 15-20 pm sized Ag/AlOx/Al junctions.

Data stored in a data warehouse must be kept consistent and up-to-date with the underlying information sources. By providing the capability to identify, categorize and detect changes in these sources, only the modified data needs to be transferred and entered into the warehouse. Another alternative, periodically reloading from scratch, is obviously inefficient. When the schema of an information source changes, all components that interact with, or make use of, data originating from that source must be updated to conform to the new schema. In this paper, the authors present an approach to detecting data and schema changes in scientific documents. Scientific data is of particular interest because it is normally stored as semi-structured documents, and it incurs frequent schema updates. They address the change detection problem by detecting data and schema changes between two versions of the same semi-structured document. This paper presents a graph representation of semi-structured documents and their schema before describing their approach to detecting changes while parsing the document. It also discusses how analysis of a collection of schema changes obtained from comparing several individual can be used to detect complex schema changes.