U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Order 450.1, Environmental Protection Program, requires each DOE site to conduct environmental monitoring. Environmental monitoring at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is conducted in order to: (a) Verify and support compliance with applicable federal, state, and local environmental laws, regulations, permits, and orders; (b) Establish baselines and characterize trends in the physical, chemical, and biological condition of effluent and environmental media; (c) Identify potential environmental problems and evaluate the need for remedial actions or measures to mitigate the problem; (d) Detect, characterize, and report unplanned releases; (e) Evaluate the effectiveness of effluent treatment and control, and pollution abatement programs; and (f) Determine compliance with commitments made in environmental impact statements, environmental assessments, safety analysis reports, or other official DOE documents. This Environmental Monitoring Plan (EMP) has been written to contain the rationale and design criteria for the monitoring program, extent and frequency of monitoring and measurements, procedures for laboratory analyses, quality assurance (QA) requirements, program implementation procedures, and direction for the preparation and disposition of reports. Changes to the environmental monitoring program may be necessary to allow the use of advanced technology and new data collection techniques. This EMP will document any proposed changes …

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a county clerk may charge fee for posting an Open Meetings Act notice (RQ-0099-GA)

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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether the Fannin County Commissioners Court may retain counsel to advise it on legal matters without the consent of the county attorney (RQ-0106-GA)

This paper presents the results of a broad investigation into the effects of the electron energy distribution function on the predictions of non-LTE collisional-radiative atomic kinetics models. The effects of non-Maxwellian and suprathermal (''hot'') electron distributions on collisional rates (including three-body recombination) are studied. It is shown that most collisional rates are fairly insensitive to the functional form and characteristic energy of the electron distribution function as long as the characteristic energy is larger than the threshold energy for the collisional process. Collisional excitation and ionization rates, however, are highly sensitive to the fraction of hot electrons. This permits the development of robust spectroscopic diagnostics that can be used to characterize the electron density, bulk electron temperature, and hot electron fraction of plasmas with non-equilibrium electron distribution functions (EDFs). Hot electrons are shown to increase and spread out plasma charge state distributions, amplify the intensities of emission lines fed by direct collisional excitation and radiative cascades, and alter the structure of satellite features in both K- and L-shell spectra. The characteristic energy, functional form, and spatial properties of hot electron distributions in plasmas are open to characterization through their effects on high-energy continuum and line emission and on the polarization …

Weekly newspaper from Albany, Texas that includes local, county, and state news along with extensive advertising.

Anomaly mediation solves the supersymmetric flavor and CP problems. This is because the superconformal anomaly dictates that supersymmetry breaking is transmitted through nearly flavor-blind infrared physics that is highly predictive and UV insensitive. Slepton mass squareds, however, are predicted to be negative. This can be solved by adding D-terms for U(1)_Y and U(1)_{B-L} while retaining the UV insensitivity. In this paper we consider electroweak symmetry breaking via UV insensitive anomaly mediation in several models. For the MSSM we find a stable vacuum when tanbeta< 1, but in this region the top Yukawa coupling blows up only slightly above the supersymmetry breaking scale. For the NMSSM, we find a stable electroweak breaking vacuum but with a chargino that is too light. Replacing the cubic singlet term in the NMSSM superpotential with a term linear in the singlet wefind a stable vacuum and viable spectrum. Most of the parameter region with correct vacua requires a large superpotential coupling, precisely what is expected in the"Fat Higgs'" model in which the superpotential is generated dynamically. We have therefore found the first viable UV complete, UV insensitive supersymmetry breaking model that solves the flavor and CP problems automatically: the Fat Higgs model with UV insensitive …

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

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

Semi-weekly newspaper from Livingston, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.

In this project General Electric Energy and Environmental Research Corporation conducts a preliminary field evaluation of a novel technology, referred to as Hg/NO{sub x}, that can reduce emissions of both mercury (Hg) and oxides of nitrogen (NO{sub x}) from coal-fired power plants. The evaluation takes place in Green Station Unit 2 operated by Western Kentucky Energy. Reduction of Hg and NO{sub x} emissions in Unit 2 is achieved using coal reburning. Activities during first project year (January 23, 2003--January 22, 2004) included measurements of baseline Hg emissions in Unit 2 and pilot-scale testing. Baseline testing of Hg emissions in Green Unit 2 has been completed. Two fuels were tested with OFA system operating at minimum air flow. Mercury emissions were measured at ESP inlet and outlet, and at the stack using Ontario Hydro revised method. Testing demonstrated that baseline Hg reductions at ESP outlet and stack were 30-45% and 70-80%, respectively. Pilot-scale testing demonstrated good agreement with baseline measurements in Unit 2. Testing showed that fuel composition had an effect on the efficiency of Hg absorption on fly ash. Maximum achieved Hg removal in reburning was close to 90%. Maximum achieved Hg reduction at air staging conditions was 60%. Testing …

The proposed high-level radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, would be constructed in the high-silica rhyolite (Tptp) member of the Miocene-age Topopah Spring Tuff, a mostly welded ash-flow tuff in the {approx}500-m-thick unsaturated zone. Strontium isotope compositions have been measured in pore water centrifuged from preserved core samples and in leachates of pore-water salts from dried core samples, both from boreholes in the Tptp. Strontium isotope ratios ({sup 87}Sr/{sup 86}Sr) vary systematically with depth in the surface-based boreholes. Ratios in pore water near the surface (0.7114 to 0.7124) reflect the range of ratios in soil carbonate (0.7112 to 0.7125) collected near the boreholes, but ratios in the Tptp (0.7122 to 0.7127) at depths of 150 to 370 m have a narrower range and are more radiogenic due to interaction with the volcanic rocks (primarily non-welded tuffs) above the Tptp. An advection-reaction model relates the rate of strontium dissolution from the rocks with flow velocity. The model results agree with the low transport velocity ({approx}2 cm per year) calculated from carbon-14 data by I.C. Yang (2002, App. Geochem., v. 17, no. 6, p. 807-817). Strontium isotope ratios in pore water from Tptp samples from horizontal boreholes collared in tunnels at …

In support of a small column ion exchange (SCIX) process for the Savannah River Site waste processing program, a transient two-dimensional heat transfer model that includes the conduction process neglecting the convection cooling mechanism inside the crystalline silicotitanate (CST) column has been constructed and heat transfer calculations made for the present design configurations. For this situation, a no process flow condition through the column was assumed as one of the reference conditions for the simulation of a loss-of-flow accident. A series of the modeling calculations has been performed using a computational heat transfer approach. Results for the baseline model indicate that transit times to reach 130 degrees Celsius maximum temperature of the CST-salt solution column are about 96 hours when the 20-in CST column with 300 Ci/liter heat generation source and 25 degrees Celsius initial column temperature is cooled by natural convection of external air as a primary heat transfer mechanism. The modeling results for the 28-in column equipped with water jacket systems on the external wall surface of the column and water coolant pipe at the center of the CST column demonstrate that the column loaded with 300 Ci/liter heat source can be maintained non-boiling indefinitely. Sensitivity calculations for …

This article describes a numerical study of microwave reflectometry for the measurement of turbulent fluctuations in tokamak-like plasmas with a cylindrical geometry. Similarly to what was found previously in plane-stratified plasmas, the results indicate that the characteristics of density fluctuations cannot be uniquely determined from the reflected waves if the latter are allowed to propagate freely to the point of detection, as in standard reflectometry. Again, we find that if the amplitude of fluctuations is below a threshold that is set by the spectrum of poloidal wave numbers, the local characteristics of density fluctuations can be obtained from the phase of reflected waves when these are collected with a wide aperture antenna, and an image of the cutoff is formed onto an array of phase-sensitive detectors.

The anomalous skin effect in a plasma with a highly anisotropic electron velocity distribution function (EVDF) is very different from skin effect in a plasma with the isotropic EVDF. An analytical solution was derived for the electric field penetrated into plasma with the EVDF described as a Maxwellian with two temperatures Tx >> Tz, where x is the direction along the plasma boundary and z is the direction perpendicular to the plasma boundary. The skin layer was found to consist of two distinctive regions of width of order nTx/w and nTz/w, where nTx,z/w = (Tx,z/m)1/2 is the thermal electron velocity and w is the incident wave frequency.

OAK-B135 The major accomplishments of this project were: (1) the initial characterization of dcsA, the gene for the putative catalytic subunit of cellulose synthase in the cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum; (2) the detection of a developmentally regulated event (unidentified, but perhaps a protein modification or association with a protein partner) that is required for cellulose synthase activity (i.e., the dcsA product is necessary, but not sufficient for cellulose synthesis); (3) the continued exploration of the developmental context of cellulose synthesis and DcsA; (4) the isolation of a GFP-DcsA-expressing strain (work in progress); and (5) the identification of Dictyostelium homologues for plant genes whose products play roles in cellulose biosynthesis. Although our progress was slow and many of our results negative, we did develop a number of promising avenues of investigation that can serve as the foundation for future projects.

The VISION model has been developed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to provide estimates of the potential energy use, oil use, and carbon emission impacts to 2050 of advanced light- and heavy-duty highway vehicle technologies and alternative fuels. DOE supports research of advanced transportation technologies (including fuels) and is frequently asked to provide estimates of the potential impacts of successful market penetration of these technologies, sometimes on a relatively quick-turnaround basis. VISION is a spreadsheet model in Microsoft Excel that can be used to respond rapidly to quick-turnaround requests, as well as for longer-term analyses. It uses vehicle survival and age-dependent usage characteristics to project total light and heavy vehicle stock, total vehicle miles of travel (VMT), and total energy use by technology and fuel type by year, given market penetration and vehicle energy efficiency assumptions developed exogenously. Total carbon emissions for on-highway vehicles by year are also estimated because life-cycle carbon coefficients for various fuels are included in VISION. VISION is not a substitute for the transportation component of the Energy Information Administration's (EIA's) National Energy Modeling System (NEMS). NEMS incorporates a consumer choice model to project market penetration of advanced vehicles and alternative fuels. The projections …

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

Weekly newspaper from Stamford, 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.

Funeral program for Lena M. Tisdell, born August 12, 1912. The funeral was held February 19, 2004 at Sutton-Sutton Mortuary Chapel, officiated by Rev. James P. Amerson. Funeral arrangements were made through the Sutton-Sutton Mortuary, Inc., and she was buried in Gates of Heaven Memorial Gardens in San Antonio, Texas.

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

Weekly newspaper from Rio Grande City, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

We have observed spectra from highly charged zinc ions in a variety of laser-produced plasmas. Spectral features that are Na- and Mg-like satellites to high-n Rydberg transitions in the Ne-like ZnXXI spectrum are analyzed and modeled. Identifications and analysis are made by comparison with highly accurate atomic structure calculations and steady state collisional-radiative models. Each observed ZnXX and ZnXIX feature comprises up to {approx} 2 dozen individual transitions, these transitions are excited principally by dielectronic recombination through autoionizing levels in Na- and Mg-like Zn{sup 19+} Zn{sup 18+}. We find these satellites to be ubiquitous in laser-produced plasmas formed by lasers with pulse lengths that span four orders of magnitude, from 1 ps to {approx} 10 ns. The diagnostic potential of these Rydberg satellite lines is demonstrated.