A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Energy (DOE) manages more than 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste stored in 149 single-shell and 28 double-shell underground tanks at its Hanford Site in Washington State. Many of these aging tanks have already leaked waste into the soil. Meanwhile, DOE's planned process for emptying the tanks and treating the waste--mixing it with molten glass and solidifying it in canisters for storage--has experienced delays, lengthening the time the tanks will store waste and intensifying concerns about the tanks' viability during a long cleanup process. This report addresses (1) the condition, contents, and long-term viability of Hanford's underground tanks; (2) DOE's strategy for managing the tanks; and (3) the extent to which DOE has weighed the risks and benefits of its tank management strategy against the growing costs of that strategy. GAO analyzed numerous studies and reports on the tanks and interviewed DOE officials and other experts on relevant issues."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), through its Veterans Health Administration (VHA), provides health care for more than 5 million veterans each year. In 2001, VHA began an initiative, HealtheVet, to modernize its current medical information system. GAO's objectives were to determine the status of the modernization, VA's overall plan for completing it, and how VA is providing oversight to ensure the success of the initiative. To conduct this review, GAO analyzed project documentation and interviewed officials responsible for the development and implementation of the new system."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "After a 1975 fire at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama threatened the unit's ability to shut down safely, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued prescriptive fire safety rules for commercial nuclear units. However, nuclear units with different designs and different ages have had difficulty meeting these rules and have sought exemptions to them. In 2004, NRC began to encourage the nation's 104 nuclear units to transition to a less prescriptive, risk-informed approach that will analyze the fire risks of individual nuclear units. GAO was asked to examine (1) the number and causes of fire incidents at nuclear units since 1995, (2) compliance with NRC fire safety regulations, and (3) the transition to the new approach. GAO visited 10 of the 65 nuclear sites nationwide, reviewed NRC reports and related documentation about fire events at nuclear units, and interviewed NRC and industry officials to examine compliance with existing fire protection rules and the transition to the new approach."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As the baby boom generation ages, the demand for long-term care services, which include nursing home care, is likely to grow and could strain state and federal resources. The increased use of long-term care insurance (LTCI) may be a way of reducing the share of long-term care paid by state and federal governments. Oversight of LTCI is primarily the responsibility of states, but over the past 12 years, there have been federal efforts to increase the use of LTCI while also ensuring that consumers purchasing LTCI are adequately protected. Despite this oversight, concerns have been raised about both premium increases and denials of claims that may leave consumers without LTCI coverage when they begin needing care. GAO was asked to review the consumer protection standards governing LTCI policies and how those standards are being enforced. Specifically, GAO examined oversight of the LTCI industry's (1) rate setting practices and (2) claims settlement practices. GAO reviewed information from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) on all states' rate setting standards. GAO also completed 10 state case studies on oversight of rate setting and claims settlement practices, which …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Millions of drivers hold commercial driver licenses (CDL), allowing them to operate commercial vehicles. The Department of Transportation (DOT) established regulations requiring medical examiners to certify that these drivers are medically fit to operate their vehicles and provides oversight of their implementation. Little is known on the extent to which individuals with serious medical conditions hold CDLs. GAO was asked to (1) examine the extent to which individuals holding a current CDL have serious medical conditions and (2) provide examples of commercial drivers with medical conditions that should disqualify them from receiving a CDL. To examine the extent to which individuals holding CDLs have serious medical conditions, GAO identified those who were in both DOT's CDL database and selected federal disability databases of the Social Security Administration, Office of Personnel Management, and Departments of Veterans Affairs and Labor and have been identified as 100 percent disabled according to the program's criteria. Because DOT's data also include inactive licenses, GAO obtained current CDL data from 12 selected states based primarily on the size of CDL population. To provide case study examples, GAO focused on four states--Florida, Maryland, …

Other written product issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The tax gap--the difference between the tax amounts taxpayers pay voluntarily and on time and what they should pay under the law--has been a long-standing problem in spite of many efforts to reduce it. When some taxpayers fail to comply, the burden of funding the nation's commitments falls more heavily on compliant taxpayers. reducing the tax gap would help improve the nation's fiscal stability. For example, each 1 percent reduction in the net tax gap would likely yield $3 billion annually. Most recently, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estimated it would recover $55 billion of this gap, resulting in a net 2001 tax gap of $290 billion. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), GAO, and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) convened this forum on September 6, 2007, to discuss tax compliance and the options to close the tax gap. Participants were a select group of individuals drawn from the federal tax policy community and state revenue offices. This forum was designed for the participants to discuss these issues openly and without individual attribution in order to facilitate a rich and substantive discussion. Therefore, comments expressed do …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Millions of American drivers hold commercial driver's licenses (CDL), allowing them to operate a variety of commercial vehicles, such as school buses, cargo vans, and tractor trailers. While most commercial drivers do not test positive for drugs and alcohol, Department of Transportation (DOT) data show that each year from 1994 through 2005, from 1.3 percent to 2.8 percent of truck drivers tested positive for the presence of illegal drugs under random testing. However, as our recent investigation shows, the current DOT drug testing process can easily be defeated with products, such as synthetic urine, that are widely available for sale. To help prevent accidents resulting from commercial drivers who use drugs and alcohol, federal law requires commercial drivers to be tested for drug and alcohol use. Specifically, the testing is required as part of the preemployment screening process, on a random basis while employed, and following an accident involving a fatality. Commercial drivers who fail a drug test, refuse to test, or otherwise violate the drug testing regulations are required to complete a return-to-duty process before returning to the road. The return-to-duty process is guided by a substance …

Modelica is an object-oriented acausal modeling language that is well positioned to become a de-facto standard for expressing models of complex physical systems. To simulate a model expressed in Modelica, it needs to be translated into executable code. For generating run-time efficient code, such a translation needs to employ algebraic formula manipulations. As the SPARK solver has been shown to be competitive for generating such code but currently cannot be used with the Modelica language, we report in this paper how SPARK's symbolic and numerical algorithms can be implemented in OpenModelica, an open-source implementation of a Modelica modeling and simulation environment. We also report benchmark results that show that for our air flow network simulation benchmark, the SPARK solver is competitive with Dymola, which is believed to provide the best solver for Modelica.

In 2008, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program and the Climate Change Prediction Program (CCPP) have been asked to produce joint science metrics. For CCPP, the metrics will deal with a decade-long control simulation using geodesic grid-coupled climate model. For ARM, the metrics will deal with observations associated with the 2006 deployment of the ARM Mobile Facility (AMF) to Niamey, Niger. Specifically, ARM has been asked to deliver data products for Niamey that describe cloud, aerosol, and dust properties. This report describes the aerosol optical depth (AOD) product.

We determine the second-order correction to the gain function of the microbunching instability in single-pass systems of interest for the next generation of light sources. The calculation applies to the case where the instability is seeded by shot noise. We examine an analytically treatable model of beam dynamics where collective forces are active only in non-dispersive sections of the linac. We find that the second order term can augment the linear gain significantly while affecting the spectrum of the overall gain only marginally. The weight of the second-order correction relative to the linear gain is found to scale quadratically with respect to R56. The qualitative behavior predicted by the model is consistent with exact numerical solutions of the Vlasov equations for realistic lattices.

This report will discuss strategies available to address identified gaps and weaknesses in education efforts aimed at the preparation of a skilled and properly trained national security workforce.The need to adequately train and educate a national security workforce is at a critical juncture. Even though there are an increasing number of college graduates in the appropriate fields, many of these graduates choose to work in the private sector because of more desirable salary and benefit packages. This is contributing to an inability to fill vacant positions at NNSA resulting from high personnel turnover from the large number of retirements. Further, many of the retirees are practically irreplaceable because they are Cold War scientists that have experience and expertise with nuclear weapons.

The purpose of the project was to develop the processes for using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts for WR production and to put in place a system for implementing the data management tools required to disseminate, store, track procurement, and qualify vendors. Much of the effort was devoted to determining if the use of COTS parts was possible. A basic question: How does the Nuclear Weapons Complex (NWC) begin to use COTS in the weapon Stockpile Life Extension Programs with high reliability, affordability, while managing risk at acceptable levels? In FY00, it was determined that a certain weapon refurbishment program could not be accomplished without the use of COTS components. The elements driving the use of COTS components included decreased cost, greater availability, and shorter delivery time. Key factors that required implementation included identifying the best suppliers and components, defining life cycles and predictions of obsolescence, testing the feasibility of using COTS components with a test contractor to ensure capability, as well as quality and reliability, and implementing the data management tools required to disseminate, store, track procurement, and qualify vendors. The primary effort of this project then was to concentrate on the risks involved in the use of COTS and …

Ultra-lean, hydrogen-air mixtures are found to support another kind of laminar flame that is steady and stable beside flat flames and flame balls. Direct numerical simulations are performed of flames that develop into steadily and stably propagating cells. These cells were the original meaning of the word"flamelet'' when they were observed in lean flammability studies conducted early in the development of combustion science. Several aspects of these two-dimensional flame cells are identified and are contrasted with the properties of one-dimensional flame balls and flat flames. Although lean hydrogen-air flames are subject to thermo-diffusive effects, in this case the result is to stabilize the flame rather than to render it unstable. The flame cells may be useful as basic components of engineering models for premixed combustion when the other types of idealized flames are inapplicable.

The technology we propose consists primarily of an improved design for increasing the energy density of a certain class of bio-fuel cell (BFC). The BFCs we consider are those which harvest electrons produced by microorganisms during their metabolism of organic substrates (e.g. glucose, acetate). We estimate that our technology will significantly enhance power production (per unit volume) of these BFCs, to the point where they could be employed as stand-alone systems for distributed energy generation.

The entire project addresses the issue of mitigating additional intermittency and fast ramps that occur at higher penetration of intermittent resources, including wind genera-tion, in the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and the California Independent Sys-tem Operator (California ISO) control areas. The proposed Wide Area Energy Storage and Management System (WAEMS) will address the additional regulation requirement through the energy exchange between the participating control areas and through the use of energy storage and other generation resources. For the BPA and California ISO control centers, the new regulation service will look no different comparing with the traditional regulation resources. The proposed project will benefit the regulation service in these service areas, regardless of the actual degree of penetration of the intermittent resources in the regions. The project develops principles, algorithms, market integration rules, functional de-sign and technical specifications for the WAEMS system. The project is sponsored by BPA and supported in kind by California ISO, Beacon Power Corporation, and the Cali-fornia Energy Commission (CEC).

Computational radiation transport has steadily gained acceptance in the last decade as a viable modeling tool due to the rapid advancements in computer software and hardware technologies. It can be applied for the analysis of a wide range of problems which arise in nuclear reactor physics, medical physics, atmospheric physics, astrophysics and other areas of engineering physics. However, radiation transport is an extremely chanllenging computational problem since the governing equation is seven-deimensional (3 in space, 2 in direction, 1 in energy, and 1 in time) with a high degree of coupleing betwen these variables. If not careful, this relatively large number of independent variables when discretized can potentially lead to sets of linear equations of intractable size. Though parallel computing has allowed the solution of very large problems, avaliable computational resources will always be finite due to the fact that every more sophisticated multiphysics models are being demanded by industry. There is thus the pressing requirement to optimize the discretizations so as to minimize the effort and maximize the accuracy.

Comparatively little attention has been given to multicomponent diffusion effects in lean hydrogen-air flames, in spite of the importance of these flames in safety and their potential importance to future energy technologies. Prior direct numerical simulations either have considered only the mixture-averaged transport model, or have been limited to stabilized flames that do not exhibit the thermo-diffusive instability. The so-called full, multicomponent transport model with cross-diffusion is found to predict hotter, significantly faster flames with much faster extinction and division of cellular structures.

Cooperative Agreement DE-FC26-06NT42726 was established in January 2006, and is current through Amendment 2, April 2006. The current reporting period, April 1, 2008 through June 30, 2008, is the eighth progress-reporting period for the project. However, this report will be the final report (instead of a quarterly report) because this project is being terminated. Efforts to bring this project to a close over the past several months focused on internal project discussions, and subsequent communications with NETL, regarding the inherent difficulty with completing this project as originally scoped, and the option of performing an engineering study to accomplish some of the chief project objectives. However, NETL decided that the engineering study did indeed constitute a significant scope deviation from the original concepts, and that pursuit of this option was not recommended. These discussions are summarized in the Results and Discussion, and the Conclusion sections. The objective of this project by a team lead by URS Group was to demonstrate the use of regenerative heat exchange to reduce flue gas temperature and minimize evaporative water consumption in wet flue gas desulphurization (FGD) systems on coal-fired boilers. Furthermore, the project intended to demonstrate that regenerative heat exchange to cool flue gas upstream …

This report documents the development of a database-supported user manual for DEMVAL assets in the NSTI area of operations and focuses on providing comprehensive user information on DEMVAL assets serving businesses with national security technology applications in southern New Mexico. The DEMVAL asset program is being developed as part of the NSPP, funded by both Department of Energy (DOE) and NNSA. This report describes the development of a comprehensive user manual system for delivering indexed DEMVAL asset information to be used in marketing and visibility materials and to NSTI clients, prospective clients, stakeholders, and any person or organization seeking it. The data about area DEMVAL asset providers are organized in an SQL database with updateable application structure that optimizes ease of access and customizes search ability for the user.

This paper describes the Building Controls Virtual Test Bed (BCVTB) that is currently under development at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. An earlier prototype linked EnergyPlus with controls hardware through embedded SPARK models and demonstrated its value in more cost-effective envelope design and improved controls sequences for the San Francisco Federal Building. The BCVTB presented here is a more modular design based on a middleware that we built using Ptolemy II, a modular software environment for design and analysis of heterogeneous systems. Ptolemy II provides a graphical model building environment, synchronizes the exchanged data and visualizes the system evolution during run-time. Our additions to Ptolemy II allow users to couple to Ptolemy II a prototype version of EnergyPlus,MATLAB/Simulink or other simulation programs for data exchange during run-time. In future work we will also implement a BACnet interface that allows coupling BACnet compliant building automation systems to Ptolemy II. We will present the architecture of the BCVTB and explain how users can add their own simulation programs to the BCVTB. We will then present an example application in which the building envelope and the HVAC system was simulated in EnergyPlus, the supervisory control logic was simulated in MATLAB/Simulink and Ptolemy II was …

Lithofacies successions from diverse depositional environments show distinctive patterns in various rock-physics planes (velocity-porosity, velocity-density and porosity-clay). Four clear examples of decameter-scale lithofacies sequences are documented in this study: (1) Micocene fluvial deposits show an inverted-V pattern indicative of dispersed fabric, (2) a fining-upward sequence of mud-rich deep deposits shows a linear trend associated with laminated sand-clay mixtures, (3) sand-rich deposits show a pattern resulting from the scarcity of mixed lithofacies, and (4) a coarsening-upward sequence shows evidence of both dispersed and horizontally laminated mixed lithofacies, with predominating dispersed mixtures generated by bioturbation. It was observed that carbonate-cemented sandstones are extremely heterogeneous in the project deep-water study area. Those from the base of incisions are usually associated with lower shaliness, lower porosity and higher P-impedance, while from the top of flooding surfaces exhibit higher shaliness, higher porosity and lower P-impedance. One rock physics model that captures the observed impedance-porosity trend is the 'stiff-sand model'. For this model, the high-porosity end-member is unconsolidated sand whose initial porosity is a function of sorting and shaliness, while the low-porosity end-member is solid mineral. These two end points are joined with a Hashin-Shtrikman equation. A systematic variation of quartz:clay ratio from proximal to distal …

Past research has shown that laser ignition provides a potential means to reduce emissions and improve engine efficiency of gas-fired engines to meet longer-term DOE ARES (Advanced Reciprocating Engine Systems) targets. Despite the potential advantages of laser ignition, the technology is not seeing practical or commercial use. A major impediment in this regard has been the 'open-path' beam delivery used in much of the past research. This mode of delivery is not considered industrially practical owing to safety factors, as well as susceptibility to vibrations, thermal effects etc. The overall goal of our project has been to develop technologies and approaches for practical laser ignition systems. To this end, we are pursuing fiber optically coupled laser ignition system and multiplexing methods for multiple cylinder engine operation. This report summarizes our progress in this regard. A partial summary of our progress includes: development of a figure of merit to guide fiber selection, identification of hollow-core fibers as a potential means of fiber delivery, demonstration of bench-top sparking through hollow-core fibers, single-cylinder engine operation with fiber delivered laser ignition, demonstration of bench-top multiplexing, dual-cylinder engine operation via multiplexed fiber delivered laser ignition, and sparking with fiber lasers. To the best of our …

Gold that is brought from artisanal and small-scale gold mining areas to gold shops for processing and sale typically contains 5-40% mercury. The uncontrolled removal of the residual mercury in gold shops by using high-temperature evaporation can be a significant source of mercury emissions in urban areas where the shops are located. Emissions from gold shop hoods during a burn can exceed 1,000 mg/m{sup 3}. Because the saturation concentration of mercury vapor at operating temperatures at the hood exhaust is less than 100 mg/m{sup 3}, the dominant component of the exhaust is in the form of aerosol or liquid particles. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with technical support from Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne), has completed a project to design and test a technology to remove the dominant aerosol component in the emissions from gold shops. The objective was to demonstrate a technology that could be manufactured at low cost and by using locally available materials and manufacturing capabilities. Six prototypes designed by Argonne were locally manufactured, installed, and tested in gold shops in Itaituba and Creporizao, Brazil. The initial prototype design incorporated a pebble bed as the media for collecting the mercury aerosols, and a mercury collection efficiency of …

The Maine Forest Bioproducts Research and Development project originally focused on the State’s interest in the development of an integrated forest products refinery (IFPR). The original intent was that Research and Development (R&D) funded by this award will allow Maine to refine its strategy and pursue development of an integrated biorefinery. Activities were to be divided into three major R&D projects: (a) Establish the potential for a forest products biorefinery in Maine, by determining the technical and economic feasibility and resource availability. (b) Investigate and develop conversion processes for forest bioproducts to utilize the sugars available from hemicellulose. Research projects will determine how to best utilize refinery waste streams to recover heat value and recycle remaining components. (c) Cost share very early stage R&D efforts to engage the private sector and stimulate innovative efforts that will build upon the research efforts in (b) above, utilize the information gleaned from (a), and lead to commercialization of new products or services and development of the forest bioproducts industrial sector in Maine.