This report is about Avian Influenza, specifically about agricultural issues.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) posted a deficit of $23.5 billion as of the latest reporting period, and the deficit is expected to grow further. Major bills introduced in the 109th Congress to reform funding rules for the defined benefit pension system and to raise PBGC premiums include H.R. 2830 and S. 1783. Neither has yet passed the full House or Senate. PBGC premiums are an important source of revenue for meeting the budget reconciliation targets. The House Budget Committee has reported out H.R. 4241, a budget reconciliation package that would raise PBGC premiums. The Senate has passed S. 1932, a budget reconciliation package that also contains PBGC premium increases.

This report provides information about the Dairy Policy Issues. Several dairy issues are considered by Congress, some of which effects the three major federal dairy policy tools. Federal milk marketing orders regulate the farm price of milk for roughly two-thirds of U.S Milk production.

This report discusses the Background, Issues, and Options for Congress on Defense Procurement. The full funding policy is a federal budgeting rule imposed on DOD by Congress in the 1950s that requires entire procurement cost of a weapon of military equipment.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Advances in technology have led to rapidly increasing sales of new electronic devices. With this increase comes the dilemma of managing these products at the end of their useful lives. Some research suggests that the disposal of used electronics could cause a number of environmental problems. Research also suggests that such problems are often exacerbated by the export of used electronics to countries without protective environmental regulations. Given that millions of used electronics become obsolete each year with only a fraction of them being recycled, GAO was asked to (1) summarize information on the volumes of, and problems associated with, used electronics; (2) examine the factors affecting their recycling and reuse; and (3) examine federal efforts to encourage recycling and reuse of these products."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Because of the significance of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) collections to federal receipts and, in turn, to the consolidated financial statements of the U.S. government, which GAO is required to audit, and Congress's interest in financial management at IRS, GAO audits IRS's financial statements annually to determine whether (1) the financial statements IRS prepares are reliable and (2) IRS management maintained effective internal controls. We also test IRS's compliance with selected provisions of significant laws and regulations and its financial management systems' compliance with the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act of 1996 (FFMIA)."

Fish and marine mammals are important resources in open ocean and nearshore coastal areas. Many laws and regulations guide the management of these resources by federal agencies. This report contains information on commercial and sport fisheries, aquaculture, and marine mammals and issues related to the 109th Congress.

This report discusses federal program called head start program that has provided comprehensive early childhood development services to low-income children since 1965. The Head Start program has received increases of varying levels over the past two decades.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Complex includes many sites and laboratories that store quantities of low-level, solid nuclear waste in drums and other types of shipping containers. The drums may be stored for long periods of time prior to being transported and final dispositioning. Based on the radioactivity (e.g., Pu{sup 239} equivalent), chemical nature (e.g. volatile organic compounds) and other characteristics of the stored waste, flammable gases may evolve. Documented safety analyses (DSAs) for storage of these drums must address storage and safety management issues to protect workers, the general public, and the environment. This paper discusses an improved analytical method for determining the explosion effects flammable gas-air mixtures as well as the subsequent accident phenomenology.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "For years, Congress has wrestled with rising Medicare costs and improper payments for outpatient therapy services--physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech-language pathology. In 1997 Congress established per-person spending limits, or "therapy caps," for nonhospital outpatient therapy but, responding to concerns that some beneficiaries need extensive services, has since placed temporary moratoriums on the caps. The current moratorium is set to expire at the end of 2005. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 required GAO to report on whether available information justifies waiving the caps for particular conditions or diseases. As agreed with the committees of jurisdiction, GAO also assessed the status of the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) efforts to develop a needs-based payment policy and whether circumstances leading to the caps have changed."

In February and March 2005, the Navy testified that the Navy in future years may require a total of 260 to 325 ships and provided a report to Congress showing the notional compositions of 260- and 325-ship fleets in FY2035.

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Annual financial report for the Texas State Office of Risk Management during fiscal year 2005 including balance sheets for revenues, expenditures, and various funds, with associated notes.

The burst test is used to assess the material performance of tritium reservoirs in the surveillance program in which reservoirs have been in service for extended periods of time. A materials system model and finite element procedure were developed under a Savannah River Site Plant-Directed Research and Development (PDRD) program to predict the structural response under a full range of loading and aged material conditions of the reservoir. The results show that the predicted burst pressure and volume ductility are in good agreement with the actual burst test results for the unexposed units. The material tensile properties used in the calculations were obtained from a curved tensile specimen harvested from a companion reservoir by Electric Discharge Machining (EDM). In the absence of exposed and aged material tensile data, literature data were used for demonstrating the methodology in terms of the helium-3 concentration in the metal and the depth of penetration in the reservoir sidewall. It can be shown that the volume ductility decreases significantly with the presence of tritium and its decay product, helium-3, in the metal, as was observed in the laboratory-controlled burst tests. The model and analytical procedure provides a predictive tool for reservoir structural integrity under aging …

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Chemical Looping Combustion is a novel combustion technology for the inherent separation of the greenhouse gas, CO{sub 2}. In 1983, Richter and Knoche proposed reversible combustion, which utilized both the oxidation and reduction of metal. Metal associated with its oxidized form as an oxygen carrier was circulated between two reactors--oxidizer and reducer. In the reducer, the solid oxygen carrier reacts with the fuel to produce CO{sub 2}, H{sub 2}O and elemental metal only. Pure CO{sub 2} will be obtained in the exit gas stream from the reducer after H{sub 2}O is condensed. The pure CO{sub 2} is ready for subsequent sequestration. In the oxidizer, the elemental metal reacts with air to form metal oxide and separate oxygen from nitrogen. Only nitrogen and some unused oxygen are emitted from the oxidizer. The advantage of CLC compared to normal combustion is that CO{sub 2} is not diluted with nitrogen but obtained in a relatively pure form without any energy needed for separation. In addition to the energy-free purification of CO{sub 2}, the CLC process also provides two other benefits. First, NO{sub x} formation can be largely eliminated. Secondly, the thermal efficiency of a CLC system is very high. Presently, the CLC process …

In the plasma-wakefield experiment at SLAC, known as E157, an ultra-relativistic electron beam is used to both excite and witness a plasma wave for advanced accelerator applications. If the beam is tilted, then it will undergo transverse oscillations inside of the plasma. These oscillations can grow exponentially via an instability know as the electron hose instability. The linear theory of electron-hose instability in a uniform ion column predicts that for the parameters of the E157 experiment (beam charge, bunch length, and plasma density) a growth of the centroid offset should occur. Analysis of the E157 data has provided four critical results. The first was that the incoming beam did have a tilt. The tilt was much smaller than the radius and was measured to be 5.3 {micro}m/{delta}{sub z} at the entrance of the plasma (IP1.) The second was the beam centroid oscillates in the ion channel at half the frequency of the beam radius (betatron beam oscillations), and these oscillations can be predicted by the envelope equation. Third, up to the maximum operating plasma density of E157 ({approx}2 x 10{sup 14} cm{sup -3}), no growth of the centroid offset was measured. Finally, time-resolved data of the beam shows that up …

Science--like business, national security, and even everyday life--is becoming more and more data intensive. In some sciences the data-management challenge already exceeds the compute-power challenge in its needed resources. Leadership in applying computing to science will necessarily require both world-class computing and world-class data management. The Office of Science program needs a leadership-class capability in scientific data management. Currently two-thirds of Office of Science research and development in data management is left to the individual scientific programs. About $18M/year is spent by the programs on data-management research and development targeted at their most urgent needs. This is to be compared with the $9M/year spent on data management by DOE computer science. This highly mission-directed approach has been effective, but only in meeting just the highest-priority needs of individual programs. A coherent, leadership-class, program of data management is clearly warranted by the scale and nature of the Office of Science programs. More directly, much of the Office of Science portfolio is in desperate need of such a program; without it, data management could easily become the primary bottleneck to scientific progress within the next five years. When grouped into simulation-intensive science, experiment/observation-intensive science, and information-intensive science, the Office of Science programs …

The eighth evaluation of the RIKEN BNL Research Center (RBRC) took place on October 10-12, 2005, at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The members of the Scientific Review Committee (SRC) were Dr. Jean-Paul Blaizot, Professor Makoto Kobayashi, Dr. Akira Masaike, Professor Charles Young Prescott (Chair), Professor Stephen Sharpe (absent), and Professor Jack Sandweiss. We are grateful to Professor Akira Ukawa who was appointed to the SRC to cover Professor Sharpe's area of expertise. In addition to reviewing this year's program, the committee, augmented by Professor Kozi Nakai, evaluated the RBRC proposal for a five-year extension of the RIKEN BNL Collaboration MOU beyond 2007. Dr. Koji Kaya, Director of the Discovery Research Institute, RIKEN, Japan, presided over the session on the extension proposal. In order to illustrate the breadth and scope of the RBRC program, each member of the Center made a presentation on higher research efforts. In addition, a special session was held in connection with the RBRC QCDSP and QCDOC supercomputers. Professor Norman H. Christ, a collaborator from Columbia University, gave a presentation on the progress and status of the project, and Professor Frithjof Karsch of BNL presented the first physics results from QCDOC. Although the main purpose of this review …

This document contains the statement of work required to drill, characterize, and construct the proposed groundwater monitoring wells at 300-FF-5 Operable Unit during FY 2006.

Oxide removal from Ge(100) surfaces treated by HCl and HF solutions with different concentrations are systematically studied by synchrotron radiation photoelectron spectroscopy (SR-PES). SR-PES results show that clean surfaces without any oxide can be obtained after wet chemical cleaning followed by vacuum annealing with a residual carbon contamination of less than 0.02 monolayer. HF etching leads to a hydrogen terminated Ge surface whose hydrogen coverage is a function of the HF concentration. In contrast, HCl etching yields a chlorine terminated surface. Possible etching mechanisms are discussed. Surface roughness after HF and HCl treatments is also investigated by AFM, which shows that HF treatment leaves a rougher surface than HCl. Germanium (Ge) is increasingly being studied for MOSFET applications to take advantage of its high intrinsic electron and hole mobility. To fabricate high performance devices on Ge, it is essential to understand Ge surface chemistry and find an effective way to clean and passivate its surface. Although Si surface cleaning and passivation have been extensively studied, only recently has some research been done on Ge surfaces. Conventional XPS results show that HF etching removes Ge oxide and carbon contamination significantly, and HCl etching leads to a chlorine terminated Ge(111) surface, which …