Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is in the process of developing a new Monte Carlo Particle Transport code named MERCURY. This new code features a 3-D Combinatorial Geometry tracking algorithm. This paper details some of the characteristics of this Monte Carlo tracker

This report identifies the main recommendations of the 9/11 Commission with respect to the intelligence budget. This report also describes the intelligence budget process under current law to explain the effect of these recommendations and presents the current budget authorities of the Director of Central Intelligence, as well as budget provisions in two bills, S. 2774 and H.R. 5040, that include all Commission recommendations.

This report presents the findings from a study of experience with digital instrumentation and controls (I&C) technology in evolutionary nuclear power plants. In particular, this study evaluated regulatory approaches employed by the international nuclear power community for licensing advanced l&C systems and identified lessons learned. The report (1) gives an overview of the modern l&C technologies employed at numerous evolutionary nuclear power plants, (2) identifies performance experience derived from those applications, (3) discusses regulatory processes employed and issues that have arisen, (4) captures lessons learned from performance and regulatory experience, (5) suggests anticipated issues that may arise from international near-term deployment of reactor concepts, and (6) offers conclusions and recommendations for potential activities to support advanced reactor licensing in the United States.

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

Weekly newspaper from Alvin, 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.

The research objectives for this report are: (1) Transform poplar and other tree species to extend and optimize chlorinated hydrocarbon (CHC) oxidative activities. (2) Determine the mechanisms of CHC oxidation in plants. (3) Isolate the genes responsible for CHC oxidation in plants. We have made significant progress toward an understanding of the biochemical mechanism of CHC transformation native to wild-type poplar. We have identified chloral, trichloroethanol, trichloroacetic acid, and dichloroacetic acid as products of TCE metabolism in poplar plants and in tissue cultures of poplar cells.(Newman et al. 1997; Newman et al. 1999) Use of radioactively labeled TCE showed that once taken up and transformed, most of the TCE was incorporated into plant tissue as a non-volatile, unextractable residue.(Shang et al. 2001; Shang and Gordon 2002) An assay for this transformation was developed and validated using TCE transformation by poplar suspension cells. Using this assay, it was shown that two different activities contribute to the fixation of TCE by poplar cells: one associated with cell walls and insoluble residues, the other associated with a high molecular weight, heat labile fraction of the cell extract, a fixation that was apparently catalyzed by plant enzymes.

The change in the electronic structure of germanium nanocrystals is investigated as their concentration is increased from non-interacting, individual particles to assembled arrays of particles. The electronic structure of the individual nanoclusters shows clear effects due to quantum confinement which are lost in the concentrated assemblies of bare particles. When the surface of the individual particles is passivated, they retain their quantum confinement properties also upon assembly. These effects are interpreted in terms of a particle - particle interaction model.

This work has led to the initial development of a very promising material that has the potential to greatly simplify hydrocarbon reforming for the production of hydrogen and to improve the overall efficiency and economics of the process. This material, which was derived from an advanced calcium-based sorbent, was composed of core-in-shell pellets such that each pellet consisted of a CaO core and an alumina-based shell. By incorporating a nickel catalyst in the shell, a combined catalyst and sorbent was prepared to facilitate the reaction of hydrocarbons with steam. It was shown that this material not only catalyzes the reactions of methane and propane with steam, it also absorbs CO{sub 2} simultaneously, and thereby separates the principal reaction products, H{sub 2} and CO{sub 2}. Furthermore, the absorption of CO{sub 2} permits the water gas shift reaction to proceed much further towards completion at temperatures where otherwise it would be limited severely by thermodynamic equilibrium. Therefore, an additional water gas shift reaction step would not be required to achieve low concentrations of CO. In a laboratory test of methane reforming at 600 C and 1 atm it was possible to produce a gaseous product containing 96 mole% H{sub 2} (dry basis) …

The University of North Dakota (UND) Chemical Engineering Department in conjunction with the UND Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) have initiated a program to thoroughly examine the combined chemical (reaction and phase change) and physical (erosion) effects experienced by a variety of refractory materials during both normal operation and thermal cycling under slagging coal gasification conditions. The goal of this work is to devise a mechanism of refractory loss under these conditions. The controlled-atmospheric dynamic corrodent application furnace (CADCAF) is being utilized to simulate refractory/slag interactions under dynamic conditions that more realistically simulate the environment in a slagging coal gasifier than any of the static tests used previously by refractory manufacturers and researchers. Shakedown testing of the CADCAF has been completed. Samples of slag and refractory from the Tampa Electric Polk Power Station have been obtained for testing in the CADCAF. The slag has been dried and sieved to the size needed for our flowing slag corrosion tests. Screening tests are in currently in progress. Detailed analysis of corrosion rates from the first tests is in progress.

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

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A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In February 2003 reports, GAO identified actions needed to better prepare critical financial market participants for wide-scale disasters, such as terrorist attacks. To determine progress made since then, GAO assessed (1) actions that critical securities market organizations took to improve their ability to prevent and recover from disruptions, (2) actions that financial market and telecommunications industry participants took to improve telecommunications resiliency, (3) financial regulators' efforts to ensure the resiliency of the financial markets; and (4) SEC's efforts to improve its program for overseeing operations risks at certain market participants."

H.R. 1417, 108th Congress, first session, was introduced on March 25, 2003 and passed by the House on March 3, 2004. If enacted, this bill would make extensive changed to the procedural framework for adjudicating royalty rates for compulsory licenses under the Copyright Act. This report details the background and legislative action on the Copyright Royalty and Distribution Reform Act of 2004.

The Administration's FY2005 request for international HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria programs totals about $2.8 billion, as compared with $2.4 billion appropriated for FY2004. The FY2005 request includes a large increase for the bilateral Global AIDS Initiative, headquartered at the Department of State, while the request for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is $200 million, compared with $546.7 million appropriated in FY2004.

The coupling of statistical cloud schemes with mass-flux convection schemes is addressed. Source terms representing the impact of convection are derived within the framework of prognostic equations for the width and asymmetry of the probability distribution function of total water mixing ratio. The accuracy of these source terms is quantified by examining output from a cloud resolving model simulation of deep convection. Practical suggestions for inclusion of these source terms in large-scale models are offered.

Scientific data analysis often requires mining large databases or data warehouses to find features in space. One important task is to find regions of interest such as stellar objects in astrophysics or flame fronts in combustion studies. Typically, this task is performed in two steps. The first step (searching) identifies records satisfying certain conditions specified by the user and outputs a set of cells. The second step (region-growing) groups these cells into connected regions. Most common approaches essentially perform a brute-force scan for these arching step. A number of indexing schemes have been proposed to speed up the searching step. Because they usually also slow down the region-growing step, these schemes have not reduced the overall time. In this article, we propose an approach based on compressed bitmap indices. Our approach speeds up not only the searching step, but also the region-growing step. In the literature, the time complexity of the region-growing step is demonstrated to be linear in the number of records in the dataset. In our tests, we show that the response time of our region-growing algorithm is linear in the number of records close to the surface of the regions of interest which is a small subset …

The third annual report of ''Improving CO{sub 2} Efficiency for Recovery Oil in Heterogeneous Reservoirs'' presents results of laboratory studies with related analytical models for improved oil recovery. All studies were designed to optimize utilization and extend the practice of CO{sub 2} flooding to a wider range of reservoirs. Chapter 1 describes the behavior at low concentrations of the surfactant Chaser International CD1045{trademark} (CD) versus different salinity, pressure and temperature. Results of studies on the effects of pH and polymer (hydrolyzed polyacrylamide?HPAM) and CO{sub 2} foam stability after adsorption in the core are also reported. Calcium lignosulfonate (CLS) transport mechanisms through sandstone, description of the adsorption of CD and CD/CLS onto three porous media (sandstone, limestone and dolomite) and five minerals, and the effect of adsorption on foam stability are also reported. In Chapter 2, the adsorption kinetics of CLS in porous Berea sandstone and non-porous minerals are compared by monitoring adsorption density change with time. Results show that adsorption requires a much longer time for the porous versus non-porous medium. CLS adsorption onto sandstone can be divided into three regions: adsorption controlled by dispersion, adsorption controlled by diffusion and adsorption equilibrium. NaI tracer used to characterize the sandstone had …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Congress has long stressed the importance of proper treatment of taxpayers by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This emphasis was a major impetus for the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, which included numerous additional protections for taxpayers. Among these was Section 1203, which defines 10 acts or omissions for which an IRS employee is to be fired. Most, but not all, of the acts or omissions involve mistreatment of taxpayers, such as by falsifying information or by harassing them. At the same time, Congress has been concerned about IRS's ability to administer the tax laws, including whether the Section 1203 provisions could hamper IRS's enforcement efforts by having a "chilling effect" on IRS employees' willingness to take appropriate enforcement actions against noncompliant taxpayers. Related concerns are whether the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) process for reviewing allegations made against employees is too time consuming and inconsistent, and whether all the Section 1203 provisions should be retained. In February 2003, we recommended that IRS evaluate the effectiveness of changes it made to speed up and otherwise improve the review of Section 1203 …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Preferred provider organizations (PPO) are more prevalent than other types of health plans in the private market, but, in 2003, only six PPOs contracted to serve Medicare beneficiaries in Medicare+Choice (M+C), Medicare's private health plan option. In recent years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that administers Medicare, initiated two demonstrations that include a total of 34 PPOs. GAO (1) described how CMS used its statutory authority to conduct the two demonstrations, (2) assessed the extent to which demonstration PPOs expanded access to Medicare health plans and attracted enrollees in 2003, (3) compared CMS's estimates of out-of-pocket costs beneficiaries incurred in demonstration PPOs with those of other types of coverage, including fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare, M+C plans, and Medigap policies in 2003, and (4) determined the effects of demonstration PPOs on Medicare spending."

The controlled integration of organic and inorganic components confers natural bone with superior mechanical properties. Bone biogenesis is thought to occur by templated mineralization of hard apatite crystals by an elastic protein scaffold, a process we sought to emulate with synthetic biomimetic hydrogel polymers. Crosslinked polymethacrylamide and polymethacrylate hydrogels were functionalized with mineral-binding ligands and used to template the formation of hydroxyapatite. Strong adhesion between the organic and inorganic materials was achieved for hydrogels functionalized with either carboxylate or hydroxy ligands. The mineral-nucleating potential of hydroxyl groups identified here broadens the design parameters for synthetic bone-like composites and suggests a potential role for hydroxylated collagen proteins in bone mineralization.

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This report details various issues regarding national park management and recreation. Issues include maintenance backlog, aircraft overflights, and the National Trails System

Nuclear-coupled flow/power oscillations in boiling water reactors (BWRs) are investigated experimentally and analytically. A detailed literature survey is performed to identify and classify instabilities in two-phase flow systems. The classification and the identification of the leading physical mechanisms of the two-phase flow instabilities are important to propose appropriate analytical models and scaling criteria for simulation. For the purpose of scaling and the analysis of the nonlinear aspects of the coupled flow/power oscillations, an extensive analytical modeling strategy is developed and used to derive both frequency and time domain analysis tools.