Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO has long held the position that financial regulators can benefit from improved information sharing. As regulators are faced with the challenges of overseeing a myriad of financial products, along with the individuals and organizations that develop and sell them, information sharing among regulators serves as a key defense against fraud and market abuses. However, our system of financial regulation is fragmented and, in many cases, isolated among numerous federal and state financial regulators overseeing the securities, insurance, and banking industries. While there has been a greater effort to improve communication in recent years, the routine sharing of information between the regulators of the three major financial industries--securities, insurance, and banking--continues to be a source of concern. At Congress' request, we have issued reports and testimonies in recent years discussing the benefits of improved sharing of criminal and regulatory information and the consequences of failing to adequately share such information. This report focuses on three areas where greater attention is needed to improve information-sharing capabilities among financial services regulators. First, we highlight the need for insurance regulators to have more consistent access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Approximately 6,600 miles of Alaska's coastline and many of the low-lying areas along the state's rivers are subject to severe flooding and erosion. Most of Alaska's Native villages are located on the coast or on riverbanks. In addition to the many federal and Alaska state agencies that respond to flooding and erosion, Congress established the Denali Commission in 1998 to, among other things, provide economic development services and meet infrastructure needs in rural Alaska communities. This testimony is based on GAO's report, Alaska Native Villages: Most Are Affected by Flooding and Erosion, but Few Qualify for Federal Assistance (GAO-04-142, December 12, 2003). Specifically, GAO identified (1) the number of Alaska Native villages affected by flooding and erosion, (2) the extent to which federal assistance has been provided to those villages, (3) the efforts of nine villages to respond to flooding and erosion, and (4) alternatives that Congress may wish to consider when providing assistance for flooding and erosion."

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 local election officials had the discretion to accept or reject signatures on local option election petitions filed prior to the effective date of the 2003 amendments to the Alcoholic Beverage Code when the signatures were withdrawn by affidavit, or when the signatures appeared on the back side of a petition signature sheet from which certain statutory elements were absent (RQ-0159-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 under article XVI, section 65 of the Texas Constitution a justice of the peace announced his candidacy for another office on December 31 by informing a newspaper reporter that he would be a candidate for another office (RQ-0162-GA)

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 the entire procurement cost of a weapon of military equipment.

Strontium isotope compositions (87Sr/86Sr) measured in groundwater samples from 273 wells in the Pasco Basin unconfined aquifer below the Hanford Site show large and systematic variations that provide constraints on groundwater recharge, weathering rates of the aquifer host rocks, communication between unconfined and deeper confined aquifers, and vadose zone-groundwater interaction. The impact of millions of cubic meters of wastewater discharged to the vadose zone (103-105 times higher than ambient drainage) shows up strikingly on maps of groundwater 87Sr/86Sr. Extensive access through the many groundwater monitoring wells at the site allows for an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate the strontium geochemistry of a major aquifer, hosted primarily in unconsolidated sediments, and relate it to both long term properties and recent disturbances. Groundwater 87Sr/86Sr increases systematically from 0.707 to 0.712 from west to east across the Hanford Site, in the general direction of groundwater flow, as a result of addition of Sr from the weathering of aquifer sediments and from diffuse drainage through the vadose zone. The lower 87Sr/86Sr groundwater reflects recharge waters that have acquired Sr from Columbia River Basalts. Based on a steady-state model of Sr reactive transport and drainage, there is an average natural drainage flux of 0-1.4 mm/yr near …

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

OAK-B135 This paper is submitted in fulfillment of DOE Grant No. DE-FG03-015F22369 on the experience of western states/provinces with demand response (DR) in the electricity sector. Demand-side resources are often overlooked as a viable option for meeting load growth and addressing the challenges posed by the region's aging transmission system. Western states should work together with utilities and grid operators to facilitate the further deployment of DR programs which can provide benefits in the form of decreased grid congestion, improved system reliability, market efficiency, price stabilization, hedging against volatile fuel prices and reduced environmental impacts of energy production. This report describes the various types of DR programs; provides a survey of DR programs currently in place in the West; considers the benefits, drawbacks and barriers to DR; and presents lessons learned and recommendations for states/provinces.

As was reported in our previous work, accurate, nondisturbing near-anode measurements of the plasma density, electron temperature, and plasma potential performed with biased and emissive probes allowed the first experimental identification of both electron-repelling (negative anode fall) and electron-attracting (positive anode fall) anode sheaths in Hall thrusters. An interesting new phenomenon revealed by the probe measurements is that the anode fall changes from positive to negative upon removal of the dielectric coating, which appears on the anode surface during the course of Hall thruster operation. As reported in the present work, energy dispersion spectroscopy analysis of the chemical composition of the anode dielectric coating indicates that the coating layer consists essentially of an oxide of the anode material (stainless steel). However, it is still unclear how oxygen gets into the thruster channel. Most importantly, possible mechanisms of anode fall formation in a Hall thruster with a clean and a coated anodes are analyzed in this work; practical implication of understanding the general structure of the electron-attracting anode sheath in the case of a coated anode is also discussed.

The River Protection Project-Waste Treatment Plant (RPP-WTP) requested Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) to conduct small-scale foaming and antifoam testing using actual Hanford waste and simulants subjected to air sparging. The foaminess of Hanford tank waste solutions was previously demonstrated in SRNL during WTP evaporator foaming and ultrafiltration studies and commercial antifoam DOW Q2-3183A was recommended to mitigate the foam in the evaporators. Currently, WTP is planning to use air spargers in the HLW Lag Storage Vessels, HLW Concentrate Receipt Vessel, and the Ultrafiltration Vessels to assist the performance of the Jet Pulse Mixers (JPM). Sparging of air into WTP tanks will induce a foam layer within the process vessels. The air dispersion in the waste slurries and generated foams could present problems during plant operation. Foam in the tanks could also adversely impact hydrogen removal and mitigation. Antifoam (DOW Q2-3183A) will be used to control foaming in Hanford sparged waste processing tanks. These tanks will be mixed by a combination of pulse-jet mixers and air spargers. The percent allowable foaminess or freeboard in WTP tanks are shown in tables.

CIRCE (Coherent InfraRed CEnter) is a proposal for a new electron storage ring to be built at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The ring design is optimized for the generation of coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) in the terahertz frequency range. Among others, CIRCE operation includes three interesting CSR modes: ultra stable, femtosecond laser slicing and broadband bursting. CSR allows CIRCE to generate an extremely high flux in the terahertz frequency region. The many orders of magnitude increase in the intensity over that presently achievable by conventional sources, has the potential to enable new science experiments. The characteristics of CIRCE and of the different modes of operation are described in this paper.

BL 7.2 is a new beamline at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) dedicated to electron beam diagnostics. The system, which is basically a hard x-ray pinhole camera, was installed in the storage ring in August 2003 and commissioning with the ALS electron beam followed immediately after. In this paper the commissioning results are presented together with the description of the relevant measurements performed for the beamline characterization.

We present recent developments in design concepts for LUX - a source of ultra-short synchrotron radiation pulses based on a recirculating superconducting linac. The source produces high-flux x-ray pulses with duration of 100 fs or less at a 10 kHz repetition rate, optimized for the study of ultra-fast dynamics across many fields of science [1]. Cascaded harmonic generation in free-electron lasers (FEL's) produces coherent radiation in the VUV-soft x-ray regime, and a specialized technique is used to compress spontaneous emission for ultra-short-pulse photon production in the 1-10 keV range. High-brightness electron bunches of 2-3 mm-mrad emittance at 1 nC charge in 30 ps duration are produced in an rf photocathode gun and compressed to 3 ps duration following an injector linac, and recirculated three times through a 1 GeV main linac. In each return path, independently tunable harmonic cascades are inserted to produce seeded FEL radiation in selected photon energy ranges from approximately 20 eV with a single stage of harmonic generation, to 1 keV with a four-stage cascade. The lattice is designed to minimize emittance growth from effects such as coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR), and resistive wall wakefields. Timing jitter between pump lasers and x-ray pulses is minimized by …

In support of Low-Curie Salt (LCS) process validation at the Savannah River Site (SRS), Liquid Waste Disposition (LWD) has undertaken a program of tank characterization, including salt sampling. As part of this initiative, they sampled the surface and subsurface of Tank 10H saltcake using a series of three 12-inch long sample tubes. These tubes each contain 1-foot long segments of the saltcake from one location, representing the top three feet of saltcake. The primary objective of the characterization that will be useful to the selection and processing of the next waste tanks. Most important is the determination of the Cs-137 concentration and liquid retention properties of Tank 10H saltcake to confirm acceptability of processing. Additional chemical analyses are performed to provide information on salt elemental, ionic, and radiological composition to aid in assessment of the suitability of processing drained and dissolved material and in refining the information in the waste characterization system (WCS).

CIRCE (Coherent InfraRed Center) at the Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), is a proposal for a new electron storage ring optimized for the generation of coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) in the terahertz frequency range. One of the main requirement for this special mode of operation is the capability of the ring of operating at small momentum compaction values. In this regime, the longitudinal dynamics becomes strongly nonlinear and an accurate control of the higher order energy dependent terms of the momentum compaction is necessary. The lattice for CIRCE allows controlling the seterms up to the third order. The paper describes the lattice and presents the calculated performances in terms of momentum acceptance, dynamic aperture , lifetime and momentum compaction tune capabilities.

The Savannah River Site (SRS) is currently in the process of Deactivation and Decommissioning (D and D) several processing areas. This paper addresses the Material Control and Accountability (MC and A) activities that were developed and implemented to downgrade the material balance area (MBA) from an active Category I facility to an inactive Category IV MBA. MC and A downgrade requirements developed address topical areas that can impact final facility closure milestones. Final operational activities to process the remaining nuclear material in the facility needed to be coordinated with MC and A closure activities to minimize the amount of time and cost associated with the closure of the facility. MC and A activities that needed to be addressed included; the decommissioning of process areas, transfer of accountable nuclear material to other facilities, the material hold-up measurements required once process areas were shut down, the access requirements to nuclear material during the final processing and simultaneous closure of processing areas, the usage of enhanced material surveillance requirements to improve the utilization of Operations personnel, the updating and record retention for accountability records, the transition to a lower category MBA for final deactivation activities which included phasing out security force personnel, and …

Continuing advancements in software and hardware technology are providing facilities the opportunity for improvements in the areas of safety, regulatory compliance, administrative control, data collection, and reporting. Implementing these changes to improve plant operating efficiency can also create many challenges which include but are not limited to: justifying cost, planning for scalability, implementing applications across varied platforms, integrating multitudes of proprietary vendor applications, and creating a common vision for diverse process improvement projects. The Defense Programs (DP) facility at the Savannah River Site meets these challenges on a daily basis. Like many other plants, DP, has room for improvement when it comes to effective and clear communication, data entry, data storage, and system integration. Specific examples of areas targeted for improvement include: shift turnover meetings using system status data one to two hours old, lockouts and alarm inhibits performed on points on the Distributed Control System (DCS) and tracked in a paper logbook, disconnected systems preventing preemptive correction of regulatory compliance issues, and countless examples of additional task and data duplication on independent systems. Investment of time, money, and careful planning addressing these issues are already providing returns in the form of increased efficiency, improved plant tracking and reduced cost …

This report provides the final results of analyses of the saltcake core sample and a separate supernate sample from Tank 29H. The supernate sample was markedly different from the drained interstitial liquid. The Tank 29H supernate had a reduction in 238Pu upon filtering through a 0.45-micron filter. Approximately 25 per cent of the U is in suspension in the supernate and can be removed by filtration. As expected, the radionuclides Cs-137 and Tc-99 are entirely soluble and the actinides are largely insoluble, in the interstitial liquid, within experimental error. It is not known how representative this saltcake sample is for the entire tank. There is considerably more liquid present in this sample than in most other tank samples examined thus far. The history of the tank indicates that some of the saltcake in the top layer likely dissolved by the addition of low ionic strength solutions over the past few years. Also, the sample was collected at the bottom of a 7-foot well that was mined into the saltcake with water. These water additions could have dissolved the sodium nitrate in the top layer, and left behind a layer containing the remaining salts, including those of aluminum, although it is …

The aim of the proposed research is to use electroactive ion exchange materials to remove anionic contaminants from HLW wastes and process streams. An ion exchange process using electroactive materials sorbs contaminants selectively and then expels (elutes) them electrochemically by changing the charge balance through redox reactions in the sorbent as opposed to requiring the addition of a chemical eluent. Such processes can theoretically remove anions (e.g., pertechnetate, chromate, and perchorate) and concentrate them in a separate product stream while adding no process chemicals. A practical implementation in HLW process facilities would be a breakthrough in the ability of DOE to economically minimize waste and prevent pollution throughout the complex. To enable this, our work focuses on manipulating specific properties of redox polymers to control the hydrophobicity and ion-pair properties pertinent to the reversibility, selectivity, stability, intercalation/de-intercalation rates, and capacity of the polymers.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has selected Uranium Disposition Services, LLC (UDS) to proceed with disposition of the inventory of depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF{sub 6}) for which DOE has management responsibility. To accomplish this task, UDS will construct and operate facilities at two DOE-owned sites, one near Paducah, Kentucky, and another near Portsmouth, Ohio, to convert DUF{sub 6} to uranium oxide (principally U{sub 3}O{sub 8}). The off-gas treatment system for the conversion process will produce aqueous hydrogen fluoride (AqHF), also known as hydrofluoric acid, and a relatively small amount of calcium fluoride (CaF{sub 2}), each containing some residual radioactive material. As part of its contractual charge, UDS must identify and implement a disposition for all three products generated by the DUF{sub 6} conversion facilities: uranium oxide, AqHF, and CaF{sub 2}. The UDS DUF{sub 6} Conversion Product Management Plan (DUF{sub 6}-UDS-PLN-004, September 2003) concludes that a viable commercial market exists for AqHF, which, if not sold, would have to be neutralized, producing a relatively large quantity of additional CaF{sub 2}. Although CaF{sub 2} has very limited market potential, there is some possibility that it also could be sold. If these potential markets could be developed, DOE would save the costs …

One of the throughput limitations for the Actinide Removal Process (ARP) and Salt Waste Processing Facility is the lengthy sorption time of plutonium on monosodium titanate(MST). Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) personnel proposed use of the In-Situ-Mixed Iron Oxide (IS-MIO) process, which removes strontium and actinides from waste streams with faster reaction kinetics than the MST process. The Savannah River National Laboratory and ANL received funding to develop the IS-MIO process for deployment at the Savannah River Site. Personnel performed simulant filtration tests to evaluate the process. They prepared 100 L of simulated SRS high level waste, added IS-MIO solutions to the simulated waste, mixed the solutions for four hours, and filtered the slurry in a bench-scale crossflow filter. The simulant was designed to maximize strontium solubility; it was not designed to match a particular tank composition. The crossflow filter was 3/8 inch internal diameter, 2 feet long, and possessing a 0.196 ft2 internal surface area. Researchers also performed a series of decontamination tests using actual waste. They prepared a multi-tank composite adjusted it to 5.6 M sodium, and allowed it to equilibrate. They used this material in six tests. Four of the tests used IS-MIO solutions, one of the tests …

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

This report is written in response to commonly asked questions about military funeral honors. It provides information on the eligibility criteria, required components of the honor detail, and the funeral ceremony. It also cites legislation that mandates that the Department of Defense (DOD) make military funeral honors available to every eligible veteran upon request.

This report contains the federal pension and retirement benefits of the former presidents.