Major- and trace-element concentrations and strontium isotope ratios (strontium-87/strontium-86) in samples of ground water potentially can be useful in delineating flow paths in the complex ground-water system in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Water samples were collected from boreholes to characterize the lateral and vertical variability in the composition of water in the saturated zone. Discrete sampling of water-producing intervals in the saturated zone includes isolating borehole sections with packers and extracting pore water from core obtained by sonic drilling. Chemical and isotopic stratification was identified in the saturated zone beneath southern Fortymile Wash.

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The initial multi-mode interfacial velocity and density perturbations present at the onset of a small Atwood number, incompressible, miscible, Rayleigh-Taylor instability-driven mixing layer have been quantified using a combination of experimental techniques. The streamwise interfacial and spanwise interfacial perturbations were measured using high-resolution thermocouples and planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF), respectively. The initial multi-mode streamwise velocity perturbations at the two-fluid density interface were measured using particle-image velocimetry (PIV). It was found that the measured initial conditions describe an initially anisotropic state, in which the perturbations in the streamwise and spanwise directions are independent of one another. The evolution of various fluctuating velocity and density statistics, together with velocity and density variance spectra, were measured using PIV and high-resolution thermocouple data. The evolution of the velocity and density statistics is used to investigate the early-time evolution and the onset of strongly-nonlinear, transitional dynamics within the mixing layer. The early-time evolution of the density and vertical velocity variance spectra indicate that velocity fluctuations are the dominant mechanism driving the instability development. The implications of the present experimental measurements on the initialization of Reynolds-averaged turbulent transport and mixing models and of direct and large-eddy simulations of Rayleigh-Taylor instability-induced turbulence are discussed.

The cereus group represents sporulating soil bacteriacontaining pathogenic strains which may cause diarrheic or emetic foodpoisoning outbreaks. Multiple locus sequence typing revealed a presencein natural samples of these bacteria of about thirty clonal complexes.Application of genomic methods to this group was however biased due tothe major interest for representatives closely related to B. anthracis.Albeit the most important food-borne pathogens were not yet defined,existing dataindicate that they are scattered all over the phylogenetictree. The preliminary analysis of the sequences of three genomesdiscussed in this paper narrows down the gaps in our knowledge of thecereus group. The strain NVH391-98 is a rare but particularly severefood-borne pathogen. Sequencing revealed that the strain must be arepresentative of a novel bacterial species, for which the name Bacilluscytotoxis is proposed. This strain has a reduced genome size compared toother cereus group strains. Genome analysis revealed absence of sigma Bfactor and the presence of genes encoding diarrheic Nhe toxin, notdetected earlier. The strain B. cereus F837/76 represents a clonalcomplex close to that of B. anthracis. Including F837/76, three such B.cereus strains had been sequenced. Alignment of genomes suggests that B.anthracis is their common ancestor. Since such strains often emerge fromclinical cases, they merit a special attention. The …

The F-22A Raptor is a next-generation fighter/attack aircraft that features the latest stealth technology to reduce detection by radar. Using more advanced engines and avionics than the current F-15 Eagle, the F-22A is intended to maintain U.S. Air Force capabilities against more sophisticated enemy aircraft and air defenses in the 21st century. This report examines the Air Force’s F-22A Raptor program, including costs and schedule; considers several key issues, and concludes with a synopsis of recent legislative activity on the program.

This report briefly summarizes the mandatory subsidies available for about 25 agricultural commodities.

This report provides information about a primer on Federal Civil Rights Statutes. it also provides a brief summary of selected civil rights statutes, including the civil rights acts, the equal pay act, etc.

This report is an overview of the major training activities and facilities of the federal departments and agencies that provide counter-terrorism training. It identifies some of the issues associated with the training, including the possible duplication of federal counter-terrorism training programs; determination of Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism training priorities; and possible redundancy and coordination of DHS counter-terrorism training programs.

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With the Nation's coal-burning utilities facing the possibility of tighter controls on mercury pollutants, the U.S. Department of Energy is funding projects that could offer power plant operators better ways to reduce these emissions at much lower costs. Sorbent injection technology represents one of the simplest and most mature approaches to controlling mercury emissions from coal-fired boilers. It involves injecting a solid material such as powdered activated carbon into the flue gas. The gas-phase mercury in the flue gas contacts the sorbent and attaches to its surface. The sorbent with the mercury attached is then collected by the existing particle control device along with the other solid material, primarily fly ash. During 2001, ADA Environmental Solutions (ADA-ES) conducted a full-scale demonstration of sorbent-based mercury control technology at the Alabama Power E.C. Gaston Station (Wilsonville, Alabama). This unit burns a low-sulfur bituminous coal and uses a hot-side electrostatic precipitator (ESP) in combination with a Compact Hybrid Particulate Collector (COHPAC{reg_sign}) baghouse to collect fly ash. The majority of the fly ash is collected in the ESP with the residual being collected in the COHPAC{reg_sign} baghouse. Activated carbon was injected between the ESP and COHPAC{reg_sign} units to collect the mercury. Short-term mercury removal …

Construction of an E85 fueling facility at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida

This final report describes the research effort focusing on the nature of charge transfer and localized electronic structure at semiconductor interfaces, one of the most fundamental issues in the solid state. The basic charge exchange between two materials in general is directly connected with the systematic atomic bonding changes and redistribution that occurs at the nanoscale interface. Our programhas extended our understanding of the atomic-scale nature of electrostatic barrier formation, heterojunction band offsets, and the optical and electronic features of impurity confinement in a set of model materials systems, including nanometer-scale wide band gap semiconductor and insulator structures. This fundamentally new class of materials investigation utilizes a powerful and unique combination of techniques that are revealing the atomic-scale movement, chemical bonding, and resultant charge transfer across well-defined model interfaces.

The objective for the cooperative research program for which this report has been written was to provide separate NCT facility user support for the students, faculty and scientists who would be doing the U.S. Department of Energy Office (DOE) of Science supported advanced radiotargeted research at the WSU 1 megawatt TRIGA reactor. The participants were the Idaho National laboratory (INL, P.I., Dave Nigg), the Veterinary Medical Research Center of Washington State University (WSU, Janean Fidel and Patrick Gavin), and the Washington State University Nuclear Radiation Center (WSU, P.I., Gerald Tripard). A significant number of DOE supported modifications were made to the WSU reactor in order to create an epithermal neutron beam while at the same time maintaining the other activities of the 1 MW reactor. These modifications were: (1) Removal of the old thermal column. (2) Construction and insertion of a new epithermal filter, collimator and shield. (3) Construction of a shielded room that could accommodate the very high radiation field created by an intense neutron beam. (4) Removal of the previous reactor core fuel cluster arrangement. (5) Design and loading of the new reactor core fuel cluster arrangement in order to optimize the neutron flux entering the epithermal neutron …

The 2005 investigation of contaminant sources at Agra, Kansas, was conducted at the request of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE; Gotto 2004). The Environmental Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory implemented the investigation on behalf of the Commodity Credit Corporation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (CCC/USDA). The investigation was designed to (1) update the conceptual site model and (2) investigate sources of previously identified carbon tetrachloride contamination in groundwater. Six technical objectives were proposed in the ''Work Plan'' (Argonne 2005). The ''Work Plan'' was approved by the KDHE on March 28, 2005 (KDHE 2005). The six objectives were as follows: (1) Determine the current configuration of the carbon tetrachloride plume in the investigation area. (2) Delineate contamination detected in 1998-1999 at the former CCC/USDA facility. (3) Investigate the Pro-Ag Co-op property for evidence of releases of carbon tetrachloride. (4) Investigate the area adjacent to the site of the former retail store for evidence of releases of carbon tetrachloride to the subsurface. (5) Collect data to support the analysis of potential remedial alternatives. (6) Update the inventory of private wells to identify potential downgradient receptors. This report details and interprets the data collected during the 2005 investigation …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2002, GAO reported that the number of restatement announcements due to financial reporting fraud and/or accounting errors grew significantly between January 1997 and June 2002, negatively impacting the restating companies' market capitalization by billions of dollars. GAO was asked to update key aspects of its 2002 report (GAO-03-138). This report discusses (1) the number of, reasons for, and other trends in restatements; (2) the impact of restatement announcements on the restating companies' stock prices and what is known about investors' confidence in U.S. capital markets; and (3) regulatory enforcement actions involving accounting- and audit-related issues. To address these issues, GAO collected restatement announcements meeting GAO's criteria, calculated and analyzed the impact on company stock prices, obtained input from researchers, and analyzed selected regulatory enforcement actions."

This report gives an overview of the major regulatory relief provisions in H.R. 3505 and S. 2856, focusing on their potential impact on bank concentration. The report examines both bills’ provisions to assess whether they are likely to support or discourage bank consolidation. The consolidation of the banking industry arguably reduces competition, which could tend to raise the price of banking services. On the other hand, there is empirical evidence that shows economies of scale in banking, including economies in complying with banking regulations, suggesting larger banks might be able to provide banking services at lower cost than smaller banks.

Combining our results for various {Omicron}({alpha}{sub s}{sup 2}) corrections to the weak radiative B-meson decay, we are able to present the first estimate of the branching ratio at the next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD. We find {Beta}({bar B} {yields} X{sub s}{gamma}) = (3.15 {+-} 0.23) x 10{sup -4} for E{sub {gamma}} > 1.6 GeV in the {bar B}-meson rest frame. The four types of uncertainties: non-perturbative (5%), parametric (3%), higher-order (3%) and m{sub c}-interpolation ambiguity (3%) have been added in quadrature to obtain the total error.

We propose a new scheme for an approximate solution of the Schroedinger equation for a many-body interacting system, based on the use of pairs of walkers. Trial wavefunctions for these pairs are combinations of standard symmetric and antisymmetric wavefunctions. The method consists in applying a fixed-node restriction in the enlarged space, and computing the energy of the antisymmetric state from the knowledge of the exact ground state energy for the symmetric state. We made two conjectures: first, that this fixed-hypernode energy is an upper bound to the true fermion energy; second that this bound would necessarily be lower than the usual fixed-node energy using the same antisymmetric trial function. The first conjecture is true, and is proved in this paper. The second is not, and numerical and analytical counterexamples are given. The question of whether the fixed-hypernode energy can be better than the usual bound remains open.

We review recent work in which compactifications of string and M theory are constructed in which all scalar fields (moduli) are massive, and supersymmetry is broken with a small positive cosmological constant, features needed to reproduce real world physics. We explain how this work implies that there is a ''landscape'' of string/M theory vacua, perhaps containing many candidates for describing real world physics, and present the arguments for and against this idea. We discuss statistical surveys of the landscape, and the prospects for testable consequences of this picture, such as observable effects of moduli, constraints on early cosmology, and predictions for the scale of supersymmetry breaking.

Foreign capital inflows are playing an important role in the U.S. economy by bridging the gap between domestic supplies of and demand for capital. Foreign investors now hold more than 55% of the publicly-held and -traded U.S. Treasury securities. This report relies on a comprehensive set of data on capital flows, represented by purchases and sales of U.S. government securities and U.S. and foreign corporate stocks, bonds, into and out of the United States, that is reported by the Treasury Department on a monthly basis.

The gauge-invariant three-gluon vertex obtained from the pinch technique is characterized by thirteen nonzero form factors, which are given in complete generality for unbroken gauge theory at one loop. The results are given in d dimensions using both dimensional regularization and dimensional reduction, including the effects of massless gluons and arbitrary representations of massive gauge bosons, fermions, and scalars. We find interesting relations between the functional forms of the contributions from gluons, quarks, and scalars. These relations hold only for the gauge-invariant pinch technique vertex and are d-dimensional incarnations of supersymmetric nonrenormalization theorems which include finite terms. The form factors are shown to simplify for N = 1, 2, and 4 supersymmetry in various dimensions. In four-dimensional non-supersymmetric theories, eight of the form factors have the same functional form for massless gluons, quarks, and scalars, when written in a physically motivated tensor basis. For QCD, these include the tree-level tensor structure which has prefactor {beta}{sub 0} = (11N{sub c}-2N{sub f})/3, another tensor with prefactor 4N{sub c} - N{sub f}, and six tensors with N{sub c} - N{sub f}. In perturbative calculations our results lead naturally to an effective coupling for the three-gluon vertex, {tilde {alpha}}(k{sub 1}{sup 2}, k{sub 2}{sup 2}, …

The preclosure safety analysis for the monitored geologic repository at Yucca Mountain must consider the hazard that aircraft may pose to surface structures. Relevant surface structures are located beneath the restricted airspace of the Nevada Test Site (NTS) on the eastern slope of Yucca Mountain, near the North Portal of the Exploratory Studies Facility Tunnel (Figure 1). The North Portal is located several miles from the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR), which is used extensively by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) for training and test flights (Figure 1). The NTS airspace, which is controlled by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for NTS activities, is not part of the NTTR. Agreements with the DOE allow USAF aircraft specific use of the airspace above the NTS (Reference 2.1.1 [DIRS 103472], Section 3.1.1 and Appendix A, Section 2.1; and Reference 2.1.2 [DIRS 157987], Sections 1.26 through 1.29). Commercial, military, and general aviation aircraft fly within several miles to the southwest of the repository site in the Beatty Corridor, which is a broad air corridor that runs approximately parallel to U.S. Highway 95 and the Nevada-California border (Figure 2). These aircraft and other aircraft operations are identified and described in ''Identification of …

This report provides an overview of FY2004 appropriations for state and local terrorism preparedness. Preparedness may be defined as enhancing a state or local government’s capability to respond effectively to a terrorist attack, particularly one involving a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).