Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Energy is required to establish a technology infrastructure pilot program to improve technology partnership activities. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), in April 2002, reported that it was unable to implement the technology infrastructure pilot program in fiscal year 2001, because of other programming priorities. NNSA also said that it did not have any immediate plans to implement the pilot program in fiscal year 2002. Although it has not funded the pilot program, NNSA stated that it supports technology partnerships with private entities that fulfill mission requirements and agreed that the "cluster" type of infrastructure that the pilot program would promote is important for its facilities because community and economic development are enhanced."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Nearly 450,000 elderly and other households depend on federal assistance to live in multifamily rural rental properties that were constructed with subsidized federal loans. Because the properties were built in areas when and where privately financed housing units, affordable by lower income households, were not considered economically feasible, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Housing Service (RHS) has made direct loans available to developers of affordable multifamily housing under its section 515 program. RHS has funded many more new properties than the portfolio has lost through prepayment. The number of new properties added to the portfolio exceeded the number that left the program after prepayment in every year except 2001. If the statutory requirement restricting prepayment for loans made before December 1989, were changed to allow prepayment without restrictions after 20 years from the date of the loan, prepayment could be an option for the owners of 3,900 of all section 515 properties over the next eight years. RHS field staff routinely inspect properties, complete and retain detailed descriptions of noted deficiencies, and transmit the summaries of the deficiencies identified to a central database. Only current …

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This letter answers several questions that arose from a recent GAO testimony (GAO-02-528T) on human capital management. GAO discusses (1) early retirement and early separation incentives, (2) expanded management flexibilities, (3) federal financial management, (4) hiring processes, (5) what federal managers must do to motivate and empower their employees, and (6) what the federal government must do to be competitive as an employer of choice."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Improperly defined intellectual property rights in a government contract can result in the loss of an entity's critical assets or limit the development of applications critical to public health or safety. Conversely, successful contracts can spur economic development, innovation, and growth, and dramatically improve the quality of delivered goods and services. Contracting for intellectual property rights is difficult. The stakes are high, and negotiating positions are frequently ill-defined. Moreover, the concerns raised must be tempered with the understanding that government contracting can be challenging even without the complexities of intellectual property rights. Further, contractors often have reasons for not wanting to contract with the government, including concerns over profitability, capacity, accounting and administrative requirements, and opportunity costs. Within the commercial sector, companies identified a number of specific intellectual property concerns that affected their willingness to contract with the government. These included perceived poor definitions of what technical data is needed by the government, issues with the government's ability to protect proprietary data adequately, and unwillingness on the part of government officials to exercise the flexibilities available concerning intellectual property rights. Some of these concerns were on perception rather …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Under welfare reform, American Indian tribes have the option to run Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs either alone or as part of a consortium of other tribes rather than receiving benefits and services from state TANF programs. Because of the difficult economic circumstances on many reservations, the law also gives tribal TANF programs more flexibility to design their programs than it gives to states. Tribes have used various strategies to stimulate economic development; however, unemployment and poverty rates remain high on reservations, and prospects for economic growth are limited. Nationally, the number of American Indian families receiving TANF assistance has declined significantly in recent years. On some reservations, however, caseloads have remained the same or increased. American Indians represent an increasing proportion of the total TANF caseload in some states. To date, 172 tribes, either alone or as part of a consortium, have used the act's flexibility to design and administer their own TANF programs. Tribes face challenges in implementing tribal TANF programs, including a lack of (1) reliable data on the number of American Indian TANF recipients; (2) infrastructure support, such as information systems; and …

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Semi-weekly newspaper from Clifton, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Concrete and asbestos-containing materials were widely used in DOE building construction in the 1940s and 1950s. Over the years, many of these porous materials have been contaminated with radioactive sources, on and below the surface. To improve current practice in identifying hazardous materials and in characterizing radioactive contamination, an interdisciplinary team from Rensselaer has conducted research in two aspects: (1) to develop terahertz time-domain spectroscopy and imaging system that can be used to analyze environmental samples such as asbestos in the field, and (2) to develop algorithms for characterizing the radioactive contamination depth profiles in real-time in the field using gamma spectroscopy. The basic research focused on the following: (1) mechanism of generating of broadband pulsed radiation in terahertz region, (2) optimal free-space electro-optic sampling for asbestos, (3) absorption and transmission mechanisms of asbestos in THz region, (4) the role of asbestos sample conditions on the temporal and spectral distributions, (5) real-time identification and mapping of asbestos using THz imaging, (7) Monte Carlo modeling of distributed contamination from diffusion of radioactive materials into porous concrete and asbestos materials, (8) development of unfolding algorithms for gamma spectroscopy, and (9) portable and integrated spectroscopy systems for field testing in DOE. Final results …

The objective of this work was to characterize the physical properties (rheology and calorimetry) of actual tank wastes at various stages of the River Protection Project treatment process.

Savannah River Site has received approval from SCDHEC for disposal of radioactively contaminated equipment with lead shielding or counterweights. The objective of this analysis was to document the technical basis for the administrative limit of 100,000 pounds approved by SCDHEC under alternative disposal strategies.

The use of long shaft vertical pumps is common practice in the nuclear waste processing industry. Unfortunately, when such pumps employ plain cylindrical journal bearings, they tend to suffer from rotordynamic instability problems due to the inherent lightly-loaded condition that the vertical orientation places on the bearings. This paper describes a case study in which the authors utilized rotordynamic analysis and experimental vibration analysis to diagnose such a problem and designed replacement tilting-pad bearings to solve the problem.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

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

Funeral program for Earl "Rock" Glosson, born June 7, 1927 and died May 6, 2002. The funeral was held May 10, 2002 at F. E. Lewis Memorial Chapel, officiated by Rev. Lowell Johnson. The funeral arrangements were made through Lewis Funeral Home and he was buried in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery near San Antonio, Texas.

Funeral program for Mr. Lemuel Turbin, born October 16, 1932. The funeral was held May 10, 2002 at Hardy's Mortuary Chapel, officiated by Deacon Tom White. Funeral arrangements were made through Hardy's Mortuary, and he was buried in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery near San Antonio, Texas.

This report analyzes congressional and court precedents regarding bills under Article I, Section 7, clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution (known as the Origination Clause). It also describes the various ways in which the Origination Clause has been enforced and looks at the application of the Clause to other types of legislation.

The Government Printing Office (GPO) is designated the principal agent for almost all federal government printing. This report reviews recent legal, management, policy, and technological challenges to the GPO printing system and public printing reform efforts of the 105th, 106th, and current Congresses, and tracks current efforts to address existing problems in this area.

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Languages in use for high performance computing at the laboratory--Fortran (f77 and f90), C, and C++--have many years of development behind them and are generally considered the fastest available. However, Fortran and C do not readily extend to object-oriented programming models, limiting their capability for very complex simulation software. C++ facilitates object-oriented programming but is a very complex and error-prone language. Java offers a number of capabilities that these other languages do not. For instance it implements cleaner (i.e., easier to use and less prone to errors) object-oriented models than C++. It also offers networking and security as part of the language standard, and cross-platform executables that make it architecture neutral, to name a few. These features have made Java very popular for industrial computing applications. The aim of this paper is to explain the trade-offs in using Java for large-scale scientific applications at LLNL. Despite its advantages, the computational science community has been reluctant to write large-scale computationally intensive applications in Java due to concerns over its poor performance. However, considerable progress has been made over the last several years. The Java Grande Forum [1] has been promoting the use of Java for large-scale computing. Members have introduced efficient …

The US Heavy Ion Fusion Virtual National Laboratory is continuing research into ion sources and injectors that simultaneously provide high current (0.5-1.0 Amps) and high brightness (normalized emittance better than 1.0 {pi}-mm-mr). The central issue of focus is whether to carry on the traditional approach of large surface ionization sources or to adopt a multi-aperture approach that transports many smaller ''beamlets'' separately at low energies before allowing them to merge. For the large surface source, the recent commissioning of the 2-MeV injector for the High Current experiment has increased our understanding of the beam quality limitations for these sources. We have also improved our techniques for fabricating large diameter aluminosilicate sources to improve lifetime and emission uniformity. For the multi-aperture approach we are continuing to study the feasibility of small surface sources and a RF induced plasma source in preparation for beamlet merging experiments, while continuing to run computer simulations for better understanding of this alternate concept. Experiments into both architectures will be performed on a newly commissioned ion source test stand at LLNL called the STS-500. This stand test provides a platform for testing a variety of ion sources and accelerating structures with 500 kV, 17-microsecond pulses. Recent progress …

A scalable fiber laser approach is described based on phase-locking multiple gain cores in an antiguided structure. The waveguide is comprised of periodic sequences of gain- and no-gain-loaded segments having uniform index, within the cladding region. Initial experimental results are presented.

The Programmable Fluidic Processor (PFP), a device conceived of by researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center, is a reconfigurable and programmable bio-chemical analysis system designed for handheld operation in a variety of applications. Unlike most microfluidic systems which utilize channels to control fluids, the PFP device is a droplet-based system. The device is based on dielectrophoresis; a fluid transport phenomenon that utilizes mismatched polarizability between a droplet and its medium to induce droplet mobility. In the device, sample carrying droplets are polarized by an array of electrodes, individually addressable by subsurface microelectronics. My research focused on the development of a polymer-based microfluidic injection system for injecting these droplets onto the electrode array. The first of two device generations fabricated at LLNL was designed using extensive research and modeling performed by MD Anderson and Coventor. Fabricating the first generation required several iterations and design changes in order to generate an acceptable device for testing. Difficulties in planar fabrication of the fluidic system and a narrow channel design necessitated these changes. The second generation device incorporated modifications of the previous generation and improved on deficiencies discovered during experimentation with the initial device. Extensive modeling of the injection channels and fluid storage chamber …

ARAP s integrated suite of research, development, and operational programs is focused on the creation of capabilities for predicting the consequences of atmospheric releases of hazardous materials. The foundation of ARAP lies in its science and technology base in multi-scale meteorological and dispersion modeling, field experiments, and software systems (databases, real-time data acquisition software, and remote-access tools). Scientific and technological advancements are integrated into DOENNSA s operational National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center (NARAC) at LLNL to support emergency response, pre-event planning, preparedness, and consequence analysis. Some recent ARAP development highlights are described below.