A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the financial statements of the Bank Insurance Fund, the Savings Association Insurance Fund, and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation Resolution Fund for the years ended December 31, 1999 and 1998. GAO also reviewed: (1) the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) management's assertions regarding the effectiveness of its internal controls as of December 31, 1999; and (2) FDIC's compliance with laws and regulations during 1999."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Navy's F/A-18E/F aircraft program, focusing on whether the operational tests: (1) validated the Department of Defense's (DOD) statements that the F/A-18E/F will provide performance capabilities that are superior to existing F/A-18 aircraft; and (2) raised issues that could impact aircraft cost or the upcoming decision on whether the Navy should award a multiyear procurement contract for full-rate production of the aircraft."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Department of Energy's (DOE) national security controls for its contractor employees' foreign travel, focusing on: (1) the types of foreign intelligence-gathering incidents that have occurred during foreign travel by contractor employees; (2) the DOE controls that apply to foreign travel by contractor employees; and (3) areas where these controls can be strengthened."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO provided information on the Financial Management Service's (FMS) computer controls in fiscal year (FY) 1999, focusing on: (1) the significant weaknesses GAO identified in its limited official use report and the recommendations that GAO had made; and (2) a follow-up on previously reported weaknesses."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed three agencies' annual performance plans to determine whether the plans met congressional requirements, focusing on: (1) which aspects of congressional information needs were met by the agency's annual performance plan or some other source; (2) where those needs were not met, and what accounted for the discrepancies or gaps in the information provided; and (3) what options agencies could use to practically and efficiently provide the desired performance information."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Air Force's and the Navy's development of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) and the recent extension of the program's development schedule, focusing on: (1) what the program's status is and what the causes of the schedule slip and cost increase were; and (2) whether the Air Force is following the most effective acquisition strategy to reduce the risk of cost growth and schedule delays."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Work places that produce, use, store, or dispose of hazardous materials are considered to be among the most dangerous in the nation. Workers at these facilities face the potential for injury, chronic illness, or death, which can be caused simply by exposure to certain materials. Several agencies play a role in protecting workplace safety and health. This report discusses coordination of efforts by federal agencies to make the work place safer. GAO found that the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Department of the Treasury's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board play distinct roles in federal efforts to protect the safety and health of workers at hazardous materials work places. However, these agencies' functions partially overlap in several areas. These overlaps cause them to place duplicate requirements on employers. Although there is a good effort on the part of the agencies, more coordination is needed to eliminate the overlaps."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Department of Justice policy encourages cooperation among law enforcement agencies at all levels. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) participated in two such task forces, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) and the Violent Gang Task Force. These task forces have come under public and legal scrutiny for possible misconduct by law enforcement officers. Several convictions were overturned because evidence was tampered with or LAPD officers physically abused suspects. Media reports fueled concerns that LAPD and INS secretly worked together to illegally deport Latino immigrants. GAO concludes that INS was neither involved in nor observed any misconduct while working on these task forces. Interviews with INS officers, the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, and immigrants rights groups did not reveal any misconduct involving INS agents. GAO did note, however, that documentation in some arrest files was missing or incomplete and that funding set aside for use in the OCDETF program was improperly used for non-OCDETF activities."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Defense's (DOD) implementation of the Defense Counterproliferation Initiative, focusing on: (1) DOD actions to make the nuclear, biological, and chemical threat a matter of routine consideration within its organization, activities, and functions; (2) other actions DOD can take to improve implementation of the Initiative; and (3) the actions of the interagency Counterproliferation Program Review Committee to coordinate the research and development programs of DOD, the Department of Energy (DOE), and the U.S. intelligence community to identify and eliminate unnecessary duplication."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO assessed the equality of the Social Security Administration's (SSA) letters to the public, focusing on the: (1) problems that make SSA's letters difficult to understand; and (2) status of SSA's actions to fix the problems."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands' (CNMI) customs administration, focusing on: (1) procedures for controlling the flow of aliens and goods into and out of the CNMI; and (2) the aliens' use of public health care and education and their involvement in criminal activities in the CNMI."

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Room temperature (RT) pulsed operation of blue nitride based multi-quantum well (MQW) laser diodes grown on c-plane sapphire substrates was achieved. Atmospheric pressure MOCVD was used to grow the active region of the device which consisted of a 10 pair In{sub 0.21}Ga{sub 0.79}N (2.5nm)/In{sub 0.07}Ga{sub 0.93}N (5nm) InGaN MQW. The threshold current density was reduced by a factor of 2 from 10 kA/cm{sup 2} for laser diodes grown on sapphire substrates to 4.8 kA/cm{sub 2} for laser diodes grown on lateral epitaxial overgrowth (LEO) GaN on sapphire. Lasing wavelengths as long as 425nm were obtained. LEDs with emission wavelengths as long as 500nm were obtained by increasing the Indium content. These results show that a reduction in nonradiative recombination from a reduced dislocation density leads to a higher internal quantum efficiency. Further research on GaN based laser diodes is needed to extend the wavelength to 490nm which is required for numerous bio-detection applications. The GaN blue lasers will be used to stimulate fluorescence in special dye molecules when the dyes are attached to specific molecules or microorganisms. Fluorescein is one commonly used dye molecule for chemical and biological warfare agent detection, and its optimal excitation wavelength is 490 nm. InGaN …

The Project provides for the design, procurement, construction, assembly, installation, and acceptance testing of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), an experimental inertial confinement fusion facility intended to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion in the laboratory by imploding a small capsule containing a mixture of the hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium. The NIF will be constructed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, California as determined by the Record of Decision made on December 19, 1996, as a part of the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (SSM PEIS). Safety: On Saturday April 29, 2000, while preparing the Ringer crane for operation at the NIF site, a mechanical malfunction was observed by the operator. He stopped work and consulted with line management. They agreed with the operator's assessment, and with the Livermore Emergency Duty Officer, implemented a precautionary evacuation of the area around the crane. DOE was notified of the situation. The crane was then placed in a safe condition. A crane maintenance vendor is inspecting the crane and a management team headed by the Beampath Infrastructure System Associate Project Manager is reviewing the documentation, crane history, and repairs to ensure that the crane is fully safe before reuse. …

The radiation-damaged polystyrene (given the identification name of 'polycube') was fabricated by mixing high-density polystyrene material ("Dylene Fines # 100") with plutonium and uranium oxides. The polycubes were used in the 1960s for criticality studies during processing of spent nuclear fuel. The polycubes have since been stored for almost 40 years at the Hanford Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) after failure of two processes to reclaim the plutonium and uranium oxides from the polystyrene matrix. Thermal decomposition products from this highly cross-linked polystyrene matrix were characterized using Gas Chromatograph/Mass Spectroscopy (GC/MS) system coupled to a horizontal furnace. The decomposition studies were performed in air and helium atmospheres at about 773 K. The volatile and semi-volatile organic products for the radiation-damaged polystyrene were different compared to virgin polystyrene. The differences were in the number of organic species generated and their concentrations. In the inert (i.e., helium) atmosphere, the major volatile organic products identified (in order of decreasing concentrations) were styrene, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, nathphalene, propane, .alpha.-methylbenzene, indene and 1,2,3-trimethylbenzene. But in air, the major volatile organic species identified changed slightly. Concentrations of the organic species in the inert atmosphere were significantly higher than those for the air atmosphere processing. Overall, 38 …

Sluicing operations were performed to retrieve high-heat sludge from single-shell tank 241-C-106 and transfer it to double-shell tank 241-AY-102 using the Waste Retrieval Sluicing System. This eliminated the high-heat safety issue for C-106 and demonstrated a technology for retrieval of single-shell tank waste. Both AY-102 and C-106 were monitored during the waste transfer operations, providing a clear picture of general trends in each tank. Specific issues addressed were evaluation of the data for evidence of flammable gas accumulation in AY-102 and thermal performance of AY-102 under the increasing heat load.

In Situ Gaseous Reduction is a technology currently being developed by DOE for the remediation of soil waste sites contaminated with hexavalent chromium. Prior work suggests that a candidate for application of this approach is the 183-DR site at Hanford. However, deep vadose zone drilling is needed to verify the presence of a hexavalent chromium source and to determine the concentration levels and spatial distribution of contamination. This document presents the requirements associated with drilling one to two vadose zone boreholes at the 183-DR site to obtain this information. If hexavalent chromium is determined to be present at levels of at least 10 ppm in the vadose zone in one of the initial boreholes, this hole will be completed for gas injection and six additional gas extraction boreholes will be drilled and completed. This network will be used as a flowcell for performing a gas treatment test at the site.

Representing samll-scale features can be a challenge when one wants to model unsaturated flow in large domains. In this report, the various upscaling techniques are reviewed. The following upscaling methods have been identified from the literature: stochastic methods, renormalization methods, volume averaging and homogenization methods. In addition, a final technique, full resolution numerical modeling, is also discussed.

The purpose of the work described in this report was to identify methods that are currently being used in the Department of Energy (DOE) complex to identify and control hazards/risks in the workplace, evaluate them in terms of their effectiveness in reducing risk to the workers, and to develop a preliminary method that could be used to predict the relative risks to workers performing proposed tasks using some of the current methodology. This report describes some of the performance indicators (i.e., safety metrics) that are currently being used to track relative levels of workplace safety in the DOE complex, how these fit into an Integrated Safety Management (ISM) system, some strengths and weaknesses of using a statistically based set of indicators, and methods to evaluate them. Also discussed are methods used to reduce risk to the workers and some of the techniques that appear to be working in the process of establishing a condition of continuous improvement. The results of these methods will be used in future work involved with the determination of modifying factors for a more complex model. The preliminary method to predict the relative risk level to workers during an extended future time period is based on …

A total-system performance assessment (TSPA) for a potential nuclear-waste repository requires an estimate of the amount of water that might contact waste. This paper describes the model used for part of that estimation in a recent TSPA for the Yucca Mountain site. The discussion is limited to estimation of how much water might enter emplacement drifts; additional considerations related to flow within the drifts, and how much water might actually contact waste, are not addressed here. The unsaturated zone at Yucca Mountain is being considered for the potential repository, and a drift opening in unsaturated rock tends to act as a capillary barrier and divert much of the percolating water around it. For TSPA, the important questions regarding seepage are how many waste packages might be subjected to water flow and how much flow those packages might see. Because of heterogeneity of the rock and uncertainty about the future (how the climate will evolve, etc.), it is not possible to predict seepage amounts or locations with certainty. Thus, seepage is treated as a stochastic quantity in TSPA simulations, with the magnitude and spatial distribution of seepage sampled from uncertainty distributions. The distillation of the essential components of process modeling into …

This report summarizes results of a study performed to develop a strategy for characterization of low levels of radioactive contaminants [plutonium (Pu), neptunium (Np), americium (Am), and technetium (Tc)] in depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF{sub 6}) cylinders at the gaseous diffusion plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Paducah, Kentucky; and Piketon, Ohio. In these gaseous diffusion plants, this radioactivity came from enriching recycled uranium (the so-called ''reactor returns'') from Savannah River, South Carolina, and Hanford, Washington, reactors. Results of this study will be used to support a request for proposals to design, build, and operate facilities to convert the DUF{sub 6} to more chemically stable forms. These facilities would need to be designed to handle any transuranic contaminants that might be present in order to (1) protect the workers' health and safety and (2) protect the public and the environment.

This document provides the calculated estimated dose rates for three external locations on the Rotary Mode Core Sampling (RMCS) exhauster HEPA filter housing, per the request of Characterization Field Engineering.

On February 14 and 15, 2000, a demonstration of current perfluorocarbon tagging technology and the future potential of these methods was held at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The demonstration consisted of a brief technical discussion followed by a laboratory demonstration. The laboratory demonstrations included the detection of letters, parcels, briefcases and lockers containing perfluorocarbon-tagged papers. Discrimination between tagged and non-tagged items and between three perfluorocarbon tags was demonstrated along with the detection of perfluorocarbon in a background of non-fluorinated volatile organic solvent. All demonstrations involved real-time detection using a direct sampling ion trap mass spectrometer. The technical results obtained at ORNL during and in preparation for the demonstration are presented in Appendix 1 to assist Tracer Detection Technology Corp. in further evaluating their position on development and marketing of perfluorocarbon tracer technology.

This report presents the results of an evaluation of the U.S. Department of Energy's Industrial Assessment Center (IAC) Program. The purpose of this program is to conduct energy, waste, and productivity assessments for small to medium-sized industrial firms. Assessments are conducted by 30 university-based industrial assessment centers. The purpose of this project was to evaluate energy and cost savings attributable to the assessments, the trained alumni, and the Websites sponsored by this program. How IAC assessments, alumni, and Web-based information may influence industrial energy efficiency decision making was also studied. It is concluded that appreciable energy and cost savings may be attributed to the IAC Program and that the IAC Program has resulted in more active and improved energy-efficiency decision making by industrial firms.