This report briefly discusses Congressional considerations on whether to continue to protect the ecosystem on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) or to open it to oil and gas development.

This report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress passes each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Agriculture by summarizing the current legislative status of the bill, its scope, major issues, funding levels, and related legislative activity. The report also lists the key CRS staff relevant to the issues covered and related CRS products.

The United States recognized the independence of all the former Soviet republics by the end of 1991, including the South Caucasus states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. The United States has fostered these states' ties with the West in part to end the dependence of these states on Russia for trade, security, and other relations. The FREEDOM Support Act of 1992 provides authorization for assistance to the Eurasian states for humanitarian needs, democratization, and other purposes. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the Administration appealed for a national security waiver of the prohibition on aid to Azerbaijan, in consideration of Azerbaijan's assistance to the international coalition to combat terrorism. Azerbaijani and Georgian troops participate in stabilization efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Armenian personnel serve in Iraq.

Several proof-of-principle laser accelerator experiments turned a long-wavelength of a CO{sub 2} laser to advantage. Ongoing advancement to multi-terawatt femtosecond CO{sub 2} lasers opens new venues for next-generation laser acceleration research.

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report reviews the U.S. Customs Service's Compliance Measurement Examination (COMPEX) and Immigration and Naturalization Service's (INS) Inspections Traveler Examination (INTEX). These programs, which help Customs and INS assess the nature and extent of enforcement risks at ports of entry, compare violations found during targeted inspections with violations found during random inspections. GAO found that both Customs and INS inspectors did not always adhere to guidance on sample selection and did not always conduct inspections with the minimum level of thoroughness required. As a result, statistical data generated by the programs may not reliably reflect the extent to which travelers who seek entry into the U.S. are in violation of customs or immigration laws. GAO also found that the COMPEX and INTEX programs both draw from the same population of international travelers; have similar purposes and goals; and often use Customs and INS inspectors who work side by side, particularly at land border ports of entry. Customs and INS might realize efficiencies if the two programs were combined."

The purpose of this calculation is to identify the initial design requirements for refuge stations, including the client requirements, standards, codes, laws, and regulations, general discipline design criteria, and design basis events and hazards. The scope of this document is for the specific task of designing and constructing refuge stations in the Enhanced Characterization Repository Block (ECRB) subsurface openings as necessary personnel safety enhancements to the current construction, maintenance and testing operations. This document is for the construction at the Exploratory Site Facility (ESF). The criteria is not intended to be incorporated into the proposed repository design and does not support Site Recommendation or License Application efforts. This calculation is prepared in accordance with N-3.12Q as a field support calculation and was prepared using the ''Technical Work Plan for Test Facilities Design FY01 Work Activities'' (TWP) (CRWMS M&O 2000b).

Segmented electrodes with a low secondary electron emission are shown to alter significantly plasma flow in the ceramic channel of the Hall thruster. The location of the axial acceleration region relative to the magnetic field can be moved. The radial potential distribution can also be altered near the channel walls. A hydrodynamic model shows that these effects are consistent with a lower secondary electron emission of the segmented electrode as compared to ceramic channel walls.

None

None

We have come up with a way for calculating longitudinal wakefields for high Q resonances by mapping the wake functions to a two dimension vector space. Then in this space, a transformation which is basically a scale change and a rotation, allows us to calculate the new wakefield by knowing only one previous wakefield and one previous particle passage through the cavity. We will also compare this method to the brute force method which needs to know all the passages of the previous particles through the cavity.

None

To study the mechanism of anomalous transport in tokamaks requires the use of sophisticated diagnostic tools for the measurement of short-scale turbulent fluctuations. In this article, we describe an attempt at developing a technique capable of providing a comprehensive description of plasma fluctuations with k(subscript parallel rho i) < 1, such as such as those driven by the Ion Temperature Gradient mode in tokamaks. The proposed method is based on microwave reflectometry, and stems from a series of numerical calculations showing that the spatial structure of fluctuations near the cutoff could be obtained from the phase of reflected waves when these are collected with a wide aperture optical system forming an image of the cutoff onto an array of phase sensitive detectors. Preliminary measurements with a prototype apparatus on the Torus Experiment for Technology Oriented Research 94 (TEXTOR-94) [U. Samm, Proceedings of the 16th IEEE Symposium on Fusion Engineering, 1995 (IEEE, Piscata way, NJ, 1995), p. 470] confirm the validity of these conclusions. Technical issues in the application of the proposed technique to tokamaks are discussed in this article, and the conceptual design of an imaging reflectometer for the visualization of turbulent fluctuations in the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) …

A remote data acquisition chassis, called a HOTLink Rack Monitor, HRM, has been developed for use in the Fermilab control system. This chassis provides for 64 analog input channels, 8 analog output channels, and 8 bytes of digital I/O. The interface to the host VMEbus crate is by way of a 320 MHz HOTLink serial connection to a PMC mezzanine module. With no processor intervention, all data sources in the remote chassis are read at 100 sec intervals, time stamped, and stored in a 2 MB circular buffer on the PMC module. In operation, the memory always contains the most recent 16 k samples of 10 kHz data from all 64 analog input channels. An expansion module that resides in the HRM chassis records snapshot data for 8 analog channels, each channel consisting of up to 16 k readings, digitized at rates up to 10 MHz. Snapshot data is also returned and stored in buffers on the PMC module. Because the HRM presents a memory-mapped interface to the host, it is independent of the operating system and may be used in any system that supports PMC mezzanine modules.

In response to the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, Congress passed legislation making permanent a provision that allows aliens with critical information on criminal or terrorist organizations to come into the United States in order to provide information to law enforcement officials. This legislation (S. 1424) became P.L. 107-45 on October 1, 2001. The law amends the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide permanent authority for the administration of the “S” visa, which was scheduled to expire on September 13, 2001. On November 29, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the “Responsible Cooperators Program” to reach out to persons who may be eligible for the S visa. Up to 200 criminal informants and 50 terrorist informants may be admitted annually. Since FY1995, almost 700 informants and their accompanying family members have entered S visas. This report will not be regularly updated.

This report discusses contribution of technological advancement to economic growth and productivity increases. Because technology can contribute to economic growth and productivity increases, congressional interest has focused on how to augment private-sector technological development.

This report discusses the different roles of intelligence and law enforcement agencies in countering transnational threats and the difficulties in coordinating their efforts. This report also discusses the desire of some observers to base the intelligence and law enforcement agencies' relationship in statutory law. Updated December 3, 2001.

Theoretical and computational advances in lattice calculations are reviewed, with focus on examples relevant to the unitarity triangle of the CKM matrix. Recent progress in semi-leptonic form factors for B {yields} {pi}/v and B {yields} D*lv, as well as the parameter {zeta} in B{sup 0}-{bar B}{sup 0} mixing, are highlighted.

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In most of the requests approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to transfer licenses to own or operate nuclear power plants, the financial arrangements have sought to ensure that adequate funds will be available to decommission those plants. However, when new owners proposed to continue relying on periodic deposits to external sinking funds, NRC's reviews were not always rigorous enough to ensure that decommissioning funds would be adequate. Varying cleanup standards and proposed new decommissioning methods introduce additional uncertainty about the future costs of decommissioning nuclear power plants. Changes to the Financial Accounting Standards Board's financial reporting standard will require, for the first time, owners of facilities that require significant end-of-life cleanup expenditures--such as nuclear power plants--to consistently report estimated decommissioning costs as liabilities in their financial statements. However, the new accounting standard is not intended to, and will not, establish a legal requirement that these licensees set aside adequate funding for decommissioning costs."

The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) is an innovative magnetic fusion device that was constructed by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Columbia University, and the University of Washington at Seattle. Since achieving first plasma in 1999, the device has been used for fusion research through an international collaboration of more than twenty institutions. The NSTX is operated through a collection of control systems that encompass a wide range of technology, from hardwired relay controls to real-time control systems with giga-FLOPS of capability. This paper presents a broad introduction to the control systems used on NSTX, with an emphasis on the computing controls, data acquisition, and synchronization systems.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) spent nuclear fuel (DSNF) is categorized into eleven different spent fuel groups. Group 7, is predominantly uranium metal spent fuel from N Reactor that could oxidize rapidly in the presence of air when a waste package is breached. Such rapid oxidation constitutes a pyrophoric event. The consequences of a post closure pyrophoric event were evaluated in terms of its potential to damage adjacent waste packages and consequences of it in terms of long-term dose to humans. This work was conducted as part of the total system performance assessment (TSPA) of DOE spent fuel for the National Spent Nuclear Fuel Program. These analyses were performed in support of the site recommendation for a repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

The objective of this effort is to benchmark the development of process-based quality tools for application in CAD (computer-aided design) model-based applications. The processes of interest are design, manufacturing, and quality process applications. A study was commissioned addressing the impact, current technologies, and known problem areas in application of 3D MCAD (3-dimensional mechanical computer-aided design) models and model integrity on downstream manufacturing and quality processes. The downstream manufacturing and product quality processes are profoundly influenced and dependent on model quality and modeling process integrity. The goal is to illustrate and expedite the modeling and downstream model-based technologies for available or conceptual methods and tools to achieve maximum economic advantage and advance process-based quality concepts.

None

It is generally accepted that the information necessary to specify the native, functional, three-dimensional structure of a protein is encoded entirely within its amino acid sequence; however, efficient reversible folding and unfolding is observed only with a subset of small single-domain proteins. Refolding experiments often lead to the formation of kinetically-trapped, misfolded species that aggregate, even in dilute solution. In the cellular environment, the barriers to efficient protein folding and maintenance of native structure are even larger due to the nature of this process. First, nascent polypeptides must fold in an extremely crowded environment where the concentration of macromolecules approaches 300-400 mg/mL and on average, each ribosome is within its own diameter of another ribosome (1-3). These conditions of severe molecular crowding, coupled with high concentrations of nascent polypeptide chains, favor nonspecific aggregation over productive folding (3). Second, folding of newly-translated polypeptides occurs in the context of their vehtorial synthesis process. Amino acids are added to a growing nascent chain at the rate of -5 residues per set, which means that for a 300 residue protein its N-terminus will be exposed to the cytosol {approx}1 min before its C-terminus and be free to begin the folding process. However, because protein …

1.7 x 10{sup 8} x-ray photons per 3.5 ps pulse have been produced in Thomson scattering by focusing CO{sub 2} laser pulse on counter-propagating relativistic electron beam. We explore a possibility of further enhancement of process efficiency by propagating both beams in a plasma capillary. Conventional synchrotron light sources based on using giga-electron-volt electron synchrotron accelerators and magnetic wigglers generate x-ray radiation for versatile application in multi-disciplinary research. An intense laser beam causes relativistic electron oscillations similar to a wiggler. However, because the laser wavelength is thousand times shorter than a wiggler period, very moderate electron energy is needed to produce hard x-rays via Thomson scattering. This allows using relatively compact mega-electron-volt linear accelerators instead of giga-electron-volt synchrotrons. Another important advantage of Thomson sources is a possibility to generate femtosecond x-ray pulses whereas conventional synchrotron sources have typically {approx}300 ps pulse duration. This promises to revolutionize x-ray research in chemistry, physics, and biology expanding it to ultra-fast processes. Thomson sources do not compete in repetition rate and average intensity with conventional light sources that operate at the megahertz frequency. However, Thomson sources have a potential to produce much higher photon numbers per pulse. This may allow developing a single shot …