This report provides background information for a series of reports documenting accident scenario simulations for the Accelerator Production of Tritium blanket heat removal systems.

This report is a guide to basic sources useful in tracking federal legislation and regulations. It has been prepared primarily for the use of constituents who wish to follow the federal government's legislative or regulatory activities at the local level. Brief annotations for the selected printed, telephone, electronic, and related sources describe their scope, focus, and frequency, include publisher contact information, and provide Internet addresses where available.

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This report provides an overview of the financial outlook for Social Security and Medicare programs.

Amorphous carbon films are used as protective coatings on magnetic media to protect the magnetic layer from wear and abrasion caused by the read/write head during hard disk drive start-up and operation. A key requirement in increasing the storage capacity and reliability of hard-disk drives is improving the performance of these coatings. This cooperative agreement used optical characterization techniques developed at LBNL to study thin-film hard disk media produced by Seagate Technology, major US hard drive manufacturer. The chief scientific goal was relating quantitatively the results of the optical characterization to the underlying chemical structure of the overcoat. In a collaboration with Seagate, LBNL, and Cambridge University, optical and electron-based characterization were used to evaluate the chemical structure of overcoats. The sp3 fraction of the sputtered amorphous carbon films was measured quantitatively for the first time and related to the optical spectroscopy results. This work and other selected aspects of the research performed under the agreement were presented at technical meetings and published in the open literature. The chief technical goal was designing manufacturing processes for the protective carbon overcoat for use in new generations of Seagate disk drives. To this end, joint research carried out under this agreement enabled …

Several studies have suggested that the uniformity of Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) detectors play an important role in their performance when operated as gamma-ray spectrometers. However the detailed gamma response of simple planar detectors as a function of position over the device area is largely unknown. To address this issue the authors have built a system capable of measuring the detector response with a resolution of {approximately}250 {micro}m. The system consists of a highly collimated ({approximately}200 {micro}m) photon source (<150 kev) scanned over the detector using a computer controlled two-axis translation stage. Fifteen samples configured as planar detectors were examined with the new apparatus. The material grade of the detectors examined varied from counter to select discriminator. Two classes of spatial response variation were observed and are presented here. Infrared (IR) transmission images were also acquired for each sample and correlation between features in the pulse height spectrum and crystalline defects were observed.

Resistivity results from a 48x48 pixelated CdZnTe (CZT) radiation detector array are presented alongside X-ray topography and detector mapping with a collimated gamma-ray beam. By using a variety of measurements performed on the same sample and registering each data set relative to the others, the spatial dependence of relationships between them was examined. The local correlations between resistivity and one measure of detector performance were strongly influenced by the positions of grain boundaries and other gross crystal defects in the sample. These measurements highlight the need for material studies of spatially heterogeneous CZT to record position information along with the parameters under study.

This report discusses the Appalachian Development Highway Program (ADHP). After a brief description of the ADHP system, the report describes the ADHP's operation, organization, spending history and status. It then describes changes in its funding mechanism resultant from TEA 21 and issues of interest to Congress related to the ADHP.

The X-Ray Computed Microtomography workstation at beamline X27A at the NSLS has been utilized by scientists from a broad range of disciplines from industrial materials processing to environmental science. The most recent applications are presented here as well as a description of the facility that has evolved to accommodate a wide variety of materials and sample sizes. One of the most exciting new developments reported here resulted from a pursuit of faster reconstruction techniques. A Fast Filtered Back Transform (FFBT) reconstruction program has been developed and implemented, that is based on a refinement of the ''gridding'' algorithm first developed for use with radio astronomical data. This program has reduced the reconstruction time to 8.5 sec for a 929 x 929 pixel{sup 2} slice on an R10,000 CPU, more than 8x reduction compared with the Filtered Back-Projection method.