Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Service Acquisition Reform Act of 2002 seeks to strengthen the acquisition workforce by moving toward a performance-based contracting environment and improving service acquisitions management. During the past decade, federal agencies have substantially increased their purchases of services, particularly for information technology and professional, administrative, and management support. In fiscal year 2001 alone, the federal government acquired $109 billion in services. This money, however, is not always well-spent. GAO continues to find that defense and civilian acquisitions are poorly planned, not adequately completed, and poorly managed. Some leading companies have changed their approach to acquiring services after finding themselves spending a lot of money on services without knowing how much was being spent and where these dollars were going. GAO found that these companies were able to turn this situation around by adopting a more strategic perspective to service spending. Each company focused more on what was good for the company as a whole rather than just individual business units, and each began making decisions using enhanced knowledge about service spending. The companies analyzed their spending services to answer basic questions about how much was being spent and …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "One-third of the 2.1 million cases of cash assistance provided under federal or state welfare programs in the fall of 2001 went to children. Because no adults in these families received either Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or state maintenance-of-effort funds, work requirements and time limits did not apply. Welfare reform legislation passed in 1996 included a caseload reduction credit that reduces each state's mandated participation rate if its welfare caseload declines. Because of the dramatic declines in welfare caseloads since 1996, states have generally seen greatly reduced participation rates for TANF programs. After accounting for cases involving only children, states excluded 11 percent of the remaining 1.4 million families with an adult from federal or state time limits. States' experiences with work requirements and time limits highlight key issues Congress may wish to consider when reauthorizing TANF provisions, including the relatively few families who have reached their time limit so far and the future adequacy of the federal 20-percent extension."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Office of Justice Programs (OJP) provides grants to state and local governments, universities, and private foundations to help prevent and control crime, administer justice, and assist crime victims. OJP bureaus and program offices award both formula and discretionary grants. The monitoring of grant activities is a key management tool to ensure that funds awarded to grantees are being properly spent. In recent years, GAO and others, including OJP, have identified various grant monitoring problems among OJP's bureaus and offices. OJP has begun to work with its bureaus and offices to address these problems, but it is too early to tell whether its efforts will resolve the issues identified."

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Meaning of "lifetime service credit for purposes of subchapter D of chapter 41 of the Government Code, which mandates longevity pay for certain assisstant prosecutors (RQ-0042-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a member of the City Council of the City of Watauga may appoint himself to the Board of Directors of the Watagua Crime Control and prevention District.(RQ-0452-JC).

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Authority of the Texas Board of Professional Land Surveying to require that all proposed oil and gas well locations be surveyed by a registered professional land surveyor(RQ-0440-JC).

This report describes the National Science Foundation (NSF) that was created by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, as amended (P.L. 81-507).

Eddy current (EC) estimate of flaw size obtained from inservice inspection is often the primary means of assessing the structural integrity of steam generator tubes. Reliable prediction of failure pressure and leak rate in tubes with complex cracking requires more detailed information about the geometry and extent of degradation than is generally available from conventional bobbin coil examinations. High-resolution inspections with EC rotating probes are thus carried out on selected regions of tubing to provide the more extensive nondestructive evaluation (NDE) information that is needed to better assess flaw size and distribution. Interpretation of signals from complex cracking that are often distorted by coherent and incoherent noise can be a challenging NDE task. Studies at Argonne National Laboratory have demonstrated that computer-aided data analysis can be used for more accurate and efficient processing of the large amounts of data collected by such probes. The basic structure of a rule-based multiparameter data analysis algorithm is described in this paper. Multiple-frequency inspection data from a standard rotating pancake coil were used for the analyses. The codes were implemented as MATLAB scripts and provide, as the final outcome, profiles of flaw depth in a section of tube. Graphical user interface tools were devised …

In this work we describe neutron and proton induced reaction cross-sections for iron produced by the codes TNG and CEM95 in the 5 to 300 MeV energy range. TNG calculations cover the 5-90 MeV range, while CEM95 covers the 50-300 MeV high energy range. The two codes show some disagreements in the overlap energy range, both among themselves and with the experimental data, which are presently being addressed. The experimental data used are from NNDC and/or from LA150 NSE references. We also describe some developments for combining TNG and CEM95 into a new code called CETNG (Cascade Exciton TNG).

Researchers characterized high-level waste derived from dissolved salt cake from the Savannah River Site (SRS) tank farm and measured the cesium distribution coefficients (DCs) for extraction, scrub, and stripping steps of the caustic-side solvent extraction (CSSX) flowsheet. The measurements used two SRS high-level waste samples derived entirely or in part from salt cake. The chemical compositions of both samples are reported. Dissolved salt cake waste contained less Cs-137 and more dianions than is typical of supernate samples. Extraction and scrub DCs values for both samples exceeded process requirements and agreed well with model predictions. Strip DCs values for the Tank 46F sample also met process requirements. However, strip DCs values could not be calculated for the Tank 38H sample due to the poor material balance for Cs-137. Potential explanations for the poor material balance are discussed and additional work to determine the cause is described.

The AFR-300, Advanced Fast Reactor (300 Mwe), has been proposed as a Generation IV concept. It could also be used to dispose of surplus weapons grade plutonium or as an actinide burner for transmutation of high level radioactive waste. AFR-300 uses metallic fuel and sodium coolant. The design of AFR-300 takes account of the successful design and operation of EBR-II, but the AFR-300 design includes a number of advances such as an advanced fuel cycle, inspectability and improved economics. One significant difference between AFR-300 and EBR-II is that AFR-300 is considerably larger. Another significant difference is that AFR-300 has no auxiliary EM pump in the primary loop to guarantee positive core flow when the main primary pumps are shut down. Thus, one question that has come up in connection with the AFR-300 design is whether natural circulation flow is sufficient to prevent damage to the core if the primary pumps fail. Insufficient natural circulation flow through the core could result in high cladding temperatures and cladding failure due to eutectic penetration of the cladding by the metal fuel. The rate of eutectic penetration of the cladding is strongly temperature dependent, so cladding failure depends on how hot the cladding gets …

This report presents data collected during calendar year 2001 (January 2001 to December 2001) to support the groundwater monitoring program at the Sanitary Landfill (SLF).

Non-elutable crystalline silicotitanate (CST) ion-exchanger materials have been studied for removing cesium from a variety of radioactive wastes at several U.S. DOE sites over the last decade. For the current pretreatment facility design of the River Protection Project (RPP) Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) in Hanford, the removal of cesium from low activity waste (LAW) is achieved by ion-exchange technology based on SuperLig(R) 644 resin. However, due to concerns over potential radiological and chemical degradation of SuperLig(R) 644 resin, IONSIV IE-911 (CST in its engineered form) material is being proposed as a backup ion-exchange material for the removal of cesium from Hanford radioactive waste. This paper discusses the methodology used to determine the optimal CST ion-exchange column size to process all 16 separate batches of feeds from the ten targeted Hanford waste tanks. The optimal design ensures the best utilization of CST material and therefore results in a minimum amount of spent CST.

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The goal of the Majorana Experiment is to determine the effective Majorana masss of the eletron neutrino. Detection of the neutrino mass implied by oscillation results in within our grasp. This exciting physics goal is best pursued using double-beta decay of germanium because of the historical and emerging advances in eliminating competing signals from radioactive backgrounds. The Majorana Experiment will consist of a large mass of 76Ge in the form of high-resolution detectors deep underground, searching for a sharp peak at the BB endpoint. We present here an overview of the entire project in order to help put in perspective the scope, the level and technial risk, and the readiness of the Collaboration to begin the undertaking.

This form updates the groundwater monitoring plan for the B Pond system and documents revision agreed upon with the Washington State Department of Ecology concerning well network, constitutuent list, statistical analysis, and report procedures.

The focus of this contract (in the summer and fall of 2001) was originally to help the California Energy Commission (CEC) locate and evaluate potential sites for electric power generation facilities and to assist the CEC in addressing areas of congestion on transmission lines and natural gas supply line corridors. Subsequent events have reduced the immediate urgency, although not the ultimate need for such analyses. Software technology for deploying interactive geographic information systems (GIS) accessible over the Internet have developed to the point that it is now practical to develop and publish GIS web sites that have substantial viewing, movement, query, and even map-making capabilities. As part of a separate project not funded by the CEC, the GIS Center at LLNL, on an experimental basis, has developed a web site to explore the technical difficulties as well as the interest in such a web site by agencies and others concerned with energy research. This exploratory effort offers the potential or developing an interactive GIS web site for use by the CEC for energy research, policy analysis, site evaluation, and permit and regulatory matters. To help ground the geospatial capabilities in the realistic requirements and needs of the CEC staff, the …

This report details the results of analyses for organic compounds and trace components in various process streams based on samples from the 48-hour radioactive waste test.

This paper describes the 2001 progress achieved by the Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors (RERTR) Program in collaboration with its many international partners. Postirradiation examinations of microplates have continued to reveal excellent irradiation behavior of U-Mo dispersion fuels in a variety of compositions and irradiating conditions. Irradiation of two new batches of miniplates of greater sizes was completed in the ATR to investigate the swelling behavior of these fuels under prototypic conditions. These materials hold the promise of achieving the program goal of developing LEU research reactor fuels with uranium densities in the 8-9 g/cm{sup 3} range. Qualification of the U-Mo dispersion fuels has been delayed by a patent issue involving KAERI. Test fuel elements with uranium density of 6 g/cm{sup 3} are being fabricated by BWXT and are expected to begin undergoing irradiation in the HFR-Petten reactor around March 2003, with a goal of qualifying this fuel by mid-2005. U-Mo fuel with uranium density of 8-9 g/cm{sup 3} is expected to be qualified by mid-2007. Final irradiation tests of LEU {sup 99}Mo targets in the RAS-GAS reactor at BATAN, in Indonesia, had to be postponed because of the 9/11 attacks, but the results collected to date indicate …

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This report reviews several issues relating to alternative fuels and vehicles, mainly to combat dependence on petroleum imports and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The report discusses the advantages and drawbacks of various alternative fuels and vehicles, as well as related legislation.

This report discusses the reauthorization of major farm income and commodity price support programs that expire after crop year 2002. Many agricultural interests expect that a new “counter-cyclical assistance” program will be an integral component of future farm policy. The intent of counter-cyclical assistance is to provide more government support when farm prices and/or incomes decline, and less support when they improve.

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