A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "What GAO Found"

Other written product issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) receives a great deal of personal information about individuals and businesses. While taxpayers are required to provide this information to IRS under penalty of fine or imprisonment, confidentiality of information reported to IRS is widely held to be a critical element of taxpayers’ willingness to provide information to IRS and comply with the tax laws. As a general rule, anything reported to IRS is held in strict confidence—Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 6103 provides that federal tax information is confidential and to be used to administer federal tax laws except as otherwise specifically authorized by law."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "According to VA data during fiscal years 2000 to 2010, most enhanced monthly benefit recipients were veterans, over age 65, and receiving the A&A enhancement as part of their pension benefit. The recipient population is changing, however. In particular, the percentage of enhanced monthly benefit recipients age 65 or younger increased from 18 percent to 24 percent over the decade. Also, the percentage of recipients paid benefits under the disability compensation program increased from 15 percent to 26 percent. The cost of enhanced monthly benefits has increased from $124 million in fiscal year 2000 to $409 million in fiscal year 2010; however, VA does not know what portion of these costs was paid specifically for A&A and Housebound benefits. VA maintains data on enhanced monthly benefit recipients’ total payments but does not separately identify the amount awarded as an A&A or Housebound benefit. VA officials stated that under its current system, separately tracking the costs of these benefits would be complicated and difficult."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "What GAO Found"

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "What GAO Found:"

Annual budget and setting rates adopted by the Coastal Water Authority, for the Red Bluff Water Treatment Plant. it includes resolutions passed by the board of directors, budget summaries, and other related documentation.

The Linac Coherent Light Source is an x-ray free-electron laser at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is operating at x-ray wavelengths of 20-1.2 Angstrom with peak brightness nearly ten orders of magnitude beyond conventional synchrotron radiation sources. At the low charge operation mode (20 pC), the x-ray pulse length can be <10 fs. In this paper we report our numerical optimization and simulations to produce even shorter x-ray pulses by optimizing the machine and undulator setup at 20 pC charge. In the soft x-ray regime, with combination of slotted-foil or undulator taper, a single spike x-ray pulse is achievable with peak FEL power of a few 10s GW. Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the world's first hard x-ray Free electron laser (FEL), has started operation since 2009. With nominal operation charge of 250 pC, the generated x-ray pulse length is from 70 fs to a few hundred fs. This marks the beginning of a new era of ultrashort x-ray sciences. In addition, a low charge (20pC) operation mode has also been established. Since the collective effects are reduced at the low charge mode, we can increase the compression factor and still achieve a few kA peak current. The expected …

We propose to generate steady-state microbunching in a storage ring with a reversible seeding scheme. High gain harmonic generation (HGHG) and echo-enabled harmonic generation (EEHG) are two promising methods for microbunching linac electron beams. Because both schemes increase the energy spread of the seeded beam, they cannot drive a coherent radiator turn-by-turn in a storage ring. However, reversing the seeding process following the radiator minimizes the impact on the electron beam and may allow coherent radiation at or near the storage ring repetition rate. In this paper we describe the general idea and outline a proof-of-principle experiment. Electron storage rings can drive high average power light sources, and free-electron lasers (FELs) are now producing coherent light sources of unprecedented peak brightness While there is active research towards high repetition rate FELs (for example, using energy recovery linacs), at present there are still no convenient accelerator-based sources of high repetition rate, coherent radiation. As an alternative avenue, we recently proposed to establish steady-state microbunching (SSMB) in a storage ring. By maintaining steady-state coherent microbunching at one point in the storage ring, the beam generates coherent radiation at or close to the repetition rate of the storage ring. In this paper, we …

The overall objective of this research effort was to develop methods for labeling biomolecules with higher oxidation state species of At-211. This was to be done in an effort to develop reagents that had higher in vivo stability than the present carbon-bonded At-211-labeled compounds. We were unsuccessful in that effort, as none of the approaches studied provided reagents that were stable to in vivo deastatination. However, we gained a lot of information about At-211 in higher oxidation states. The studies proved to be very difficult as small changes in pH and other conditions appeared to change the nature of the species that obtained (by HPLC retention time analyses), with many of the species being unidentifiable. The fact that there are no stable isotopes of astatine, and the chemistry of the nearest halogen iodine is quite different, made it very difficult to interpret results of some experiments. With that said, we believe that a lot of valuable information was obtained from the studies. The research effort evaluated: (1) methods for chemical oxidation of At-211, (2) approaches to chelation of oxidized At-211, and (3) approaches to oxidation of astatophenyl compounds. A major hurdle that had to be surmounted to conduct the research …

We explore simple but novel bouncing solutions of general relativity that avoid singularities. These solutions require curvature k = +1, and are supported by a negative cosmological term and matter with -1 < w < -1 = 3. In the case of moderate bounces (where the ratio of the maximal scale factor a{sub +} to the minimal scale factor a{sub -} is {Omicron}(1)), the solutions are shown to be classically stable and cycle through an infinite set of bounces. For more extreme cases with large a{sub +} = a{sub -}, the solutions can still oscillate many times before classical instabilities take them out of the regime of validity of our approximations. In this regime, quantum particle production also leads eventually to a departure from the realm of validity of semiclassical general relativity, likely yielding a singular crunch. We briefly discuss possible applications of these models to realistic cosmology.

The Electronic Maintenance Report forms present a uniform dataset for analysis of Sustainability metrics. These forms collect readily minable data while allowing the attachment of site-specific checklists or other supporting files for review by the Sustainability Manager and Program Management.

Weak vertical coupled bunch instability with oscillation amplitude at {mu}m level has been observed in SPEAR3. The instability becomes stronger when there is a vacuum pressure rise by partially turning off vacuum pumps and it becomes weaker when the vertical beam emittance is increased by turning off the skew quadrupole magnets. These confirmed that the instability was driven by ions in the vacuum. The threshold of the beam ion instability when running with a single bunch train is just under 200 mA. This paper presents the comprehensive observations of the beam ion instability in SPEAR3. The effects of vacuum pressure, beam current, beam filling pattern, chromaticity, beam emittance and bunch-by-bunch feedback are investigated in great detail. In an electron accelerator, ions generated from the residual gas molecules can be trapped by the beam. Then these trapped ions interact resonantly with the beam and cause beam instability and emittance blow-up. Most existing light sources use a long single bunch train filling pattern, followed by a long gap to avoid multi-turn ion trapping. However, such a gap does not preclude ions from accumulating during one passage of the single bunch train beam, and those ions can still cause a Fast Ion Instability …

We propose a novel approach to measure short electron bunch profiles at micrometer level. Low energy electrons generated during beam-gas ionization are simultaneously modulated by the transverse electric field of a circularly-polarized laser, and then they are collected at a downstream screen where the angular modulation is converted to a circular shape. The longitudinal bunch profile is simply represented by the angular distribution of the electrons on the screen. We only need to know the laser wavelength for calibration and there is no phase synchronization problem. Meanwhile the required laser power is also relatively low in this setup. Some simulations examples and experimental consideration of this method are discussed. At Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), an S-band RF transverse deflector (TCAV) is used to measure the bunch length with a resolution 10 femtosecond (fs) rms. An X-band deflector (wavelength 2.6cm) is proposed recently to improve the resolution. However, at the low charge operation mode (20pC), the pulse length can be as short as fs. It is very challenging to measure femtosecond and sub-femtosecond level bunch length. One of the methods is switching from RF to {mu}m level wavelength laser to deflect the bunch. A powerful laser ({approx}10s GW) is required …

The SLAC Beam Physics group and other SLAC collaborators continue to study options for implementing a near diffraction-limited ring-based light source in the 2.2-km PEP-II tunnel that will serve the SSRL scientific program in the future. The study team has completed the baseline design for a 4.5-GeV storage ring having 160 pm-rad emittance with stored beam current of 1.5 A, providing >10{sup 22} brightness for multi-keV photon beams from 3.5-m undulator sources. The team has also investigated possible 5-GeV ERL configurations which, similar to the Cornell and KEK ERL plans, would have {approx}30 pm-rad emittance with 100 mA current, and {approx}10 pm-rad emittance with 25 mA or less. Now a 4.5-GeV 'ultimate' storage ring having emittance similar to the ERL and operating with {approx}200 mA is under study. An overview of the progress of the PEP-X design study and SSRL's plans for defining performance parameters that will guide the choice of ring options is presented.

This work establishes the criticality safety technical basis to increase the fissile mass limit from 120 grams to 200 grams for Type A 55-gallon drums and their equivalents. Current RHWM fissile mass limit is 120 grams Pu for Type A 55-gallon containers and their equivalent. In order to increase the Type A 55-gallon drum limit to 200 grams, a few additional criticality safety control requirements are needed on moderators, reflectors, and array controls to ensure that the 200-gram Pu drums remain criticality safe with inadvertent criticality remains incredible. The purpose of this work is to analyze the use of 200-gram Pu drum mass limit for waste storage operations in Radioactive and Hazardous Waste Management (RHWM) Facilities. In this evaluation, the criticality safety controls associated with the 200-gram Pu drums are established for the RHWM waste storage operations. With the implementation of these criticality safety controls, the 200-gram Pu waste drum storage operations are demonstrated to be criticality safe and meet the double-contingency-principle requirement per DOE O 420.1.

In 2009, manure management accounted for 2,356 Gg or 107 billion standard cubic ft of methane (CH{sub 4}) emissions in the United States, equivalent to 0.5% of U.S. natural gas (NG) consumption. Owing to the high global warming potential of methane, capturing and utilizing this methane source could reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The extent of that reduction depends on several factors - most notably, how much of this manure-based methane can be captured, how much GHG is produced in the course of converting it to vehicular fuel, and how much GHG was produced by the fossil fuel it might displace. A life-cycle analysis was conducted to quantify these factors and, in so doing, assess the impact of converting methane from animal manure into renewable NG (RNG) and utilizing the gas in vehicles. Several manure-based RNG pathways were characterized in the GREET (Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation) model, and their fuel-cycle energy use and GHG emissions were compared to petroleum-based pathways as well as to conventional fossil NG pathways. Results show that despite increased total energy use, both fossil fuel use and GHG emissions decline for most RNG pathways as compared with fossil NG and petroleum. …

This report first provides a brief federal legislative history of identity theft laws.

This report considers the Agriculture and Related Agencies appropriations bill. The report compares and contrasts the Senate and House versions of the bill in terms of budgeting.

The measurement of the ultra-short electron bunch length on the femtosecond time scale constitutes a very challenging problem. In the x-ray free electron laser facilities such as the Linac Coherent Light Source, generation of a sub-ten femtoseconds electron beam with 20pC charge is possible, but direct measurements are very difficult due to the resolution limit of the present diagnostics. We propose a new method here based on the measurement of the electron beam energy modulation induced from laser-electron interaction in a short wiggler. A typical optical streaking method requires a laser wavelength much longer than the electron bunch length. In this paper a laser with its wavelength shorter than the electron bunch length has been adopted, while the slope on the laser intensity envelope is used to distinguish the different periods. With this technique it is possible to reconstruct the bunch longitudinal profile from a single shot measurement. Generation of ultrashort x-ray pulses at femtoseconds (fs) scale is of great interest within synchrotron radiation and free electron laser (FEL) user community. One of the simple methods is to operate the FEL facility at low charge. At the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), we have demonstrated the capability of generating ultrashort …

The objective of this analysis is to develop and establish the technical basis on the criticality safety controls for the storage of mixed beryllium (Be), natural uranium (Nat-U), and carbon (C)/graphite reflectors in 55-gallon waste containers and/or their equivalents in Hazardous Waste Management (HWM) facilities. Based on the criticality safety limits and controls outlined in Section 3.0, the operations involving the use of mixed-reflector drums satisfy the double-contingency principle as required by DOE Order 420.1 and are therefore criticality safe. The mixed-reflector mass limit is 120 grams for each 55-gallon drum or its equivalent. a reflector waiver of 50 grams is allowed for Be, Nat-U, or C/graphite combined. The waived reflectors may be excluded from the reflector mass calculations when determining if a drum is compliant. The mixed-reflector drums are allowed to mix with the typical 55-gallon one-reflector drums with a Pu mass limit of 120 grams. The fissile mass limit for the mixed-reflector container is 65 grams of Pu equivalent each. The corresponding reflector mass limits are 300 grams of Be, and/or 100 kilograms of Nat-U, and/or 110 kilograms of C/graphite for each container. All other unaffected control parameters for the one-reflector containers remain in effect for the mixed-reflector …

The following 200-gram Pu drum criticality safety controls are applicable to RHWM drum storage operations: (1) Mass (Fissile/Pu) - each 55-gallon drum or its equivalent shall be limited to 200 gram Pu or Pu equivalent; (2) Moderation - Hydrogen materials with a hydrogen density greater than that (0.133 g H/cc) of polyethylene and paraffin are not allowed and hydrogen materials with a hydrogen density no greater than that of polyethylene and paraffin are allowed with unlimited amounts; (3) Interaction - a spacing of 30-inches (76 cm) is required between arrays and 200-gram Pu drums shall be placed in arrays for 200-gram Pu drums only (no mingling of 200-gram Pu drums with other drums not meeting the drum controls associated with the 200-gram limit); (4) Reflection - no beryllium and carbon/graphite (other than the 50-gram waiver amount) is allowed, (note that Nat-U exceeding the waiver amount is allowed when its U-235 content is included in the fissile mass limit of 200 grams); and (5) Geometry - drum geometry, only 55-gallon drum or its equivalent shall be used and array geometry, 55-gallon drums are allowed for 2-high stacking. Steel waste boxes may be stacked 3-high if constraint.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the Department of Commerce, is the executive branch's principal advisory office on domestic and international telecommunications and information policies. Its mandate is to provide greater access for all Americans to telecommunications services, support U.S. attempts to open foreign markets, advise on international telecommunications negotiations, and fund research for new technologies and their applications. NTIA also manages the distribution of funds for several key grant programs.

Several bills to establish a national infrastructure bank have been introduced in the 112th Congress. This report examines three such bills, the Building and Upgrading Infrastructure for Long-Term Development Act (S. 652), the American Infrastructure Investment Fund Act of 2011 (S. 936), and the National Infrastructure Development Bank Act of 2011 (H.R. 402).

The objective of this report is to determine the overall impact of atmospheric aerosols on radioactive balance.