Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In February 2007, we issued our opinions on the calendar year 2006 financial statements of the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) and the FSLIC Resolution Fund (FRF). We also issued our opinion on the effectiveness of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's (FDIC) internal control over financial reporting (including safeguarding assets) and compliance as of December 31, 2006, and our evaluation of FDIC's compliance with significant provisions of selected laws and regulations for the two funds for the year ended December 31, 2006. The purpose of this report is to present issues identified during our audits of the 2006 financial statements regarding internal controls and accounting procedures and to recommend actions to address these issues. Although these issues were not material in relation to the financial statements, we believe they warrant management's attention."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "For years, GAO has raised concerns about the ability of the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service (Service) to track the amounts it obligates for and spends on timber sales and to use this information in managing the sales. Timber sales are generally carried out by ranger districts (the lowest level of the Service's decentralized organizational structure), which are overseen by national forest offices. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) within the Department of the Interior also conducts timber sales. This report examines the extent to which (1) the Forest Service tracks timber sales-related obligations and expenditures, including the extent to which the Service uses this information in making management decisions; (2) BLM tracks timber sales-related obligations and expenditures; and (3) both agencies track their timber sales-related revenue."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Waterborne pathogens can contaminate water and sand at beaches and threaten human health. Under the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health (BEACH) Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides grants to states to develop water quality monitoring and public notification programs. This statement summarizes the key findings of GAO's May 2007 report, Great Lakes: EPA and the States Have Made Progress in Implementing the BEACH Act, but Additional Actions Could Improve Public Health Protection. In this report GAO assessed (1) the extent to which EPA has implemented the Act's provisions, (2) concerns about EPA's BEACH Act grant allocation formula, and (3) described the experiences of the Great Lakes states in developing and implementing beach monitoring and notification programs using their grant funds."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The purpose of this testimony is to assist the Committees in monitoring progress on the Capitol Visitor Center (CVC) project. This testimony will focus on (1) the Architect of the Capitol's (AOC) construction progress since the last CVC hearing on April 24, 2007; and (2) the project's expected cost at completion and funding status. GAO's remarks are based on our review of schedules and financial reports for the CVC project and related records maintained by AOC and its construction management contractor, Gilbane Building Company; our observations on the progress of work at the CVC construction site; and our discussions with the CVC team (AOC and its major CVC contractors), AOC's Chief Fire Marshal, and representatives from the U.S. Capitol Police. We also reviewed AOC's construction management contractor's periodic schedule assessments, potential change order log, and weekly reports on the progress of interior wall and floor stonework. In addition, we reviewed the contract modifications made to date."

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) and Laser Mega Joule (LMJ) facilities are currently under construction in the United States and France. Ignited targets at these facilities are anticipated to produce up to 1019 deuterium-tritium fusion neutrons. This will provide unprecedented opportunities and challenges for the use of nuclear diagnostics in inertial confinement fusion experiments. The NIF and LMJ nuclear diagnostics will work in a harsh radiation environment that includes neutron, hard x-ray, and gamma backgrounds, neutron induced signals in coaxial cables, and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated signals. Recent results of different background measurements on OMEGA laser facility will be reported. Based on these results, specific design concepts have been identified to mitigate much of the radiation and EMP-induced backgrounds. An overview of the background mitigation techniques in the NIF nuclear diagnostics conceptual designs will be presented.

'Puff and pump' radiating divertor scenarios [1,2] were applied to upper SN and DN H-mode plasmas. Under similar operating conditions, argon (Ar) accumulated in the main plasma of single-null (SN) plasmas more rapidly and reached a higher steady-state concentration when the B x {del}B ion drift direction was toward the divertor than when the B x {del}B ion drift direction was out of the divertor. The initial rate that Ar accumulated inside double-null (DN) plasmas was more than twice that of comparably-prepared SNs with the same B x {del}B direction. One way to reduce power loading at the divertor targets is to 'seed' the divertor plasma with impurities that radiatively reduce the conducted power. Studies have shown that the concentration of impurities in the divertor are increased by raising the flow of deuterium ions (D{sup +}) into the divertor by a combination of upstream deuterium gas puffing and active particle exhaust at the divertor targets, i.e., puff-and-pump. An enhanced D{sup +} particle flow toward the divertor targets exerts a frictional drag on impurities, and inhibits their escape from the divertor. A puff-and-pump approach using Ar as the impurity was successfully applied in recent DIII-D experiments to SN plasmas [3] while …

This CRADA was established at the start of FY02 with $200 K from IBM and matching funds from DOE to support post-doctoral fellows in collaborative research between International Business Machines and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to explore effective use of emerging petascale computational architectures for the solution of computational biology problems. 'No cost' extensions of the CRADA were negotiated with IBM for FY03 and FY04.

In this paper, we estimate how quickly and how precisely a reactor's operational status and thermal power can be monitored over hour to month time scales, using the antineutrino rate as measured by a cubic meter scale detector. Our results are obtained from a detector we have deployed and operated at 25 meter standoff from a reactor core. This prototype can detect a prompt reactor shutdown within five hours, and monitor relative thermal power to 3.5% within 7 days. Monitoring of short-term power changes in this way may be useful in the context of International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Reactor Safeguards Regime, or other cooperative monitoring regimes.

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The free energies of reaction and the activation energies are calculated, with DFT (B3PW91) and small RECP (relativistic core potential) for uranium, for the reaction of Cp2UNMe and Cp2UO with MeCCMe and H3Si-Cl that yields the corresponding addition products. CAS(2,7) and DFT calculations on Cp2UO and Cp2UNMe give similar results, which validates the use of DFT calculations in these cases. The calculated results mirror the experimental reaction of [1,2,4-(CMe3)3C5H2]2UNMe with dimethylacetylene and [1,2,4-(CMe3)3C5H2]2UO with Me3SiCl. The net reactions are controlled by the change in free energy between the products and reactants, not by the activation energies, and therefore by the nature of the UO and UNMe bonds in the initial and final states. A NBO analysis indicates that the U-O interaction in Cp2UO is composed of a single U-O bond with three lone pairs of electrons localized on oxygen, leading to a polarized U-O fragment. In contrast, the U-NMe interaction in Cp2UNMe is composed of a and component and a lone pairof electrons localized on the nitrogen, resulting in a less polarized UNMe fragment, in accord with the lower electronegativity of NMe relative to O. The strongly polarized U(+)-O(-) bond is calculated to be about 70 kcal mol-1 stronger than …

The Sayers and Kachanov (1991) crack-influence parametersare shown to be directly related to Thomsen (1986) weak-anisotropyseismic parameters for fractured reservoirs when the crack density issmall enough. These results are then applied to seismic wave propagationin reservoirs having HTI symmetry due to aligned vertical fractures. Theapproach suggests a method of inverting for fracture density from wavespeed data.

In recent years, LLNL has developed methods for diagnosing significant quantities of special nuclear material (SNM). Homeland security problems have recently focused our attention on detection of shielded highly enriched uranium (HEU), which is a weak signal problem. Current and advanced safeguards applications will require working in the opposite extreme of strong but buried signals. We will review some of the technologies that have been developed at LLNL for homeland security applications and discuss how they might be used in support of international safeguards.

Ultrashort pulsed lasers can accurately ablate materials which are refractory, transparent, or are otherwise difficult to machine by other methods. The typical method of machining surfaces with ultrashort laser pulses is by raster scanning, or the machining of sequentially overlapping linear trenches. Experiments in which linear trenches were machined in alumina at various pulse overlaps and incident fluences are presented, and the dependence of groove depth on these parameters established. A model for the machining of trenches based on experimental data in alumina is presented, which predicts and matches observed trench geometry. This model is then used to predict optimal process parameters for the machining of trenches for maximal material removal rate for a given laser.

The extension to recursion over holes of the Gilleron and Pain method for calculating partition functions of a canonical ensemble of non-interacting bound electrons is presented as well as a generalization for the efficient computation of collisional line broadening.

High performance plasmas, including both hybrid and advanced tokamak (AT) bench-mark discharges, were shown to be highly repeatable in DIII-D over 6000 plasma-seconds of operation during the 2006 campaign with no intervening boron depositions or high temperature bakes. Hybrid and AT discharges with identical control targets were repeated after the initial boronization at the beginning of the 2006 campaign, and again just before and after a second boronization near the end of the 2006 campaign. After a long entry vent between the 2006 and 2007 campaigns, similar discharges were again repeated after the standard high temperature baking and plasma cleanup, but prior to a boronization. Performance metrics, such as {beta}, confinement quality, and density control, were extremely well repeated. A low performance daily reference shot (DRS) was also established as a routine monitor of impurity influx. Over the 2006 campaign, the DRS database indicated little to no secular increase in impurity content. Oxygen content and Ni line emission were higher after the intervening vent, but were still minor contributors to plasma contamination. This indicates that erosion of boron films used for wall conditioning will not be a limitation to establishing long pulse high performance discharges in the new generation of …

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Magnetic data storage technology is presently leading the high tech industry in advancing device integration--doubling the storage density every 12 months. To continue these advancements and to achieve terra bit per inch squared recording densities, new approaches to store and access data will be needed in about 3-5 years. In this project, collaboration between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Center for Materials for Information Technology (MINT) at University of Alabama (UA), Imago Scientific Instruments, and Seagate Technologies, was undertaken to address the fundamental scientific problems confronted by the industry in meeting the upcoming challenges. The areas that were the focus of this study were to: (1) develop atom probe tomography for atomic scale imaging of magnetic heterostructures used in magnetic data storage technology; (2) develop a first principles based tools for the study of exchange bias aimed at finding new anti-ferromagnetic materials to reduce the thickness of the pinning layer in the read head; (3) develop high moment magnetic materials and tools to study magnetic switching in nanostructures aimed at developing improved writers of high anisotropy magnetic storage media.

Emulsions appear in many subsurface applications includingbioremediation, surfactant-enhanced remediation, and enhancedoil-recovery. Modeling emulsion transport in porous media is particularlychallenging because the rheological and physical properties of emulsionsare different from averages of the components. Current modelingapproaches are based on filtration theories, which are not suited toadequately address the pore-scale permeability fluctuations and reductionof absolute permeability that are often encountered during emulsiontransport. In this communication, we introduce a continuous time randomwalk based alternative approach that captures these unique features ofemulsion transport. Calculations based on the proposed approach resultedin excellent match with experimental observations of emulsionbreakthrough from the literature. Specifically, the new approach explainsthe slow late-time tailing behavior that could not be fitted using thestandard approach. The theory presented in this paper also provides animportant stepping stone toward a generalizedself-consistent modeling ofmultiphase flow.

Fast shutdown of discharges using massive gas injection (MGI) is a promising technique for reducing tokamak wall damage during disruptions [1]. An outstanding concern, however, is the generation of runaway electrons (RE) during the shutdown. Although RE formation observed during MGI in present-day experiments is quite small (typically <1% of the main plasma current I{sub p} in DIII-D), it is thought that even this small RE current could be amplified to significant levels in reactor-scale tokamaks such as ITER [2]. It is expected that complete collisional suppression of any potential RE amplification during the CQ can be achieved for suppression parameters {gamma}{sub crit} {triple_bond} E{sub crit}/E{sub {psi}} > 1, where E{sub crit} = [2{pi}e{sup 3}ln{Lambda}(2n{sub e} + n{sub B})]/mc{sup 2} is the critical electric field [2] and E{sub {psi}} {approx} -[({mu}{sub 0}l{sub i})/4{pi}][-({partial_derivative}I{sub p}/{partial_derivative}t)+ {alpha}{sub L}(I{sub W}/{tau}{sub W})] is the toroidal electric field resulting from the decay of the plasma current I{sub p}. n{sub e} is the free electron density, n{sub B} is the bound electron density, {alpha}{sub L} {approx} 2[ln(8R/r{sub w})-2]/l{sub i} is the ratio of external (outside conducting wall) to internal (inside conducting wall) self-inductance, I{sub w} is the wall current, and {tau}{sub w} is the wall time. …

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During the 2005 hurricane season, gasoline prices rose sharply, both in directly affected areas and elsewhere in the country, and attention turned to the causes underlying these sharp increases. Although gasoline prices have fluctuated since then, Congres continues to consider legislation on fuel pricing, including provisions addressing price gouging. In the 110th Congress, bills have been introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives that would adopt federal provisions on price gouging of gasoline and other fuels.

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We derive estimates of the Babuska-Brezzi inf-sup constant {beta} for two-dimensional incompressible flow in a periodic channel with one flat boundary and the other given by a periodic, Lipschitz continuous function h. If h is a constant function (so the domain is rectangular), we show that periodicity in one direction but not the other leads to an interesting connection between {beta} and the unitary operator mapping the Fourier sine coefficients of a function to its Fourier cosine coefficients. We exploit this connection to determine the dependence of {beta} on the aspect ratio of the rectangle. We then show how to transfer this result to the case that h is C{sup 1,1} or even C{sup 0,1} by a change of variables. We avoid non-constructive theorems of functional analysis in order to explicitly exhibit the dependence of {beta} on features of the geometry such as the aspect ratio, the maximum slope, and the minimum gap thickness (if h passes near the substrate). We give an example to show that our estimates are optimal in their dependence on the minimum gap thickness in the C{sup 1,1} case, and nearly optimal in the Lipschitz case.