The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) manages the 717 units in the National Wildlife Refuge System. The system includes 500 national wildlife refuges, 166 waterfowl production areas, and 51 wildlife coordination areas.

The Department of Defense (DOD) operates six environmental programs that address cleanup of past contamination at military facilities, compliance with environmental laws and regulations that apply to current activities, cleanup at military bases being closed, pollution prevention, natural resource conservation, and environmental technology. In addition, the Department of Energy (DOE) is responsible for managing defense nuclear waste generated from the past production of atomic materials used to construct nuclear weapons and for remediating contaminated sites. For FY1999, the Administration has requested a total of $10. 14 billion for DOD and DOE's defense-related environmental activities, which represents about 3.7% of the total request of $271.6 billion for national defense and is roughly 1.6% below the FY1998 funding level of $l0.30 billion.

The growing U.S. trade imbalance with China, and alleged Chinese unfair trade practices, have become of major concern to many U.S. policymakers. Over the past few years, the U.S. trade deficit with China has grown at a faster rate than that of any other major U.S. trading partner. In 1993, the U.S. trade deficit with China totalled $22.8 billion, the second largest U.S. bilateral trade imbalance after Japan. Many trade analysts have attributed the growing U.S.-China trade deficit to a variety of Chinese restrictive trade practices. Other areas of concern to the United States have included China's alleged violation of U.S. intellectual property rights, transshipments of textiles to the United States in violation of U.S. textile quotas, and China's alleged use of forced labor for products exported to the United States.

On May 19, 1994, the Senate passed, by a vote of 95 to 3, S. 2019, the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1994, a comprehensive proposal to reauthorize and amend the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). During floor debate on the bill, the Senate considered numerous amendments, many of which were adopted. This report summarizes selected provisions of S. 2019, as passed.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

Letter opinion 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, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether committee chairs or committee members of the Texas Physical Therapy Association may be members of the Texas Board of Physical Examiners (RQ-1110)

Letter opinion 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, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a member of the Texas Board of Physical Therapy Examiners may simultaneously hold the office of county clerk (RQ-1094)

Letter opinion 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, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Effective date of amendments to subchapter T, chapter 65, title 31, Texas Administrative Code (RQ-1097)

Letter opinion 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, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether county tax assessor's filing for school board trustee effects an automatic resignation from the tax assessor's office, and related question (ID# 26736)

Letter opinion 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, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Authority of a county treasurer to pay for an autopsy performed, at the request of a justice of the peace of the county, on the body of a person killed in a traffice accident in a neighboring county (ID# 25244)

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO updated its previous report on United Nations (U.N.) financial issues and U.S. arrears, focusing on: (1) the amount the United States will need to pay before the end of 1999 to avoid losing its right to vote in the U.N. General Assembly; (2) the trend in U.S. assessed contributions and arrears that has led to the current situation; (3) U.S. arrears and the amounts withheld for legislative and policy reasons; and (4) the status of member states that lost their right to vote in the General Assembly at the beginning of 1999."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Education's method of calculating a school's student loan default rate, focusing on: (1) whether there has been an increase in the number of borrowers who entered repayment but subsequently received deferments or forbearances; (2) what effect would excluding borrowers whose loans were in deferment or forbearance have on the most recent default rate calculation; and (3) whether additional schools would have exceeded the 25-percent default rate threshold under the alternative method of calculating the default rate."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on: (1) how changes in the way airlines sell tickets affected travel agencies and consumers; (2) airlines' policies and practices for the sale and use of airline tickets sold by travel agencies compared with the sale and use of tickets sold directly by airlines; (3) what airlines' policies and practices are for making their airfares, particularly discount fares, accessible to travel agencies and consumers; and (4) what airlines' policies and practices are regarding the use of data on travel agency sales."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the: (1) Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA) outreach and testing efforts for ensuring that Medicare providers will be year 2000 compliant; and (2) surveys that have been completed to date or planned on the year 2000 status of healthcare providers."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO: (1) identified census tracts in medium-sized to large cities that met specific poverty criteria; and (2) provided additional information on each census tract."

We have explored the major technical and conceptual issues relating to the suitability of a diode-pumped solid state laser as a driver for an inertial fusion energy power plant. While solid state lasers have long served as the workhorse of inertial confinement fusion physics studies, the deployment of a driver possessing adequate efficiency, reliability, and repetition rate for inertial fusion energy requires the implementation of several technical innovations discussed in this article.

This is the first quarterly technical progress report for the project. Although the contract was awarded on March 30, 1995 and Pre-Award Approval was given on January 26, 1995, the partners of this project initiated work on October 1, 1994. As such, this progress report summarizes the work performed from project inception. The production and injection data, reservoir engineering data, and digitized and normalized log data were all completed sufficiently by the end of the quarter to start work on the basic reservoir engineering and geologic stochastic models. Basic reservoir engineering analysis began June 1 and will continue to March, 1996. Design work for the 5 observation/core holes, oil finger printing of the cored oil sands, and tracers surveys began in January, 1995. The wells will be drilled from July--August, 1995 and tracer injection work is projected to start in October, 1995. A preliminary deterministic 3-D geologic model was completed in June which is sufficient to start work on the stochastic 3-D geologic model. The four proposed horizontal wells (two injectors and two producers) have been designed, equipment has been ordered, and the wells will be drilled from mid-August through September. Four existing steam injection wells were converted to hot …

The Tasks of this project are to: (1) complete implementation of a Risk Based Data Management System (RBDMS) in the States of Alaska, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska; and (2) conduct Area of Review (AOR) Workshops in the states of California, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. The RBDMS was designed to be a comprehensive database with the ability to expand into multiple areas, including oil and gas production. The database includes comprehensive well information for both producing and injection wells. It includes automated features for performing functions redated to AOR analyses, environmental risk analyses, well evaluation, permit evaluation, compliance monitoring, operator bonding assessments, operational monitoring and tracking, and more. This quarterly report describes the status of the development of the RBDMS project in both stated tasks and proposes further steps in its implementation.

In our application, dichroics in a high average power, near-infrared, laser system have short operating lifetimes. These dichroics were used as the resonator fold mirrors and permitted the transmission of the pumping argon (Ar) ion laser light. Representative samples of two different dichroic optics were taken off-line and the transmission performance monitored in various scenarios. Irradiating these optics under resonator vacuum conditions, ({le}1 mT, 11.7 kW/cm{sup 2}, Ar laser running all wavelengths) resulted in a degradation of transmission with time. Irradiating these optics in a rarefied oxygen atmosphere (1 to 10 T of oxygen, 11.7 kW/cm{sup 2}, Ar laser running all wavelengths) the transmission remained steady over a period of days. The transmission loss observed in the optic tested in vacuum was somewhat reversible if the optic was subsequently irradiated in a rarefied oxygen atmosphere. This reversibility was only possible if the transmission degradation was not too severe. Further tests demonstrated that an atmosphere of 10 T of air also prevented the transmission degradation. In addition, tests were performed to demonstrate that the optic damage was not caused by the ultra-violet component in the Ar ion laser. Mechanisms that may account for this behavior are proposed.

The objective of this project is to develop a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and quantitative characterization of a fluvial-deltaic reservoir which will allow realistic inter-well and reservoir-scale modeling to be constructed for improved oil-field development in similar reservoirs world-wide. The geological and petrophysical properties of the Cretaceous Ferron Sandstone in east-central Utah will be quantitatively determined. Both new and existing data will be integrated into a three-dimensional representation of spatial variations in porosity, storativity, and tensorial rock permeability at a scale appropriate for inter-well to regional-scale reservoir simulation. Results could improve reservoir management through proper infill and extension drilling strategies, reduction of economic risks, increased recovery from existing oil fields, and more reliable reserve calculations. Technical progress this quarter is divided into regional stratigraphy, case studies, stochastic modeling and fluid-flow simulation, and technology transfer activities. The regional stratigraphy of the Ferron Sandstone outcrop belt from Last Chance Creek to Ferron Creek is being described and interpreted. Photomosaics and a database of existing surface and subsurface data are being used to determine the extent and depositional environment of each parasequence, and the nature of the contacts with adjacent rocks or flow units. For the second field season, detailed geological and petrophysical characterization of …

The TREAT Facility was designed and built in the late 1950s at Argonne National Laboratory to provide a transient reactor for safety experiments on samples of reactor fuels. It first operated in 1959. Throughout its history, experiments conducted in TREAT have been important in establishing the behavior of a wide variety of reactor fuel elements under conditions predicted to occur in reactor accidents ranging from mild off normal transients to hypothetical core disruptive accidents. For much of its history, TREAT was used primarily to test liquid-metal reactor fuel elements, initially for the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II), then for the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF), the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Plant (CRBRP), the British Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR), and finally, for the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). Both oxide and metal elements were tested in dry capsules and in flowing sodium loops. The data obtained were instrumental in establishing the behavior of the fuel under off-normal and accident conditions, a necessary part of the safety analysis of the various reactors. In addition, TREAT was used to test light-water reactor (LWR) elements in a steam environment to obtain fission-product release data under meltdown conditions. Studies are now under way on applications of TREAT …

An investigation of the rapid rise time of x-ray emission from targets heated by an ultrashort-pulse high-intensity optical laser was conducted for use as a pump for inner-shell photo-ionized x-ray lasing. Results of x-ray rise times from instantaneously heated Au rod targets show little benefit for using optical pulse widths less than 30 fs. Gain calculations for inner-shell photo-ionized lasing show that large gains can be obtained for pulse widths between 30 and 100 fs. Calculated spectra, using the hydrodynamic/atomic kinetics code LASNEX, from a 1 J, 65 fs FWHM pulse optical laser incident on a structured Au target gave a gain of 1 1.5 cm{sup {minus}1} in C at 45 {angstrom}.

The seismic structure of North Africa is poorly understood due to the relative paucity of stations and seismicity when compared to other continental regions of the world. A better understanding of the velocity structure in this area will allow improved models of travel times and regional phase amplitudes. Such models will improve location and identification capability in this region leading to more effective monitoring of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Using regional-to-teleseismic Rayleigh and Love waves that traverse the area we can obtain information about the region's seismic structure by examining phase velocity as a function of period. We utilize earthquakes from the tectonically active regions bounding North Africa (Mediterranean, Red Sea, East African Rift, and Mid-Atlantic Ridge) recorded at broadband seismic stations distributed throughout the region. A two-station method is utilized to determine phase velocity information along the interstation segment of the ray path. The two-station method provides particular advantage in this region as it dramatically increases the number of events available to provide pure North African sampling. Bandpass filters are applied to the seismograms so that peaks and troughs may be correlated. The phase is unwrapped and a difference curve computed. The difference curve is then converted to a …