A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Over 25 million children have health insurance coverage through Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Coverage alone, however, does not guarantee that services will be available or that children will receive needed care. GAO was asked to evaluate states' efforts to facilitate and monitor access to primary and preventive services for children in these jointly funded federal-state programs. The study surveyed 16 states, covering over 65 percent of the Medicaid and SCHIP population. GAO analyzed requirements relevant to managed care and fee-for-service (FFS) delivery systems, including the number and location of physicians and their availability to see beneficiaries, monitoring of health plan or physician compliance with these requirements, and collection and analysis of beneficiary service utilization data."

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

This report discusses the energy policy. Comprehensive energy legislation was introduced in the Senate by both parties by late March (S. 388, S. 389, S. 596, S. 597).

Dependable, plentiful, and economical energy has been the driving force for financial, industrial, and political growth in the US since the mid 19th century. For a country whose progress is so deeply rooted in abundant energy and whose current political agenda involves stabilizing world fossil fuel prices, the development of a reliable, efficient and environmentally friendly power generating source seems compulsory. The maturing of high technology fuel cells may be the panacea the country will find indispensable to free itself from foreign dependence. Fuel cells offer an efficient, combustion-less, virtually pollution-free power source, capable of being sited in downtown urban areas or in remote regions. Fuel cells have few moving parts and run almost silently. Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that convert the chemical energy of a fuel directly to electrical energy. Unlike batteries, which store a finite amount of energy, fuel cells will generate electricity continuously, as long as fuel and oxidant are available to the electrodes. Additionally, fuel cells offer clean, efficient, and reliable power and they can be operated using a variety of fuels. Hence, the fuel cell is an extremely promising technology. Over the course of this research, the fundamental knowledge related to ceramic processing, sintering, …

Energy use and environmental parameters were monitored in two small (14.9 m{sup 2}) non-residential buildings during the summer of 2000. The buildings were initially monitored for about 1 1/2 months to establish a base condition. The roofs of the buildings were then painted with a white coating and the monitoring was continued. The original solar reflectivities of the roofs were about 26%; after the application of roof coatings the reflectivities increased to about 72%. The monitored electricity savings were about 0.5kWh per day (33 Wh/m2 per day). The estimated annual savings are about 125kWh per year (8.4 kWh/m2); at a cost of $0.1/kWh, savings are about $0.86/m2 per year. Obviously, it costs significantly more than this amount to coat the roofs with reflective coating, particularly because of the remote locations of these buildings. However, since the prefabricated roofs are already painted green at the factory, painting them a white (reflective) color would bring no additional cost. Hence, a reflective roof saves energy at no incremental cost.

Weekly newspaper from Emory, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

None

None

While microwave reflectometry has proven to be a sensitive tool for measuring electron density fluctuations in many circumstances, it has also been shown to have limited viability for core measurements and/or conditions of strong turbulence. To this end, a new instrument based on 2-D imaging reflectometry has been developed to measure density fluctuations over an extended plasma region in the TEXTOR tokamak. Laboratory characterization of this instrument has been performed using corrugated reflecting targets as an approximation to plasma reflections including 2-D turbulent fluctuations of various magnitude and poloidal wavenumber. Within this approximation, the imaging reflectometer can recover the spectral and spatial characteristics of the reflection layer lost to or otherwise inaccessible to conventional techniques.

In 1997, the Savannah River Site completed toxicity testing studies on an alternate species, Daphnia ambigua, that we have proposed for use as a toxicity testing organism at SRS. We demonstrated that this species could be cultured in the laboratory and that it was at least as sensitive as Ceriodaphnia dubia to a broad range of toxicants (Specht and Harmon, 1997; Harmon, 1998; Harmon and Specht, 1998; Harmon, Specht and Chandler, 1999). However, it performed better that C. dubia in very soft water, which is representative of many SRS effluents and receiving waters. In January 2000, representatives from SRS met with representatives from U.S. EPA Region 4 and SCDHEC to discuss data needs related to EPA's consideration of SRS's request to use the alternate species (D. ambigua) for routine toxicity testing at SRS. SRS contends that the very low water hardness of some of its effluents is responsible for toxicity failures because the species recommended by the EPA (C. dubia) does not reproduce well in waters that have very low hardness.

Groundwater in D-Area at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE) and by-products resulting from discharges of this organic solvent during past operations. Several potential clean-up strategies are being or have been investigated, including a novel drip irrigation-phytoremediation process that is the focus of the treatability study described in this report. The contaminated groundwater in D-Area occurs primarily at depths of 30 to 50 feet below ground surface, well below the depths that are typically penetrated by plant roots. The system investigated in this study involved pumping water from the contaminated aquifer and discharging the water into overlying test plots below the surface using drip irrigation. The test plots contained pines, cottonwoods, or no vegetation (controls). The primary objective was to determine the overall effectiveness of the process for TCE removal and to elucidate the biotic and abiotic pathways for its removal.

The Atmospheric Technologies Group of the Savannah River Technology Center operates an extensive meteorological monitoring network of 13 tower in and near the Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina. The data from this system are available in ''real-time'' for emergency response atmospheric release modeling and operational weather forecasting.

Scanning X-ray Microdiffraction (m-SXRD) combines the use of high brilliance synchrotron sources with the latest achromatic X-ray focusing optics and fast large area 2D-detector technology. Using white beams or a combination of white and monochromatic beams, it allows for orientation and strain/stress mapping of polycrystalline thin films with submicron spatial resolution. The technique is described in detail as applied to the study of thin aluminium and copper blanket films and lines following electromigration testing and/or thermal cycling experiments. It is shown that there are significant orientation and strain/stress variations between grains and inside individual grains. A polycrystalline film when investigated at the granular (micron) level shows a highly mechanically inhomogeneous medium that allows insight into its mesoscopic properties. If the m-SXRD data are averaged over a macroscopic range, results show good agreement with direct macroscopic texture and stress measurements .

Roadmapping is a powerful tool to manage technical risks and opportunities associated with complex problems. Roadmapping identifies technical capabilities required for both project- and program-level efforts and provides the basis for plans that ensure the necessary enabling activities will be done when needed. Roadmapping reveals where to focus further development of the path forward by evaluating uncertainties for levels of complexity, impacts, and/or the potential for large payback. Roadmaps can be customized to the application, a ''graded approach'' if you will. Some roadmaps are less detailed. We have called these less detailed, top-level roadmaps ''mini-roadmaps''. These mini roadmaps are created to tie the needed enablers (e.g., technologies, decisions, etc.) to the functions. If it is found during the mini-roadmapping that areas of significant risk exist, then those can be roadmapped further to a lower level of detail. Otherwise, the mini-roadmap may be sufficient to manage the project/program risk. Applying a graded approach to the roadmapping can help keep the costs down. Experience has indicated that it is best to do mini-roadmapping first and then evaluate the risky areas to determine whether to further evaluate those areas. Roadmapping can be especially useful for programs/projects that have participants from multiple sites, programs, …

A high-resolution X-ray crystal spectrometer has recently been installed at the National Spherical Torus Experiment to record the satellite spectra of helium-like argon, ArXVII, in the wavelength range from 3.94 to 4.00 {angstrom} for measurements of ion and electron temperatures, and measurements of the ionization equilibrium of argon, which is of interest for studies of ion transport. The instrument presently consists of a spherically bent quartz crystal and a conventional one-dimensional position-sensitive multi-wire proportional counter, but it will soon be upgraded to a new type of X-ray imaging crystal spectrometer by the installation of a large size (10 cm x 30 cm) two-dimensional position-sensitive detector that will allow us to obtain temporally and spatially resolved spectra from an 80 cm high cross-section of the plasma. In its present configuration, the spectrometer has been optimized for high throughput so that it is possible to record spectra with small statistical errors with a time resolution of 10 ms by adding only small, nonperturbing amounts of argon to the plasma. The spectrometer is most valuable for measurements of the ion temperature in the absence of a neutral beam in ohmically heated and radio-frequency heated discharges, when charge exchange recombination spectroscopy does not function. …

Profiling instruments are well-suited to the measurement of grazing incidence optics, such as those found in synchrotron radiation beam lines. Slope measuring profilers, based upon the principle of the pencil beam interferometer, have proven to be especially useful in measuring the figure and slope errors on cylindrical aspheres. The Long Trace Profiler, in various configurations, is the most widely used of this class of profiler. Current performance provides slope measurement accuracy at the microradian level and height measurements accurate to 25 nm over 1 meter trace lengths.

An Acceptable Knowledge (AK)-based radiological characterization methodology is being developed for RH TRU waste generated from ANL-E hot cell operations performed on fuel elements irradiated in the EBR-II reactor. The methodology relies on AK for composition of the fresh fuel elements, their irradiation history, and the waste generation and collection processes. Radiological characterization of the waste involves the estimates of the quantities of significant fission products and transuranic isotopes in the waste. Methods based on reactor and physics principles are used to achieve these estimates. Because of the availability of AK and the robustness of the calculation methods, the AK-based characterization methodology offers a superior alternative to traditional waste assay techniques. Using the methodology, it is shown that the radiological parameters of a test batch of ANL-E waste is well within the proposed WIPP Waste Acceptance Criteria limits.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Phase change of pore fluid (boiling/condensing) in rock cores under conditions representative of geothermal reservoirs results in alterations of the electrical resistivity of the samples. In fractured samples, phase change can result in resistivity changes that are more than an order of magnitude greater than those measured in intact samples. These results suggest that electrical resistivity monitoring may provide a useful tool for monitoring the movement of water and steam within fractured geothermal reservoirs. We measured the electrical resistivity of cores of welded tuff containing fractures of various geometries to investigate the resistivity contrast caused by active boiling and to determine the effects of variable fracture dimensions and surface area on water extraction. We then used the Nonisothermal Unsaturated Flow and Transport model (NUFT) (Nitao, 1998) to simulate the propagation of boiling fronts through the samples. The simulated saturation profiles combined with previously reported measurements of resistivity-saturation curves allow us to estimate the evolution of the sample resistivity as the boiling front propagates into the rock matrix. These simulations provide qualitative agreement with experimental measurements suggesting that our modeling approach may be used to estimate resistivity changes induced by boiling in more complex systems.

This document describes an evaluation of the Level II Milestone achievements of the LLNL program on Grain-Scale Dynamics in Explosives on January 14, 2003. ''The Grain-Scale Dynamics in Explosives Program'' is a mixture of advanced computational methodology and physico-chemical theory applied to understanding deflagration and detonation of plastic-bonded explosives from the nano to the macro scales. At many points, the modeling is tied directly to experiments within the precisions of both. Advances are needed in the experimental, theoretical, and computational aspects of detonations. Work reported in this review represents significant, cross-pollinating advances in each area. The team successfully carried out ALE-3D simulations of deflagration in PBX with grain scale effects. (Milestone requirements 1 and 2), interpreted experimental data on flame speed vs. pressure and sensitivity to global kinetics in terms of ALE-3D simulations (Milestone requirement 3), and used the results of these simulations to develop a continuum reactive flow model that captures some of these effects (Milestone requirement 4). By comparing experiments and detonation velocities in small diameter, unconfined explosives, they found non-idealities that remain at intermediate diameters (ca. 1.5 mm) that require further analysis. In all of these areas, the project team has met, indeed exceeded, their Level II …

None

None

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.