This report examines Treasury's debt management practices, focusing on the auction process, how prices and interest rates of securities are determined, and the role of market participants in the process. It also addresses the role of debt plays in influencing present and future budget outcomes.

This report provides background information and issues for Congress on the John Lewis (TAO-205) class oiler shipbuilding program, a program to build a new class of 17 fleet oilers for the Navy.

This report presents a fact sheet that summarizes selected highlights of the military construction and military family housing portions of the FY2017 Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act.

Rev 1 of this report provides corrections and clarifications in response to reviewer comments arising during a project review meeting held June 7-8, 2007.

This report (Rev 1) incorporates corrections and clarifications regarding the interpretation of solutions in BNL (1995) per reviewer comments from a June 7-8, 2007 review meeting. The review comments affect Appendixes C and D of this report - the body of the report is unchanged.

A resume of Health Physics activities for April, May, and June, 1959 is presented. Discussions and tabulations which summarize results of field surveys, biooassy, personnel monitoring, and environmental surveys are included. The thorium redrumming program reactivated for the summer. Work is in progress to move th "HH" Building process to the "T" Building. The ventilation system for the Hot Gas Facility was extended to handle the ventilation requirements for tthe R-108 Surveillance facility. "Hot" work in R-108 began in June. During this quarter "hot" work was initiated in the new Plutonium Alloy Research facility. Health Physics design criteria for the proposed Clover facility has been submitted to the Engineeering Department. The installation of the air monitoring systems in the new Cryogenics facility and iin the new Ceramics facility is essentially complete. We have embarked on the program of converting all of our personnel monitoring and survey record keeping systems to the IBM system.

The overall goal of the program is to advance the current state of crystalline silicon solar cell technology to make photovoltaics more competitive with conventional energy sources. This program emphasizes fundamental and applied research that results in low-cost, high-efficiency cells on commercial silicon substrates with strong involvement of the PV industry, and support a very strong photovoltaics education program in the US based on classroom education and hands-on training in the laboratory.

Bayesian networks (BN) are an excellent tool for modeling uncertainties in systems with several interdependent variables. A BN is a directed acyclic graph, and consists of a structure, or the set of directional links between variables that depend on other variables, and conditional probabilities (CP) for each variable. In this project, we apply BN's to understand uncertainties in NIF ignition experiments. One can represent various physical properties of National Ignition Facility (NIF) capsule implosions as variables in a BN. A dataset containing simulations of NIF capsule implosions was provided. The dataset was generated from a radiation hydrodynamics code, and it contained 120 simulations of 16 variables. Relevant knowledge about the physics of NIF capsule implosions and greedy search algorithms were used to search for hypothetical structures for a BN. Our preliminary results found 6 links between variables in the dataset. However, we thought there should have been more links between the dataset variables based on the physics of NIF capsule implosions. Important reasons for the paucity of links are the relatively small size of the dataset, and the sampling of the values for dataset variables. Another factor that might have caused the paucity of links is the fact that in …

This project was developed to conduct research to improve the efficacy of captive broodstock programs and advance hatchery reform throughout the Columbia River Basin. The project has three objectives: (1) maintain adaptive life history characteristics in Chinook salmon, (2) improve imprinting in juvenile sockeye salmon, and (3) match wild phenotypes in Chinook and sockeye salmon reared in hatcheries. A summary of the results are as follows: Objective 1: The ratio of jack to adult male Chinook salmon were varied in experimental breeding populations to test the hypothesis that reproductive success of the two male phenotypes would vary with their relative frequency in the population. Adult Chinook salmon males nearly always obtained primary access to nesting females and were first to enter the nest at the time of spawning. Jack male spawning occurred primarily by establishing satellite positions downstream of the courting pair, and 'sneaking' into the nest at the time of spawning. Male dominance hierarchies were fairly stable and strongly correlated with the order of nest entry at the time of spawning. Observed participation in spawning events and adult-to-fry reproductive success of jack and adult males was consistent with a negative frequency-dependent selection model. Overall, jack males sired an average …

This report talks about the aircraft configuration

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The proposed straw separation system developed in the research project harvests the large internode sections of the straw which has the greater potential as a feedstock for lignocellulosic ethanol production while leaving the chaff and nodes in the field. This strategy ensures sustainable agriculture by preventing the depletion of soil minerals, and it restores organic matter to the soil in amounts and particle sizes that accommodate farmers’ needs to keep tillage and fertilizer costs low. A ton of these nutrient-rich plant tissues contains as much as $10.55 worth of fertilizer (economic and energy benefits), in terms of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other nutrients provided to the soil when incorporated by tillage instead of being burned. Biomass conversion to fermentable sugars for the purpose of producing fuels, chemicals, and other industrial products is well understood. Most bioenergy strategies rely on low-cost fermentable sugars for sustainability and economic viability in the marketplace. Exploitation of the “whole crop”—specifically, wheat straw or other plant material currently regarded as residue or waste—is a practical approach for obtaining a reliable and low-cost source of sugars. However, industrial-scale production of sugars from wheat straw, while technically feasible, is plagued by obstacles related to capital costs, energy consumption, …

Department of Energy EPSCoR The University of Mississippi Award: DE-FG02-04ER46121 Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy Studies of Complex Transition Metal Oxides The central thrust of this DOE funded research program has been to apply resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS), an elegant and efficient method for determining the elastic stiffness constants of a crystal, to the complex and poorly understood class of materials known as transition metal oxides (TMOs). Perhaps the most interesting and challenging feature of TMOs is their strongly correlated behavior in which spin, lattice, and charge degrees of freedom are strongly coupled. Elastic constants are a measure of the interatomic potentials in a crystal and are thus sensitive probes into the atomic environment. This sensitivity makes RUS an ideal tool to study the coupling of phase transition order parameters to lattice strains. The most significant result of the project has been the construction of a high temperature RUS apparatus capable of making elastic constant measurements at temperatures as high as 1000 degrees Celsius. We have designed and built novel acoustic transducers which can operate as high as 600 degrees Celsius based on lithium niobate piezoelectric elements. For measurement between 600 to 1000 C, a buffer rod system is used in which …

The amount of scientific data generated by simulations orcollected from large scale experiments have reached levels that cannot bestored in the researcher's workstation or even in his/her local computercenter. Such data are vital to large scientific collaborations dispersedover wide-area networks. In the past, the concept of a Gridinfrastructure [1]mainly emphasized the computational aspect ofsupporting large distributed computational tasks, and optimizing the useof the network by using bandwidth reservation techniques. In this paperwe discuss the concept of Storage Resource Managers (SRMs) as componentsthat complement this with the support for the storage management of largedistributed datasets. The access to data is becoming the main bottleneckin such "data intensive" applications because the data cannot bereplicated in all sites. SRMs can be used to dynamically optimize the useof storage resource to help unclog this bottleneck.

The monocular passive ranging (MPR) problem in remote sensing consists of identifying the precise range of an airborne target (missile, plane, etc.) from its observed radiance. This inverse problem may be set as a global optimization problem (GOP) whereby the difference between the observed and model predicted radiances is minimized over the possible ranges and atmospheric conditions. Using additional information about the error function between the predicted and observed radiances of the target, we developed GMG, a new algorithm to find the Global Minimum with a Guarantee. The new algorithm transforms the original continuous GOP into a discrete search problem, thereby guaranteeing to find the position of the global minimum in a reasonably short time. The algorithm is first applied to the golf course problem, which serves as a litmus test for its performance in the presence of both complete and degraded additional information. GMG is further assessed on a set of standard benchmark functions and then applied to various realizations of the MPR problem.

In this report we investigate order, stability, and phase transformations for a series of actinide-based alloys. The statics and kinetics of precipitation and ordering in this class of alloys are modeled with a scheme that couples fundamental information on the alloy energetics obtained from experimental and assessed thermo-chemical data to the CALPHAD approach commonly used in industry for designing alloys with engineering specificity with the help of the Thermo-Calc software application. The CALPHAD approach is applied to the study of the equilibrium thermodynamic properties of Pu-based alloys, Pu-X, where X=Al, Fe, Ga. The assessment of the equilibrium phase diagrams in the whole range of alloy composition has been performed with the PARROT module of the Thermo-Calc application software. Predictions are made on the low temperature and Pu-rich side of the phase diagrams of Pu-Ga and Pu-Al for which controversy has been noted in the past. The validity of the assessed thermo-chemical database will be discussed by comparing predicted heats of transformation for pure Pu with measured values from differential scanning calorimetry analysis. An overall picture for the stability properties of Pu-Ga and Pu-Al that reconciles the results of past studies carried out on these alloys is proposed. Results on phase …

The objective of this task is to identify potential waste streams that could be treated with the Small Column Ion Exchange (SCIX) and perform an initial assessment of the impact of doing so on the High-Level Waste (HLW) system. Design of the SCIX system has been performed as a backup technology for decontamination of High-Level Waste (HLW) at the Savannah River Site (SRS). The SCIX consists of three modules which can be placed in risers inside underground HLW storage tanks. The pump and filter module and the ion exchange module are used to filter and decontaminate the aqueous tank wastes for disposition in Saltstone. The ion exchange module contains Crystalline Silicotitanate (CST in its engineered granular form is referred to as IONSIV{reg_sign} IE-911), and is selective for removal of cesium ions. After the IE-911 is loaded with Cs-137, it is removed and the column is refilled with a fresh batch. The grinder module is used to size-reduce the cesium-loaded IE-911 to make it compatible with the sludge vitrification system in the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF). If installed at the SRS, this SCIX would need to operate within the current constraints of the larger HLW storage, retrieval, treatment, and disposal …

In this paper we revisit the topological twisted sigma model with H-flux. We explicitly expand and then twist the worldsheet Lagrangian for bi-Hermitian geometry. we show that the resulting action consists of a BRST exact term and pullback terms, which only depend on one of the two generalized complex structures and the B-field. We then discuss the topological feature of the model.

In a discovery sampling activity the auditor seeks to vet an inventory by measuring (or inspecting) a random sample of items from the inventory. When the auditor finds every sample item in compliance, he must then make a confidence statement about the whole inventory. For example, the auditor might say: ''We believe that this inventory of 100 items contains no more than 5 defectives with 95% confidence.'' Note this is a retrospective statement in that it asserts something about the inventory after the sample was selected and measured. Contrast this to the prospective statement: ''We will detect the existence of more than 5 defective items in this inventory with 95% probability.'' The former uses confidence probability while the latter uses detection probability. For a given sample size, the two probabilities need not be equal, indeed they could differ significantly. Both these probabilities critically depend on the auditor's prior belief about the number of defectives in the inventory and how he defines non-compliance. In other words, the answer strongly depends on how the question is framed.

Discovery sampling is a tool used in a discovery auditing. The purpose of such an audit is to provide evidence that some (usually large) inventory of items complies with a defined set of criteria by inspecting (or measuring) a representative sample drawn from the inventory. If any of the items in the sample fail compliance (defective items), then the audit has discovered an impropriety, which often triggers some action. However finding defective items in a sample is an unusual event--auditors expect the inventory to be in compliance because they come to the audit with an ''innocent until proven guilty attitude''. As part of their work product, the auditors must provide a confidence statement about compliance level of the inventory. Clearly the more items they inspect, the greater their confidence, but more inspection means more cost. Audit costs can be purely economic, but in some cases, the cost is political because more inspection means more intrusion, which communicates an attitude of distrust. Thus, auditors have every incentive to minimize the number of items in the sample. Indeed, in some cases the sample size can be specifically limited by a prior agreement or an ongoing policy. Statements of confidence about the results …

The proposed action of disposing of 52 moderator deionizer vessels within the ILV was evaluated in this SA. In particular, a detailed analysis of the release of {sup 14}C via the atmospheric pathway was conducted for these vessels since the major concern has been the nearly 20 Ci of {sup 14}C that is associated with each vessel. The more rigorous evaluation of the atmospheric pathway for {sup 14}C included incorporation of new information about the chemical availability of {sup 14}C when disposed in a grout/cement encapsulation environment, as will be the case in the ILV. This information was utilized to establish the source term for a 1-D numerical model to simulate the diffusion of {sup 14}CO{sub 2} from the ILV Waste Zone to the land surface. The results indicate a peak surface emanation rate from the entire ILV of 1.42E-08 Ci/yr with an associated dose of only 3.83E-05 mrem/yr to the Maximally Exposed Individual (MEI) at 100m. The fact that the atmospheric pathway exposure for {sup 14}C is controlled by chemical solubility limits for {sup 14}C between the solid waste, pore water and pore vapor within the disposal environment rather than the absolute inventory suggests that the establishment of specific …

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The potentiometric behavior of zirconium in fluoride, nitrate, and fluoride-nitrate systems is correlated and discussed in terms of the zirconium species present. A potentiometric titration was used successfully for the determination of total nitrate and zirconium in aqueous or organic (tributyl phosphate) zirconium-nitrate systems. (auth)