A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Joint Strike Fighter Program (JSFP), the military's most expensive aircraft program, is intended to produce affordable, next-generation aircraft to replace aging aircraft in military inventories. Although JSFP has made good progress in some technology areas, the program may not meet its affordability objective because critical technologies are not projected to be matured to levels GAO believes would indicate a low risk program at the planned start of engineering and manufacturing development in October 2001."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Public assessments by Department of Defense (DOD) officials have emphasized the seriousness of the military threat from chemical and biological (CB) weapons. However, neither DOD nor the services have systematically examined the adequacy of the current specialty mix of medical personnel for CB defense. Although some of the services have begun to review the adequacy of staffing of deployable medical units that would manage the consequences of chemical warfare scenarios, they have not done so for biological warfare scenarios. Joint protocols for treating CB casualties have recently been completed, but the services have not yet agreed on which health care providers should provide treatment. Relatively few military health care providers are trained to a standard of proficiency in providing care to CB casualties. The service surgeons general have begun integrating chemical and a few biological scenarios into their medical exercises, but no realistic field exercise of medical support for CB warfare had been concluded. DOD and the services have not fully addressed weaknesses and gaps in modeling, planning, training, tracking, or proficiency testing for the treatment of CB casualties. The resulting medical structure has not been …

This report is a compilation of 7 studies conducted for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers between 1995 and 1998 which used hydroacoustic methods to study the behavior of migrating salmon in response to navigation channel maintenance activities in the lower Columbia River near river mile 45. Differences between daytime and nighttime behavior and fish densities were noted. Comparisons were made of fish distribution across the river (in the channel, channel margin or near shore) and fish depth upstream and downstream of dikes, dredges, and pile driving areas.

Pennsylvanian-age Morrow reservoirs are a key component of a large fluvial-deltaic system that extends across portions of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. A problem that operators have to solve in some Morrow plays in this multi-state area is that many of the fluvial channels within the Morrow interval are invisible to seismic compressional (P) waves. This P-wave imaging problem forces operators in such situations to site infill, field-extension, and exploration wells without the aid of 3-D seismic technology. The objective of this project was to develop and demonstrate seismic technology that can improve drilling success in Morrow plays. Current P-wave technology commonly results in 80-percent of Morrow exploration wells not penetrating economic reservoir facies. Studies at Colorado School of Mines have shown that some of the Morrow channels that are elusive as P-wave targets create robust shear (S) wave reflections (Rampton, 1995). These findings caused Visos Energy to conclude that exploration and field development of Morrow prospects should be done by a combination of P-wave and S-wave seismic imaging. To obtain expanded information about the P and S reflectivity of Morrow facies, 9-component vertical seismic profile (9-C VSP) data were recorded at three locations along the Morrow trend. These data …

The QUALIT grant funded two broad categories of work: (1) Project-wide QBone engineering, instrumentation, and integration; (2) Focused workshops and measurement work relating specifically to advanced university/DOE connectivity. Significant progress has been made in both areas and, to both, QUALIT funding has been a key enabling resource. This final report summarizes the accomplishments of the QUALIT project and explains changes to the technical focus of the project that, while significant, remained true to the overall project goal: to research, test, and deploy IP layer traffic differentiation to redress congestion-related end-to-end performance problems on key university-DOE lab paths.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This is a follow-on to GAO's report on its audit of the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) fiscal year 2000 financial statements. Many of the issues raised in this report have persisted for years. IRS believes that the solution to many of these issues may lie in systems modernization. IRS plans to implement a new financial system that includes a cost accounting module as well as integrated administrative and custodial general ledgers that are supported by subsidiary ledgers containing the transactional details for key accounts, such as taxes receivable and property and equipment. IRS continues to make progress in addressing its financial management challenges. The strong commitment by IRS senior management to financial management reform has played a crucial role in the agency's progress so far and is critical for future improvements. IRS has developed many workaround processes that allowed it to produce reliable financial statements for fiscal year 2000. However, these processes take considerable time, effort, and expense and do not fix many of the fundamental financial management issues that continue to plague IRS."

In FY00, a matrix for process development testing was created to identify those items related to the ceramic process that had not been fully developed or tested and to help identify variables that needed to be tested. This matrix, NMTP/IP-99-003, was jointly created between LLNL and SRTC and was issued to all affected individuals. The matrix was also used to gauge the progress of the development activities. As part of this matrix, several series of tests were identified for the granulation process. This summary provides the data and results from the granulation testing. The results of the granulation matrix testing were used to identify the baseline process for testing in the PuCTF with cold surrogates in B241 at LLNL.

This report is a compilation of 7 studies conducted for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers between 1995 and 1998 which used hydroacoustic methods to study the behavior of migrating salmon in response to navigation channel maintenance activities in the lower Columbia River near river mile 45. Differences between daytime and nighttime behavior and fish densities were noted. Comparisons were made of fish distribution across the river (in the channel, channel margin or near shore) and fish depth upstream and downstream of dikes, dredges, and pile driving areas.

A series of laser welds have been made on several materials using a Rofin-Sinar DY-033, 3.3 kW, Diode-Pumped Continuous Wave (CW) Nd:YAG laser system, located at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Materials welded in these experiments include 21-6-9 stainless steel, 304L stainless steel, vanadium, and tantalum. The effects of changes in the power input at a constant travel speed on the depth, width, aspect ratio, and total melted area of the welds have been analyzed. Increases in the measured weld pool dimensions as a function of power input are compared for each of the base metals investigated. These results provide a basis for further examining the characteristics of diode pumped CW Nd:YAG laser systems in welding applications.