Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In a fiscal year 1999 accountability report to Congress, the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) made several clerical errors in the accounting of Medicare trust funds, which caused the Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund to be overinvested by about $14 billion and the Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI) Trust Fund to be underinvested by about $18 billion. Because of these errors, the HI Trust Fund earned excess interest and the SMI Trust Fund lost interest. GAO found that these errors went undetected for a year because of internal control weaknesses. Inadequate training and supervision and ineffective reconciliations were key factors that allowed the errors to go undetected. HCFA took corrective action, however, as soon as the errors were discovered."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO worked with the Department of Defense (DOD) to develop and report a reliable estimate for the postemployment health care benefits due to military retirees, their dependents, and survivors. To accomplish this, the DOD Office of Actuary has contracted with a private sector firm of actuaries and consultants, Milliman & Robertson. This report provides a non-technical summary of the contractor's findings and includes GAO's recommendation that the changes discussed in the reports be implemented. GAO found that although the analysis prepared by the Office of Actuary does a good job of identifying the factors that affect the military postretirement health care benefits liability and of evaluating the possible impact of those factors, issues still need to be addressed. An additional break out of information is needed in some areas in order for the Office of Actuary to properly analyze their impact on liability. The methodology used was generally reasonable, but some deficiencies still remained."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report compares the drug prices paid by the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) with the prices paid by the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA). On average, for the sample of drug prices analyzed by GAO, HCFA's prices were higher than those of either DOD or VA."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Concerns have been raised about the Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA) decision to extend a contract with an accounting firm that has been implicated in major fraud. KPMG's contract with HCFA included annual options to extend performance that could be exercised at HCFA's will. Although information on the fraud investigation was available to HCFA staff at various levels, the information was not used to make reasoned contracting decisions. If HCFA had considered the information and documented its decision to extend KPMG's contract, it could have minimized concerns over the appropriateness of its decision."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO audited the financial statements of the District of Columbia's Highway Trust Fund for fiscal years 1999 and 1998. GAO found that the District did not maintain effective internal control over financial reporting related to its Highway Trust Fund as of September 30, 1999. Material weaknesses affected accounting for expenditures and computer system general controls."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report discusses possible money laundering by U.S. corporations formed by Russian entities. It is easy for foreign entities to hide their identities while forming shell corporations that can be used for money laundering. GAO investigated the following two Delaware corporations that are suspected of money laundering: Euro-American Corporate Services, Inc. and International Business Creations. Suspicious banking activity involved correspondent bank accounts and wire transfers of funds from Eastern European banks through U.S. banks to other Eastern European banks. Two U.S. banks, Citibank of New York and Commercial Bank of San Francisco, violated their customer policies by failing to close the accounts of clients who did not comply with the bank's requirement to appear at the bank in person within 30 days of opening an account. These banks facilitated the transfer of about $1 billion from Eastern Europe, through U.S. banks, and back to Eastern Europe by corporations formed for Russian brokers. It is possible that these transfers were used to launder money. GAO referred the matter to appropriate law enforcement authorities."

The primary objective for vitrifying the LAW samples is to generate glass products for subsequent product testing. The work presented in this report is divided into 6 work elements: 1) Glass Fabrication, 2) Chemical Composition, 3) Radiochemical Composition, 4) Crystalline and Non-crystalline Phase Determination, and 5) Release Rate (Modified PCT). These work elements will help demonstrate the RPP-WTP projects ability to satisfy the product requirements concerning, chemical and radionuclide reporting, waste loading, identification and quantification of crystalline and non-crystalline phases, and waste form leachability. VOA, SVOA, dioxins, furans, PCBs, and total cyanide analyses will be reported in as separate document (WTP-RPT-005).

Consolidated sludge samples described in this report were collected from the Hanford K East Basin fuel storage pool in March and April 1999. Material for the samples was collected from both the basin floor and fuel canisters within the basin. Analyses persented include weight percent solids determination, uranium analysis by kinetic phosphorescence (KPA), plutonium isotope analysis by alpha energy analysis (AEA), gross beta analysis, gamma energy analysis (GEA), and metals analysis by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES).

This report summarizes data on the organic vapors in the single-shell high level radioactive waste tanks at the Hanford site to support a forthcoming toxicological study. All data were obtained from the Tank Characterization Database (PNNL 1999). The TCD contains virtually all the available tank headspace characterization data from 1992 to the present, and includes data for 109 different single-shell waste tanks. Each single-shell tank farm and all major waste types are represented. Descriptions of the sampling and analysis methods have been given elsewhere (Huckaby et al. 1995, Huckaby et al. 1996), and references for specific data are available in the TCD. This is a revision of a report with the same title issued on March 1, 2000 (Stock and Huckaby 2000).

Document in the case no. 99-1178, "Solid Waste Agency of Norther Cook County v. United States Army Corps of Engineers et al." in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

This report describes program goals, activities, processes, benefits for the profession of engineering and for the project participants, coordination, and impact of NHBEP throughout the three years of implementation.

This report summarizes the research that has been performed by Reaction Engineering International (REI) during the last three months on demonstrating and evaluating low NOx control strategies and their possible impact on boiler performance for firing US coals. The focus of our efforts during the last six months have been on: (1) Field Tests for RRI at the Conectiv BL England Station Unit No.1, a 130 MW cyclone fired boiler; (2) Extending our Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based NOx model to accommodate the chemistry for Rich Reagent Injection (RRI) in cyclone fired boilers; (3) Applying the NOx model to evaluate RRI systems integrated into a boiler with Over Fired Air (OFA) and Selective Non-Catalytic Reduction (SNCR); (4) Field Tests of the REI Corrosion Probe at the Conectiv BL England Station Unit No.1; (5) Commence engineering study of ammonia adsorption mechanisms for Fly Ash; (6) Presentation of current program accomplishments and plans for future work to DoE staff members at NETL-FE (Pittsburgh); and (7) Presentation of preliminary field test results for RRI to EPRI CNCIG.

Two bits were designed. One bit was fabricated and tested at Terra-Tek's Drilling Research Laboratory. Fabrication of the second bit was not completed due to complications in fabrication and meeting scheduled test dates at the test facility. A conical bit was tested in a Carthage Marble (compressive strength 14,500 psi) and Sierra White Granite (compressive strength 28,200 psi). During the testing, Hydraulic Horsepower, Bit Weight, Rotation Rate, were varied for the Conical Bit, a Varel Tricone Bit and Varel PDC bit. The Conical Bi did cut rock at a reasonable rate in both rocks. Beneficial effects from the near and through cutter water nozzles were not evident in the marble due to test conditions and were not conclusive in the granite due to test conditions. At atmospheric drilling, the Conical Bit's penetration rate was as good as the standard PDC bit and better than the Tricone Bit. Torque requirements for the Conical Bit were higher than that required for the Standard Bits. Spudding the conical bit into the rock required some care to avoid overloading the nose cutters. The nose design should be evaluated to improve the bit's spudding characteristics.

The primary research activities under this grant were in E871 (HyperCP) at Fermilab, a search for CP violation in hyperon decays which completed data taking in January, 2000. HyperCP is an experiment designed to perform a sensitive search for direct CP violation in the decays of cascade ({Xi}) and {Lambda} hyperons by looking for an asymmetry between particle and antiparticle decay parameters. The experiment is expected to achieve a sensitivity {approx}10{sup -4} in the decay parameters. Standard model predictions for this CP-violating asymmetry range from 0.3 to 5 x 10{sup -4}. A difference between the decay parameters for particle and antiparticle is direct evidence that CP symmetry is violated. A non-zero asymmetry would be the first evidence for CP violation outside of the K{sup o} system. Recent results from KTeV indicate a direct CP violation in K{sup o} decays, which suggests that CP violation will appear in other decays. In addition, we will look at a number of rare hyperon decays involving muons. These probe important new physics topics such as Majorana neutrinos and lepton number violating processes. The latter are of great current interest because new evidence for neutrino oscillations indicate lepton flavor violation does occur. Our data will …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The number of Tuberculosis (TB) and multidrug-resistant TB cases in the United States has declined steadily since 1992. However, continued vigilance is needed to further reduce TB rates. A resurgence of the disease in the late 1980s and early 1990s was linked to a relaxation of TB control efforts. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization suggest that the presence of TB as a major public health problem in other countries has likely been a key contributor to the number of new cases in the United States. As a result, the United States has undertaken several initiatives to control global TB, including providing funding and technical assistance for TB control programs."

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is investigating Yucca Mountain, Nevada, for its feasibility as a potential deep geological repository of high-level nuclear waste. In a deep geological repository, radioactive decay heat released from high-level nuclear waste will heat up the rock mass. Although the following discussion about the thermal-hydrological (TH) process may not be directly relate to the topic of this paper, it provides a bigger picture of the processes in a potential repository. The heat will mobilize pore water in the rock mass by evaporation, or boiling if the thermal load is great enough. The water vapor/steam will flow away from the heat source because of pressure and thermal gradients and the effects of buoyancy force. The vapor/steam will flow along fractures or highly permeable zones and condense into liquid water in the cooler regions. Gravity and the fracture network will control the drainage of the condensed water. Some water may flow back toward the waste package and re-evaporate. This TH process will affect the amount of water that may come into contact with the waste package. Water is the main concern in maintaining the integrity of the waste package and the waste form, and the potential …

This report discusses particle size and calorimetry analyses performed on single-pull sludge samples collected from the Hanford K East Basin floor and pits. This study was conducted by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in support of the baseline sludge management plan, which calls for the sludge to be packaged, shipped and stored at T Plant in the Hanford 200 West Area until final processing as a future date. These analyses were needed to better understand the K Basin sludge inventory and chemical reactivity.

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is investigating Yucca Mountain, Nevada, for its feasibility as a potential deep geological repository of high-level nuclear waste. In a deep geological repository, the radioactive decay heat released from high-level nuclear waste will heat up the rock mass. The heat will mobilize pore water in the rock mass by evaporation, and even boiling, if the thermal load is great enough. The water vapor/steam will flow away from the heat source because of pressure and thermal gradients and the effects of buoyancy force. The vapor/steam may flow along fractures or highly permeable zones and condense into liquid water in the cooler regions. Gravity and fracture network will control the drainage of the condensed water. Some of the water may flow back toward the waste package and reevaporated. This thermal-hydrological (TH) process will affect the amount of water that may come into contact with the waste package. Water is the main concern for the integrity of the waste package and the waste form, and the potential transport of radioactive nuclides. Thermally driven chemical and mechanical processes may affect the TH process. The coupled thermal-hydrological-mechanical-chemical (THMC) processes need to be understood before the performance of a …

We present a Plasma Wakefield Acceleration (PWFA) scheme that can in principle provide an acceleration gradient above 100 GeV/m, based on a reasonable modification of the existing SLAC beam parameters. We also study a possible up-grade of the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC) to hundreds of GeV center-of-mass energy using such a PWFA as a booster. The emittance degradation of the accelerated beams by the plasma wakefield focus is relatively small due to a uniform transverse distribution of the driving beam and the single stage acceleration.

In an effort to develop a more extensive model for the thermomechanical behavior of shape memory alloy (SMA) films, a novel characterization method has been developed. This automated test has been tailored to characterize films for use in micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) actuators. The shape memory effect in NiTiCu is seen in the solid-state phase transformation from an easily deformable low-temperature state to a 'shape remembering' high-temperature state. The accurate determination of engineering properties for these films necessitates measurements of both stress and strain in microfabricated test structures over the full range of desired deformation. Our various experimental methods (uniaxial tensile tests, bimorph curvature tests and diaphragm bulge tests) provide recoverable stress and strain data and the stress-strain relations for these films. Tests were performed over a range of temperatures by resistive heating or ambient heating. These measurements provide the results necessary for developing active SMA structural film design models.

Semiweekly newspaper from Boerne, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Willis Gathright. Gathright was born on 3 December 1924 and graduated from high school in 1942. Upon being drafted in June 1943 he went to eight weeks of boot training at the US Naval Training Station in San Diego. This was followed by twelve weeks of sonar training at the West Coast Sound School at Point Loma, California. He describes how a sonar unit works. After graduating from the sonar school and receiving gunnery training at in Algiers, Louisiana, Gathright was assigned to Patrol Craft Escort 849. On 18 June 1944, the ship arrived at Brisbane, Australia where Army radio equipment was placed on board manned by a crew of ten Army soldiers. Gathright recalls the ship being part of the fleet during the invasion of Leyte acting as the radio relay between the USS Blue Ridge (AGC-2) and General McArthur’s headquarters in Australia. After participating in the invasion of Lingayen Gulf at Luzon, the ship remained in Manila until February 1945 when they were ordered to Morotai, where they joined the Australian Fleet for the invasion of Tarakan, Borneo on 1 May 1945. Gathright describes the ship …

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been using vitrification processes to convert high-level radioactive waste forms into a stable glass for disposal in waste repositories. Vitrification facilities at the Savannah River Site (SRS) and at the West Valley Demonstration Project (WVDP) are converting liquid high-level waste (HLW) by combining it with a glass-forming media to form a borosilicate glass, which will ensure safe long-term storage. Large, slurry fed melters, which are used for this process, were anticipated to have a finite life (on the order of two to three years) at which time they would have to be replaced using remote methods because of the high radiation fields. In actuality the melters useable life spans have, to date, exceeded original life-span estimates. Initial plans called for the removal of failed melters by placing the melter assembly into a container and storing the assembly in a concrete vault on the vitrification plant site pending size-reduction, segregation, containerization, and shipment to appropriate storage facilities. Separate facilities for the processing of the failed melters currently do not exist. Options for handling these melters include (1) locating a facility to conduct the size-reduction, characterization, and containerization as originally planned; (2) long-term storing or …