The primary objective of this study was to provide recommendations for Mined Geologic Disposal System requirements affected by thermal loading that will provide sufficient definition to facilitate development of design concepts and support life cycle cost determinations. The study reevaluated and/or redefined selected thermal goals used for design and are currently contained in the requirements documents or the Controlled Design Assumption Document. The study provided recommendations as to what, if any, actions (such as edge loading and limiting of the heat variability between waste packages) are needed and must be accommodated in the design. Additionally, the study provided recommendations as to what alternative thermal loads should be maintained for continued flexibility. This report contains seven appendices: Technical basis for evaluation of thermal goals below the potential nuclear was repository at Yucca Mountain; Thermal-mechanical evaluation of the 200 C drift-wall temperature goal; Evaluation of ground stability and support; Coupled ventilation and hydrothermal evaluations; Heat flow and temperature calculations for continuously ventilated emplacement drifts; Thermal management using aging and/or waste package selection; and Waste stream evaluations.

In September 1995, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued the Audit of Subsidized Ancillary Services at the Nevada Test Site which concluded that the Department continued to pay high subsidies for ancillary services, including bus services, that were not used extensively, may no longer be needed, could be more fully supported by its users, or could be operated more efficiently. Consistent with the audit at Nevada, the purpose of this audit was to assess whether bus service subsidies at the Laboratory were still necessary or reasonable. Specifically, the audit determined if the current level of bus services was still needed, if operating costs could be reduced, and if users should bear a greater share of bus operations costs.

The Savannah River Site (SRS) has upgraded its aqueous emergency response capability to model the transport of pollutants released from SRS facilities during normal operation or accidents through onsite streams to the Savannah River. The transport and dispersion modules from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) WASP5 model were incorporated into the SRS emergency response system, called the Weather Information and Display (WIND) System. WASP5 is a water quality analysis program that simulates surface water pollutant transport, using a finite difference method to solve the advective transport equation. Observed tritium concentrations in the SRS streams and the Savannah River from an accidental release from K-Reactor, one of the SRS nuclear material production reactors, were used to benchmark the new model. Although all SRS reactors have since been deactivated, this release of tritiated water occurred between December 22 and 25, 1991, through the K-Reactor secondary cooling water discharge. Analyses of reactor discharge water suggested the leak began sometime during December 22. The leak was positively identified and isolated on December 25. Following the release, tritium concentrations were tracked and measured as the tritiated water flowed from the K-Area outfall into Indian Grave Branch and pen Branch, through the Savannah River swamp, …

This paper presents aspects of DOE`s demonstration of compliance with the EPA regulation of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The WIPP, a geologic repository for transuranic (TRU) waste, is located 2150 feet below the ground surface in a bedded salt formation about 20 miles east of Carlsbad, NM. Performance of the WIPP as a repository requires that releases to the accessible environment not exceed the limits of the regulation 40 CFR Part 191(1) either when the WIPP is undisturbed, or if there is intrusion into the repository by drilling. In 1996, the EPA promulgated 40 CFR Part 194(2): the implementing regulation for 40 CFR Part 191. The regulatory subsection addressed here, 40 CFR 194.24(b), directs the DOE to identify and analyze the components and characteristics of the TRU waste that can impact performance of the WIPP repository, and thereby possibly impact waste containment. DOE must also analyze those waste characteristics and components that will not affect repository performance.

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 the Texas Board of Health is authorized by the Medical Radiologic Technologist Certification Act, V.T.C.S. art. 4512m, to promulgate rules establishing a class of certificate for students who perform radiologic procedures in an academic or clinical setting as part of a training program which meets minimum standards adopted by the board (ID# 39225)

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: Eligibility for mandatory release of inmates convicted of indecency with a child under Penal Code section 21.11(a)(11) (ID# 39210)

The Nevada Test Site became the nation`s continental nuclear weapons test site on January 11, 1951. Over the years, the Nevada Operations Office (Nevada) built an extensive infrastructure to support and conduct nuclear tests at the site and in Las Vegas. Roads, housing, test towers, electrical systems, and water systems are just a few of the construction projects that have been required by the Site`s nuclear testing mission. Nuclear testing continued through 1992. A presidential decision directive issued in October that year stopped testing but required Nevada to conduct and experimental program and maintain a readiness posture to resume nuclear testing within 6 months through fiscal year 1995. The directive further required that, beginning with fiscal year 1996, Nevada maintain a 2-3 year readiness posture. This change in Nevada`s mission coupled with Department downsizing requires that only cost effective projects with defined mission needs be undertaken. Although Nevada has changed and rescoped some construction projects in response to the changing Test Site mission, there are two projects, one underway and one planned, that contain unneeded overlap of capability. Specifically, the audit identified two electrical system projects that provided unnecessary duplicate capability at a cost of about $1.35 million. Management concurred …

The overall objective of this two phase program is to investigate the use of dry carbon-based sorbents for mercury control. This information is important to the utility industry in anticipation of pending regulations. During Phase I, a bench-scale field test device that can be configured as an electrostatic precipitator, a pulse-jet baghouse, or a reverse-gas baghouse has been designed, built and integrated with an existing pilot-scale facility at PSCo`s Comanche Station. Up to three candidate sorbents will be injected into the flue gas stream upstream of the test device to and mercury concentration measurements will be made to determine the mercury removal efficiency for each sorbent. During the Phase II effort, component integration for the most promising dry sorbent technology shall be tested at the 5000 acfm pilot-scale.

Document 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; Applicability of Senate Bill 646, Act of May 27, 1995, 74th Leg., R.S., ch. 854, 1995 Tex. Gen. Laws. 4287, 4288, which relates to veterans' employment preference (RQ-856)

Document 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 Board of Medical Examiners to regulate hyperbaric oxygen therapy (RQ-890)

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 the State may enter into a continent with a private law firm for the provision of legal services involved in a particular lawsuit (ID# 39014)

We have used a two-step (low and high temperature) strain-annealing process to evolve the grain boundary character distribution (GBCD) in fully recrystallized oxygen-free electronic (OFE) Cu bar that was forged and rolled. Orientation imaging microscopy has been used to characterize the GBCD after each step in the processing. The fraction of special grain boundaries was {similar_to}70% in the starting recrystallized material. Three different processing conditions were employed: high, moderate, and low temperature. The high-temperature process resulted in a reduction in the fraction of special GBs while both the lower temperature processes resulted in an increase in special fraction up to 85%. Further, the lower temperature processes resulted in average deviation angles from exact misorientation, for special boundaries, that were significantly smaller than observed from the high temperature process. Results indicate the importance of the low temperature part of the two-step strain-annealing process in preparing the microstructure for the higher temperature anneal and commensurate increase in the special fraction.

Governments participating in the 1996 World Food Summit will examine how to deal with world hunger and malnutrition and achieve the goal of food security for all. There is broad agreement on the desirability of the Summit's goal, but controversy has developed over such issues as the relationship of trade liberalization and food security, the advisability of declaring a legal right to food, the link between population stabilization and reproductive health and food security, and responsibility within the UN system for Summit follow-up.

The goal of the proposed research is to test a statistical model of speech recognition that incorporates the knowledge that speech is produced by relatively slow motions of the tongue, lips, and other speech articulators. This model is called Maximum Likelihood Continuity Mapping (Malcom). Many speech researchers believe that by using constraints imposed by articulator motions, we can improve or replace the current hidden Markov model based speech recognition algorithms. Unfortunately, previous efforts to incorporate information about articulation into speech recognition algorithms have suffered because (1) slight inaccuracies in our knowledge or the formulation of our knowledge about articulation may decrease recognition performance, (2) small changes in the assumptions underlying models of speech production can lead to large changes in the speech derived from the models, and (3) collecting measurements of human articulator positions in sufficient quantity for training a speech recognition algorithm is still impractical. The most interesting (and in fact, unique) quality of Malcom is that, even though Malcom makes use of a mapping between acoustics and articulation, Malcom can be trained to recognize speech using only acoustic data. By learning the mapping between acoustics and articulation using only acoustic data, Malcom avoids the difficulties involved in collecting …

Over the past decade, numerous major treaties have been concluded to deal with global environmental concerns. This report very briefly summarizes major global environmental treaties currently in effect, selected to include those that are subjects of frequent interest by Members of Congress.

DWPF-Engineering requested that SRTC determine the minimum indicated melter vapor space temperature that must be maintained in order to minimize the potential for off-gas flammability during a steady sludge-only feeding operation at 1.0 GPM containing 14,000 ppm total organic carbon. The detailed scope of this request is described in the technical task request, HLW-DWPF-TTR-960092 (DWPT Activity No. DWPT-96-0065). In response to this request, a dynamic simulation study was conducted in which the concentration of flammable gases was tracked throughout the course of a simulated 3X off-gas surge using the melter off-gas (MOG) dynamics model. The results of simulation showed that as long as the melter vapor space temperature as indicated on TI4085D is kept at 570 degrees C or higher, the peak concentration of combustible gases in the melter off-gas system is not likely to exceed 60 percent of the lower flammability limit (LFL). The minimum TI4085D of 570 degrees C is valid only when the air purges to FIC3221A and FIC3221B are maintained at or above 850 and 250 lb/hr, respectively. All the key bases and assumptions along with the input data used in the simulation are described in the attached E-7 calculation note.

Document 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 Harris County Flood Control District to provide for recreational and environmental improvements under Senate Bill 586, Act of May 21, 1993, 73d Leg., R.S., ch 409, 1993 Tex. Gen. Laws 1711, 1711 (RQ-798)

Document 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 the board of regents of an institution of higher education may waive all or part of tuition and fees for a particular student or a particular group of students and related questions (RQ-737, RQ-769)

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.

In the following the authors give several relationships which are used for the preliminary design and to estimate the collider performance. They limit to the case of the performance during storage and colliding mode. Two of such relations are the relation between bending field B, the bending radius {rho} and the proton momentum p B (Tesla) {rho} (meter) = 3.3356 p (GeV/c) and the minimum requirement of the collider luminosity L which scales with the beam energy E according to L = (10{sup 33} cm{sup {minus}2} s{sup {minus}1}) (E/20 TeV ). They assume that the collider is made of two identical intersecting rings where the two beams circulate in opposite directions otherwise with identical configuration, dimensions and intensity. Both beams are bunched. They also assume, for simplicity, that the beams are round, that is they have the same betatron emittance in the two transverse planes of oscillations, horizontal and vertical. Also the two beams are exactly round at the interaction point where the lattice functions {beta}* has also the same values in the two planes.

During this Workshop, it was concluded that a Proton-Proton Collider with an energy of 100 TeV per beam and a luminosity of about 10{sup 35} cm{sup {minus}2} s{sup {minus}1} is feasible. The most important technical requirement for the realization of such a project is a large bending field. For instance, a field of 13 Tesla would be desirable. This is twice the field of the SSC superconducting magnets, which very likely may be achieved in a non-too-far future by extrapolation of the present technology. The design of this Collider would follow very closely the methods used for the design of the SSC and of the LHC, with the major noticeable difference that, because of the larger bending field and the larger beam energy, the performance is determined by the effects of the Synchrotron Radiation in the similar manner they affect the performance of an electron-positron collider. This fact has considerable beneficial consequences since it allows the attainment of large luminosity by reducing the beam dimensions at collision and by requiring, to some degree, less number of particles per beam. On the other end. the losses to synchrotron radiation are to be absorbed by the cryogenic system, and the vacuum system …

The ELOISATRON Project is a proton-proton collider at very high energy and very large luminosity. The main goal is to determine the ultimate performance that is possible to achieve with reasonable extrapolation of the present accelerator technology. A complete study and design of the collider requires that several steps of investigations are undertaken. The authors count five of such steps as outlined in the report.

The Robotics Development Groups at the Savannah River Site (SRS) and at the Hanford site have developed remote video and photography systems for deployment in underground radioactive-waste storage tanks at the Department of Energy (DOE) sites as a part of the Office of Science and Technology (OST) program within DOE. Viewing and documenting the tank interiors and their associated annular spaces is an extremely valuable tool in characterizing their condition and contents and in controlling their remediation. Several specialized video/photography systems and robotic End Effectors have been fabricated that provide remote viewing and lighting. All are remotely deployable into and out of the tank, with all viewing functions remotely operated. Positioning all control components away from the facility prevents the potential for personnel exposure to radiation and contamination. Only the remote video systems are discussed in this paper.

For two decades, scientists have been warning that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and Halons (bromine-containing fluorocarbons) may deplete the stratospheric ozone shield that screens out some of the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays and thus regulates the amounts which reach the Earth's surface. CFCs have been used as refrigerants, solvents, foam blowing agents, and outside the United States as aerosol propellants; Halons are used primarily as firefighting agents. Increased radiation could result in an increase in skin cancers, suppression of the human immune system, and decreased productivity of terrestrial and aquatic organisms, including some commercially important crops.