A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO provided information on the operations and benefits of the Department of Defense's (DOD) Defense Modernization Account, focusing on: (1) the status of funding and uses of the account; and (2) whether DOD has reported to the six congressional committees on the activities of the account as required by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1996."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the economic and democratic assistance that the United States has provided to the Central Asian Republics (CAR) of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, focusing on: (1) what the Agency for International Development's (AID) economic and democratic reform initiatives in the CAR were designed to achieve, what has been accomplished, and what factors, if any, have limited the implementation of reforms; (2) whether lessons learned from similar AID programs in Central Europe and Russia have been applied in CAR; and (3) how AID ensures that its assistance funds in CAR are spent for intended purposes."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the status of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) X-33 Program, focusing on: (1) whether the X-33 Program is meeting the cost, schedule, and performance objectives established in the X-33 cooperative agreement; (2) how NASA's oversight responsibility was changed by the cooperative agreement; and (3) potential issues NASA may face as it moves toward a decision on whether to use Venture Star reusable launch vehicles (RLV) to service the International Space Station."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed states' and local agencies' efforts to improve the timeliness of judicial decisions concerning the permanent placement of foster children, focusing on: (1) the key problems in the juvenile dependency court system; and (2) state and local responses to these problems."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Sawtooth National Recreation Area's (SNRA) funding, its accomplishments and unmet needs, and on agency actions that have adverse impacts on the area, focusing on: (1) the funds allocated to the SNRA for fiscal years 1993 through 1997; (2) spending for fiscal years 1993 through 1997 to enhance recreation, to preserve conservation values, such as fish and wildlife, and to manage commodity programs, such as grazing, and the accomplishments and unmet needs in these areas; (3) the funds not allocated or the funds allocated and then taken back from the Recreation Area for fiscal years 1993 through 1997 and what was done with those funds; and (4) some examples of potentially adverse effects of how the Recreation Area is managed on individuals, companies, and communities economically dependent on the area."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Customs Service's software development maturity and improvement activities, focusing on: (1) the maturity of Customs' software development processes; and (2) whether Customs has an effective software process improvement program."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the: (1) Department of Labor's response to the House Appropriations Committee's directive that it verify a random sample of employers' wage data submissions and select a sample of submissions for on-site data verification; and (2) likely effect of these efforts on the accuracy and timeliness of Davis-Bacon Act wage determinations."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Food and Nutrition Service's (FNS) efforts to maintain the integrity of the Food Stamp Program, focusing on the: (1) dollar amount of the financial penalties, collections, and debt reductions (waivers, adjustments, or write-offs) affecting storeowners violating program regulations during fiscal year (FY) 1993 through FY 1998; (2) effectiveness of the FNS' procedures and practices for assessing financial penalties against storeowners for program violations; and (3) effectiveness of FNS' procedures and practices for collecting financial penalties levied against storeowners."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Superfund Program expenditures, focusing on: (1) the relative shares of Superfund expenditures for contractor cleanup work, site-specific support, and non-site-specific support; (2) the activities carried out with the EPA's cleanup support spending, particularly its non-site-specific spending; and (3) EPA's efforts to monitor and analyze how its regions and headquarters units spend Superfund resources, particularly the distribution of expenditures among contractor cleanup work, site-specific support, and non-site-specific support."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Army's development and acquisition plans for command and control systems that will be part of future digitized battlefield units, focusing on the Army protection plan to determine whether it ensures sufficient assessments to test and develop the defensibility of the digitized battlefield against command and control warfare attacks."

The LHC Interaction Region Quadrupoles (IRQ) will be shipped from Fermilab to CERN. The IRQ magnets are supported by glass fiber supports. A prototype cryostat support has been tested under various mechanical forces in order to check its mechanical behavior. These measurements have been made in order to validate a numerical model. A large range of mechanical loads simulates loads due to the shipment of the device, the weight of the cold mass as well as the cool down conditions. Its mechanical properties are measured by means of a dedicated arrangement operating at room temperature. This study appears to be essential to optimize the design of the support. The purpose of this note is to summarize the first measurements related to mechanical tests performed with the support.

This report discusses recent congressionally mandated reductions in the Department of Defense(DOD) acquisition workforce.

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The objective of this report is to evaluate the effect of potential changes to the TSPA-VA base case design on long-term repository performance. The design feature that is evaluated in this report is a higher thermal load (Feature 26 or F26). The following paragraph briefly describes the motivation for evaluating higher thermal loading. Higher thermal load has been identified as a design feature that might have a beneficial effect on long-term repository performance. A higher thermal load will increase temperatures and decrease relative humidity on the waste package surface. The decrease in relative humidity may delay the onset of corrosion, thus delaying the failure of waste packages and the release of radionuclides from the engineered barrier system (EBS). For the current calculation a thermal load of 109 MTU/acre (metric tons of uranium per acre) is considered. Two cases are evaluated, one with the base case inventory and a higher thermal load and a second with an increased inventory that would cover the current repository footprint at the higher thermal load. This report documents the modeling assumptions and calculations conducted to evaluate the long-term performance of higher thermal loading. The performance measure for this evaluation is dose-rate. Results are presented that …

The objective of this report is to document the analysis that was conducted to evaluate the effect of a potential change to the TSPA-VA base case design that could improve long-term repository performance. The design feature evaluated in this report is a modification of the topographic surface of Yucca Mountain. The modification consists of covering the land surface immediately above the repository foot-print with a thick layer of unconsolidated material utilizing rip-rap and plants to mitigate erosion. This surface modification is designated as Feature 23a or simply abbreviated as F23a. The fundamental aim of F23a is to reduce the net infiltration into the unsaturated zone by enhancing the potential for evapotranspiratiration at the surface; such a change would, in turn, reduce the seepage flux and the rate of radionuclide releases from the repository. Field and modeling studies of water movement in the unsaturated zone have indicated that shallow infiltration at the surface is almost negligible in locations where the bedrock is covered by a sufficiently thick soil layer. In addition to providing storage for meteoric water, a thick soil layer would slow the downward movement of soil moisture to such an extent that evaporation and transpiration could easily transfer most …

The Kinetic Tandem fusion plasma confinement concept is a member of the class of open magnetic confinement systems whose magnetic topology is that of a tube of magnetic flux open at both ends. In open-ended systems the central problem is that of limiting the rate of plasma losses out the ends. In a conventional tandem mirror system end-plugging is accomplished by the generation of positive potential barriers within special short mirror cells located at each end of a long central confinement cell. The kinetic tandem concept accomplishes the same end result by employing dynamic effects, but without the necessity of special end cells. The field employed in the kinetic tandem is a simple axially symmetric solenoidal field whose intensity tapers to low values at the ends. Since the field line curvature is everywhere positive such a field is stabilizing for MHD interchange modes. Into each end are injected ion beams that are aimed nearly parallel to the field line direction. The ions from these beams then are radially compressed, stopped, and reflected back by magnetic mirror action in climbing up the magnetic gradient. In this way ion density peaks are formed between which the plasma is to be confined. As …

We use a combination of molecular dynamics and kinetic Monte Carlo simulations to explore the role of temperature and dose rate on damage accumulation in a model system with complex kinetics. We describe the accumulation of He-vacancy (HeV) complexes as well as vacancy and interstitial clusters as a function of irradiation temperature, dose, and dose rate. We show that nucleation of stable HeV complexes (voids and bubbles) at low temperature and flux takes place at extremely low doses. We also describe the effect of temperature on the HeV complex size distribution and show that growth beyond a critical nucleation size is not possible in this system at temperatures above 300 K for dose rates smaller than 10{sup -8} dpa/s. We further demonstrate that a temperature shift of 25 K per decade of flux scales the dose rate dependence of He-vacancy complex (voids and bubbles) accumulation when irradiation is carried out to low doses (0.03-0.06 dpa) at temperatures between 150 K and 300 K and dose rates of 10{sup -6}, 10{sup -7}, l0{sup -8}, and 10{sup -9} dpa/s. The results provide an atomistic description of microstructure evolution including void nucleation and the early stages of growth, and should be useful in …

This report with the attached tables provide supporting documentation for completing Performance Agreement TWR 1.2.2, C-106 Sluicing, Performance Expectation. The calculations summarized in the tables were performed using process control procedures and strategies as documented in engineering procedure HFN-SD-WM-PROC-021, Section 23.0, Rev. 2C, subsection 4.4, ''Calculation of Sludge Transferred.'' Four methods are described including: (1) Mass transfer based on Mass Flow Meter; (2) Mass transfer based on ENRAF{trademark} Densitometer density profiles; (3) Mass transfer based on ENRAF{trademark} Densitometer sediment levels; (4) Mass transfer based on dissolved solids.

We performed temperature programmed desorption up to 500K on silica-reinforced polysiloxane in both solid and foamed forms (M9787 and M9750 respectively). Our data show that H{sub 2}O was the dominant desorbing species in both forms of silicone (on the order of 100 {micro}g of physisorbed water and 900 {micro}g of chemisorbed water per gram of polymer), which are expected to be very hydrophilic when dehydrated. Detailed studies of the TPD spectra of H{sub 2}O from the silicones and from the fumed silica fillers suggest that H{sub 2}O molecules preferentially adsorbed on the surface of silica particles contained in the silicones with activation energies of desorption of 15 {+-} 3 kcal/mol and 50 {+-} 10 kcal/mol. There was strong evidence of H{sub 2} desorption below 400K from the silicones. The equivalent concentration of H{sub 2} in the silicones was 0.44 {micro}g of H{sub 2} per gram of silicone. Other species desorbing from the silicones were CO, and CO{sub 2} with concentrations on the order of 2.5 {micro}g, and 1.6 {micro}g per gram of silicone and activation energies of desorption of 10 {+-} 2 kcal/mol and 9.5 {+-} 1.5 kcal/mol, respectively.

This document presents the Project's position on compliance with the SNF Project NRC Equivalency Criteria--HNF-SD-SNF-DE-003, Spent Nuclear Fuel Project Path Forward Additional NRC Requirements. No non-compliances are shown The compliance statements have been reviewed and approved by DOE. Open items are scheduled to be closed prior to project completion.

This Interface Control Document (ICD) describes the interface between the Tank Farm System and the Central Waste Complex (CWC) or the Low-Level Burial Ground (LLBG). The Tank Farm System generates solid waste during operations. These facilities do not have a direct physical interface since the waste will be moved by truck to the CWC or LLBG. The purpose of the ICD process is to formalize working agreements between the River Protection Project (RPP) Tank Farm System and organization/companies internal and external to RPP. This ICD has been developed as part of the requirements basis for design of the DST System to support the Phase I Privatization effort. The signatures on the cover page of this document indicate agreement between the parties that this document reflects the current technical baseline for each system and that the requirements contained in this document will not be revised without the agreement of all parties.

This report presents data obtained on 241-SY-101 pump performance. The period covered is October 1 through December 31, 1998. During the quarter: (1) There was an indication of a 7.0-inch increase in the waste level at riser 1A, and an average growth rate of 0.076 inches per day; (2) There was an indication of a 2.3-inch increase in the waste level at riser 1C; (3) This riser was flushed with water several times, which would lower the level of the crust at this location; (4) Gases continued to be released at less than the pre-pump installation baseline rate, indicating a decrease in the gas generation rate, or an increase in gas retention, or both. The release rate was about 60 percent of the rate in the previous few quarters, and only 44 percent of the pre-pump release rate; and (5) There was no change in the parameters that monitor pump performance.

Seismic data for events in and around Kuwait were collected and analyzed. The authors estimated event moment, focal mechanism and depth by waveform modeling. Results showed that reliable seismic source parameters for events in and near Kuwait can be estimated from a single broadband three-component seismic station. This analysis will advance understanding of earthquake hazard in Kuwait.

Cesium-137 has contaminated a large area of the wetlands on the Savannah River Site. Remediation of the contaminated wetlands is problematic because current techniques destroy the sensitive ecosystem and generate a higher dose to workers. To address this problem, we proposed a non-trusive, in situ technology to sequester 137Cs in sediments. One intention of this study was to provide information regarding a go/no go decision for future work. Since the proof-of-concept was successful and several minerals were identified as potential candidates for this technology, a go decision was made.