The purpose and scope of this report is to describe the analysis of available colloidal data from waste form corrosion tests at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) to extract characteristics of these colloids that can be used in modeling their contribution to the source term for sparingly soluble radioelements (e.g., Pu). Specifically, the focus is on developing a useful description of the following waste form colloid characteristics: (1) composition, (2) size distribution, and (3) quantification of the rate of waste form colloid generation. The composition and size distribution information are intended to support analysis of the potential transport of the sparingly soluble radionuclides associated with the waste form colloids. The rate of colloid generation is intended to support analysis of the waste form colloid-associated radionuclide concentrations. In addressing the above characteristics, available data are interpreted to address mechanisms controlling colloid formation and stability. This report was developed in accordance with the ''Technical Work Plan for Waste Form Degradation Process Model Report for SR'' (CRWMS M&O 2000). Because the end objective is to support the source term modeling we have organized the conclusions into two categories: (1) data analysis conclusions and (2) recommendations for colloid source term modeling. The second category is …

None

The purpose of this report was to document the process leading to development of the Biosphere Dose Conversion Factors (BDCFs) for the postclosure nominal performance of the potential repository at Yucca Mountain. BDCF calculations concerned twenty-four radionuclides. This selection included sixteen radionuclides that may be significant nominal performance dose contributors during the compliance period of up to 10,000 years, five additional radionuclides of importance for up to 1 million years postclosure, and three relatively short-lived radionuclides important for the human intrusion scenario. Consideration of radionuclide buildup in soil caused by previous irrigation with contaminated groundwater was taken into account in the BDCF development. The effect of climate evolution, from the current arid conditions to a wetter and cooler climate, on the BDCF values was evaluated. The analysis included consideration of different exposure pathway's contribution to the BDCFs. Calculations of nominal performance BDCFs used the GENII-S computer code in a series of probabilistic realizations to propagate the uncertainties of input parameters into the output. BDCFs for the nominal performance, when combined with the concentrations of radionuclides in groundwater allow calculation of potential radiation doses to the receptor of interest. Calculated estimates of radionuclide concentration in groundwater result from the saturated zone …

Report on status of program to raise awareness and heighten interest in nuclear engineering and nuclear science, particularly among 7th through 12th grade students and pre-college freshmen.

The Waste Management Project (WMP) is committed to excellence in our work and to delivering quality products and services to our customers, protecting our employees and the public and to being good stewards of the environment. We will continually strive to understand customer requirements, perform services, and activities that meet or exceed customer expectations, and be cost-effective in our performance. The WMP maintains an environment that fosters continuous improvement in our processes, performance, safety and quality. The achievement of quality will require the total commitment of all WMP employees to our ethic that Quality, Health and Safety, and Regulatory Compliance must come before profits. The successful implementation of this policy and ethic requires a formal, documented management quality system to ensure quality standards are established and achieved in all activities. The following principles are the foundation of our quality system. Senior management will take full ownership of the quality system and will create an environment that ensures quality objectives are met, standards are clearly established, and performance is measured and evaluated. Line management will be responsible for quality system implementation. Each organization will adhere to all quality system requirements that apply to their function. Every employee will be responsible for …

The Nuclear Operations Project Services identified the need to improve manual tank farm surveillance data collection, review, distribution and storage practices often referred to as Operator Rounds. This document provides the analysis in terms of feasibility to improve the manual data collection methods by using handheld computer units, barcode technology, a database for storage and acquisitions, associated software, and operational procedures to increase the efficiency of Operator Rounds associated with surveillance activities.

The entry into force, on January 1, 1994, of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has eliminated the advantage that the beneficiaries of the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (CBERA) and related provisions of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) had enjoyed in trade with the United States relative to Mexico, and gave Mexico an increasingly significant competitive edge over the CBERA countries. The scheduled further implementation of the NAFTA would have resulted in a substantial advantage to Mexico over the CBERA countries and vitiate in part the purpose of the CBERA.

The passage of the Department of Defense authorization and appropriations bills through Congress often does not follow the course laid out in textbooks on legislative procedure. This report is a research aid, which lists the DOD authorization bills ad appropriation bills. This includes all the pertinent information on the passage of these bills through the legislative process: bill numbers, report numbers, dates reported and passed, recorded vote numbers and vote tallies, dates of the passage of the conference reports with their numbers and votes, vetos, substitutions, dates of final passage, and public law numbers.

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) has been one of the most controversial of all environmental laws. Undoubtedly, the controversy stems from the strict substantive provisions of this law compared to many other environmental laws which tend to be more procedurally oriented or to permit greater administrative discretion. As a result of the ESA’s standards, the Act often plays a role in disputes in which all sides agree that a given species is not the center of the debate.

During the WBS4 review almost a year ago in January, and in more recent discussions of needed capsule characterization, I was struck by three pieces of information related to machined Be capsules: (1) that the speed of sound (and perhaps other properties) in Be grains is markedly different in orthogonal directions, (2) that the grain size in the best refined bulk Be samples is 10 to 15 {micro}m, and that these grains in the best case are randomly oriented, and (3) that we are concerned about capsule homogeneity on the level of 1 part in 10{sup 4}, presumably over angular length scales corresponding to the maximum in the growth curve. It seems to me that the first two points might be inconsistent with the third, and this led me to attempt to model the effect of randomly oriented Be grains on the radially dependent properties of a capsule.

None

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The colocation of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) units provides the best opportunity for the agencies to jointly serve the public, effect operational efficiencies, and improve land management. The Service First Initiative is designed to improve the operations of these two agencies by combining resources and providing "one-stop shopping" services for the public. Since the initiative has been in operation, the number of shared projects between BLM and the Forest Service has increased from 15 in fiscal year 1996 to 272 in mid-fiscal year 2000. Many of the projects involve shared personnel, shared equipment, and joint training projects. Although there have been some successes in achieving efficient government operations, there are many legal and regulatory barriers that prevent the full integration of the agencies' resources. The full integration of the agencies' operations depends on resolution of these barriers."

None

In order to view exo-solar planets and to improve our knowledge of the early universe, it is important to field very large, 100-meter-class, space telescopes. To be able to practically and affordably field such instruments, it is essential to develop membrane optics that are both lighter and more compactly packagable than present space optics. The authors demonstrate a significant breakthrough in membrane optics utilizing thin diffractive lenses instead of reflective films. The uniqueness of this approach is that diffractive lenses utilize globally-flat, easily supported, membranes, and are many orders-of-magnitude less sensitive to out-of-plane surface errors than are reflective optics. Their flight-validation experiment will launch, deploy, and optically test a lightweight diffractive lens. This lens will be built from multiple thin glass sheets, each optically patterned as a diffractive lens panel and then joined together to form a multi-segment foldable lens. the folded-up lens is tightly packaged to survive launch loads and supported after deployment by an outer rim. Its optical PSF performance is then measured by using a three-component system consisting of the diffractive lens, linked by tethers to an optical-beacon on one side, and a sensor-pod on the other.

CH2M Hill Hanford Group, Inc. (CHG) had an outstanding year. The most significant accomplishments that occurred throughout fiscal year (FY) 2000 include the following: On April 24,2000, DOE ORP received BNFL Inc. B-1 deliverables and CHG completed Phase 1 Part B-2 Readiness-to-Proceed (RTP), to demonstrate the ability to provide waste feed to be treated/stored in a long-term disposal facility. The RTP consisted of key enabling assumptions, critical risks, waste handling actions, financial and schedule risk analysis, staffing plans, a project execution plan, and a resource loaded schedule. The Department determined that the BNFL Inc. proposal was unacceptable in many areas and essentially shifted the financial risk from BNFL Inc. back to the Federal government; thus a key benefit of privatization was lost. On May 8,2000, the Secretary announced that the privatization contract be terminated. In the interim, the Department directed the onsite Tank Farm Contractor, CHG, to continue the design work scope for the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant until a new waste treatment contract is awarded. DOE ORP released its request for proposals (RFP) for a new Waste Treatment and Immobilization contractor on August 31,2000 and is on schedule to meet award of the contract by January 15,2000. CHG …

This Phase I project was designed to demonstrate feasibility of in situ waste destruction and vitrification technology as a means of remediating hard-to-treat buried radioactive and hazardous wastes and focused on proving viability of the concentric graphite arc melter technique as a robust, safe, and economic tool for use as the IWDV process heat source. Oak Ridge National Laboratory provided technical support to Montec Research including the volatile behavior of elements during silicate melting operations and temperature viscosity modeling of silicate melts. Further research will be needed to develop this technology into a competitive remediation technique.

Appropriations are one part of a complex federal budget process that includes budget resolutions, appropriations (regular, supplemental, and continuing) bills, rescissions, and budget reconciliation bills. This report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress passes each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government.

The 2H Evaporator contains large quantities of aluminosilicate solids deposited on internal fixtures. The proposed cleaning operations will dissolve the solids in nitric acid. Operations will then neutralize the waste prior to transfer to a waste tank. Combining recent calculations of heat transfer for the 2H Evaporator cleaning operations and laboratory experiments for dissolution of solid samples from the pot, the authors estimated the re-formation rate for aluminosilicates during cooling. The results indicate a half-life formation of 17 hours when evaporator solution cools from 60 degrees C and 9 hours when cooled from 90 degrees C.

China’s economy continues to be a concern to U.S. policymakers. On the one hand, China’s economic growth presents huge opportunities for U.S. exporters. On the other hand, the surge in Chinese exports to the United States has put competitive pressures on many U.S. industries. Many U.S. policymakers have argued that greater efforts should be made to pressure China to fully implement its WTO commitments and to change various economic policies deemed harmful to U.S. economic interests, such as its currency peg and its use of subsidies to support its SOEs. In addition, recent bids by Chinese state-owned firms to purchase various U.S. firms have raised concerns among Members over the impact such acquisitions could have on U.S. national and economic security.

As part of the Tanks Focus Area's (TFA) effort to increase waste loading for high-level waste vitrification at various facilities in the Department of Energy (DOE) complex, the occurrence of phase separation in waste glasses spanning the Savannah River Site (SRS) and Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) composition ranges have been studied. The type of phase separation that occurs in the phosphate rich borosilicate waste glasses, such as those investigated for INEEL, crystallizes upon cooling. This type of phase separation mechanism is less well studied than amorphous phase separation in phosphate poor borosilicate waste glasses. Therefore, the type of phase separation, extent, and impact of phase separation on glass durability for a series of INEEL-type glasses were examined and the data statistically analyzed in this study.

Experiments were performed using a thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) system by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)to study the drying behavior of the K-Basin spent nuclear fuel (SNF) internal sludge and two different surface coatings of SNF elements. These measurements were conducted in support of the safety and process analyses of the proposed Integrated Process Strategy (IPS) to move the N-Reactor fuel stored at K-Basin to an interim storage facility. These limited experiments on the corrosion products of K-Basin SNF material were part of the broad studies performed to ascertain the bounding pressurization of the Multi-Canister Overpack (MCO). Seven SNF internal sludge samples taken from different damage regions of three damaged/corroded outer K-Basin SNF elements were dried. Additionally, two surface coating samples taken from two SNF elements stored at K-West were tested. All the tests were performed in a vacuum atmosphere with the same temperature ramp rate of about 0.4 C/ min. Each TGA test sample was weighed before and after the test on a balance located in the Shielded Analytical Laboratory hot cell. The test samples were vacuum dried in the TGA system for about 24 hours prior to heating them at the rate of 0.4 C/min. The observations from the …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Department of Defense's use of withdrawn land near Hawthorne, Nevada, focusing on: (1) the status of the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) proposal to reduce the amount of withdrawn land near Hawthorne; and (2) possible approaches for addressing the use of this land."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed foreign assistance, focusing on the: (1) use of the Compact of Free Association funding by the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) between fiscal years 1987 and 1998; (2) progress both nations have made in advancing economic self-sufficiency; (3) role of Compact funds in supporting economic progress; and (4) extent of accountability by the two nations and the United States over Compact expenditures."

None