A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report examines how best practices offer improvements to the way the Department of Defense defines and matches weapon system requirements to available resources such as cost, schedule, and mature technologies. GAO identified three factors that were key to matching needs and resources before product development began. First, developers employed the technique of systems engineering to identify gaps between resources and customer needs before committing to a new product development. Second, customers and developers were flexible. Leeway existed to reduce or defer customer needs to future programs or for the developer to make an investment to increase knowledge about a technology or design feature before beginning product development. Third, the roles and responsibilities of the customer and the product developer were matched, with the product developer being able to determine or significantly influence product requirements. In cases where these factors were not present at program launch, product development began without a match between requirements and resources. Invariably, this imbalance favored meeting customer needs by adding resources, which resulted in increased costs and later deliveries."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) budgets billions of dollars each year to purchase and repair the spare parts needed to maintain its weapons systems and support equipment. The quality of the spare parts can greatly determine if the Department's investment of funds is effective, efficient, and economical. This report examines the Navy's Product Quality Deficiency Reporting Program and the extent to which the program has gathered the data needed for the analysis, correction, and prevention of deficiencies in spare parts. GAO found that data on parts defects identified at the time of installation were underreported. Data on parts that failed after some operation but before their expected design life were not collected as part of this program. In the quality reports GAO reviewed, some key information was omitted on the cause of the parts' failures and some reports did not identify who was responsible for the defects. To a large extent, the program's ineffectiveness can be attributed to lack of management, limited training and incentives to report deficiencies, and competing priorities for the staff resources needed to carry out the program."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The number of women participating in intercollegiate athletics at four-year colleges and universities increased substantially between school years 1981-82 and 1998-99, while the number of men participating increased more modestly. The total number of women's teams increased by 3,784 teams, compared to an increase of 36 men's teams. In all, 963 schools added teams and 307 discontinued teams since 1992-93. The two factors cited most often as greatly influencing the decision to add or discontinue teams were the need to address student interest in particular sports and the need to meet gender equity goals and requirements. Schools that discontinued men's teams also found the need to reallocate the athletic budget to other sports. Colleges and universities that discontinued a team typically took three months or less between originating the proposal and making the final decision. Most schools informed members of the campus community of the possibility that the team would be discontinued, and most held meetings with campus groups before making the final decision. Most schools offered to help affected athletes transfer to other schools, and students receiving athletics-related financial aid continued to receive financial aid …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The District of Columbia's fiscal year 2000 performance report is an improvement in that it meets some of the statutory requirements that the previous year's report did not. However, the extensive changes that the District made to its fiscal year 2000 performance goals during the fiscal year undermine the report's usefulness because the District did not include critical information needed by Congress and other stakeholders. Such information, identifying how, when, and why specific goals were altered and the decision-making and accountability implications of those changes, is important to Congress and others so that they can have confidence in the validity and completeness of the reported performance data. Also, the report does not cover all significant activities of the District government. Sustained progress is needed to address the critical performance and other management challenges that the District faces. The District recognizes the shortcomings with its performance management efforts and has stated a commitment to addressing them. The effective implementation of the various initiatives underway in the District is vital to the success of the District's efforts to create a more focused, results-oriented approach to management and decision-making--an …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Congress has enacted many statutes that designate types of customers or geographic areas for preference and priority in purchasing electricity from federal agencies. In general, the preference has been intended to (1) direct the benefits of public resources--relatively inexpensive hydropower--to portions of the public through nonprofit entities, (2) spread the benefits of federally generated hydropower widely and encourage the development of rural areas, (3) prevent private interests from exerting control over the full development of electric power on public lands, and (4) provide a yardstick against which the rates of investor-owned utilities can be measured. The applications of various preference provisions have been challenged several times in the courts, which have directed a power marketing administration (PMA) to provide power to preference customers. In other instances, they have supported the denial of power to such customers. The characteristics of the electricity industry have changed. During the last 20 years, competition has been replacing regulation in major sectors of the U.S. economy. Several proposals have come before Congress to restructure the electrical industry, including some that would encourage the states to allow retail customers a choice in …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report reviews changes in fastener industry practice "resulting from or apparently resulting from" the small-lot exemption of the Fastener Quality Act. GAO found no evidence that the fastener industry changed any practices resulting from, or apparently resulting from, the small-lot exemption. The Customs Service's limited tests of imported fasteners in 2001 found no evidence of substandard fasteners and no evidence of any decline in the quality of fasteners from the results of tests Customs conducted in 1998."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To help military families adapt and function effectively in military life, the Department of Defense (DOD) funds a wide variety of personnel and family support programs. These programs use a combination of direct assistance and information and referral to help with crises, deployments, moves, child care, personal financial management, parenting, and transition out of the service. To efficiently distribute funds to those with the greatest need, DOD requires each service to assess the needs of military personnel and their families and their use of family support programs. This report examines (1) how the Air Force determines the needs of its military families, (2) what type of information about military family needs the Air Force obtains, and (3) how information from needs assessments affects the allocation of funding for Air Force family support programs. GAO found that the Air Force assesses the needs of its personnel every two years using a random sample survey. However, the Air Force process does not meet other DOD criteria generally recognized as important for needs assessments, including the use of benchmarks to determine if needs have changed or emerged. Additionally, the …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Since 1980, the Winter and Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games hosted in the United States have increased in size and magnitude, as have the total direct costs to plan and stage them. The reported direct costs to plan and stage the games discussed in this report ranged from $363 million to more than $2.4 billion. Although the total dollar amount of federal funding and support has increased, the total federal share of the reported total direct costs to plan and stage the games has decreased. Since 1980, the amount of funding and support provided by state and local governments has increased. Generally, federal funding and support for the total direct costs of each of these games was either specifically designated by Congress or approved by the federal agencies."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. tax system is based on voluntary reporting. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reviews all tax returns after they are filed to ensure compliance with tax laws governing this voluntary system. Despite these efforts, each year billions of dollars in taxes owed are not voluntarily reported and paid, which could result in reduced revenue to fund federal programs, higher tax rates, or both. There are three types of voluntary compliance measures: filing compliance, which measures the percent of taxpayers who file returns in a timely manner; payment compliance, which measures the percent of tax payments that are paid in a timely manner; and reporting compliance, which measures the percent of actual tax liability that is reported accurately on returns. This report reviews the status of IRS' plans to measure voluntary reporting compliance as well as six other federal programs that currently measure voluntary compliance. GAO found that IRS has tried to develop an approach for measuring voluntary compliance. It has established objectives and guiding principles for developing this measure as well as developed database software to collect and analyze data. As of March 2001, IRS' …

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The effectiveness and appropriateness of the International Monetary Fund's lending programs to poor countries have been widely debated, generally centering on whether the program has improved these countries' economies. In response to some of these concerns and as part of a concerted international effort to reduce poverty, the Fund expanded the goals of its lending program to its poorest members in 1999 to include an explicit focus on poverty reduction. To underscore this focus, the Fund renamed its concessional lending program the Poverty Reduction and Frowth Facility. GAO found that although the design of the facility does not differ significantly from the Fund's previous program, some elements of the new program are emphasized more now than in the past. The one major design change--getting countries to take ownership of their macroeconomic framework--is difficult to achieve for three reasons. First, many recipient governments have limited capacity to independently analyze and effectively negotiate the macroeconomic framework, which reduces the opportunity for country-specific elements to be addressed. Second, it is difficult to effectively engage nongovernmental organizations in a dialogue on these very complex matters. Finally, a national dialogue on …

A test methodology for measuring temperature, impedance, pH, and electrochemical potential distributions within a sludge-packed tube support plate crevice in a laboratory test is described. The method successfully showed that there were large concentration gradients between the tube and tube support plate sides of the crevice. The testing also showed that strong bases concentrated more effectively than strong acids, and that the crevice pH, when exposed to seawater-based solutions, increased with increasing superheat and decreasing bulk concentration. The large variations in the crevice chemistry observed under heat transfer were eliminated upon shutdown. These new test data suggest that it might be beneficial to evaluate the variation in the extent of stress corrosion cracking with tube support plate elevation found in some steam generators in light of local chemistry changes, as well as the variation in tubing temperature. Because of the large crevice chemistry gradients during boiling heat transfer and their subsequent homogenization upon test shutdown, the results suggest reassessing the use of hideout return measurements and tube deposit analyses in industry to infer the crevice chemistry under heat transfer conditions.

The possibility of fast ignition of thermo-nuclear fusion is stimulating research interest and activity worldwide. Fast ignition (FI) offers significantly higher gain than conventional spark ignition and the high gain opens the way to an efficient fusion energy producing cycle with laser drivers. The key to FI is the efficient transport of energy from a short pulse laser beam, the igniter, to a small ignition spark in compressed deuterium-tritium fuel. The primary candidate process enabling such energy transfer, is the absorption of laser light and its conversion into a beam of relativistic electrons, which heats the spark. Theory has predicted self-induced magnetic collimation of the electron beam, which could enable efficient transport from the absorption point to the ignition spark. Experiments are required to understand this highly complex process which involves currents in the electron beam, which greatly exceed the Alfven current limit6 (at which the Larmor radius of an electron in the magnetic field associated with by the current is smaller than the radius of the beam). Almost complete current compensation by cold electron return current is therefore required. The oppositely directed hot and cold electron flows initiate strong growth of the Weibel instability, which causes the currents to …

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Reconciliation report with an ending account balance of $454.75 reconciled for the period ending on July 31, 2001.

This document contains the CY 2001 schedules for the routine collection of samples for the Surface Environmental Surveillance Project (SESP) and Drinking Water Monitoring Project. Each section includes sampling locations, sample types, and analyses to be performed.

PNNL conducted a walk-through audit of Marine Corps Air Station at Camp Pendleton. The audit inspected a significant portion of the site and identified a large number of similar energy saving opportunities across all building types.

The objective of this calculation is to verify the energy balance of the thermal calculations analyzed by ANSYS Version (V) 5.4 solver (see Section 4). The scope of this calculation is limited to calculating the energy balance of a two-dimensional repository thermal representation using the temperatures obtained from ANSYS V5.4. The procedure, AP-3.124, Calculations (Ref. 3), and the Technical Work Plan for: Waste Package Design Description for LA (Ref. 2) are used to develop this calculation. The associated activity is the development of engineering evaluations to support the Licensing Application design activities.

The purpose of this Fire Hazards Analysis Technical Report (hereinafter referred to as Technical Report) is to assess the risk from fire within individual fire areas to ascertain whether the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) fire safety objectives are met. The objectives, identified in DOE Order 420.1, Change 2, Fire Safety, Section 4.2, establish requirements for a comprehensive fire and related hazards protection program for facilities sufficient to minimize the potential for: (1) The occurrence of a fire or related event; (2) A fire that causes an unacceptable on-site or off-site release of hazardous or radiological material that will threaten the health and safety of the employees, the public, and the environment; (3) Vital DOE programs suffering unacceptable interruptions as a result of fire and related hazards; (4) Property losses from a fire and related events exceeding defined limits established by DOE; and (5) Critical process controls and safety class systems being damaged as a result of a fire and related event.

Some recent work has been done to look at improvements of transporting beam from the Lithium Lens to the Debuncher. This work has been done using the beamline modeling tools developed by Dave McGinnis. These tools, console application P143 and optimization code running MAD repeatedly on the Beam Physics UNIX system, were first used to match the Twiss and dispersion parameters at the end of AP2 to the Debuncher. Imaginary trims were then added to AP2 to study where additional trims could be used to help with beam control in small aperture areas.

When exposed to deaerated high purity water, Alloy X-750 is susceptible to both high temperature (> 249 C) intergranular stress corrosion cracking (IGSCC) and intergranular low temperature (< 149 C) fracture (LTF). However, the microstructural and microchemical factors that govern environmentally assisted cracking (EAC) susceptibility are poorly understood. The present study seeks to characterize the grain boundary microstructure and microchemistry in order to gain a better mechanistic understanding of stress corrosion crack initiation, crack growth rate, and low temperature fracture. Light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, orientation imaging microscopy, scanning Auger microscopy, and thermal desorption spectroscopy were performed on selected heats of Alloy X-750 AH. These data were correlated to EAC tests performed in 338 C deaerated water. Results show that grain boundary MC-type [(Ti,Nb)C] carbides and increased levels of grain boundary phosphorus correlate with an increase in LTF susceptibility but have little effect on the number of initiation sites or the SCC crack growth rate. Thermal desorption data show that multiple hydrogen trapping states exist in Alloy X-750 condition AH. Moreover, it appears that exposure to high temperature (> 249 C), hydrogen deaerated water increases the hydrogen concentration in strong hydrogen trap states and degrades the resistance …

Prior studies of Alloy 600 and Alloy X-750 have shown the existence of a maximum in stress corrosion cracking (SCC) susceptibility in high temperature water (e.g., at 360 C), when testing is conducted over a range of dissolved (i.e., aqueous) hydrogen (H{sub 2}) concentrations. It has also been shown that this maximum in SCC susceptibility tends to occur in proximity to the nickel/nickel oxide (Ni/NiO) phase transition, suggesting that oxide phase stability may affect primary water SCC (PWSCC) resistance. Previous studies have estimated the Ni/NiO transition using thermodynamic calculations based on free energies of formation for NiO and H{sub 2}O. The present study reports experimental measurements of the Ni/NiO transition performed using a contact electric resistance (CER) instrument. The CER is capable of measuring the surface resistance of a metal to determine whether it is oxide-covered or oxide-free at a given condition. The transition aqueous hydrogen (H{sub 2}) concentration corresponding to the Ni/NiO equilibrium was measured at 288, 316, 338 and 360 C using high purity Ni specimens. The results showed an appreciable deviation (i.e., 7 to 58 scc H{sub 2}/kg H{sub 2}O) between the measured Ni/NiO transition and the theoretical Ni/NiO transition previously calculated using free energy data from …

It is well accepted that the 1992 M 5.6 Little Skull Mountain earthquake, the largest historical event to have occurred within 25 km of Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was triggered by the M 7.2 Landers earthquake that occurred the day before. On the premise that earthquakes can be triggered by applied stresses, we have examined the earthquake catalog from the Southern Great Basin Digital Seismic Network (SGBDSN) for other evidence of triggering by external and internal stresses. This catalog now comprises over 12,000 events, encompassing five years of consistent monitoring, and has a low threshold of completeness, varying from M 0 in the center of the network to M 1 at the fringes. We examined the SGBDSN catalog response to external stresses such as large signals propagating from teleseismic and regional earthquakes, microseismic storms, and earth tides. Results are generally negative. We also examined the interplay of earthquakes within the SGBDSN. The number of ''foreshocks'', as judged by most criteria, is significantly higher than the background seismicity rate. In order to establish this, we first removed aftershocks from the catalog with widely used methodology. The existence of SGBDSN foreshocks is supported by comparing actual statistics to those of a simulated catalog …

The purpose of this assumptions document is to provide general scope, strategy, technical basis, schedule and cost assumptions for the Monitored Geologic Repository (MGR) life cycle cost (LCC) estimate and schedule update incorporating information from the Viability Assessment (VA) , License Application Design Selection (LADS), 1999 Update to the Total System Life Cycle Cost (TSLCC) estimate and from other related and updated information. This document is intended to generally follow the assumptions outlined in the previous MGR cost estimates and as further prescribed by DOE guidance.

The purpose of this report is to identify the potential for on-site power generation in the U.S. industrial sector with emphasis on nine industrial groups called the ''Industries of the Future'' (IOFs) by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Through its Office of Industrial Technologies (OIT), the DOE has teamed with the IOFs to develop collaborative strategies for improving productivity, global competitiveness, energy usage and environmental performance. Total purchases for electricity and steam for the IOFs are in excess of $27 billion annually. Energy-related costs are very significant for these industries. The nine industrial groups are (1) Agriculture (SIC 1); (2) Forest products; (3) Lumber and wood products (SIC 24); (4) Paper and allied products (SIC 26); (5) Mining (SIC 11, 12, 14); (6) Glass (SIC 32); (7) Petroleum (SIC 29); (8) Chemicals (SIC 28); and (9) Metals (SIC 33): Steel, Aluminum, and Metal casting. Although not currently part of the IOF program, the food industry is included in this report because of its close relationship to the agricultural industry and its success with on-site power generation. On-site generation provides an alternative means to reduce energy costs, comply with environmental regulations, and ensure a reliable power supply. On-site generation can …