Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) nonprofit research corporations, which receive funds primarily from non-VA sources to conduct medical research at VA facilities. Since VA's nonprofit corporations were first established, there has been limited oversight of their operations and contributions to VA research. Nonprofit corporations support VA's research environment by funding a portion of the department's research needs, such as laboratory equipment and improvements to infrastructure, and by providing flexible personnel and contracting arrangements to respond to investigators' needs. To detect conflict of interest, investigators on research projects administered by VA's nonprofit corporations are subject to federal statutes and regulations applicable to federal employees concerning conduct and conflicts of interest and may be required to disclose their financial interests. Institutional conflicts of interest are unlikely to occur in VA's nonprofit research corporations because they cannot own stock, have an equity interest in private companies, or obtain intellectual property rights. VA has delegated responsibility for monitoring and overseeing the activities of nonprofit corporations to the directors of VA medical centers; however, VA headquarters does not oversee and monitor corporations' financial activities and ensure that identified deficiencies are …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses efforts to link resources to results--also known as "performance budgeting." During the past decade, Congress and several administrations have put in place a structure for increasing the focus on and accountability for government performance. Federal agencies have been working to carry out the Government Performance Act, which requires the development of periodic strategic and annual performance plans and reports. Absent structural change in a number of major entitlement programs, budgetary flexibility will continue to decline and eventually disappear--while demands for new federal resources to address such emerging challenges as homeland security and other issues become more compelling and pressing. Given the country's longer-range fiscal imbalance, there is also a need to broaden the measures and focus of the federal budget process to accommodate these goals. The nation's fiscal challenges escalate rapidly just beyond the 10-year budget projection period. As a result, new metrics and mechanisms are needed to better highlight the longer-term implications of existing programs and proposed new fiscal commitments. Furthermore, in order to address emerging challenges, it is necessary to address both retirement and health programs encumbering the nation's fiscal future, in addition …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The United States is the most mobile nation on the planet. Constructing, improving, and repairing roads and bridges is fundamental to meeting the nation's mobility needs to facilitate commerce, national defense, and pleasure use and to promote economic growth. Therefore, it is important that highway projects using federal financial support are completed in as timely a manner as possible. According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and based on its professional judgment, it typically takes from 9 to 19 years to plan, gain approval for, and construct a new, major federally funded highway project that has significant environmental impacts. However, these projects constitute only 3 percent of all federally funded projects, according to FHWA. Officials in federal and state agencies and other knowledgeable organizations indicate that delivering larger, more complex or controversial projects may take longer to complete than is typical for most highway projects. In addition to needing more time because of their size and complexity, they often take longer to complete because they must comply with more federal and state requirements and because of the public interest that they may generate. Federal and state agencies have …

None

This report documents tests performed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to verify that the new air monitoring system for the 296-Z-1 ventilation exhaust stack meets the applicable regulatory criteria regarding the placement of the air sampling probe, sample transport, and stack flow measurement accuracy. These criteria ensure that the contaminants in the stack are well mixed with the airflow at the location of the probe so that the collected sample represents the whole. The sequence of tests addresses the acceptability of the flow angle relative to the probe uniformity of air velocity and gaseous and particle tracers in the cross section of the stack delivery of the sample from the sampler nozzle to the collection filter. The tests conducted on the air monitoring system demonstrated that the location for the air-sampling probe meets all performance criteria for air sampling systems at nuclear facilities. The performance criterion for particle transport was also met. All tests were successful, and all acceptance criteria were met.

A document that provides instructions to find a file or folder with handwritten notes on September 19, 2002.

Tritium activities decreased in all three SALDS proximal wells during FY 2002, compared with FY 2001. Activities in well 699-48-77A first decreased to less than 3,000 pCi/L in January 2002, but rose to 150,000 in July, probably as a result of tritium discharges to SALDS that resumed in February 2002. Well 699-48-77C, where tritium analysis produced a maximum value of 750,000 pCi/L in January 2002, reflects the result of the delayed penetration of effluent deeper into the aquifer from tritium discharges. SALDS proximal well 699-48-77D produced a maximum result of 240,000 pCi/L in July 2002. Timing between detections of tritium and other constituents in well 699-48-77C suggest a delay of approximately three years from detection in wells 699-48-77A and 699-48-77D. Historically maxima for tritium (790 and 860 pCi/L in successive sample periods) suggest that tritium from SALDS may be reaching the northern edge of the 200 West Area, south of the facility.

Weekly newspaper from Comanche, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Timpson, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Semi-weekly newspaper from Livingston, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Hondo, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with extensive advertising.

The rigid ceramic filters have been recognized to be a most promising kind of equipment for the gas-solid separation and the cleaning of hot gases due to their unique properties and higher separation efficiency for larger than 5 {micro}m particles, which will well meet downstream system component protection and environmental standards. They have potential for increased efficiency in advanced coal-fired power generation systems like pressurized fluidized bed combustion (PFBC) and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) process, and petrochemical process such as fluid catalyst cracking (FCC) Process. In the commercial utilization of rigid ceramic filters, the performance of pulse cleaning systems has crucial effects on the long-term structural durability and reliability of the entire design. In order to get a clear insight into the nature of this cleaning process and provide a solid basis for the industrial applications, the transient flow characteristics of the rigid ceramic candle filter during the whole pulse cleaning process should be completely analyzed.

The aim of the actual investigations is to integrate the catalytic reduction of carbon monoxide and particularly nitric oxides into the hot gas filtration process with ceramic filter elements of fluidized bed combustors which mainly represent an important N2O-source. According to Klein (Klein 1994) worldwide approx. 260 coal-fired power plants with fluidized bed combustors in the power range > 50 MWel existed in 1994, to which approx. 1% of the global coal dissipation corresponds. These emitted dinitrogen oxide with 70 kt/a, however, 20% of the entire N2O amounts from stationary firing plants. After Kleins calculations an increase of coal-fired fluidized bed combustors only by 10% triples the N2O emission.

In recent years a significant amount of effort has been devoted to develop damage-tolerant hot gas filter elements, which can withstand chemical, high pressure and extreme thermal cyclic loading in the coal-based environment (Alvin 1999, Spain and Starrett 1999). Ceramic candle filters have proven to be an effective filter for the ash laden gas streams, protecting the gas turbine components from exposure to particulate matter (Lippert et al. 1994). Ceramic candle filters need to sustain extreme thermal environment and vibration-induced stresses over a great period of time. Destructive tests have been used to describe physical, mechanical and thermal properties of the filters and to relate these properties and behaviors to in-service performance, and ultimately to predict the useful life of the filter materials (Pontius and Starrett 1994, Alvin et al. 1994). Nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques have been developed to determine the deterioration or the presence of damage and to estimate the remaining stiffness of ceramic candle filters (Chen and Kiriakidis 2001). This paper presents a study of parameters involved in the prediction of remaining life of ceramic candle filters under service conditions. About one hundred ceramic candle filters from previous studies (Chen and Kiriakidis 2000) and forty-six filters received during …

High-performance GaInAsSb/AlGaAsSb/GaSb thermophotovoltaic (TPV) devices with quantum efficiency and fill factor near theoretical limits and open-circuit voltage within about 15% of the limit can be routinely fabricated. To achieve further improvements in TPV device performance, detailed materials studies of GaInAsSb epitaxial growth, the microstructure, and minority carrier lifetime, along with device structure considerations are reported. This paper discusses the materials and device issues, and their implications on TPV device performance. In addition, improvements in TPV performance with integrated distributed Bragg reflectors and back-surface reflectors are discussed.

Hot gas filtration from industrial processes offers various advantages in terms of improvement of process efficiencies, heat recovery and protection of plant installation. Especially hot gas filtration is an essential technology for pressurized fluidized bed combustion (PFBC) and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC).

The objective of this work was to develop a nondestructive (NDE), cost-effective and reliable method to assess the condition of rigid ceramic hot gas filters. The work was intended to provide an end user, as well as filter producers, with a nondestructive method to assess the ''quality'' or status of the filters.

This paper describes an attempt to divide the total sulfur capacity into its contribution from zinc and iron using a pressurized-type thermobalance. The methodology to estimate the sulfur capacities corresponding to zinc and iron was applied to evaluate the variation in performance during multiple-cycle desulfurization. Primary objective of this paper is providing information on the stability of zinc-related sulfur capacity, which is essentially important to the sulfur removal performance at the concentration of the part-per-million level.

The Power Systems Development Facility (PSDF) is a joint Department of Energy/Industry sponsored engineering-scale facility for testing advanced coal-based power generation technologies. High temperature, high pressure gas cleaning is critical to many of these advanced technologies. Barrier filter elements that can operate continuously for nearly 9000 hours are required for a successful gas cleaning system for use in commercial power generation. Since late 1999, the Kellogg Brown & Root Transport reactor at the PSDF has been operated in gasification mode. This paper describes the test results for filter elements operating in the Siemens-Westinghouse particle collection device (PCD) with the Transport reactor in gasification mode. Operating conditions in the PCD have varied during gasification operation as described elsewhere in these proceedings (Martin et al, 2002).

Stable operation, in other words the achievement of a succession of uniform filtration cycles of reasonable length is a key issue in high-temperature gas filtration with ceramic media. Its importance has rather grown in recent years, as these media gain in acceptance due to their excellent particle retention capabilities. Ash properties have been known for some time to affect the maximum operating temperature of filters. However, softening and consequently ''stickiness'' of the ash particles generally depend on composition in a complex way. Simple and accurate prediction of critical temperature ranges from ash analysis--and even more so from coal analysis--is still difficult without practical and costly trials. In general, our understanding of what exactly happens during break-down of filtration stability is still rather crude and general. Early work was based on the concept that ash particles begin to soften and sinter near the melting temperatures of low-melting, often alkaline components. This softening coincides with a fairly abrupt increase of stickiness, that can be detected with powder mechanical methods in a Jenicke shear cell as first shown by Pilz (1996) and recently confirmed by others (Kamiya et al. 2001 and 2002, Kanaoka et al. 2001). However, recording {sigma}-{tau}-diagrams is very time consuming …

The purpose of this study is to characterize microstructural changes and analyze their possible effect to long term durability and reliability of SiC-based clay bonded hot gas filters.

In this study, we investigate the regeneration characteristics, desulfurization performance after regeneration and the durability of zinc ferrite sorbent in the desulfurization/regeneration cycles.

We see the sorbent reaction performance in a HGD process consisting of a transport desulfurizer and a fluidized regenerator in this study. We have obtained the solid hold-up and solid circulation rate necessary to reach the target desulfurization efficiency. A major obstacle for fluidized- or transport bed sorbent developments is sorbent durability withstanding attrition. Continuous operation only makes similar conditions of real processes such as rapid temperature swing, chemical transformations between sulfidation and regeneration, stresses induced by fluidization and continuous particle circulation between two reactors. Therefore, an integrated system of transport desulfurizer and bubbling regenerator is operated continuously more than 150 hours to see system reliability, sorbent reaction characteristics, sorbent morphology before and after test.

Advanced coal and biomass-based gas turbine power generation technologies (IGCC, PFBC, PCFBC, and Hipps) are currently under development and demonstration. Efforts at Siemens Westinghouse Power Corporation (SWPC) have been focused on the development and demonstration of hot gas filter systems as an enabling technology for power generation. This paper reviews SWPC's material and component assessment efforts, identifying the performance, stability, and life of porous metal, advanced alloy, and intermetallic filters under simulated, pressurized fluidized-bed combustion conditions.