A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Every year millions of Americans covered by Medicare undergo endoscopic medical procedures in a variety of health care settings ranging from physicians' offices to hospitals. These invasive procedures call for the use of a lighted, flexible instrument and are used for screening and treating disease. Although some of these procedures can be performed while the patient is fully awake, most require some form of sedation and are usually provided in health care facilities such as hospitals or ambulatory surgical centers (ASC). Some physician specialty societies have expressed concern that Medicare's reimbursement policies may offer a financial incentive to physicians to perform endoscopic procedures in their offices and that these procedures may be less safe because physicians' offices are less closely regulated and therefore there is less oversight of the quality of care. For the 20 procedures reviewed, there was no evidence to suggest that there in any difference in the level of safety of gastroenterological and urological endoscopic procedures performed on Medicare beneficiaries in either physicians' offices or health care facilities, such as hospitals and ASC's. There was also no evidence found to suggest that the …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "More than 30,000 people are diagnosed annually with leukemia or other blood, metabolic, or immune system disorders, many of whom may die without stem cell transplants, using stem cells from bone marrow or another source. When a patient needs a transplant of donated stem cells and no genetically compatible related donor is available, the National Bone Marrow Donor Registry may help the patient search for compatible stem cells from unrelated donors. The National Bone Marrow Registry Reauthorization Act of 1998 required, among other things, that the Registry carry out a donor recruitment program giving priority to minority and underrepresented donor populations, ensure efficiency of operations, and verify compliance with standards by organizations that participate in the Registry. From 1998, when the National Bone Marrow Registry Reauthorization Act was enacted, through 2001, the number of stem cell donors on the Registry increased for all racial and ethnic groups. Although the exact number of patients in need of transplants is not known, estimates suggest that about one-third of them use the Registry to search for donors. The organizations that are involved in transplantation and participate in the National …

Weekly student newspaper from San Antonio College in San Antonio, Texas that includes campus news along with advertising.

A photograph of TAMS alumni at the 2002 UNT Homecoming. There are large tents behind them and there are large standing letters beside them. One is wearing a backpack.

A photograph of a group of TAMS alumni at the 2002 UNT Homecoming. There are three large tents behind them and one has a sign that reads "TAMS ALUMNI RECEPTION" on it. There are letters and balloons that are decorating the area.

A photograph of a group of TAMS alumni at the 2002 UNT Homecoming. There are three large tents behind them and one has a sign that reads "TAMS ALUMNI RECEPTION" on it. There are letters and balloons that are decorating the area.

A photograph of TAMS alumni at the 2002 UNT Homecoming. There are large tents behind them and one has balloons attached to it. They are handling name-tags for people at the event.

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

With the Nation's coal-burning utilities facing the possibility of tighter controls on mercury pollutants, the U.S. Department of Energy is funding projects that could offer power plant operators better ways to reduce these emissions at much lower costs. Mercury is known to have toxic effects on the nervous system of humans and wildlife. Although it exists only in trace amounts in coal, mercury is released when coal burns and can accumulate on land and in water. In water, bacteria transform the metal into methylmercury, the most hazardous form of the metal. Methylmercury can collect in fish and marine mammals in concentrations hundreds of thousands times higher than the levels in surrounding waters. One of the goals of DOE is to develop technologies by 2005 that will be capable of cutting mercury emissions 50 to 70 percent at well under one-half of today's costs. ADA Environmental Solutions (ADA-ES) is managing a project to test mercury control technologies at full scale at four different power plants from 2000-2003. The ADA-ES project is focused on those power plants that are not equipped with wet flue gas desulfurization systems. ADA-ES has developed a portable system that will be tested at four different utility power …

Lead-Bismuth Eutectic and Tungsten are under consideration as target materials with high-energy protons for generating neutrons to drive actinide and fission product transmuters. A detailed characterization has been performed to study the performance of these target materials as a function of the main variables and the design selections. The characterization includes the neutron yield, the spatial energy deposition, the neutron spectrum, the beam window performance, and the target buffer impact on the target performance. The characterization has also considered high-energy deuteron particles to study the impact on the target neutronic performance. The obtained results quantify the performance of the Lead-Bismuth Eutectic and Tungsten target materials as a function of the target variables and design selections.

Accurate measurement of temperature is essential for the safe and efficient operation and control of a wide range of industrial processes. Appropriate techniques and instrumentation are needed depending on the temperature measurement requirements in different industrial processes and working environments. Harsh environments are common in many industrial applications. These harsh environments may involve extreme physical conditions, such as high-temperature, high-pressure, corrosive agents, toxicity, strong electromagnetic interference, and high-energy radiation exposure. Due to these severe environmental conditions, conventional temperature sensors are often difficult to apply. This situation has opened a new but challenging opportunity for the sensor society to provide robust, high-performance, and cost-effective temperature sensors capable of operating in those harsh environments. The focus of this research program has been to develop a temperature measurement system for temperature measurements in the primary and secondary stages of slagging gasifiers. For this application the temperature measurement system must be able to withstand the extremely harsh environment posed by the high temperatures and corrosive agents present in these systems. Real-time, accurate and reliable monitoring of temperature for the coal gasification process is important to realize the full economic potential of these gasification systems. Long life and stability of operation in the high temperature …

We report the first results obtained by the CDF collaboration from the analysis of the Tevatron Run II data collected until June 2002. All components of the CDF detector are operating at or near the design specifications. Typical physics signals are observed and used both to characterize the CDF detector performance, and to make several physics measurements. In spite of the still limited accumulated luminosity some measurements are already competitive with the best currently available.

The Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) requires analyses to verify that strontium and total alpha content of treated wastes meet Saltstone Processing Facility (SPF) Waste Acceptance Criteria (WAC). The SWPF will require that results are available in time to meet process cycle requirements. SWPF personnel sought on-line and at-line monitors to follow trends in strontium-90 and alpha concentrations in order to track process performance. While an on-line method is under development at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), it has yet to be demonstrated. This report describes off-line methods that will not be subject to some of the concerns about and limitations of on-line/at-line methods. Presently, less-rapid off-line technologies are the baseline methods. Also, this report compares advantages and disadvantages of a variety of approaches including rapid radiochemical separations, automated analytical-scale processing systems, and radiation measurement tools.

The purpose of this document is to evaluate the potential for criticality for the fissile material that could accumulate in the near-field (invert) and in the far-field (host rock) beneath the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) spent nuclear fuel (SNF) codisposal waste packages (WPs) as they degrade in the proposed monitored geologic repository at Yucca Mountain. The scope of this calculation is limited to the following DOE SNF types: Shippingport Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR), Enrico Fermi, Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF), Fort St. Vrain, Melt and Dilute, Shippingport Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR), N-Reactor, and Training, Research, Isotope, General Atomics reactor (TRIGA). The results of this calculation are intended to be used for estimating the probability of criticality in the near-field and in the far-field. There are no limitations on use of the results of this calculation. The calculation is associated with the waste package design and was developed in accordance with the technical work plan, ''Technical Work Plan for: Department of Energy Spent Nuclear Fuel and Plutonium Disposition Work Packages'' (Bechtel SAIC Company, LLC [BSC], 2002a). This calculation is subject to the Quality Assurance Requirements and Description (QARD) per the activity evaluation under work package number P6212310Ml in the …

The authors investigated the performance of freshly precipitated manganese oxide and monosodium titanate (MST) for the removal of strontium (Sr) and actinides from actual high-level waste. Manganese oxide precipitation occurs upon addition of a reductant such as formate (HCO2-) or peroxide (H2O2) to a waste solution containing permanganate (MnO4-). An addition of non-radioactive strontium typically precedes the MnO4- and reductant addition, which serves primarily to isotopically dilute the strontium-90 (90Sr) present in the waste. Tests utilized a Tank 37H/44F composite waste solution. Personnel significantly increased the concentration of actinides in the waste by the addition of acidic americium/curium solution (F-Canyon Tank 17.1 solution), which contained a significant quantity of plutonium (Pu), and neptunium-237 (237Np) stock solution. Initial tests examined three manganese oxide treatment options.

Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators started a neutrino working group to identify new opportunities in the field of neutrino oscillations and explore how our laboratory facilities can be used to explore this field of research. The memo to the working group and the charge are included in Appendix I. This report is the result of the deliberations of the working group. Previously, we wrote a letter of intent to build a new high intensity neutrino beam at BNL. A new intense proton beam will be used to produce a conventional horn focused neutrino beam directed at a detector located in either the Homestake mine in Lead, South Dakota at 2540 km or the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, NM at 2880 km. As a continuation of the study that produced the letter of intent, this report examines several items in more detail. We mainly concentrate on the use of water Cherenltov detectors because of their size, resolution, and background rejection capability, and cost. We examine the prospects of building such a detector in the Homestake mine. The accelerator upgrade will be carried out in phases. We expect the first phase to yield a 0.4 MW proton beam and …

The general purpose D0 collider detector at the Fermilab Tevatron has undergone major upgrades for Run II. We describe the current status and performance of the D0 detector.

A cart system using linear synchronous motors was being considered for the Plutonium Immobilization Plant (PIP). One of the applications in the PIP was the movement of a stack of furnace trays, filled with the waste form (pucks) from a stacking/unstacking station to several bottom loaded furnaces. A system was ordered to perform this function in the PIP Ceramic Prototype Test Facility (CPTF). This system was installed and started up in SRTC prior to being installed in the CPTF. The PIP was suspended and then canceled after the linear synchronous motor system was started up. This system was used to determine repeatability of a linear synchronous motor cart system for the Modern Pit Facility.

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.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Under 10 U.S.C. 2466, the military services and defense agencies can use no more than 50 percent of annual depot maintenance funding for work by private-sector contractors. The Department of Defense (DOD) is to submit two reports to the Congress annually on the costs of public- and private-sector depot maintenance workloads: a "prior-years" report on the past 2 fiscal years and a "future-years" report on the next 5. Section 2466 also requires GAO to report to the Congress on whether DOD complied with the so-called "50-50 requirement" in the prior-years report and whether the future-years projections are reasonable. This report fulfills that requirement."

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This report discusses the Cost-of-living Adjustments to Social Security in 2003. To compensate for the effects of inflation, Social Security recipients receive a cos-of-living adjustment (COLA) in January of each year. The Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), updates monthly by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), is the measure used to compute the change.

We have identified important chemical reactions that control the fate of metal-contaminated estuarine sediments if they are left undisturbed (in situ) or if they are dredged. We combined information on the molecular bonding of metals in solids from X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) with thermodynamic and kinetic driving forces obtained from dissolved metal concentrations to deduce the dominant reactions under reduced and oxidized conditions. We evaluated the in situ geochemistry of metals (cadmium, chromium, iron, lead, manganese and zinc) as a function of sediment depth (to 100 cm) from a 60-year record of contamination at the Alameda Naval Air Station, California. Results from XAS and thermodynamic modeling of porewaters show that cadmium and most of the zinc form stable sulfide phases, and that lead and chromium are associated with stable carbonate, phosphate, phyllosilicate, or oxide minerals. Therefore, there is minimal risk associated with the release of these trace metals from the deeper sediments contaminated prior to the Clean Water Act (1975) as long as reducing conditions are maintained. Increased concentrations of dissolved metals with depth were indicative of the formation of metal HS- complexes. The sediments also contain zinc, chromium, and manganese associated with detrital iron-rich phyllosilicates and/or oxides. These phases …

This report describes the change in the age of distribution of the U.S. population that will occur between 2000 and 2020 and summarizing the historical data on the labor force participation of older workers. This discussion is followed by an analysis of data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey on employment and receipt of pension income in recent years among persons age 55 and older.