A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Title XI of the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, as amended, is intended to help promote growth and modernization of the U.S. merchant marine and U.S. shipyards by enabling owners of eligible vessels and shipyards to obtain financing at attractive terms. The program has committed to guarantee more than $5.6 billion in ship construction and shipyard modernization costs since 1993, but it has experienced several large-scale defaults over the past few years. Because of concerns about the scale of recent defaults, GAO was asked to (1) determine whether MARAD complied with key program requirements, (2) describe how MARAD's practices for managing financial risk compare to those of selected private-sector maritime lenders, and (3) assess MARAD's implementation of credit reform."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The economic well being of the U.S. is dependent on the expeditious flow of people and goods through the transportation system. The attacks on September 11, 2001, illustrate the threats and vulnerabilities of the transportation system. Prior to September 11, the Department of Transportation (DOT) had primary responsibility for the security of the transportation system. In the wake of September 11, Congress created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) within DOT and gave it primary responsibility for the security of all modes of transportation. TSA was recently transferred to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). GAO was asked to examine the challenges in securing the transportation system and the federal role and actions in transportation security."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spent about $23 billion to provide health care to over 4 million veterans in fiscal year 2002. To provide this care, VA relied primarily on its own employees, totaling about 190,000. VA also used contract employees, sometimes referred to as contract labor, to provide these services. In response to the requirements of the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998 (the FAIR Act), VA compiled an inventory of more than 180,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions that it determined to be "health care commercial" in nature. This means that the work carried out in these positions is also done in the private sector and could potentially be done by contract labor. As part of its management initiatives, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has emphasized that competition should be used to determine the most effective and efficient way to provide commercial services. The process used to make this determination--referred to as competitive sourcing--is established in OMB Circular A-76. This process generally provides for competition between the government and the private sector on the basis of costs or costs and other factors. OMB …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Millions of Americans are unable to provide their own transportation--or even use public transportation--for Medicaid appointments, Head Start classes, job training, or other services. Such "transportation disadvantaged" persons are often disabled, elderly, or low income. Various federal programs are authorized to provide transportation services to them. GAO was asked to (1) identify the federal programs that fund such transportation services and the amount spent on them, (2) assess the extent of coordination among the various programs, and (3) identify any obstacles to coordination and potential ways to overcome such obstacles."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) is developing a new unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) that can suppress enemy air defenses and conduct other air-to-ground attacks, particularly against heavily defended targets. Because it may perform these missions at a relatively low cost, the UCAV could be used to replace some of DOD's aging tactical aircraft fleet. A key to UCAV's success will lie in DOD's ability to match users' needs, or requirements, with the developer's resources (technology and design knowledge, money, and time) when product development begins. Our work shows that doing so can prevent rework and save both time and money. Therefore, we assessed DOD's ability to make this match. GAO conducted its work on the basis of the Comptroller General's authority and addresses the report to the Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, House Committee on Armed Services because of its interest and jurisdiction in the program."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Privacy Act regulates how federal agencies may use the personal information that individuals supply when obtaining government services or fulfilling obligations--for example, applying for a small business loan or paying taxes. GAO was asked to review, among other things, agency compliance with the Privacy Act and related guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "After the events of September 11, 2001 led to the defeat of the Taliban, the United States and the international community developed an assistance program to support Afghanistan's new government and its people. Key components of this effort include food and agricultural assistance. GAO was asked to assess (1) the impact, management, and support of food assistance to Afghanistan and (2) the impact and management of agricultural assistance to Afghanistan, as well as obstacles to achieving food security and political stability."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The ongoing transition (or restructuring) of electricity markets from regulated monopolies to competitive markets is one of the largest single industrial reorganizations in the history of the world. While information is becoming more critical for understanding how well restructuring is working, there are troubling indications that some market participants deliberately misreported information to manipulate prices. GAO was asked to describe (1) the electricity information collected, used, and shared by key federal agencies in meeting their primary responsibilities and (2) the effect of restructuring on these federal agencies' collection, use, and sharing of this information."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Concern about the implications of the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) debt on its future competitiveness prompted Representative Richard Baker to ask GAO to determine TVA's planned and actual use of nontraditional financing arrangements (which, to date, has consisted primarily of lease-leaseback arrangements), who is at risk under TVA's lease-leaseback arrangements, and whether TVA's accounting for the lease-leaseback arrangements complies with applicable standards and requirements."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To reduce the estimated multibillion-dollar costs to the federal government of renewing rental subsidy contracts while helping preserve available and affordable low-income rental housing, Congress passed the Multifamily Assisted Housing Reform and Affordability Act of 1997 (Act), which established the "mark-to market" program to restructure the contracts. The Act also created the Office of Multifamily Housing Assistance Restructuring (OMHAR) as a temporary organization within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to administer the contract-restructuring program. With OMHAR scheduled to "sunset" (cease operations) on September 30, 2001, the Subcommittee on Housing and Transportation, Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, held a hearing in June 2001 to determine whether it would be more advantageous to the federal government to extend rather than end the program. Subsequently, Congress extended the sunset date to September 30, 2004, with restructuring work at HUD continuing until 2006. To ensure that OMHAR could attract and retain staff with requisite expertise in multifamily housing finance issues, the Act provided the Director of OMHAR authority to pay salaries comparable with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. As a result, OMHAR salaries are generally higher than …

The John Day is the nation's second longest free-flowing river in the contiguous United States and the longest containing entirely unsupplemented runs of anadromous fish. Located in eastern Oregon, the basin drains over 8,000 square miles, Oregon's fourth largest drainage basin, and incorporates portions of eleven counties. Originating in the Strawberry Mountains near Prairie City, the John Day River flows 284 miles in a northwesterly direction, entering the Columbia River approximately four miles upstream of the John Day dam. With wild runs of spring Chinook salmon and summer steelhead, westslope cutthroat, and redband and bull trout, the John Day system is truly a basin with national significance. The majority of the John Day basin was ceded to the Federal government in 1855 by the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon (Tribes). In 1997, the Tribes established an office in the basin to coordinate restoration projects, monitoring, planning and other watershed activities on private and public lands. Once established, the John Day Basin Office (JDBO) formed a partnership with the Grant Soil and Water Conservation District (GSWCD), also located in the town of John Day, who contracts the majority of the construction implementation activities for these projects from …

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to in memory of Donald R. Lewis, M.D., of Paris, Texas.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether chapter 108 of the Health and Safety Code authorizes or requires the Texas Health Code Information Council to provide the Department of Health with individually identifiable health care information (RQ-0010-GA)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; City of Skellytown's authority to enter certain agreements with the Skellytown Area Volunteer Firefighters-EMS Association (RQ-0014-GA)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether the Upton County Commissioners Court may maintain or work on private non-road property or sell county-owned dirt to private individuals for a reasonable fee (RQ-0015-GA)

None

None

This project was initially targeted to the making of coke for blast furnaces by using proprietary technology of Calderon in a phased approach, and Phase I was successfully completed. The project was then re-directed to the making of iron units. U.S. Steel teamed up with Calderon for a joint effort which will last 42 months to produce directly reduced iron with the potential of converting it into molten iron or steel consistent with the Roadmap recommendations of 1998 prepared by the Steel Industry in cooperation with the Department of Energy.

This is the twelfth Quarterly Technical Report for DOE Cooperative Agreement No: DE-FC26-00NT40753. The goal of the project is to develop cost effective analysis tools and techniques for demonstrating and evaluating low NOx control strategies and their possible impact on boiler performance for boilers firing US coals. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is providing co-funding for this program. This program contains multiple tasks and good progress is being made on all fronts. During this quarter, a new effort was begun on the development of a corrosion management system for minimizing the impacts of low NOx combustion systems on waterwalls; a kickoff meeting was held at the host site, AEP's Gavin Plant, and work commenced on fabrication of the probes. FTIR experiments for SCR catalyst sulfation were finished at BYU and indicated no vanadium/vanadyl sulfate formation at reactor conditions. Improvements on the mass-spectrometer system at BYU have been made and work on the steady state reactor system shakedown neared completion. The slipstream reactor continued to operate at AEP's Rockport plant; at the end of the quarter, the catalysts had been exposed to flue gas for about 1000 hours. Some operational problems were addressed that enable the reactor to run without …

Gas hydrates are crystalline, ice-like compounds of gas and water molecules that are formed under certain thermodynamic conditions. Hydrate deposits occur naturally within ocean sediments just below the sea floor at temperatures and pressures existing below about 500 meters water depth. Gas hydrate is also stable in conjunction with the permafrost in the Arctic. Most marine gas hydrate is formed of microbially generated gas. It binds huge amounts of methane into the sediments. Worldwide, gas hydrate is estimated to hold about 1016 kg of organic carbon in the form of methane (Kvenvolden et al., 1993). Gas hydrate is one of the fossil fuel resources that is yet untapped, but may play a major role in meeting the energy challenge of this century. In June 2002, Westport Technology Center was requested by the Department of Energy (DOE) to prepare a ''Best Practices Manual on Gas Hydrate Coring, Handling and Analysis'' under Award No. DE-FC26-02NT41327. The scope of the task was specifically targeted for coring sediments with hydrates in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) and from the present Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) drillship. The specific subjects under this scope were defined in 3 stages as follows: Stage 1: Collect information on …

The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) is designed to meet the growing need for new tools that will deepen our understanding in materials science, life science, chemistry, fundamental and nuclear physics, earth and environmental sciences, and engineering sciences. The SNS is an accelerator-based neutron-scattering facility that when operational will produce an average beam power of 2 MW at a repetition rate of 60 Hz. The accelerator complex consists of the front-end systems, which will include an ion source; a 1-GeV full-energy linear accelerator; a single accumulator ring and its transfer lines; and a liquid mercury target. This report documents an as-low-as-reasonably-achievable (ALARA) review of the accumulator ring and transfer lines at their early design stage. An ALARA working group was formed and conducted a review of the SNS ring and transfer lines at the {approx}25% complete design stage to help ensure that ALARA principles are being incorporated into the design. The radiological aspects of the SNS design criteria were reviewed against regulatory requirements and ALARA principles. Proposed features and measures were then reviewed against the SNS design criteria. As part of the overall review, the working group reviewed the design manual; design drawings and process and instrumentation diagrams; the environment, safety, …

Separation efficiency for hydrogen/light hydrocarbon mixtures was examined for three inorganic membranes. Five binary gas mixtures were used in this study: H{sub 2}/CH{sub 4} , H{sub 2}/C{sub 2}H{sub 6}, H{sub 2}/C{sub 3}H{sub 8}, He/CO{sub 2}, and He/Ar. The membranes examined were produced during a development program at the Inorganic Membrane Technology Laboratory in Oak Ridge and provided to us for this testing. One membrane was a (relatively) large-pore-diameter Knudsen membrane, and the other two had much smaller pore sizes. Observed separation efficiencies were generally lower than Knudsen separation but, for the small-pore membranes, were strongly dependent on temperature, pressure, and gas mixture, with the most condensable gases showing the strongest effect. This finding suggests that the separation is strongly influenced by surface effects (i.e., adsorption and diffusion), which enhance the transport of the heavier and more adsorption-prone component and may also physically impede flow of the other component. In one series of experiments, separation reversal was observed (the heavier component preferentially separating to the low-pressure side of the membrane). Trends showing increased separation factors at higher temperatures as well as observations of some separation efficiencies in excess of that expected for Knudsen flow suggest that at higher temperatures, molecular screening …

The remediation and deactivation and decommissioning (D&D) of nuclear waste storage tanks using telerobotics is one of the most challenging tasks faced in environmental cleanup. Since a number of tanks have reached the end of their design life and some of them have leaks, the unstructured, uncertain and radioactive environment makes the work inefficient and expensive. However, the execution time of teleoperation consumes ten to hundred times that of direct contact with an associated loss in quality. Thus, a considerable effort has been expended to improve the quality and efficiency of telerobotics by incorporating into teleoperation and robotic control functions such as planning, trajectory generation, vision, and 3-D modeling. One example is the Robot Task Space Analyzer (RTSA), which has been developed at the Robotics and Electromechanical Systems Laboratory (REMSL) at the University of Tennessee in support of the D&D robotic work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Energy Technology Laboratory. This system builds 3-D models of the area of interest in task space through automatic image processing and/or human interactive manual modeling. The RTSA generates a task plan file, which describes the execution of a task including manipulator and tooling motions. The high level controller of …

Stomata have a key role in the regulation of gas exchange and intercellular CO2 concentrations of leaves. Guard cells sense internal and external signals in the leaf environment and transduce these signals into osmoregulatory processes that control stomatal apertures. This research proposal addresses the characterization of the sensory transduction of the CO2 signal in guard cells. Recent studies have shown that in Vicia leaves kept at constant light and temperature in a growth chamber, changes in ambient CO2 concentrations cause large changes in guard cell zeaxanthin that are linear with CO2-dependent changes in stomatal apertures. Research proposed here will test the hypothesis that zeaxanthin function as a transducer of CO2 signals in guard cells. Three central aspects of this hypothesis will be investigated: CO2 sensing by the carboxylation reaction of Rubisco in the guard cell chloroplast, which would modulate zeaxanthin concentrations via changes in lumen pH; transduction of the CO2 signal by zeaxanthin via a transducing cascade that controls guard cell osmoregulation; and blue light dependence of the CO2 signal transduction by zeaxanthin, required for the formation of an isomeric form of zeaxanthin that is physiologically active as a transducer. The role of Rubisco in CO2 sensing will be investigated …