After instability during the late 1990s, Bahrain undertook substantial political reforms, but the Shiite majority continues to simmer over the Sunni-led government's perceived manipulation of laws and regulations to maintain its grip on power. Bahrain's stability has long been a key U.S. interest; it has hosted U.S. naval headquarters for the Gulf for nearly 60 years. In September 2004, the United States and Bahrain signed a free trade agreement (FTA).

The Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP), which is an advanced high temperature gas reactor (HTGR) concept with emphasis on production of both electricity and hydrogen, involves helium as the coolant and a closed-cycle gas turbine for power generation with a core outlet/gas turbine inlet temperature of 900-1000 C. In the indirect cycle system, an intermediate heat exchanger is used to transfer the heat from primary helium from the core to the secondary fluid, which can be helium, nitrogen/helium mixture, or a molten salt. The system concept for the vary high temperature reactor (VHTR) can be a reactor based on the prismatic block of the GT-MHR developed by a consortium led by General Atomics in the U.S. or based on the PBMR design developed by ESKOM of South Africa and British Nuclear Fuels of U.K. This report has made an assessment on the issues pertaining to the intermediate heat exchanger (IHX) for the NGNP. A detailed thermal hydraulic analysis, using models developed at ANL, was performed to calculate heat transfer, temperature distribution, and pressure drop. Two IHX designs namely, shell and straight tube and compact heat exchangers were considered in an earlier assessment. Helical coil heat exchangers were analyzed in the …

Clean surfaces and those with adsorbates have been investigated to obtain electronic and atomic structure data. The various modes of synchrotron radiation (SR) photoemission spectroscopy (PES) have been performed mostly beam line 7.0.1 at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) in Berkeley, CA and some at the Synchrotron Radiation Center (SRC) in Madison, WI. These were done on silicon, carbon, and group III nitrides.

The migration of biogeochemical gradients is a useful framework for understanding the evolution of biogeochemical conditions in groundwater at waste sites contaminated with metals and radionuclides. This understanding is critical to selecting sustainable remedies and evaluating sites for monitored natural attenuation, because most attenuation mechanisms are sensitive to geochemical conditions such as pH and redox potential. Knowledge of how gradients in these parameters evolve provides insights into the behavior of contaminants with time and guides characterization, remedy selection, and monitoring efforts. An example is a seepage basin site at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina where low-level acidic waste has seeped into groundwater. The remediation of this site relies, in part, on restoring the natural pH of the aquifer by injecting alkaline solutions. The remediation will continue until the pH up-flow of the treatment zone increases to an acceptable value. The time required to achieve this objective depends on the time it takes the trailing pH gradient, the gradient separating the plume from influxing natural groundwater, to reach the treatment zone. Predictions of this length of time will strongly influence long-term remedial decisions.

The Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) will facilitate technical expertise and training of Native Americans in renewable energy resource development for electrical generation facilities, and distributed generation options contributing to feasibility studies, strategic planning and visioning. CERT will also provide information to Tribes on energy efficiency and energy management techniques.This project will provide facilitation and coordination of expertise from government agencies and private industries to interact with Native Americans in ways that will result in renewable energy resource development, energy efficiency program development, and electrical generation facilities management by Tribal entities. The intent of this cooperative agreement is to help build capacity within the Tribes to manage these important resources.

Accelerator facility upgrades, new accelerator applications, and future design efforts are leading to novel klystron and IOT device concepts, including multiple beam, high-order mode operation, and new geometry configurations of old concepts. At the same time, a new simulation capability, based upon finite-difference “cut-cell” boundaries, has emerged and is transforming the existing modeling and design capability with unparalleled realism, greater flexibility, and improved accuracy. This same new technology can also be brought to bear on a difficult-to-study aspect of the energy recovery linac (ERL), namely the accurate modeling of the exit beam, and design of the beam dump for optimum energy efficiency. We have developed new capability for design calculations and modeling of a broad class of devices which convert bunched beam kinetic energy to RF energy, including RF sources, as for example, klystrons, gyro-klystrons, IOT's, TWT’s, and other devices in which space-charge effects are important. Recent advances in geometry representation now permits very accurate representation of the curved metallic surfaces common to RF sources, resulting in unprecedented simulation accuracy. In the Phase I work, we evaluated and demonstrated the capabilities of the new geometry representation technology as applied to modeling and design of output cavity components of klystron, IOT's, …

The developed software consists of two parts: FSML and VizSchema. FSML is based on an XML schema that represents the visualization entities needed for displaying fields and particles data in visualization tools. Each application is then represented by an XML instance mapping its data into the XML schema. Such XML file is used by the FSML reading library to bring in fields, particles and meshes from HDF5 files into memory. Based on this library, we developed AVS/Express and VisIt plugins. The second (more flexible) part of the software is called VizSchema. It consists of the schema expressed as a set of conventions and static data in the VizSchema code. The conventions describe the markup and organization of HDF5 data that would allow easy interpretation of data in the visualization terms. Based on theses conventions, a C++ HDF5-specific API for reading the visualization data was created. Finally, based on this library, we developed a new VisIt plugin (called Vs), which allows importing data from multiple applications using the markup. These applications include VORPAL, FACETS, UEDGE, NIMROD and MODAVE. The plugin will be included into the next releases of VisIt.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Bi-weekly student newspaper from Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Weekly magazine edition of the daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Dallas, Texas that includes local, state, and national news and advertising of interest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

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 under section 81.002(a) of the Local Government Code, the county commissioner’s oath provision, a county may employ a subcontracting company that is owned by a commissioner (RQ-0701-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 Cedar Bayou Navigation District may regulate structures on and near Cedar Bayou in certain circumstances (RQ-0702-GA)

Advertising linage report that details ad revenue from the Monitor McAllen, a Texas Daily Newspaper Association member, for September 2008.

Texas Daily Newspaper Associations information and rules for nominations for the 2008 Fred Hartman Excellence in Sportswriting Award, awarded annually by TDNA to Sports Editors and Writers. The document details the guidelines for submissions.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Perform verification surveys of 19 available grids located in the Lester Flat Area at the Davod Witherspoon Site. The survey grids included E11, E12, E13, F11, F12, F13, F14, F15, G15, G16, G17, H16, H17, H18, X16, X17, X18, K16, and J16.

This document presents the adequacy evaluation for the application of technology standards during design, fabrication, installation and testing of radioactive air exhaust systems at the Physical Sciences Facility (PSF), located on the Horn Rapids Triangle north of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) complex. The analysis specifically covers the exhaust portion of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems associated with emission units EP-3410-01-S, EP-3420-01-S and EP 3430-01-S.

This quarter, we have focused on several tasks: (1) Building a high-quality catalog of earthquake source parameters for the Middle East and East Asia. In East Asia, we computed source parameters using the CAP method for a set of events studied by Herrman et al., (MRR, 2006) using a complete waveform technique. Results indicated excellent agreement with the moment magnitudes in the range 3.5 -5.5. Below magnitude 3.5 the scatter increases. For events with more than 2-3 observations at different azimuths, we found good agreement of focal mechanisms. Depths were generally consistent, although differences of up to 10 km were found. These results suggest that CAP modeling provides estimates of source parameters at least as reliable as complete waveform modeling techniques. However, East Asia and the Yellow Sea Korean Paraplatform (YSKP) region studied are relatively laterally homogeneous and may not benefit from the CAP method’s flexibility to shift waveform segments to account for path-dependent model errors. A more challenging region to study is the Middle East where strong variations in sedimentary basin, crustal thickness and crustal and mantle seismic velocities greatly impact regional wave propagation. We applied the CAP method to a set of events in and around Iran and …

This report describes the gang problem in Central America, discusses country approaches to deal with the gangs, and analyzes U.S. policy with respect to gangs in Central America.

This report provides an overview of Jordanian politics and current issues in U.S.-Jordanian relations. It provides a brief discussion of Jordan's government and economy and of its cooperation in promoting Arab-Israeli peace and other U.S. policy objectives in the Middle East.

This report is designed to assist Members of Congress as they consider the costs and benefits of the U.S.-South Korean Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA.) It examines the provisions of the KORUS FTA in the context of the overall U.S.-South Korean economic relationship, U.S. objectives, and South Korean objectives.

This report first discusses the current state of the economy, including measures that have already been taken by the monetary authorities, and assesses the need for and potential consequences of fiscal stimulus. The second part of the report reviews the proposals discussed during debate on the recently enacted fiscal stimulus, both those adopted and those considered but not adopted. The various stimulus packages differed somewhat, and the report briefly describes those differences. This section also includes a discussion of the potential elements of a second stimulus proposal, and concludes with a discussion of the macroeconomic effects of the proposals. The final section of the paper discusses recent and proposed financial interventions.