Choir and band concert presented at the UNT College of Music Winspear Performance Hall.

The Clean Water Act (CWA) includes as one of its goals restoration and maintenance of the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters. The CWA established various programs to accomplish that goal. Among the programs is a requirement for states to establish water quality standards that will allow protection of the designated uses assigned to each water body. Once those standards are set, state agencies must sample the water bodies to determine if water quality requirements are being met. For those water bodies that are not achieving the desired water quality, the state agencies are expected to develop total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) that outline the maximum amount of each pollutant that can be discharged to the water body and still maintain acceptable water quality. The total load is then allocated to the existing point and nonpoint sources, with some allocation held in reserve as a margin of safety. Many states have already developed and implemented TMDLs for individual water bodies or regional areas. New and revised TMDLs are anticipated, however, as federal and state regulators continue their examination of water quality across the United States and the need for new or revised standards. This report was funded …

Natural gas represents an important energy source for the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Energy Information Administration (EIA), about 22% of the country's energy needs are provided by natural gas. Historically, natural gas was produced from conventional vertical wells drilled into porous hydrocarbon-containing formations. During the past decade, operators have increasingly looked to other unconventional sources of natural gas, such as coal bed methane, tight gas sands, and gas shales.

The use of thorium in current or advanced light water reactors (LWRs) has been of interest in recent years. These interests have been associated with the need to increase nuclear fuel resources and the perceived non-proliferation advantages of the utilization of thorium in the fuel cycle. Various options have been considered for the use of thorium in the LWR fuel cycle including: (1) its use in a once-through fuel cycle to replace non-fissile uranium or to extend fuel burnup due to its attractive fertile material conversion, (2) its use for fissile plutonium burning in limited recycle cores, and (3) its advantage in limiting the transuranic elements to be disposed off in a repository (if only Th/U-233 fuel is used). The possibility for thorium utilization in multirecycle system has also been considered by various researchers, primarily because of the potential for near breeders with Th/U-233 in the thermal energy range. The objective of this project is to evaluate the potential of the Th/U-233 fuel multirecycle in current LWRs, with focus this year on pressurized water reactors (PWRs). In this work, approaches for ensuring a sustainable multirecycle without the need for external source of makeup fissile material have been investigated. The intent …