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Appropriations are one part of a complex federal budget process that includes budget resolutions, appropriations (regular, supplemental, and continuing) bills, rescissions, and budget reconciliation bills. This report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress passes each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Energy and Water.

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Funeral program for Ola V. Alcorn, born November 18, 1930 and died March 21, 2002. The funeral was held March 26, 2002 at Lilly of the Vally Missionary Baptist Church, officiated by Pastor Steven R. Owens, Sr. The funeral arrangements were made through Sutton's Paradise Funeral Home and she was buried in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery near San Antonio, Texas.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To increase child support collections, Congress has considered proposals to improve the ability of private firms to gather information to help locate noncustodial parents and enforce the payment of child support. At the end of fiscal year 2000, the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) indicated that $89 billion in child support was owed but unpaid--a 96-percent increase since the end of fiscal year 1996. GAO believes that this amount is understated. Thousands of private and public sector entities can collect child support. Both private firms and state agencies reported collections from about 60 percent of their cases. Twenty-two of the 24 private firms GAO reviewed reported that they relied on private information vendors--commercial firms that sell information such as addresses, telephone numbers, and social security numbers--as their primary information source, whereas about one-third of state agencies reported using this source. State agencies relied heavily on state and federal automated databases to locate noncustodial parents and their assets. Additionally, private firms and the state agencies reported calling noncustodial parents to collect child support. However, only the private firms called third parties, such as relatives and neighbors …

The objective of this project is two-fold. It will demonstrate use of nitrogen as a widely available, cost-effective and environmentally superior injectant for miscible floods. It will also demonstrate the effectiveness of horizontal wellbores in reducing gas breakthrough and cycling. It is expected that the demonstration will lead to implementation of nitrogen injection projects in areas without readily available carbon dioxide sources. Technology transfer will occur throughout the project.

The availability of high brilliance synchrotron sources, coupled with recent progress in achromatic focusing optics and large area 2D detector technology, have allowed us to develop an X-ray synchrotron technique capable of mapping orientation and strain/stress in polycrystalline thin films with submicron spatial resolution. To demonstrate the capabilities of this instrument, we have employed it to study the microstructure of aluminum thin film structures at the granular and subgranular level. Owing to the relatively low absorption of X-rays in materials, this technique can be used to study passivated samples, an important advantage over most electron probes given the very different mechanical behavior of buried and unpassivated materials.

This research program is directed at obtaining detailed experimental information on the electronic interactions between metals and organic molecules. These interactions provide low energy pathways for many important chemical and catalytic processes. A major feature of the program is the continued development and application of our special high-resolution valence photoelectron spectroscopy (UPS), and high-precision X-ray core photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) instrumentation for study of organometallic molecules in the gas phase. The study involves a systematic approach towards understanding the interactions and activation of bound carbonyls, C-H bonds, methylenes, vinylidenes, acetylides, alkenes, alkynes, carbenes, carbynes, alkylidenes, alkylidynes, and others with various monometal, dimetal, and cluster metal species. Supporting ligands include -aryls, alkoxides, oxides, and phosphines. We are expanding our studies of both early and late transition metal species and electron-rich and electron-poor environments in order to more completely understand the electronic factors that serve to stabilize particular organic fragments and intermediates on metals. Additional new directions for this program are being taken in ultra-high vacuum surface UPS, XPS, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) experiments on both physisorbed and chemisorbed organometallic thin films. The combination of these methods provides additional electronic structure information on surface-molecule and molecule-molecule interactions. A …

The technological age has in large part been driven by the applications of semiconductors, and most notably by silicon. Our lives have been thoroughly changed by devices using the broad range of semiconductor technology developed over the past forty years. Much of the technological development has its foundation in research carried out on the different semiconductors whose properties can be exploited to make transistors, lasers, and many other devices. While the technological focus has largely been on silicon, many other semiconductor systems have applications in industry and offer formidable academic challenges. Diffusion studies belong to the most basic studies in semiconductors, important from both an application as well as research standpoint. Diffusion processes govern the junctions formed for device applications. As the device dimensions are decreased and the dopant concentrations increased, keeping pace with Moore's Law, a deeper understanding of diffusion is necessary to establish and maintain the sharp dopant profiles engineered for optimal device performance. From an academic viewpoint, diffusion in semiconductors allows for the study of point defects. Very few techniques exist which allow for the extraction of as much information of their properties. This study focuses on diffusion in the semiconductor gallium antimonide (GaSb). As will become …

Dramatic improvement in the efficiency of inorganic and organic light emitting diodes (LEDs and OLEDs) within the last decade has made these devices viable future energy efficient replacements for current light sources. However, both technologies must overcome major technical barriers, requiring significant advances in material science, before this goal can be achieved. Attention will be given to each technology associated with the following major areas of material research: (1) material synthesis, (2) process development, (3) device and defect physics, and (4) packaging. The discussion on material synthesis will emphasize the need for further development of component materials, including substrates and electrodes, necessary for improving device performance. The process technology associated with the LEDs and OLEDs is very different, but in both cases it is one factor limiting device performance. Improvements in process control and methodology are expected to lead to additional benefits of higher yield, greater reliability and lower costs. Since reliability and performance are critical to these devices, an understanding of the basic physics of the devices and device failure mechanisms is necessary to effectively improve the product. The discussion will highlight some of the more basic material science problems remaining to be solved. In addition, consideration will be …

This paper describes four general categories of infrastructure interdependencies (physical, cyber, geographic, and logical) as they apply to the water/wastewater infrastructure, and provides an overview of one of the analytic approaches and tools used by Argonne National Laboratory to evaluate interdependencies. Also discussed are the dimensions of infrastructure interdependency that create spatial, temporal, and system representation complexities that make analyzing the water/wastewater infrastructure particularly challenging. An analytical model developed to incorporate the impacts of interdependencies on infrastructure repair times is briefly addressed.

Fragmentation reactions offer a useful tool to study the spectroscopy of halo nuclei, but the large extent of the halo wave function makes the reaction theory more difficult. The simple reaction models based on the eikonal approximation for the nuclear interaction or first-order perturbation theory for the Coulomb interaction have systematic errors that they investigate here, comparing to the predictions of complete dynamical calculations. They find that stripping probabilities are underpredicted by the eikonal model, leading to extracted spectroscopy strengths that are two large. In contrast, the Coulomb excitation is overpredicted by the simple theory. They attribute this to a screening effect, as is well known in the Barkas effect on stopping powers. The errors decrease with beam energy as E{sub beam}{sup -1}, and are not significant at beam energies above 50 MeV/u. At lower beam energies, the effects should be taken into account when extracting quantitative spectroscopic strengths.

Poor mesh quality is known to adversely affect both solution efficiency and accuracy. There has been considerable research on a wide variety of mesh improvement algorithms, but the impact of these algorithms on applications has been limited because they are typically embedded in particular meshing software packages. To rectify this situation, they are developing a stand-alone mesh quality improvement toolkit called MESQUITE. In this paper, the authors describe the motivation, goals, and design of MESQUITE and give some computational results using the underlying algorithms that show the benefit of such a package.

The authors present an overview of the technical objectives of the Terascale Simulation Tools and Technologies center. The primary goal of this multi-institution collaboration is to develop technologies that enable application scientists to easily use multiple mesh and discretization strategies within a single simulation on terascale computers. The discussion focuses on the efforts to create interoperable mesh generation tools, high-order discretization techniques, and adaptive meshing strategies.

Significant advances in microwave and millimeter wave technology over the past decade have enabled the development of a new generation of imaging diagnostics for current and envisioned magnetic fusion devices. Prominent among these are revolutionary microwave electron cyclotron emission imaging (ECEI), microwave phase imaging interferometers, imaging microwave scattering and microwave imaging reflectometer (MIR) systems for imaging electron temperature and electron density fluctuations (both turbulent and coherent) and profiles (including transport barriers) on toroidal devices such as tokamaks, spherical tori, and stellarators. The diagnostic technology is reviewed, and typical diagnostic systems are analyzed. Representative experimental results obtained with these novel diagnostic systems are also presented.

Anode-supported cells comprising Ni + yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) anode, thin ({approx}10 {micro}m) YSZ electrolyte, and composite cathodes containing a mixture of La{sub 0.8}Sr{sub 0.2}MnO{sub (3-{delta})} (LSM) and La{sub 0.9}Sr{sub 0.1}Ga{sub 0.8}Mg{sub 0.2}O{sub (3-{lambda})} (LSGM) were fabricated. The relative proportions of LSGM and LSM were varied between 30 wt.% LSGM + 70 wt.% LSM and 70 wt.% LSGM + 30 wt.% LSM, while the firing temperature was varied between 1000 and 1200 C. The cathode interlayer composition had a profound effect on cathode performance at 800 C with overpotentials ranging between 60 and 425 mV at 1.0 A/cm{sup 2} and exhibiting a minimum for 50 wt.% LSGM + 50 wt.% LSM. The cathodic overpotential decreased with increasing firing temperature of the composite interlayer in the range 1000 {le} T {le} 1150 C, and then increased dramatically for the interlayer fired at 1200 C. The cell with the optimized cathode interlayer of 50 wt.% LSM + 50 wt.% LSGM fired at 1150 C exhibited an area specific cell resistance of 0.18 {Omega}cm{sup 2} and a maximum power density of 1.4 W/cm{sup 2} at 800 C. Chemical analysis revealed that LSGM reacts with YSZ above 1000 C to form the pyrochlore phase, La{sub …

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For more than half a century, since nuclear science helped us win World War II and ring in the Atomic Age, scientists have known that !he Nation would need a secure, permanent facility in which to dispose of radioactive wastes. Twenty years ago, when Congress adopted the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA or ''the Act''), it recognized the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that the best option for such a facility would be a deep underground repository. Fifteen years ago, Congress directed the Secretary of Energy to investigate and recommend to the President whether such a repository could be located safely at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Since then, our country has spent billions of dollars and millions of hours of research endeavoring to answer this question. I have carefully reviewed the product of this study. In my judgment, it constitutes sound science and shows that a safe repository can be sited there. I also believe that compelling national interests counsel in favor of proceeding with this project. Accordingly, consistent with my responsibilities under the NWPA, today I am recommending that Yucca Mountain be developed as the site for an underground repository for spent fuel and other radioactive wastes. …

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

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