This report discusses projected agricultural imports and exports for FY2003, as well as legislation that deals with federal programs in support of agricultural exports and federal aid dedicated to farms and agricultural reform.

The Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust is becoming a critical component of the U.S. response to humanitarian food emergencies in Africa, Iraq, and elsewhere. The Trust, as presently constituted, was enacted in the 1998 Africa Seeds of Hope Act (P.L. 105- 385). It replaced the Food Security Commodity Reserve established in 1996 and its predecessor the Food Security Wheat Reserve of 1980. This report discusses the administration’s proposals to reduce food aid’s reliance on surplus commodities and anticipated demand for emergency food aid have focused renewed attention on the Emerson Trust, which has been used four times in FY2002 and FY2003 to meet unanticipated food needs in Africa and Iraq.

One new groundwater monitoring well was constructed at the 200-UP-1 Operable Unit in November 2002. This document provides the information on drilling and construction. One new groundwater monitoring well was constructed in the 200-UP-1 Operable Unit in November 2002. The purpose of the well is to monitor the concentration of technetium-99 and uranium in groundwater associated with the pump-and-treat systems in the 200-UP-1 Operable Unit. The well name is 299-W19-46 and the corresponding well number is C3958. Well 299-W19-46 is located off the southwest corner of the 216-U-17 crib and east of Beloit Avenue. It is a replacement well for well 299-W19-38, which has gone dry. The location of the well is shown on Figure 1. Well 299-W19-46 was drilled in response to the recommendations of a data quality objectives process that indicated a need for additional monitoring wells in the area (BHI-01576). The new well was constructed to the specifications and requirements described in Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 173-160 and WAC 173-303, the Data Quality Objectives document (BHI-01576), and the description of work for well drilling and construction (Fruchter 2002). This document compiles information on the drilling and construction, geophysical logging, and sediment and groundwater sampling applicable to the …

Natural gas transmission companies mark the right-of-way areas where pipelines are buried with warning signs to prevent accidental third-party damage. Nevertheless, pipelines are sometimes damaged by third-party construction equipment. A single incident can be devastating, causing death and millions of dollars of property loss. This damage would be prevented if potentially hazardous construction equipment could be detected, identified, and an alert given before the pipeline was damaged. The Gas Technology Institute (GTI) is developing a system to solve this problem by using an optical fiber as a distributed sensor and interrogating the fiber with a custom optical time domain reflectometer. Key issues are the ability to detect encroachment and the ability to discriminate among potentially hazardous and benign encroachments. The work performed in the 1st quarter of 2003 included fine-tuning and debugging of the custom Optical Time Domain Reflectometer being constructed for data collection and analysis. The detector was redesigned reducing the noise floor by over a factor of ten. While GTI's OTDR was being improved, a new, commercial OTDR was used to verify that the technique is capable of measuring one pound continuous force applied to the Hergalite. Optical fibers were installed at the ANR Pipeline test site along …

Foster Wheeler Power Group, Inc. is working under US Department of Energy contract No. DE-FC26-00NT40972 to develop a partial gasification module (PGM) that represents a critical element of several potential coal-fired Vision 21 plants. When utilized for electrical power generation, these plants will operate with efficiencies greater than 60% and produce near zero emissions of traditional stack gas pollutants. The new process partially gasifies coal at elevated pressure producing a coal-derived syngas and a char residue. The syngas can be used to fuel the most advanced power producing equipment such as solid oxide fuel cells or gas turbines, or processed to produce clean liquid fuels or chemicals for industrial users. The char residue is not wasted; it can also be used to generate electricity by fueling boilers that drive the most advanced ultra-supercritical pressure steam turbines. The amount of syngas and char produced by the PGM can be tailored to fit the production objectives of the overall plant, i.e., power generation, clean liquid fuel production, chemicals production, etc. Hence, PGM is a robust building block that offers all the advantages of coal gasification but in a more user-friendly form; it is also fuel flexible in that it can use alternative …

This report discusses the "discharge rule" of the House of Representatives, which provides a means by which a majority of Members may bring to the floor for consideration a measure that has not been reported from committee.

The discharge rule of the House of Representatives affords a way for Members to bring to the floor a measure not reported from committee. Before a motion to discharge may be made, 218 Members must sign a petition for that purpose. This report provides summary data on discharge petitions filed since adoption of the present form of discharge rule in 1931. It also identifies the 32 occasions since 1967 on which a committee report or floor action occurred on a measure against which a petition was filed (or an alternative measure on the same subject).

On April 10, 2003, the House passed comprehensive energy legislation, H.R. 6 (247- 175). The bill was a composite of four measures – H.R. 39, reported from the House Committee on Resources, H.R. 238, marked up by the House Science Committee, H.R. 1531, reported from Ways and Means, and an unnumbered bill reported out of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Unlike comprehensive energy legislation (H.R. 4) debated in the 107th Congress, H.R. 6 includes a section on electricity which has stirred some controversy. H.R. 6 would provide authorization for exploration and development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

This report examines legislation in the 107th Congress pertaining to federal mandatory minimum sentencing statutes (mandatory minimums), which demand that execution or incarceration follow criminal conviction. They cover drug dealing and using a gun to commit a federal crime, among other crimes.

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Research program for the design and control of advanced chemical process systems, typified by refineries/petro chemical plants.

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Investigate the heterogeneous reduction of U(sup v1) and Cr(sup v1) on ferrous phyllosilicates. Develop theoretical models for XP spectra of transition metals.

Short wavelength Free-Electron Lasers are perceived as the next generation of synchrotron light sources. In the past decade, significant advances have been made in the theory and technology of high brightness electron beams and single pass FELs. These developments facilitate the construction of practical VUV FELs and make x-ray FELs possible. Self-Amplified Spontaneous Emission (SASE) and High Gain Harmonic Generation (HGHG)[17-19] are the two leading candidates for x-ray FELs. The first lasing of HGHG proof-of-principle experiment succeeded in August, 1999 in Brookhaven National Laboratory. The experimental results agree with the theory prediction. Compared with SASE FEL, the following advantages of HGHG FEL were confirmed; (1) Better longitudinal coherence, and hence, much narrower bandwidth than SASE. (2) More stable central wavelength, (3) More stable output energy. In this introduction, we will first briefly describe the principle of HGHG in Section A. Then in Section B, we give a general description about how to produce soft x-ray by cascading HGHG scheme. In section 2, we give a detailed description of the system design. Then, in section 3, we give a description of an analytical estimate for the HGHG process, and the calculation of the parameters of different parts of the system. The …

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This document is a tutorial on the CCA Standard as realized through the Decaf implementation. Decaf does not equal the CCA standard much in the same way that Microsoft Visual C++ is not ANSI/ISO C++. This document was created because the CCA standard is evolving and still too fluid to nail down in a tutorial document. Because of its fluidity, and that it represents a hotbed of research and development, beginners can only start learning CCA by choosing one of the frameworks (warts and all). Decaf has just enough functionality to be a useful tool for beginners in the CCA to get started on. Though it lacks many features of the bigger CCA frameworks (CCAFE [3], XCAT [10], and SciRUN [8]) where the heavy-duty research is still going on, it is the first CCA framework that is underpinned by Babel, which provides its language interoperability features. This document can also serve the dual-purpose of providing a reasonable-sized example of building an application using Babel. The entire source for Decaf is included in the examples/subdirectory of the Babel code distribution. This manual assumes the reader is a programmer who has a conceptual understanding of the Babel Language Interoperability Tool. They should …