A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO tested the effectiveness of general and application controls that support the Army Corps of Engineers' key financial system. This system processes military engineering, construction, and real estate projects and civil works projects involving the investigation, development, and maintenance of the nation's waters and related environmental resources. GAO found pervasive weaknesses in computer controls at the Corps' data processing centers. Other Corps sites revealed serious vulnerabilities that would allow both hackers and legitimate users with valid access privileges to improperly modify, inappropriately disclose, or destroy sensitive and financial data, including social security numbers and other personal information. These weaknesses undermine the Corps' ability to ensure the confidentiality and availability of data in the financial system."

A Total System Performance Assessment for Site Recommendation (TSPA-SR) has recently been completed (CRWMS M&O, 2000b) for the potential high-level waste repository at the Yucca Mountain site. The TSPA-SR is an integrated model of scenarios and processes relevant to the postclosure performance of the potential repository. The TSPA-SR scenarios and model components in turn include representations of all features, events, and processes (FEPs) identified as being relevant (i.e., screened in) for analysis. The process of identifying, classifying, and screening potentially relevant FEPs thus provides a critical foundation for scenario development and TSPA analyses for the Yucca Mountain site (Swift et al., 1999). The objectives of this paper are to describe (a) the identification and classification of the comprehensive list of FEPs potentially relevant to the postclosure performance of the potential Yucca Mountain repository, and (b) the development, structure, and use of an electronic database for storing and retrieving screening information about the inclusion and/or exclusion of these Yucca Mountain FEPs in TSPA-SR. The FEPs approach to scenario development is not unique to the Yucca Mountain Project (YMP). General systematic approaches are summarized in NEA (1992). The application of the FEPs approach in several other international radioactive waste disposal programs is …

The purpose of this test procedure is to safely operate the Fuel Retrieval System (FRS) and Integrated Water Treatment System (IWTS) with specific fuel canisters, and show that canisters containing fuel can be retrieved from the canister queue, decapped in the Canister Decapper, and loaded into the Primary Clean Machine (PCM) for fuel cleaning; and that fuel can be sorted on the Process Table, then loaded back into fuel canisters and relocated in basin storage. An option is included to load selected elements into multi-canister overpack (MCO) Fuel Baskets. Additional Data are collected during this test, beyond that collected during production operations. These data support qualifying the cleaning performance of the PCM, assessing the quantity of scrap generated during the cleaning, and evaluating the impact of fuel retrieval operations on the Basin water quality. The additional data collected primarily consist of weighing fuel and scrap at selected points in the operation, as well as photographing fuel and scrap as it is processed. The time to perform operations is also monitored for comparison with design predictions. Water quality data are collected to establish a baseline to predict the effectiveness of equipment design for control of contamination and visibility during production operation. …

This report presents the updated results of the preliminary reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) analysis of selected waste feed delivery (WFD) operations to be performed by the Tank Farm Contractor (TFC) during Phase I activities in support of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). For planning purposes, waste feed tanks are being divided into five classes in accordance with the type of waste in each tank and the activities required to retrieve, qualify, and transfer waste feed. This report reflects the baseline design and operating concept, as of the beginning of Fiscal Year 2000, for the delivery of feed from three of these classes, represented by source tanks 241-AN-102, 241-AZ-101 and 241-AN-105. The preliminary RAM analysis quantifies the potential schedule delay associated with operations and maintenance (OBM) field activities needed to accomplish these operations. The RAM analysis is preliminary because the system design, process definition, and activity planning are in a state of evolution. The results are being used to support the continuing development of an O&M Concept tailored to the unique requirements of the WFD Program, which is being documented in various volumes of the Waste Feed Delivery Technical Basis (Carlson. 1999, Rasmussen 1999, and Orme 2000). The …

This plan defines the approach that will be used to ensure the transition from initial startup to normal operations of the SNF operations--are performed in a safe, controlled, and deliberate manner. It provides a phased approach that bridges the operations between the completion of the ORR and the return to normal operations. This plan includes management oversight and administrative controls to be implemented and then reduced in a controlled manner until normal operations are authorized by SNF Management.

The purpose of this document is to establish the System Configuration Management Implementation Procedure (SCMIP) for the Cold Vacuum Drying Facility (CVDF) Monitoring and Control System (MCS). This procedure provides configuration management for the process control system. The process control system consists of equipment hardware and software that controls and monitors the instrumentation and equipment associated with the CVDF processes. Refer to SNF-3090, Cold Vacuum Drying Facility Monitoring and Control System Design Description, HNF-3553, Annex B, Safety Analysis Report for the Cold Vacuum Drying Facility, and AP-CM-6-037-00, SNF Project Process Automation Software and Equipment Configuration. This SCMIP identifies and defines the system configuration items in the control system, provides configuration control throughout the system life cycle, provides configuration status accounting, physical protection and control, and verifies the completeness and correctness of these items.

The Foreign Sales Corporation (FSC) provisions of the U.S. tax code permit U.S. firms to exempt between 15% and 30% of export income from taxation. FSC was enacted in 1984 to replace another tax benefit for exporting - the Domestic International Sales Corporation (DISC) provisions. U.S. trading partners had charged that DISC was an export subsidy, and so violated the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In 1998 the European Union (EU) complained to the World Trade Organization (WTO, GATT's successor) that FSC itself is an export subsidy and violates the agreements on which the WTO is based. A WTO panel subsequently supported the EU. Under WTO procedures

This Corrective Action Decision Document/Closure Report (CADD/CR) has been prepared for Corrective Action Unit (CAU) 252: Area 25 Engine Test Stand-1 Decontamination Pad, in accordance with the Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order (FFACO). Located at the Nevada Test Site in Nevada, CAU 252 consists of only one Corrective Action Site (25-07-04, Decontamination Pad). This CADD/CR identifies and rationalizes the U.S. Department of Energy, Nevada Operations Office's (DOE/NV's) recommendation that no corrective action is deemed necessary at CAU 252. The Corrective Action Decision Document and Closure Report have been combined into one report because the potential contaminants of concern were either not detected during the corrective action investigation or were only present at naturally occurring concentrations. Based on the field results, neither corrective action or a corrective action plan is required at this site. A Notice of Completion to DOE/NV is being requested from the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection for closure of CAU 252, as well as a request that this site be moved from Appendix III to Appendix IV of the FFACO. Further, no use restrictions are required to be placed on this CAU.

A numerical flow model is developed to simulate two-dimensional fluid flow past immersed, elastically supported tube arrays. This work is motivated by the objective of predicting forces and motion associated with both deep-water drilling and production risers in the oil industry. This work has other engineering applications including simulation of flow past tubular heat exchangers or submarine-towed sensor arrays and the flow about parachute ribbons. In the present work, a vortex method is used for solving the unsteady flow field. This method demonstrates inherent advantages over more conventional grid-based computational fluid dynamics. The vortex method is non-iterative, does not require artificial viscosity for stability, displays minimal numerical diffusion, can easily treat moving boundaries, and allows a greatly reduced computational domain since vorticity occupies only a small fraction of the fluid volume. A gridless approach is used in the flow sufficiently distant from surfaces. A Lagrangian remap scheme is used near surfaces to calculate diffusion and convection of vorticity. A fast multipole technique is utilized for efficient calculation of velocity from the vorticity field. The ability of the method to correctly predict lift and drag forces on simple stationary geometries over a broad range of Reynolds numbers is presented.