A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Congress asked GAO to review operational and programmatic aspects of the Census Bureau's ACS that will affect the reliability of small geographic area data. The ACS will be a mail survey of about 3 million households annually, whose results will be cumulated over 5 years to produce estimates that will replace information previously provided by the Decennial Census long form. In addition, annual data will be published for geographic areas with 65,000+ populations and as 3-year averages for areas with populations of 20,000 to 65,000. Annual data will be published beginning in 2006 with data for 2005. The 5-year averages for 2008-12 will provide data for small geographic areas."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Two large food recalls completed in 2003 were associated with 8 deaths and nearly 100 serious illnesses in at least 16 states. Manufacturers voluntarily recall potentially unsafe food by notifying their customers to return or destroy it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), for meat, poultry, and egg products, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for other food, have programs to monitor voluntary food recalls, verify that companies contact their customers, and maintain recall data. GAO (1) examined the recall programs and procedures USDA and FDA use to protect consumers from unsafe foods and (2) compared their food recall authority with the authority of agencies to recall other consumer products."

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This ICN documents the installation of three additional downgradient monitoring wells and one additional upgradient well. It updates the monitoring network and the stratigraphy of the aquifer.

This project explores the scientific foundation and approach for improving passive detection systems for plutonium and highly enriched uranium in real applications. Sources of gamma-ray radiation of interest were chosen to represent a range of national security threats, naturally occurring radioactive materials, industrial and medical radiation sources, and natural background radiation. The gamma-ray flux emerging from these sources, which include unclassified criticality experiment configurations as surrogates for nuclear weapons, were modeled in detail. The performance of several types of gamma-ray imaging systems using Compton scattering were modeled and compared. A mechanism was created to model the combine sources and background emissions and have the simulated radiation ''scene'' impinge on a model of a detector. These modeling tools are now being used in various projects to optimize detector performance and model detector sensitivity in complex measuring environments. This study also developed several automated algorithms for isotope identification from gamma-ray spectra and compared these to each other and to algorithms already in use. Verification testing indicates that these alternative isotope identification algorithms produced less false positive and false negative results than the ''GADRAS'' algorithms currently in use. In addition to these algorithms that used binned spectra, a new approach to isotope identification …

This scientific analysis provides retardation factors for colloids transporting in the saturated zone (SZ) and the unsaturated zone (UZ). These retardation factors represent the reversible chemical and physical filtration of colloids in the SZ. The value of the colloid retardation factor, R{sub col} is dependent on several factors, such as colloid size, colloid type, and geochemical conditions (e.g., pH, Eh, and ionic strength). These factors are folded into the distributions of R{sub col} that have been developed from field and experimental data collected under varying geochemical conditions with different colloid types and sizes. Attachment rate constants, k{sub att}, and detachment rate constants, k{sub det}, of colloids to the fracture surface have been measured for the fractured volcanics, and separate R{sub col} uncertainty distributions have been developed for attachment and detachment to clastic material and mineral grains in the alluvium. Radionuclides such as plutonium and americium sorb mostly (90 to 99 percent) irreversibly to colloids (BSC 2004 [DIRS 170025], Section 6.3.3.2). The colloid retardation factors developed in this analysis are needed to simulate the transport of radionuclides that are irreversibly sorbed onto colloids; this transport is discussed in the model report ''Site-Scale Saturated Zone Transport'' (BSC 2004 [DIRS 170036]). Although it …

Spent nuclear fuel, essentially U{sub 2}, accounts for over 95% of the total radioactivity of all of the radioactive wastes in the United States that require disposal, disposition or remediation. The UO{sub 2} in SNF is not stable under oxiding conditions and may also be altered under reducing conditions. The alteration of SNF results in the formation of new uranium phases that can cause the release or retardation of actinide and fission product radionuclides. Over the long term, and depending on the extent to which the secondary uranium phases incorporate fission products and actinides, these alteration phases become the near-field source term.

The transport of silver in CVD {beta}-SiC has been studied using ion implantation. Silver ions were implanted in {beta}-SiC using the ATLAS accelerator facility at the Argonne National Laboratory. Ion beams with energies of 93 and 161 MeV were used to achieve deposition with peak concentrations at depths of approximately 9 and 13 {micro}m, respectively. As-implanted samples were then annealed at 1500 C for 210 or 480 hours. XPS, SEM, TEM, STEM, and optical methods were used to analyze the material before and after annealing. Silver concentration profiles were determined using XPS before and after annealing. STEM and SEM equipped with quantitative chemical analysis capability were used to more fully characterize the location and morphology of the silver before and after annealing. The results show that, within the uncertainty of measurement techniques, there is no silver migration, via either inter- or intragrannular paths, for the times and temperature studied. Additionally, the silver was observed to phase separate within the SiC after annealing. The irradiation damage from the implantation process resulted in a three-layer morphology in the as-implanted condition: (1) a layer of unaltered SiC, followed by (2) a layer of crystallized SiC, followed by (3) an amorphized layer which contained …

A set of experiments has been performed on the High-Current Experiment (HCX) facility at LBNL, in which the ion beam is allowed to collide with an end plate and thereby induce a copious supply of desorbed electrons. Through the use of combinations of biased and grounded electrodes positioned in between and downstream of the quadrupole magnets, the flow of electrons upstream into the magnets can be turned on or off. Properties of the resultant ion beam are measured under each condition. The experiment is modeled via a full three-dimensional, two species (electron and ion) particle simulation, as well as via reduced simulations (ions with appropriately chosen model electron cloud distributions, and a high-resolution simulation of the region adjacent to the end plate). The three-dimensional simulations are the first of their kind and the first to make use of a timestep-acceleration scheme that allows the electrons to be advanced with a timestep that is not small compared to the highest electron cyclotron period. The simulations reproduce qualitative aspects of the experiments, illustrate some unanticipated physical effects, and serve as an important demonstration of a developing simulation capability.

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This report first describes the current select committees on intelligence and briefly covers the former Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.

This document describes a preliminary design for Prototype LSST Database (LSST DB). They identify key components and data structures and provide an expandable conceptual schema for the database. The authors discuss the potential user applications and post-processing algorithm to interact with the database, and give a set of example queries.

This document outlines a proposal for extending UPC's point-to-point memcpy library with support for explicitly non-blocking transfers, and non-contiguous (indexed and strided) transfers. Various portions of this proposal could stand alone as independent extensions to the UPC library. The designs presented here are heavily influenced by analogous functionality which exists in other parallel communication systems, such as MPI, ARMCI, Titanium, and network hardware API's such as Quadricselan, Infiniband vapi, IBM LAPI and Cray X-1. Each section contains proposed extensions to the libraries in the UPC Language Specification (section 7) and corresponding extensions to the GASNet communication system API.

This model report documents the drift scale coupled thermal-hydrological-mechanical (THM) processes model development and presents simulations of the THM behavior in fractured rock close to emplacement drifts. The modeling and analyses are used to evaluate the impact of THM processes on permeability and flow in the near-field of the emplacement drifts. The results from this report are used to assess the importance of THM processes on seepage and support in the model reports ''Seepage Model for PA Including Drift Collapse'' and ''Abstraction of Drift Seepage'', and to support arguments for exclusion of features, events, and processes (FEPs) in the analysis reports ''Features, Events, and Processes in Unsaturated Zone Flow and Transport and Features, Events, and Processes: Disruptive Events''. The total system performance assessment (TSPA) calculations do not use any output from this report. Specifically, the coupled THM process model is applied to simulate the impact of THM processes on hydrologic properties (permeability and capillary strength) and flow in the near-field rock around a heat-releasing emplacement drift. The heat generated by the decay of radioactive waste results in elevated rock temperatures for thousands of years after waste emplacement. Depending on the thermal load, these temperatures are high enough to cause boiling …

This report details the information related to gasoline prices and discusses on policies and proposals.

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