The majority of polyphosphazene material research has concentrated on the linear polymer configuration. However, this represents only one of three potential backbone configurations for phosphazenes. Linear polymers are formed either directly from phosphorus and nitrogen containing precursors or from the ring opening polymerization of hexachlorocyclotriphosphazene. Two other backbone structures can be formed from hexachlorocyclotriphosphazene cyclolinear and cyclomatrix. Cyclolinear are the least studied due to synthetic difficulty. Cyclomatrix polymers represent a more facile method for forming non-linear phosphazenes.

The High Level Waste (HLW) Salt Disposition Systems Engineering Team was formed on March 13, 1998, and chartered to identify options, evaluate alternatives, and recommend a selected alternative(s) for processing HLW salt to a permitted wasteform. This requirement arises because the existing In-Tank Precipitation process at the Savannah River Site, as currently configured, cannot simultaneously meet the HLW production and Authorization Basis safety requirements. This engineering study was performed in four phases. This document provides the technical bases, assumptions, and results of this engineering study.

Detailed chemical kinetic reaction mechanisms are developed for all nine chemical isomers of heptane (C{sub 7}H{sub 16}), following techniques and models developed previously for other smaller alkane hydrocarbon species. These reaction mechanisms are tested at high temperatures by computing shock tube ignition delay times and at lower temperatures by simulating ignition in a rapid compression machine. Although the corresponding experiments have not been reported in the literature for most of these isomers of heptane, intercomparisons between the computed results for these isomers and comparisons with available experimental results for other alkane fuels are used to validate the reaction mechanisms as much as possible. Differences in the overall reaction rates of these fuels are discussed in terms of differences in their molecular structure and the resulting variations in rates of important elementary reactions. Reaction mechanisms in this study are works in progress and the results reported here are subject to change, based on model improvements and corrections of errors not yet discovered.

This report provides information about the Principal Features and Uses on Discharge Rule in the House. The discharge rule allows a measure to come to the floor of considerationeven if the committee of referral does not report it and the leadership does not schedule it.

The “discharge rule” of the House of Representatives allows a measure to come to the floor for consideration, even if the committee of referral does not report it and the leadership does not schedule it. To initiate this action, a majority of House Members must first sign a petition for that purpose. The rule permits either (1) the committee of referral to be discharged from the measure itself; or (2) the Committee on Rules to be discharged from a special rule for considering the measure. Layover periods required by the rule permit the Committee on Rules to preempt a discharge attempt, and recover control of the floor agenda, by securing adoption of an alternative special rule for considering the measure.

The authors describe the SXMPVO algorithm for performing a visibility ordering zoo-meshed polyhedra. The algorithm runs in practice in linear time and the visibility ordering which it produces is exact.

Throughout the country the long standing administratively based regulatory structure for determining the cost and service parameters for electric utilities is changing. More and more market elements are coming into the structure. There is a push by many players to eliminate much of the current regulation. For the production side of electricity at least, these players argue that a market approach will do a better n job of pricing power and making it available to customers. However, the electricity industry currently has a large base of investment in power production equipment, some of which may have difficulty competing in a market-based system. What to do about this potentially uneconomic existing investment is an important question receiving a great deal of attention at the policy discussion level. Some argue that if the investment in existing facilities is uneconomic in a new market based system, that is too bad for the owners of the above-market cost facilities, and customers should bear no responsibility to help make those owners whole. Others argue that the owners of above-market cost facilities invested in those facilities in good faith and should not be made to bear the cost of a changing underlying industry structure. The arguments …

In the 107th Congress, renewed efforts are underway to enact a permanent replacement for the Export Administration Act of 1979 (EAA), temporarily reauthorized in the 106th Congress until August 20, 2001. The Export Administration Act of 2001 (S. 149) was introduced on January 23, 2001. Hearings were held by the Senate Banking Committee, and the bill was reported for consideration by the full Senate by a vote of 19-1 to March 22, 2001. The difficulty in passing a comprehensive rewrite of the EAA has resulted, in part, from the continuing tension between national security and commercial concerns. Industry groups, proponents of heightened export controls, the Administration, and Congress have all participated in the reauthorization debate.

We have discovered a novel two-step sintering method that opened up a low temperature processing window within which fully dense nanocrystalline yttrium oxide was obtained with no concurrent grain growth during final-stage sintering. We have developed a new method of processing laminate ceramics using deformation processing in the green state. We have lastly developed a colloidal processing technique to encapsulate biomolecules at ambient, neutral-pH, aqueous conditions.

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The primary goal of the Heavy-Section Steel Irradiation (HSSI) Program is to provide a thorough, quantitative assessment of the effects of neutron irradiation on the material behavior, and in particular the fracture toughness properties, of typical pressure vessel steels as they relate to light-water reactor pressure vessel (RPV) integrity. The program includes studies of the effects of irradiation on the degradation of mechanical and fracture properties of vessel materials augmented by enhanced examinations and modeling of the accompanying microstructural changes. Effects of specimen size; material chemistry; product form and microstructure; irradiation fluence, flux, temperature, and spectrum; and post-irradiation mitigation are being examined on a wide range of fracture properties. This program will also maintain and upgrade computerized databases, calculational procedures, and standards relating to RPV fluence-spectra determinations and embrittlement assessments. Results from the HSSI studies will be incorporated into codes and standards directly applicable to resolving major regulatory issues that involve RPV irradiation embrittlement such as pressurized-thermal shock, operating pressure-temperature limits, low-temperature overpressurization, and the specialized problems associated with low upper-shelf welds. Six technical tasks and one for program management are now contained in the HSSI Program.

The Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) provides the unique opportunity to collide polarized proton beams at a center-of-mass energy of up to 500 GeV and luminosities of up to 2 x 10{sup 32} cm{sup {minus}2} s{sup {minus}1}. Such high luminosity and high energy polarized proton collisions will open up the possibility of studying spin effects in hard processes. However, the acceleration of polarized beams in circular accelerators is complicated by the numerous depolarizing spin resonances. Using a partial Siberian snake and a rf dipole that ensure stable adiabatic spin motion during acceleration has made it possible to accelerate polarized protons to 25 GeV at the Brookhaven AGS. After successful operation of RHIC with gold beams polarized protons from the AGS have been successfully injected into RHIC and accelerated using a full Siberian snakes built from four superconducting helical dipoles. A new high energy proton polarimeter was also successfully commissioned. Operation with two snakes per RHIC ring is planned for next year.

This report presents a brief description of the five methods used to bring proposed legislation to the House floor for consideration.

This study performs an integrated assessment of new technology adoption in the steel industry. New coke, iron, and steel production technologies are discussed, and their economic and environmental characteristics are compared. Based upon detailed plant level data on cost and physical input-output relations by process, this study develops a simple mathematical optimization model of steel process choice. This model is then expanded to a life cycle context, accounting for environmental emissions generated during the production and transportation of energy and material inputs into steelmaking. This life-cycle optimization model provides a basis for evaluating the environmental impacts of existing and new iron and steel technologies. Five different plant configurations are examined, from conventional integrated steel production to completely scrap-based operations. Two cost criteria are used to evaluate technology choice: private and social cost, with the latter including the environmental damages associated with emissions. While scrap-based technologies clearly generate lower emissions in mass terms, their emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are significantly higher. Using conventional damage cost estimates reported in the literature suggests that the social costs associated with scrap-based steel production are slightly higher than with integrated steel production. This suggests that adopting a life-cycle viewpoint can substantially affect …

Postirradiation examinations were begun of a series of unrestrained dilute uranium alloy specimens irradiated to exposures up to 13,000 MWD/T in NaK-containing stainless steel capsules. This test, part of a program of development of uranium metal fuels for desalination and power reactors sponsored by the Division of Reactor Development and Technology, has the objective of defining the temperature and exposure limits of swelling resistance of the alloyed uranium. This paper discusses those test results.

This report has been prepared to provide low-income advocates and other stakeholders information on the energy burden faced by low-income customers and programs designed to alleviate that burden in various states. The report describes programs designed to lower payments, manage arrearages, weatherize and provide other energy efficiency measures, educate consumers, increase outreach to the target It discusses the costs and benefits of the population, and evaluate the programs. various options--to the degree this information is available--and describes attempts to quantify benefits that have heretofore not been quantified. The purpose of this report is to enable the low-income advocates and others to assess the options and design program most suitable for the citizens of their states or jurisdictions. It is not the authors' intent to recommend a particular course of action but, based on our broad experience in the field, to provide the information necessary for others to do so. We would be happy to answer any questions or provide further documentation on any of the material presented herein. The original edition of this report was prepared for the Utah Committee on Consumer Services, pursuant to a contract with the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), to provide information to the Utah …

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8 nm thick Ag films were sputter deposited onto amorphous TiO{sub 2} underlayers 25 nm thick, and also amorphous TiO{sub 2} (25 nm)/ZnO (5 nm) multiunderlayers. The substrates were back-etched Si with a 50 nm thick LPCVD Si{sub 3}N{sub 4} electron transparent membrane. The ZnO, sputtered onto amorphous TiO{sub 2}, formed a continuous layer with a grain size of 5 nm in diameter, on the order of the film thickness. There are several microstructural differences in the Ag dependent on the underlayers, revealed by TEM. First a strong {l_brace}0001{r_brace} ZnO to {l_brace}111{r_brace} Ag fibre-texture relationship exists. On TiO{sub 2} the Ag microstructure shows many abnormal grains whose average diameter is about 60-80 nm, whereas the films on ZnO show few abnormal grains. The background matrix of normal grains on the TiO{sub 2} is roughly 15 nm, while the normal grain size on the ZnO is about 25 nm. Electron diffraction patterns show that the film on ZnO has a strong {l_brace}111{r_brace} orientation, and dark field images with this diffraction condition have a grain size of about 30 nm. In a region near the center of the TEM grid where there is the greatest local heating during deposition, Ag films grown …

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December 20, 1989, U.S. military intervention in Panama, known as Operation Just Cause, heralded a new period in U.S.-Panamanian relations. In the aftermath of the intervention, U.S. policymakers immediately faced a new range of challenges including assistance for economic recovery, support for the development of a civilian police force, cooperation with the new government on counter-narcotics measures, and support for fragile democratic institutions.

This paper discusses the authors efforts to improve the performance of the high-accuracy (HIAC) volume rendering system, based on cell projection, which is used to display unstructured, scientific data sets for analysis. The parallelization of HIAC, using the pthreads and MPI API's, resulted in significant speedup, but interactive frame rates are not yet attainable for very large data sets.

The term "pay equity" originates from the fact that women as a group are paid less than men. In 2000, for example, women with a strong commitment to the work force earned 76 cents for every dollar earned by men. As women's earnings as a percentage of men's earnings have narrowed by just 12 percentage points over the past four decades (from about 60% in the 1960s and 1970s to more than 70% in the 1990s), some members of the public policy community have argued that current anti-discrimination laws should be strengthened and that additional measures should be enacted. Others, in contrast, believe that further government intervention is unnecessary because the gender wage gap will narrow on its own as women's labor market qualifications continue to more closely resemble those of men.

This report described promising hydrogen (protium and tritium) stripping results obtained with a Pd/zeolite catalyst at ambient temperature. Preliminary results show 90-99+ percent tritium stripping efficiency may be obtained, with even better performance expected as bed configuration and operating conditions are optimized. These results suggest that portable units with single beds of the Pd/zeolite catalyst may be utilized as ''catalytic absorbers'' to clean up both tritium gas and tritiated water. A cart-mounted prototype stripper utilizing this catalyst has been constructed for testing. This portable stripper has potential applications in maintenance-type jobs such as tritium line breaks. This catalyst can also potentially be utilized in an emergency stripper for the Replacement Tritium Facility.

This report was an integrated study of the physics and chemistry affecting gas injection, from the pore scale to the field scale, and involved theoretical analysis, laboratory experiments and numerical simulation. Specifically, advances were made on streamline-based simulation, analytical solutions to 1D compositional displacements, and modeling and experimental measures of three-phase flow.