In early 2005, the President appointed a tax reform advisory panel to formulate tax reform proposals. The report of the President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform, issued in November 2005, recommended two reform plans to consider: 1) a revised income tax, referred to as the simplified income tax (SIT); and 2) a consumption tax coupled with a tax on financial income, referred to as the growth and investment tax (GIT). This report discusses the provisions and implications of these two taxes in detail.

In this project, GE developed electrolyzer stack technologies to meet DOE’s goals for low cost electrolysis hydrogen. The main barrier to meeting the targets for electrolyzer cost was in stack assembly and construction. GE’s invention of a single piece or “monolithic” plastic electrolyzer stack reduces these costs considerably. In addition, GE developed low cost cell electrodes using a novel application of metal spray coating technology. Bench scale stack testing and cost modeling indicates that the DOE targets for stack capital cost and efficiency can be met by full-scale production of industrial electrolyzers incorporating GE’s stack technology innovations.

This report focuses on animal ID and, to a lesser extent, on meat traceability. However, traceability, and the somewhat different but related concepts of "identity prevention" and "product segregation," also pertain to other agricultural products and issues.

Section 9006 of Title IX of The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (the '2002 Farm Bill') established the Renewable Energy Systems and Energy Efficiency Improvements Program (the 'Section 9006 program'). Administered by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Section 9006 program provides grants, loan guarantees, and - perhaps in the future - direct loans to farmers, ranchers, and rural small businesses for assistance with purchasing renewable energy systems and making energy efficiency improvements. In the three rounds of Section 9006 funding to date (FY03-FY05), roughly 40% of all grant dollars in aggregate have been awarded to 'large' (defined as > 100 kW) wind projects. Such projects are also typically eligible for the Federal Production Tax Credit (PTC) codified in Section 45 of the US tax code. Because the PTC provides a significant amount of value to a wind project, most 'large wind' applicants to the Section 9006 program have also tried to take advantage of the PTC. Through what are known as 'anti-double-dipping' or, more colloquially, 'haircut' provisions, however, the size of the PTC is reduced if a project receives certain other forms of governmental support. Specifically, Section 45(b)(3) of the US tax code reduces …

In August 2001, President Bush announced that federal funds, with certain restrictions, may be used to conduct research on human embryonic stem cells. This report explains the limitations on this research, as well as corresponding and related legislation to the issue of embryonic stem cell research, including the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005.

In August 2001, President Bush announced that federal funds, with certain restrictions, may be used to conduct research on human embryonic stem cells. Federal research is limited to “the more than 60” existing stem cell lines that were derived (1) with the informed consent of the donors; (2) from excess embryos created solely for reproductive purposes; and (3) without any financial inducements to the donors. No federal funds may be used for the derivation or use of stem cell lines derived from newly destroyed embryos; the creation of any human embryos for research purposes; or cloning of human embryos for any purposes.

In August 2001, President Bush announced that federal funds, with certain restrictions, may be used to conduct research on human embryonic stem cells. Federal research is limited to “the more than 60” existing stem cell lines that were derived (1) with the informed consent of the donors; (2) from excess embryos created solely for reproductive purposes; and (3) without any financial inducements to the donors. No federal funds may be used for the derivation or use of stem cell lines derived from newly destroyed embryos; the creation of any human embryos for research purposes; or cloning of human embryos for any purposes.

A Wetlands Mitigation Bank was established at SRS in 1997 as a compensatory alternative for unavoidable wetland losses. Prior to restoration activities, 16 sites included in the project were surveyed for the SRS Site Use system to serve as a protective covenant. Pre-restoration monitoring ended in Fall 2000, and post restoration monitoring began in the Winter/Spring of 2001. The total interior harvest in the 16 bays after harvesting the trees was 19.6 ha. The margins in the opencanopy, pine savanna margin treatments were thinned. Margins containing areas with immature forested stands (bay 5184 and portions of bay 5011) were thinned using a mechanical shredder in November 2001. Over 126 hectares were included in the study areas (interior + margin). Planting of two tree species and the transplanting of wetland grass species was successful. From field surveys, it was estimated that approximately 2700 Nyssa sylvatica and 1900 Taxodium distichum seedlings were planted in the eight forested bays resulting in an average planting density of ≈ 490 stems ha-1. One hundred seedlings of each species per bay (where available) were marked to evaluate survivability and growth. Wetland grass species were transplanted from donor sites on SRS to plots that ranged in size …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Chesapeake Bay Program (Bay Program) was created in 1983 when Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the District of Columbia, the Chesapeake Bay Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agreed to establish a partnership to restore the Chesapeake Bay. The partnership's most recent agreement, Chesapeake 2000, sets out an agenda and five broad goals to guide the restoration effort through 2010. This testimony summarizes the findings of an October 2005 GAO report (GAO-06-96) on (1) the extent to which appropriate measures for assessing restoration progress have been established, (2) the extent to which current reporting mechanisms clearly and accurately describe the bay's overall health, (3) how much funding was provided for the effort for fiscal years 1995 through 2004, and (4) how effectively the effort is being coordinated and managed."

This report provides information about the Child Nutrition and Women, Infant and children (WIC) Legislation in the 108th and 109th Congresses.

More and more articles appear in the press daily about the renaissance of nuclear energy. Even many former opponents of nuclear energy are now convinced that nuclear energy is more environmentally friendly than burning fossil fuels. Nuclear energy does not release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and therefore does not contribute to the global warming problem. But nuclear energy produces spent fuel or nuclear waste. Spent fuel is radioactive and requires thousands of years of isolation from plants, animals and humans. Every country currently studying the option for disposing of high-level nuclear waste has selected deep geologic formations to be the primary barrier for accomplishing this isolation. It is postulated that by the very nature of these geological sites, they will contain the waste for long time, limiting the spread of radionuclides, for example, through water flow. The release of radionuclides to the environment can also be delayed by the construction of engineered barrier systems between the waste and the geologic formation. Corrosion engineers are participating in the design and the performance prediction of the engineered barriers. The principal engineered component in this multibarrier approach is the container for the waste. Beyond the metallic containers, other engineered barriers could be …

This report discusses Federal oversight and congressional concerns related to Credit Rating Agencies.

The validity of the Surrogate Nuclear Reactions method in the Weisskopf-Ewing limit and the Surrogate Ratio method are examined for neutron-induced fission of uranium nuclei. Both methods are approximations to the full Surrogate Nuclear Reactions approach, which aims at determining cross sections for compound-nuclear reactions. A nuclear-reaction model is employed to simulate physical quantities that are typically measured in Surrogate experiments and to test commonly-used assumptions underlying the analyses of Surrogate experiments.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Congress requested information concerning differences in cost estimates for implementing the Department of Defense's (DOD) homosexual conduct policy reported by GAO and a University of California Blue Ribbon Commission (Commission). In February 2005, we estimated that the cost to recruit and train replacements for enlisted servicemembers separated under the policy from fiscal years 1994 through 2003 was about $190.5 million. A year later, the Commission estimated that the cost was at least $363.8 million over the same time period--91 percent more than our estimate. This report answers the following questions: (1) What factors contributed to the difference in estimated costs reported by GAO and the Commission? (2) What factors accounted for the difference in estimated enlistee training costs in our 1998 and 2005 reports?"

This project was to design and build an RF test cell (TC), which could be operated at 800 MHz, filled with high pressure gases including hydrogen, at temperatures down to that of liquid nitrogen, in strong magnetic fields, in a strong radiation environment, and with interchangeable electrodes, in order to examine the use of high-pressure RF cavities for muon beam cooling.

Computational scientists are grappling with increasingly complex, multi-rate applications that couple such physical phenomena as fluid dynamics, electromagnetics, radiation transport, chemical and nuclear reactions, and wave and material propagation in inhomogeneous media. Parallel computers with large storage capacities are paving the way for high-resolution simulations of coupled problems; however, hardware improvements alone will not prove enough to enable simulations based on brute-force algorithmic approaches. To accurately capture nonlinear couplings between dynamically relevant phenomena, often while stepping over rapid adjustments to quasi-equilibria, simulation scientists are increasingly turning to implicit formulations that require a discrete nonlinear system to be solved for each time step or steady state solution. Recent advances in iterative methods have made fully implicit formulations a viable option for solution of these large-scale problems. In this paper, we overview one of the most effective iterative methods, Newton-Krylov, for nonlinear systems and point to software packages with its implementation. We illustrate the method with an example from magnetically confined plasma fusion and briefly survey other areas in which implicit methods have bestowed important advantages, such as allowing high-order temporal integration and providing a pathway to sensitivity analyses and optimization. Lastly, we overview algorithm extensions under development motivated by current SciDAC …

The need to consider aqueous and sorption kinetics andmicrobiological processes arises in many subsurface problems. Ageneral-rate expression has been implemented into the TOUGHREACTsimulator, which considers multiple mechanisms (pathways) and includesmultiple product, Monod, and inhibition terms. This paper presents aformulation for incorporating kinetic rates among primary species intomass-balance equations. The space discretization used is based on aflexible integral finite difference approach that uses irregular griddingto model bio-geologic structures. A general multi-region model forhydrological transport interacted with microbiological and geochemicalprocesses is proposed. A 1-D reactive transport problem with kineticbiodegradation and sorption was used to test the enhanced simulator,which involves the processes that occur when a pulse of water containingNTA (nitrylotriacetate) and cobalt is injected into a column. The currentsimulation results agree very well with those obtained with othersimulators. The applicability of this general multi-region model wasvalidated by results from a published column experiment ofdenitrification and sulfate reduction. The matches with measured nitrateand sulfate concentrations were adjusted with the interficial areabetween mobile hydrological and immobile biological regions. Resultssuggest that TOUGHREACT can not only be a useful interpretative tool forbiogeochemical experiments, but also can produce insight into processesand parameters of microscopic diffusion and their interplay withbiogeochemical reactions. The geometric- and process-based multi-regionmodel may provide …

Approach to Connect Global Objectives and Local Actions: (1) Articulate global objectives into a hierarchy of subsystem requirements and local attributes and measures; (2) Establish a baseline system and viable alternatives through the interactions and relationships (e.g., networks) of local system elements and their options; (3) Evaluate performance of system alternatives and develop improved nuclear material management strategies and technologies; and (4) The need to address greatest concerns first (prioritized or graded approach) and to make tradeoffs among implementation options and competing objectives entails a risk-based approach. IGNMM could provide a systematic understanding of global nuclear materials management and evolutionarily improve and integrate the management through an active architecture, using for example, situation awareness, system models, methods, technologies, and international cooperation. Different tools would be used within the overall framework to address individual issues on the desired geographic scale that could be easily linked to broader analyses. Life-cycle system analyses would allow for evaluating material path alternatives on an integrated global scale. Disconnects, overlaps, technical options, and alternatives for optimizing nuclear materials processes could be evaluated in an integrated manner.

According to the Administration’s “National Security Strategy” document released on March 16, 2006, the United States “may face no greater challenge from a single country than Iran.” To date, the Bush Administration has pursued several avenues to attempt to contain the potential threat posed by Iran, including supporting a long-term policy of changing Iran’s regime. However, the near-term Administration drive to prevent any Iranian nuclear weapons breakthrough has brought diplomatic and economic strategies to the forefront of U.S. policy.

This report discusses the debate over U.S. policy toward Iran, much of which has centered on the nature of the current regime. Some experts believe that Iran, a country of almost 70 million people, is a threat to U.S. interests because hardliners in Iran’s regime dominate and set a policy direction intended to challenge U.S. influence and allies in the region. President Bush, in his January 29, 2002, State of the Union message, labeled Iran part of an “axis of evil” along with Iraq and North Korea.

According to an Administration national security strategy document released on March 16, 2006, the United States "may face no greater challenge from a single country than Iran." The Bush Administration announced May 31, 2006, that it would negotiate with Iran in concert with U.S. allies. If diplomacy and sanctions do not succeed, some advocate military action against Iran's nuclear infrastructure rather than acquiescence to a nuclear-armed Iran. U.S. concerns regarding Iran include Iran's nuclear program, Iran's influence on Iraq by way of providing arms and other material assistance to Shiite Islamist militias, and Iran's human rights practices, which include strict limits on free expression and repression of ethnic and religious minorities.

This report presents casualty data compiled by the Department of Defense (DOD), as tallied from the agency’s press releases.

This report provides statistics on fatalities during Operation Iraqi Freedom which began on March 19, 2003, as well as on the number of fatalities since May 1, 2003, plus statistics on those wounded, but not killed, since March 19, 2003.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2005, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), as required by law, began paying for physician-administered Part B drugs using information on the drugs' average sales price (ASP). Subsequently, CMS selected ASP as the basis to pay for a subset of Part B drugs provided at hospital outpatient departments. To calculate ASP, CMS uses price data submitted quarterly by manufacturers. GAO was asked to discuss its work on Medicare payment rates for Part B drugs. This testimony is based on several GAO products: Medicare Hospital Pharmaceuticals: Survey Shows Price Variation and Highlights Data Collection Lessons and Outpatient Rate-Setting Challenges for CMS, GAO-06-372, Apr. 28, 2006; Medicare: Comments on CMS Proposed 2006 Rates for Specified Covered Outpatient Drugs and Radiopharmaceuticals Used in Hospitals, GAO-06-17R, Oct. 31, 2005; and Medicare: Payments for Covered Outpatient Drugs Exceed Providers' Costs, GAO-01-1118, Sept. 21, 2001. Specifically, GAO's statement discusses (1) ASP as a practical and timely data source for use in setting Medicare Part B drug payment rates and (2) components of ASP that are currently unknown and implications for Medicare rate-setting."