A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Several state and local government agencies and financial institutions accept consular identification (CID) cards, which are issued by foreign governments to their citizens living abroad. Mexico issued more than 2.2 million CID cards in 2002-2003 and Guatemala issued approximately 89,000 from mid-2002 to 2003. Critics of CID cards say their acceptance facilitates the unlawful stay within the United States of undocumented aliens and may provide opportunities for terrorists to remain undetected in this country. GAO examined (1) the purpose of a CID card and how Mexican and Guatemalan CID cards are being used in the United States, (2) steps Mexico and Guatemala have taken to verify the identities of CID card applicants and incorporate security features in CID cards now used in the United States, and (3) the positions and policies of federal agencies regarding CID cards."

BRAC 2005 Intelligence Joint Cross-Service Group Meeting Minutes of August 24, 2004. The document is redacted and includes the BRAC 2005 Scenario Development And Analysis Executive Summary Brief (PowerPoint slides).

In support of technology development to utilize coal for efficient, affordable, and environmentally clean power generation, the Power Systems Development Facility (PSDF) located in Wilsonville, Alabama, routinely demonstrates gasification technologies using various types of coals. The PSDF is an engineering scale demonstration of key features of advanced coal-fired power systems, including a KBR (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root) Transport Gasifier, a hot gas particulate control device, advanced syngas cleanup systems, and high-pressure solids handling systems. This report discusses Test Campaign TC16 of the PSDF gasification process. TC16 began on July 14, 2004, lasting until August 24, 2004, for a total of 835 hours of gasification operation. The test campaign consisted of operation using Powder River Basin (PRB) subbituminous coal and high sodium lignite from the North Dakota Freedom mine. The highest gasifier operating temperature mostly varied from 1,760 to 1,850 F with PRB and 1,500 to 1,600 F with lignite. Typically, during PRB operations, the gasifier exit pressure was maintained between 215 and 225 psig using air as the gasification oxidant and between 145 and 190 psig while using oxygen as the oxidant. With lignite, the gasifier operated only in air-blown mode, and the gasifier outlet pressure ranged from 150 …

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This report provides information about The Condition of the Banking Industry. Smaller banks are less able to garner cheaper funds for lending from wholesale markets and are less able to mitigate their credit and interest rate risks.

Trade agreements such asthe NAFTA and the GATT Uruguay Round agreements have been approved by majority vote of each House of Congress rather than by twothirds vote of the Senate — that is, they have been treated as congressional-executive agreements rather than astreaties. The congressional-executive agreement has been the vehicle for implementingCongress' long-standing policy ofseeking trade benefitsfor the United States through reciprocal trade negotiations. In a succession of statutes, Congress has authorized the President to negotiate and enter into tariff and nontariff barrier (NTB) agreements for limited periods, while mandating that NTB and free trade area agreements negotiated under this authority could enter into force for the United States only if approved by both Houses in a bill enacted into public law and other statutory conditions were met.

A synthetic Topopah Spring Tuff water representative of one type of pore water at Yucca Mountain, Nevada (USA) was evaporated at 95 C in a series of experiments to determine the geochemical controls for brines that may form on, and possibly impact upon the long-term integrity of waste containers and drip shields at the designated high-level, nuclear-waste repository. Solution chemistry, condensed vapor chemistry, and precipitate mineralogy were used to identify important chemical divides and to validate geochemical calculations of evaporating water chemistry using a high temperature Pitzer thermodynamic database. The water evolved towards a complex ''sulfate type'' brine that contained about 45 mol% Na, 40 mol% Cl, 9 mol% NO{sub 3}, 5 mol% K, and less than 1 mol% each of SO{sub 4}, Ca, Mg, {Sigma}CO{sub 2}(aq), F, and Si. All measured ions in the condensed vapor phase were below detection limits. The mineral precipitates identified were halite, anhydrite, bassanite, niter and nitratine. Trends in the solution composition and identification of CaSO{sub 4} solids suggest that fluorite, carbonate, sulfate, and magnesium-silicate precipitation control the aqueous solution composition of sulfate type waters by removing fluoride, calcium, and magnesium during the early stages of evaporation. In most cases, the high temperature Pitzer …

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

Weekly newspaper from Emory, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Budget Period 2 of the East Binger Unit (''EBU'') DOE Project has been. Recent activities included additional data gathering and project monitoring, plus initiation of work on an SPE paper on the modeling efforts of the project. Early production performance suggests horizontal wells do not provide sufficient additional production over vertical wells to justify their incremental cost. It will take more time to evaluate the impact of the horizontal wells on sweep and ultimate recovery, but it is unlikely that an improvement in recovery will be sufficient to make the overall economic value of horizontal wells greater than the economic value of vertical wells. Monitoring of overall performance of the pilot area continues. Overall response to the various projects continues to be very favorable. Injection into the pilot area has nearly doubled, while gas production and nitrogen content of produced gas have both decreased. Nitrogen recycle within the pilot area has dropped from 60% to 20%. Efforts to further disseminate knowledge gained through this project, by means of technical paper presentations to industry groups, are underway. Project monitoring and technology transfer will be focus areas of Budget Period 3.

The Savannah River Site is a Department of Energy, government-owned, company-operated industrial complex built in the 1950s to produce materials used in nuclear weapons. Five reactors were built to support the production of nuclear weapons material. Irradiated materials were moved from the reactors to one of the two chemical separation plants. In these facilities, known as ''canyons,'' the irradiated fuel and target assemblies were chemically processed to separate useful products from waste. Unfortunately, the by-product waste of nuclear material production was a highly radioactive liquid that had to be stored and maintained. In 1993 a strategy was developed to implement predictive maintenance technologies in the Liquid Waste Disposition Project Division responsible for processing the liquid waste. Responsibilities include the processing and treatment of 51 underground tanks designed to hold 750,000 to1,300,000 gallons of liquid waste and operation of a facility that vitrifies highly radioactive liquid waste into glass logs. Electrical and mechanical equipment monitored at these facilities is very similar to that found in non-nuclear industrial plants. Annual inspections are performed on electrical components, roof systems, and mechanical equipment. Troubleshooting and post installation and post-maintenance infrared inspections are performed as needed. In conclusion, regardless of the industry, the use of …

The project aimed at the development of a Vertical Floatation melter, for application to the aluminum industry. This is intended to improve both the energy efficiency and environmental performance of aluminum melting furnaces. Phase I of this project dealt primarily with the initial research effort. Phase II, dealt with pilot-scale testing.

This paper discusses advances made in the field of Micron-gap ThermoPhotoVoltaics (MTPV). Initial modeling has shown that MTPV may enable significant performance improvements relative to conventional far field TPV. These performance improvements include up to a 10x increase in power density, 30% to 35% fractional increase in conversion efficiency, or alternatively, reduced radiator temperature requirements to as low as 550 C. Recent experimental efforts aimed at supporting these predictions have successfully demonstrated that early current and voltage enhancements could be done repeatedly and at higher temperatures. More importantly, these efforts indicated that no unknown energy transfer process occurs reducing the potential utility of MTPV. Progress has been made by running tests with at least one of the following characteristics relative to the MTPV results reported in 2001: Tests at over twice the temperature (900 C); Tests at 50% smaller gaps (0.12 {micro}m); Tests with emitter areas from 4 to 100 times larger (16 mm{sup 2} to 4 cm{sup 2}); and Tests with over 20x reduction in parasitic spacer heat flow. Remaining fundamental challenges to realizing these improvements relative to the recent breakthroughs in conventional far field TPV include reengineering the photovoltaic (PV) diode, filter, and emitter system for MTPV and …

An increasing amount of electricity is used by equipment that is neither fully ''on'' nor fully ''off.'' We call these equipment states low power modes, or ''lopomos.'' ''Standby'' and ''sleep'' are the most familiar lopomos, but some new products already have many modes. Lopomos are becoming common in household appliances, safety equipment, and miscellaneous products. Ross and Meier (2000) reports that several international studies have found standby power to be as much as 10 percent of residential energy consumption. Lopomo energy consumption is likely to continue growing rapidly as products with lopomos that use significant amounts of energy penetrate the market. Other sectors such as commercial buildings and industry also have lopomo energy use, perhaps totaling more in aggregate than that of households, but no comprehensive measurements have been made. In this paper, we propose a research agenda for study of lopomo energy consumption. This agenda has been developed with input from over 200 interested parties. Overall, there is consensus that lopomo energy consumption is an important area for research. Many see this as a critical time for addressing lopomo issues. As equipment designs move from the binary ''on/off'' paradigm to one that encompasses multiple power modes, there is a …

Recently the collider physics community has seen significant advances in the formalisms and implementations of event generators. This review is a primer of the methods commonly used for the simulation of high energy physics events at particle colliders. We provide brief descriptions, references, and links to the specific computer codes which implement the methods. The aim is to provide an overview of the available tools, allowing the reader to ascertain which tool is best for a particular application, but also making clear the limitations of each tool.

The removal of cesium from aqueous waste solution was investigated in a column setup using SuperLig(R) 644 resin. The resin was significantly coarser in size than those used in previous studies because of hydraulic problems encountered during pilot-scale tests. The bed volume (BV = 140) at the onset of breakthrough surpassed the design requirement of 100 BV at 50 percent breakthrough. The percent of cesium removed by the resin at the onset of breakthrough was 99.96. The elution of cesium with 0.5 M HNO3 was satisfactory with a peak BV of 2.5. The elution BV for C/Co = 0.01 was 10, which is less than the target of 15 BV. The percent of sorbed cesium eluted from the resin was 99.88 percent. In addition, the BV of the various solutions used for the supporting process steps (feed displacement, post-feed displacement rinse, post-elution rinse, and regeneration) of the cesium ion exchange system was sufficient.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This document describes measurements that characterize an Advanced Research Systems DE204S cryocooler system. The data is relevant to the thermal performance and vibration characteristics of the cold-head. The thermal measurements include heat load mapping of the 1st and 2nd stage, and temperature fluctuation measurement of the 2nd stage heat station. A comparison of fluctuation measurements by four different sensors is also included to support the 2nd stage fluctuation results. Finally, optical measurement of the cyclic 2nd stage heat station deflection is described.

This report provides information about the Recommendation of the 9/11 Commission and Related Issues for Detection of Explosives on Airline Passengers. The key issue for congress is balancing various costs of mandating passenger explosives trace detection.

This report provides information about the Farm Credit System which is a national wide cooperative lending to agricultural and aquatic producers, rural homeowners and certain agricultural related businesses.

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The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Thomas Alt. Alt joined the Aviation Cadet Corps in June of 1942 at the age of 17. By January of 1943, once he turned 18, he was called up for training. In mid-1943 he traveled to Pearl Harbor, and completed Fire Fighting School with the Navy while on the island. In mid-1944 Alt was assigned to the USS Sea Cat (SS-399). He worked as Military Police on night shifts and guard duty in the brig. They traveled to Saipan and the South China Sea where the Sea Cat operated in a wolf pack. He landed on Saipan 7 July 7, as the battle was coming to an end. He served with a firefighting crew on the beach for pilots making emergency or crash landings. Alt remained on Saipan through early 1945. He was stationed on Tinian in July, and recalls when the Enola Gay landed. He returned to the US and was discharged in March of 1945.

This document is prepared annually to summarize environmental activities, primarily environmental-monitoring activities, on the ORR and within the ORR surroundings. The document fulfills the requirement of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Order 231.1, ''Environment, Safety and Health Reporting,'' for an annual summary of environmental data to characterize environmental performance. The environmental monitoring criteria are described in DOE Order 450.1, ''Environmental Protection Program''. The results summarized in this report are based on data collected prior to and through 2003. This report is not intended to provide the results of all sampling on the ORR. Additional data collected for other site and regulatory purposes, such as environmental restoration remedial investigation reports, waste management characterization sampling data, and environmental permit compliance data, are presented in other documents that have been prepared in accordance with applicable DOE guidance and/or laws. Corrections to the report for the previous year are found in Appendix A. Environmental monitoring on the ORR consists primarily of two major activities: effluent monitoring and environmental surveillance. Effluent monitoring involves the collection and analysis of samples or measurements of liquid and gaseous effluents at the point of release to the environment; these measurements allow the quantification and official reporting of contaminants, assessment …