A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO is required to annually audit the financial statements of the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF), Savings Association Insurance Fund (SAIF), and FSLIC Resolution Fund (FRF), which are administered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). GAO is responsible for obtaining reasonable assurance about whether FDIC's financial statements for BIF, SAIF, and FRF, are presented fairly in all material respects, in conformity with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, whether it maintains effective internal controls, and whether FDIC has complied with selected laws and regulations. Created in 1933 to insure bank deposits and promote sound banking practices, FDIC plays an important role in maintaining public confidence in the nation's financial system. In 1989, legislation to reform the federal deposit insurance system created three funds to be administered by FDIC: BIF and SAIF, which protect bank and savings deposits, and FRF, which was created to close out the business of the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "As technological and other advances transform the U.S. economy, many of the nation's six million employers may have trouble finding employees with the skills to do their jobs well. Some experts indicate that such a skill gap already affects many employers. To help close this skill gap, both federal- and state-funded programs are providing training and helping employers find qualified employees. In 2002, the federal government spent about $12 billion on workforce programs, and there are various studies on these programs. States also raised revenues in 2002--from taxes levied on employers--to fund their own workforce programs. However, little is known about these state programs. GAO was asked to provide information on how many states use these employer taxes to fund their own employment placement and training programs, what services are provided, the extent to which these state programs coordinate with federal programs, and how states assess the performance of these programs."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The security of U.S. commercial aviation is a long-standing concern, and substantial efforts have been undertaken to strengthen it. One of these efforts is the development of a new Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) to identify passengers requiring additional security attention. The development of CAPPS II has raised a number of issues, including whether individuals may be inappropriately targeted for additional screening, and whether data accessed by the system may compromise passengers' privacy. GAO was asked to determine (1) the development status and plans for CAPPS II; (2) the status of CAPPS II in addressing key developmental, operational, and public acceptance issues; and (3) other challenges that could impede the successful implementation of the system."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), within the Department of Defense (DOD), plays a key role in addressing the threats posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Since the September 11, 2001, attacks, the visibility of DTRA's role has increased as federal agencies and military commanders have looked to the agency for additional support and advice. GAO was asked to report on DTRA's (1) mission and the efforts it undertakes to fulfill this mission; (2) relationship with other government entities, specifically the Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS); and (3) process that it uses to prioritize resources and assess progress toward organizational goals."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The U.N. Secretary General launched two reform agendas, in 1997 and 2002, to address the U.N.'s core management challenges--poor leadership of the Secretariat, duplication among its many offices and programs, and the lack of accountability for staff performance. In 2000, GAO reported that the Secretary General had reorganized the Secretariat's leadership and structure, but that the reforms were not yet complete. As the largest financial contributor to the United Nations, the United States has a strong interest in the completion of these reforms. GAO was asked to assess the (1) overall status of the 1997 and 2002 reforms, (2) implementation of reforms in four key areas, and (3) potential challenges to reform."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "For years, some states have taken advantage of a loophole in Medicaid law that allows them to claim billions of dollars in excessive federal matching funds by exploiting the "upper payment limit" (UPL), which is intended to be a ceiling on federal cost sharing. Congress and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) acted to curtail UPL financing schemes through law in 2000 and regulation in 2001. CMS recognized that some states had developed a long-standing reliance on UPL funds. The law and regulation authorized transition periods of up to 8 years for states to phase out excessive UPL claims. GAO was asked to examine CMS's oversight of nursing home UPL arrangements, including the status of and the basis for transition period decisions."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "As we face the challenges of the 21st century, the federal government must strive to build high-performing organizations. Nothing less than a fundamental transformation in the people, processes, technology, and environment used by federal agencies to address public goals will be necessary to address public needs. In high-performing organizations, management controls, processes, practices, and systems are adopted that are consistent with prevailing best practices and contribute to concrete organizational results. Ultimately, however, the federal government needs to change its culture to become more results-oriented, client- and customer-focused, and collaborative in nature. On November 6, 2003, GAO hosted a forum to discuss what it means for a federal agency to be high-performing in an environment where results and outcomes are increasingly accomplished through partnerships that cut across different levels of government and different sectors of the economy. The forum included discussions of the metrics, means, and mechanisms that a federal agency should use to optimize its influence and contribution to nationally important results and outcomes. The forum included representatives of the public, not-for-profit, and for-profit sectors as well as academia who are knowledgeable of what it takes …

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Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

This report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress considers each year.

A novel model has been developed to capture size scale and gradient effects within the context of continuum crystal plasticity by explicitly incorporating details of dislocation transport, coupling dislocation transport to slip, evolving spatial distributions of dislocations consistent with the flux, and capturing the interactions among various dislocation populations. Dislocation flux and density are treated as nodal degrees of freedom in the finite element model, and they are determined as part of the global system of equations. The creation, annihilation and flux of dislocations between elements are related by transport equations. Crystallographic slip is coupled to the dislocation flux and the stress state. The resultant gradients in dislocation density and local lattice rotations are analyzed for geometrically necessary and statistically stored dislocation contents that contribute to strength and hardening. Grain boundaries are treated as surfaces where dislocation flux is restricted depending on the relative orientations of the neighboring grains. Numerical results show different behavior near free surfaces and non-deforming surfaces resulting from differing levels of dislocation transmission. Simulations also show development of dislocation pile-ups at grain boundaries and an increase in flow strength reminiscent of the Hall-Petch model. The dislocation patterns have a characteristic size independent of the numerical discretization.

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This report describes the work performed during the first semi-annual third year of the project, ''Preferred Waterflood Management Practices for the Spraberry Trend Area''. The objective of this project is to significantly increase field-wide production in the Spraberry Trend in a short time frame through the application of preferred practices for managing and optimizing water injection. Our goal is to dispel negative attitudes and lack of confidence in water injection and to document the methodology and results for public dissemination to motivate waterflood expansion in the Spraberry Trend. To achieve this objective, in this period we concentrated our effort on analyzing production and injection data to optimize the reservoir management strategies for Germania Spraberry Unit. This study address the reservoir characterization and monitoring of the waterflooding project and propose alternatives of development of the current and future conditions of the reservoir to improve field performance. This research should serve as a guide for future work in reservoir simulation and can be used to evaluate various scenarios for additional development as well as to optimize the operating practices in the field. The results indicate that under the current conditions, a total of 1.410 million barrels of oil can be produced in …

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

Semi-weekly newspaper from Clifton, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The SpinTek rotary microfilter is being considered as an alternative to crossflow filtration. Prior testing evaluated the vendor's standard design for a 1-disk and 3-disk design. We noted several areas of improvement during the testing of the two filter systems that can be included in the 25-disk plant size unit.This report outlines several potential enhancements and improvements to the vendor's standard design which would extend the lifetime of the unit and increase the ability to perform maintenance for units deployed in radioactive service. The enhancements proposed in this report can be implemented to the current design with minimal impact to the cost and schedule of the purchase of the standard unit. An example of this is the replacement of the current mechanical seal with a bellows seal. The improvements proposed will require an extensive redesign of components found in the current system such as the filter chamber.

Argonne's mission is to serve DOE and national security by advancing the frontiers of knowledge, by creating and operating forefront scientific user facilities, and by providing innovative and effective approaches and solutions to energy, environmental, and security challenges to national and global well-being, in the near and long term, as a contributing member of the DOE laboratory system. We contribute significantly to DOE's mission in science, energy resources, environmental stewardship, and national security, with lead roles in the areas of science, operation of scientific facilities, and energy. In accomplishing our mission, we partner with DOE, other federal laboratories and agencies, the academic community, and the private sector. Argonne is pursuing ten visionary strategic goals to deliver extraordinary science and technology with significant value to the nation: (1) Develop the technologies and infrastructure needed to produce, store, and distribute hydrogen fuel. (2) Close the nuclear fuel cycle, reducing the cost of nuclear waste disposal by billions of dollars and disposing of weapons-grade plutonium and actinides. (3) Develop advanced nuclear power technologies that are safe, economical, proliferation-resistant, and environmentally sustainable. (4) Plan, design, construct, and operate the Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) and make fundamental discoveries in nuclear physics and astrophysics. (5) Construct …

The Analytical Development Section (ADS) of the Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) has been requested to perform beryllium (Be) analysis on digested Air Filter Paper and GHOSTWIPE (Trade Mark) samples by Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission Spectrometry (ICP-ES). One of the important figures of merit for this analysis is the detection limit (LOD), the smallest concentration of an element that can be detected with a defined certainty. To meet the site Industrial Hygiene (IH) requirements, an instrument LOD of 0.03 mg per Air Filter Paper (1 hr sample) and 0.2 mg per GHOSTWIPE (Trade Mark) must be demonstrated. Another important analytical parameter is the effect on the Be quantization from potential spectral interfering matrix elements. Any existing spectral overlaps could give false positives or increase the measured Be concentrations in these matrices. The purpose of this study was to document the Analytical Development Sections' s contained ICP-ES performance in these two areas. In addition, other Quality Control recommendations will be discussed.

The Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) melter has operated for over eight years with more than six years of radioactive operations. For each sludge batch of waste processed a sample of the radioactive glass is analyzed. In conjunction with the pour stream sampling of Sludge Batch 2, a sample of the glass in contact with the pour spout insert was also collected for analysis. The samples were evaluated for chemical composition, crystal content and redox.

The Department of Energy selected caustic-side solvent extraction (CSSX) as the preferred cesium-removal technology for SRS high-level waste. In the pretreatment step of the CSSX flowsheet, the incoming salt solution, which contains entrained sludge, is contacted with MST to adsorb strontium and selected actinides. An alternative approach replaces MST with the addition of sodium permanganate, strontium nitrate, and hydrogen peroxide. The pretreatment operation then filters the resulting slurry to remove the sludge and MST or manganese oxide and strontium carbonate solids. The filtrate receives further treatment in the solvent extraction system. SRTC personnel coordinated tests using a SpinTek rotary microfilter at the vendor location in FY01. These tests demonstrated a significant improvement - 2.5 to 6 times increase - in performance relative to the conventional cross-flow filter units. Rotary microfilter testing used a filter disk with nominal pore size of either 0.1-micron or 0. 5-micron. The custom-made disks used sintered metal sheets as the filter media. The disks differed slightly in design of the permeate carrier, which facilitates flow of the product liquid. We measured filter flux and filter decontamination factor. For determining the decontamination factor, we collected samples of filtrate and feed during each test and analyzed the samples …

It has long been recognized that a common ground exists between governing equations used for describing various flow and transport phenomena in porous media. Put another way they are all generally based on the same form of mass and/or energy conservation laws. This implies that there may exist a unified formulation and numerical scheme applicable to modeling all of these physical processes. This paper explores such a possibility and proposes a generalized framework, as well as a mathematical formulation for modeling all known transport phenomena in porous media. Based on this framework, a unified numerical approach is developed and tested using multidimensional, multiphase flow, isothermal and nonisothermal reservoir simulators. In this approach, a spatial domain of interest is discretized with an unstructured grid, then a time discretization is carried out with a backward, first-order, finite-difference method. The final discrete nonlinear equations are handled fully implicitly, using Newton iteration. In addition, the fracture medium is handled using a general dual-continuum concept with continuum or discrete modeling methods. A number of applications are discussed to demonstrate that with this unified approach, modeling a particular porous-medium flow and transport process simply becomes a matter of defining a set of state variables, along with …

Air pollution is a growing concern for both the US government and its citizens. Current legislation is moving in the direction of lower emissions standards for the major pollutants, SO{sub x} and NO{sub x}. The work performed under this DOE grant focused on finding a catalyst that, when added to coal, will effectively reduce the amount of NO{sub x} produced during combustion. The test program was divided into four major tasks: (1) evaluating the impact of a combustion catalyst on nitrogen release; (2) optimizing catalyst formulation; (3) preparing a preliminary economic evaluation; and (4) outlining future test plans, costs and schedule. More than 100 bench-scale, proof-of-concept tests were completed with more than 30 different catalysts, using two different coal types, River Hill Pittsburgh 8 (River Hill) and PRB, under oxidizing and reducing conditions. The results showed that catalysts were effective in increasing, by more than 30%, the nitrogen gas (N{sub 2}) release in River Hill Pittsburgh 8 coal and more than 20% in the PRB coal. Preliminary economics suggest this technology is comparable with current combustion NO{sub x} control technologies such as overfire air addition, SNCR and reburning. Pilot-scale tests are planned in a system with low-NO{sub x} burners to …

This paper presents analytical solutions for one-dimensional radial transient flow through horizontal, unsaturated fractured rock formation. In these solutions, unsaturated flow through fractured media is described by a linearized Richards' equation, while fracture-matrix interaction is handled using the dual-continuum concept. Although linearizing Richards' equation requires a specially correlated relationship between relative permeability and capillary pressure functions for both fractures and matrix, these specially formed relative permeability and capillary pressure functions are still physically meaningful. These analytical solutions can thus be used to describe the transient behavior of unsaturated flow in fractured media under the described model conditions. They can also be useful in verifying numerical simulation results, which, as demonstrated in this paper, are otherwise difficult to validate.

The overall objective of the present project was to identify and assess strategies and solutions for the management of industry problems related to carbon in ash. Specific issues addressed included: (1) the effect of parent fuel selection on ash properties and adsorptivity, including a first ever examination of the air entrainment behavior of ashes from alternative (non-coal) fuels; (2) the effect of various low-NOx firing modes on ash properties and adsorptivity based on pilot-plant studies; and (3) the kinetics and mechanism of ash ozonation. This laboratory data has provided scientific and engineering support and underpinning for parallel process development activities. The development work on the ash ozonation process has now transitioned into a scale-up and commercialization project involving a multi-industry team and scheduled to begin in 2004. This report describes and documents the laboratory and pilot-scale work in the above three areas done at Brown University and the University of Utah during this three-year project.