Monte Carlo was performed for the purpose of relating gamma-ray signal strength from 1kg of HEU and 10g of {sup 239}Pu (as described in the ASTM standards) to the radiation emitted from an amount of {sup 133}Ba. A determination was made on the amount of {sup 133}Ba that could act as a surrogate for the specified amounts of HEU and Pu. {sup 133}Ba is not the ideal source to use as a surrogate for HEU because of its higher energies. {sup 133}Ba was chosen as the surrogate since it has a half-life of 10.54 years, rather then the more ideal surrogate of {sup 57}Co which has a half-life of 271 days. A similar Monte Carlo was performed for the purpose of relating neutron signal strength from 200g of Pu (as described in the ASTM standards) to the radiation emitted from an amount of shielded {sup 252}Cf. A determination was made on the amount of {sup 252}Cf necessary to act as a surrogate for the 200g of Pu. An ASTM standard source is a metallic sphere, cube, or right cylinder of SNM having maximum self-attenuation of its emitted radiation. For plutonium, the source should be at least 93% {sup 239}Pu, less …

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This document is the final report for the ''Advanced Compressor Engine Controls to Enhance Operation, Reliability, and Integrity'' project. SwRI conducted this project for DOE in conjunction with Cooper Compression, under DOE contract number DE-FC26-03NT41859. This report addresses an investigation of engine controls for integral compressor engines and the development of control strategies that implement closed-loop NOX emissions feedback.

Li-ion cells are being developed for high-power applications in hybrid electric vehicles currently being designed for the FreedomCAR (Freedom Cooperative Automotive Research) program. These cells offer superior performance in terms of power and energy density over current cell chemistries. Cells using this chemistry are the basis of battery systems for both gasoline and fuel cell based hybrids. However, the safety of these cells needs to be understood and improved for eventual widespread commercial application in hybrid electric vehicles. The thermal behavior of commercial and prototype cells has been measured under varying conditions of cell composition, age and state-of-charge (SOC). The thermal runaway behavior of full cells has been measured along with the thermal properties of the cell components. We have also measured gas generation and gas composition over the temperature range corresponding to the thermal runaway regime. These studies have allowed characterization of cell thermal abuse tolerance and an understanding of the mechanisms that result in cell thermal runaway.

This report discusses the issue of children that have been left as orphans due to AIDS taking their parents lives. Moreover, the report details that between 2001 and 2003 the number of children orphaned from AIDS increased by 3.5 million. The rate of orphaned children is only expected to increase in the future if massive spending is not issued to curb the problem.

A proof-of-technology demonstration for the River Protection Project (RPP) Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) was performed by SRS. As part of this demonstration, samples from a low-activity AZ-102 glass waste form were characterized. The sample handling, preparation, and analyses were performed according to standard United States of America Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) protocol to facilitate use of these results for regulatory applications.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to the statewide turnover rate for full-time classified employees, which is used to monitor total employee loss to the State. Retention strategies are provided to monitor and curb excessive turnover, which can affect an organization's ability to meet its mission.

This report provides appropriations of Transportation, Treasury, Postal Service, Executive Office of the President, General Government, and Related Agencies for FY2004

The ASCI Grid Services (initially called Distributed Resource Management) project was started under DisCom{sup 2} when distant and distributed computing was identified as a technology critical to the success of the ASCI Program. The goals of the Grid Services project has and continues to be to provide easy, consistent access to all the ASCI hardware and software resources across the nuclear weapons complex using computational grid technologies, increase the usability of ASCI hardware and software resources by providing interfaces for resource monitoring, job submission, job monitoring, and job control, and enable the effective use of high-end computing capability through complex-wide resource scheduling and brokering. In order to increase acceptance of the new technology, the goal included providing these services in both the unclassified as well as the classified user's environment. This paper summarizes the many accomplishments and lessons learned over approximately five years of the ASCI Grid Services Project. It also provides suggestions on how to renew/restart the effort for grid services capability when the situation is right for that need.

The injection of sorbents upstream of a particulate control device is one of the most promising methods for controlling mercury emissions from coal-fired utility boilers with electrostatic precipitators and fabric filters. Studies carried out at the bench-, pilot-, and full-scale have shown that a wide variety of factors may influence sorbent mercury removal effectiveness. These factors include mercury species, flue gas composition, process conditions, existing pollution control equipment design, and sorbent characteristics. The objective of the program is to obtain the necessary information to assess the viability of lower cost alternatives to commercially available activated carbon for mercury control in coal-fired utilities. Prior to injection testing, a number of sorbents were tested in a slipstream fixed-bed device both in the laboratory and at two field sites. Based upon the performance of the sorbents in a fixed-bed device and the estimated cost of mercury control using each sorbent, seventeen sorbents were chosen for screening in a slipstream injection system at a site burning a Western bituminous coal/petcoke blend, five were chosen for screening at a site burning a subbituminous Powder River Basin (PRB) coal, and nineteen sorbents were evaluated at a third site burning a PRB coal. Sorbents evaluated during the …

Yankee Atomic Energy Company (YAEC) is considering allowing portions of existing structures at the Yankee Nuclear Power Station (YNPS) to remain on site at the time of license termination. Accordingly, release of residual radioactive contaminants (i.e., H-3, C-14, Co-60, Ni-63, Sr-90, and Cs-137) from remaining subsurface concrete structures (Darman, 2004) and dose due to that release must be evaluated. Analyses were performed using DUST-MS to assess the rate of release for each radionuclide from the concrete, based upon an assumed concentration of 1 pCi/g and a concrete density of 2.5 g/cm{sup 3}. Using the same assumptions that were applied to the soil DCGL calculation (and where appropriate, the same input parameters), RESRAD was used to calculate the dose from water pathways. Values for selected RESRAD input parameters were chosen to match the release rate calculated by DUST-MS. The results indicated that Cs-137 yielded the highest dose.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to determining whether the Office of the Attorney General is administering the Child Support Program so that child support payments are disbursed to custodial parents in a timely manner.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to determining whether the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board maintains and reports reliable financial and program data, safeguards its assets and uses them efficiently, makes progress toward its goals and objectives, and complies with applicable laws and regulations.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to determining whether the Teacher Retirement System (System) implemented the TRS-ActiveCare program as the Legislature intended and in a manner that adequately protects program resources.

This report addresses the development of automated video-screening technology to assist security forces in protecting our homeland against terrorist threats. A threat of specific interest to this project is the covert placement and subsequent remote detonation of bombs (e.g., briefcase bombs) inside crowded public facilities. Different from existing video motion detection systems, the video-screening technology described in this report is capable of detecting changes in the static background of an otherwise, dynamic environment - environments where motion and human activities are persistent. Our goal was to quickly detect changes in the background - even under conditions when the background is visible to the camera less than 5% of the time. Instead of subtracting the background to detect movement or changes in a scene, we subtracted the dynamic scene variations to produce an estimate of the static background. Subsequent comparisons of static background estimates are used to detect changes in the background. Detected changes can be used to alert security forces of the presence and location of potential threats. The results of this research are summarized in two MS Power-point presentations included with this report.

This report provides the Current and Proposed Safeguards of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, or “Mad Cow Disease”).

Integral to the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) Program’s proposed closed nuclear fuel cycle, the fission products cesium and strontium in the dissolved spent nuclear fuel stream are to be separated and managed separately. A comprehensive literature survey is presented to identify cesium and strontium separation technologies that have the highest potential and to focus research and development efforts on these technologies. Removal of these high-heat-emitting fission products reduces the radiation fields in subsequent fuel cycle reprocessing streams and provides a significant short-term (100 yr) heat source reduction in the repository. This, along with separation of actinides, may provide a substantial future improvement in the amount of fuel that could be stored in a geologic repository. The survey and review of the candidate cesium and strontium separation technologies are presented herein. Because the AFCI program intends to manage cesium and strontium together, technologies that simultaneously separate both elements are of the greatest interest, relative to technologies that separate only one of the two elements.

The principal goal of this project, funded under the ''DOE Vision 21 Virtual Demonstration Initiative'' is virtual demonstration of circulating fluidized bed performance. We had proposed a ''virtual demonstration tool'', which is based on the open-domain CFD code MFIX. The principal challenge funded through this grant is to devise and implement in this CFD code sound physical models for the rheological characteristics of the gas-particle mixtures. Within the past year, which was the third year of the project, we have made the following specific advances. (a) We have completed a study of the impact of sub-grid models of different levels of detail on the results obtained in coarse-grid simulations of gas-particle flow. (b) We have also completed a study of a model problem to understand the effect of wall friction, which was proved in our earlier work to be very important for stable operation of standpipes in a circulating fluidized bed circuit. These are described in a greater detail in this report.

The objective of the research described in this report is the development and application of a methodology for comprehensively assessing the hydrogeologic uncertainties involved in dose assessment, including uncertainties associated with conceptual models, parameters, and scenarios. This report describes and applies a statistical method to quantitatively estimate the combined uncertainty in model predictions arising from conceptual model and parameter uncertainties. The method relies on model averaging to combine the predictions of a set of alternative models. Implementation is driven by the available data. When there is minimal site-specific data the method can be carried out with prior parameter estimates based on generic data and subjective prior model probabilities. For sites with observations of system behavior (and optionally data characterizing model parameters), the method uses model calibration to update the prior parameter estimates and model probabilities based on the correspondence between model predictions and site observations. The set of model alternatives can contain both simplified and complex models, with the requirement that all models be based on the same set of data. The method was applied to the geostatistical modeling of air permeability at a fractured rock site. Seven alternative variogram models of log air permeability were considered to represent data …

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This technical progress report describes work performed from September 1, 2003, through February 29, 2004, for the project, ''Conformance Improvement Using Gels.'' We examined the properties of several ''partially formed'' gels that were formulated with a combination of high and low molecular weight HPAM polymers. After placement in 4-mm-wide fractures, these gels required about 25 psi/ft for brine to breach the gel (the best performance to date in fractures this wide). After this breach, stabilized residual resistance factors decreased significantly with increased flow rate. Also, residual resistance factors were up to 9 times greater for water than for oil. Nevertheless, permeability reduction factors were substantial for both water and oil flow. Gel with 2.5% chopped fiberglass effectively plugged 4-mm-wide fractures if a 0.5-mm-wide constriction was present. The ability to screen-out at a constriction appears crucial for particulate incorporation to be useful in plugging fractures. In addition to fiberglass, we examined incorporation of polypropylene fibers into gels. Once dispersed in brine or gelant, the polypropylene fibers exhibited the least gravity segregation of any particulate that we have tested to date. In fractures with widths of at least 2 mm, 24-hr-old gels (0.5% high molecular weight HPAM) with 0.5% fiber did not …

A 4-year numerical modeling study of the physical mechanisms that control the deep water circulation of the Gulf of Mexico

This report is about the study of interactions of the Gulf of Mexico eddies with topography and the dynamical of submarine canyons in the Gulf of Mexico.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) has been relying increasingly on computer software to introduce or enhance performance capabilities of major weapon systems. To ensure successful outcomes, software acquisition requires disciplined processes and practices. Without such discipline, weapon programs encounter difficulty in meeting cost and schedule targets. For example, in fiscal year 2003, DOD might have spent as much as $8 billion to rework software because of quality-related issues. GAO was asked to identify the practices used by leading companies to acquire software and to analyze the causes of poor outcomes of selected DOD programs. GAO also was asked to evaluate DOD's efforts to develop programs for improving software acquisition processes and to assess how those efforts compare with leading companies' practices."