Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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

An estimated 41.2 million people were without health insurance in 2001. Legislation under consideration by the 108th and earlier Congresses is intended to assist small employers in offering health insurance as a benefit to their workers. A new bill, H.R. 4281, introduced on May 5, 2004, The Small Business Health Fairness Act of 2003 (H.R. 6601s. 545), and a number of bills from the earlier Congresses include provisions creating new groups for small firms to join or encouraging the growth of existing groups so that small employers can band together to offer coverage to their employees.

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

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission uses MACCS2 (MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System, Version 2) for regulatory purposes such as planning for emergencies and cost-benefit analyses. MACCS2 uses a straight-line Gaussian model for atmospheric transport and dispersion. This model has been criticized as being overly simplistic, although only expected values of metrics of interest are used in the regulatory arena. To test the assumption that averaging numerous weather results adequately compensates for the loss of structure in the meteorology that occurs away from the point of release, average MACCS2 results have been compared with average results from a state-of-the-art, 3-dimensional LODI (Lagrangian Operational Dispersion Integrator)/ADAPT (Atmospheric Data Assimilation and Parameterization Technique) and a Lagrangian trajectory, Gaussian puff transport and dispersion model from RASCAL (Radiological Assessment System for consequence Analysis). The weather sample included 610 weather trials representing conditions for a hypothetical release at the Central Facility of the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement site. The values compared were average ground concentrations and average surface-level air concentrations at several distances out to 100 miles (160.9 km) from the assumed release site.

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The Pennsylvania State University, under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory will establish, promote, and manage a national industry-driven Stripper Well Consortium (SWC) that will be focused on improving the production performance of domestic petroleum and/or natural gas stripper wells. The consortium creates a partnership with the U.S. petroleum and natural gas industries and trade associations, state funding agencies, academia, and the National Energy Technology Laboratory. This report serves as the tenth quarterly technical progress report for the SWC. Key activities for this reporting period include: (1) release of the 2003 request-for-proposal (RFP), (2) planning the spring SWC meeting in Pearl River New York, and (3) tentatively plan the SWC 2003 fall technology transfer meetings. During this reporting period, the efforts were focused primarily on the organizing and hosting the fall technology transfer meetings. Simultaneously, administrative issues such as modifying the SWC Constitution and By-Laws and creating a block membership tier to promote further industrial involvement were areas of concentration. The SWC is poised to enter its third year with a growing, diversifying membership.

The Pennsylvania State University, under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory will establish, promote, and manage a national industry-driven Stripper Well Consortium (SWC) that will be focused on improving the production performance of domestic petroleum and/or natural gas stripper wells. The consortium creates a partnership with the U.S. petroleum and natural gas industries and trade associations, state funding agencies, academia, and the National Energy Technology Laboratory. This report serves as the eleventh quarterly technical progress report for the SWC. Key activities for this reporting period include: (1) organizing and hosting the Spring SWC meeting in Pearl River, New York, (2) working with successful applicants and Penn State's Office of Sponsored Research to get subcontracts in place, and (3) planning three SWC technology transfer meetings to take place in the fall of 2003. During this reporting period, the efforts were focused primarily on the organizing and hosting the SWC Spring proposal meeting and organizing the fall technology transfer meetings.

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The High Current Experiment (HCX) is being assembled at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as part of the U.S. program to explore heavy ion beam transport at a scale representative of the low-energy end of an induction linac driver for fusion energy production. The primary mission of this experiment is to investigate aperture fill factors acceptable for the transport of space-charge dominated heavy ion beams at high space-charge intensity (line-charge density {approx}0.2{micro}C/m) over long pulse durations (>4 {micro}s). This machine will test transport issues at a driver-relevant scale resulting from nonlinear space-charge effects and collective modes, beam centroid alignment and beam steering, matching, image charges, halo, lost-particle induced electron effects, and longitudinal bunch control. We present the first experimental results carried out with the coasting K{sup +} ion beam transported through the first 10 electrostatic transport quadrupoles and associated diagnostics. Later phases of the experiment will include more electrostatic lattice periods to allow more sensitive tests of emittance growth, and also magnetic quadrupoles to explore similar issues in magnetic channels with a full driver scale beam.

SRTC performed small-scale tests to determine the behavior associated with blending streams in the High-level Waste (HLW) Lag Storage and Feed Blending Process System for the Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). The work reported here was planned and designed in response to the test specification. The Office of River Protection Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant consists of three primary facilities: a Pretreatment Facility and two facilities for low-activity and high-level waste vitrification. The Pretreatment Facility contains unit operations which receive waste feed from the Hanford Tank Farms and separate it into two treated waste streams: a low-activity, liquid waste stream stripped of most solids and radioisotopes (processed through the Low-Activity Waste Vitrification Facility) and a high-level waste slurry containing most of the solids and radioisotopes (processed through the High-Level Waste Vitrification Facility). Blending of the later solids a nd radioisotopes streams and their resulting properties is the subject of this report. These mixtures are shown to be unreactive and pumpable by using statistically designed combinations of nonradioactive simulants for the process streams. Properties of the mixtures are also predicted numerically (with the Environmental Simulation Program) and compared with the experimental results. The results did not reveal any …

Report detailing the attempts to regulate mercury emissions from electric utilities, including an investigation, potential challenges, and more.

Because of tight requirements on beam quality longitudinal single-bunch instabilities are a serious concern for the damping rings of the next generation of linear colliders. Unlike multi-bunch instabilities they cannot be damped using feed-back systems and need to be avoided altogether. We present an analysis of these instabilities for the current Feb. 03 NLC main damping ring design, with attention paid to coherent synchrotron radiation and vacuum chamber effects, with the latter including the main components (RF cavities, BPM's, and resistive wall). The study is carried out by solving the Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation for the longitudinal motion numerically. Comparison is made, whenever possible, with linear theory. We find that collective effects are dominated by coherent synchrotron radiation and estimate the instability threshold to be safely above 6 times the design current.

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A major concern in the development of hot dry rock (HDR) and hot fractured rock (HFR) reservoirs is achieving and maintaining adequate injectivity, while avoiding the development of preferential short-circuiting flow paths such as those caused by thermally-induced stress cracking. Past analyses of HDR and HFR reservoirs have tended to focus primarily on the coupling between hydrology (flow), heat transfer, and rock mechanics. Recent studies suggest that rock-fluid interactions and associated mineral dissolution and precipitation effects could have a major impact on the long-term performance of HFR reservoirs. The present paper uses recent European studies as a starting point to explore chemically-induced effects of fluid circulation in HFR systems. We examine ways in which the chemical composition of reinjected waters can be modified to improve reservoir performance by maintaining or even enhancing injectivity. Chemical manipulations considered here include pH modification and dilution with fresh water. We performed coupled thermo-hydrologic-chemical simulations in which the fractured medium was represented by a one-dimensional MINC model (multiple interacting continua), using the non-isothermal multi-phase reactive geochemical transport code TOUGHREACT. Results indicate that modifying the injection water chemistry can enhance mineral dissolution and reduce clay swelling. Chemical interactions between rocks and fluids will change a HFR …

The increasing gap between processor performance and memory access time warrants the re-examination of data movement in iterative linear solver algorithms. For this reason, we explore and establish the feasibility of modifying a standard iterative linear solver algorithm in a manner that reduces the movement of data through memory. In particular, we present an alternative to the restarted GMRES algorithm for solving a single right-hand side linear system Ax = b based on solving the block linear system AX = B. Algorithm performance, i.e. time to solution, is improved by using the matrix A in operations on groups of vectors. Experimental results demonstrate the importance of implementation choices on data movement as well as the effectiveness of the new method on a variety of problems from different application areas.

Interview with Air Force veteran John T. Chain. The interview includes Chain's perspectives as commander of the Strategic Air Command, his comments about leadership, and his personal relationships with General Curtis LeMay.

Significant experimental and theoretical progress has been made in the U.S. heavy ion fusion program on high-current sources, transport, and focusing. Currents over 200 mA have been transported through a matching section and 10 half-lattice periods with electric quadrupoles. An experiment shows control of high beam current with an aperture, while avoiding secondary electrons. New theory and simulations of the neutralization of intense beam space charge with plasma in various focusing chamber configurations predict that near-emittance-limited beam focal spot sizes can be obtained even with beam perveance (ratio of beam space potential to ion energy) >10 x higher than in earlier HIF focusing experiments. Progress in a new focusing experiment with plasma neutralization up to 10{sup -3} perveance, and designs for a next-step experiment to study beam brightness evolution from source to target are described.

Daily newspaper from Perry, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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New thermoelectric materials using Quantum Well (QW) technology are expected to increase the energy conversion efficiency to more than 25% from the present 5%, which will allow for the low cost conversion of waste heat into electricity. Hi-Z Technology, Inc. has been developing QW technology over the past six years. It will use Caterpillar, Inc., a leader in the manufacture of large scale industrial equipment, for verification and life testing of the QW films and modules. Other members of the team are Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who will sputter large area QW films. The Scope of Work is to develop QW materials from their present proof-of-principle technology status to a pre-production level over a proposed three year period. This work will entail fabricating the QW films through a sputtering process of 50 {micro}m thick multi layered films and depositing them on 12 inch diameter, 5 {micro}m thick Si substrates. The goal in this project is to produce a basic 10-20 watt module that can be used to build up any size generator such as: a 5-10 kW Auxiliary Power Unit (APU), a multi kW Waste Heat Recovery Generator (WHRG) for a class 8 truck or as small as a 10-20 …

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Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.