The recent discovery of the migration of plutonium in groundwater away from underground nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site has spawned considerable interest in the mechanisms by which plutonium may be released to the environment by a nuclear test. A suite of solid debris samples was collected during drilling through an expended test cavity and the overlying collapse chimney. Uranium and plutonium were analyzed for isotope ratios and concentration using high precision magnetic sector inductively coupled mass spectrometry. The data unequivocally shows that plutonium may be dispersed throughout the cavity and chimney environment at the time of the detonation. The {sup 239}Pu/{sup 240}Pu ratios are also fractionated relative to initial plutonium isotope ratio for the test device. Fractionation is the result of the volatilization of uranium and production of {sup 239}Pu by the reaction {sup 238}U (n,{gamma}). We conclude that for the test under consideration plutonium was deposited outside of the confines of the cavity by dynamic processes in early-time and it is this plutonium that is most likely first transferred to the groundwater regime.

This report discusses the January 2003 annual adjustment and locality payments.

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This report provides appropriations of Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs for FY2003.

This report provides background information on the types of water supply and wastewater treatment projects traditionally funded by the federal government and the several existing programs to assist communities with water supply and wastewater recycling and treatment.

This meeting took place at the Keystone, Colorado resort from March 25-30, 2003. It was attended by 206 participants, of which 35 were students; 39% of attendees submitted abstracts. The meeting had 30% returning attendees and 70% new attendees. The group of speakers was composed of internationally recruited junior and senior experts in their respective fields. The group included representatives from academia and the private sector, highlights the convergence of proteomics efforts in the two sectors. The completion of the genome sequences of a large number of prokaryotic and eukaryotic species has catalyzed new research approaches to study the structure, function and control of biological processes. They are characterized by the systematic and in many cases quantitative analysis of all the molecules of a particular type expressed by a cell or tissue. The systematic analysis of proteins has been terms ''proteomics''. In an initial phase, most of the proteomics efforts were focused on large-scale protein identification. More recently, the objectives and technologies of proteomics have been diversified and expanded. Current proteomics research attempts to systematically and, where applicable, quantitatively determine the many properties of proteins and their biological function, including: protein abundance, state of modification, specific activity, interaction with other …

During the reporting period, work continued on development of formulations using the materials down-selected from the initially identified contenders for the fibrous monolith wear resistant components. In the previous reporting period, a two-stage binder removal process was developed that resulted in prototype parts free of voids and other internal defects. During the current reporting period, work was performed to characterize the two-stage binder removal process for WC-Co based FM material systems. Use of this process has resulted in the fabrication of defect free sintered WC-Co FM bodies, with minimal free carbon porosity and densities approaching 100% theoretical. With the elimination of free carbon porosity and other binder removal process related defects, development work focused on optimizing the densification and eliminating defects observed in WC-Co based FM consolidated by pressureless sintering. Shrinkage of the monolithic core and shell materials used in the WC-Co based FM system was measured, and differences in material shrinkage were identified as a potential cause of cell boundary cracking observed in sintered parts. Re-formulation of material blends for this system was begun, with the goal of eliminating mechanical stresses during sintering by matching the volumetric shrinkage of the core and shell materials. Thirty-three 7/8 inch drill bit …

There have been extensive studies of the current and potential environmental impact of Russian Northern fleet activities. However, despite the fact that the total number of ships in both fleets are comparable, there have been very few studies published in the open literature of the impact of the Pacific fleet. This study of the Pacific fleet's impact on neighboring countries was undertaken to partially remedy this lack of analysis. This study is focused on an evaluation of the inventory of major sources of radioactive material associated with the decommissioning of nuclear submarines, and an evaluation of releases to the atmosphere and their long-range (>100km) transboundary transport.

Until the last decade, most neutron experiments have been performed at steady-state, reactor-based sources. Recently, however, pulsed spallation sources have been shown to be very useful in a wide range of neutron studies. A major review of neutron sources in the US was conducted by a committee chaired by Nobel laureate Prof. W. Kohn: ''Neutron Sources for America's Future-BESAC Panel on Neutron Sources 1/93''. This distinguished panel concluded that steady state and pulsed sources are complementary and that the nation has need for both to maintain a balanced neutron research program. The report recommended that both a new reactor and a spallation source be built. This complementarity is recognized worldwide. The conclusion of this report is that a new continuous neutron source is needed for the second decade of the 20 year plan to replace aging US research reactors and close the US neutron gap. it is based on spallation production of neutrons using a high power continuous superconducting linac to generate protons impinging on a heavy metal target. There do not appear to be any major technical challenges to the building of such a facility since a continuous spallation source has been operating in Switzerland for several years.

The huge emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel fired power plants and industrial plants over the last century have resulted in an increase of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Climatological modeling work has predicted severe climate disruption as a result of the trapping of heat due to CO{sub 2}. As an attempt to address this global warming effect, DOE has initiated the Vision 21 concept for future power plants. We first synthesized mesoporous aluminosilicates that have high surface area and parallel pore channels for membrane support materials. Later we synthesized microporous aluminosilicates as the potential thin membrane materials for selective CO{sub 2} adsorption. The pore size is controlled to be less that 1 nm so that the adsorption of CO{sub 2} on the pore wall will block the passage of N{sub 2}. Mesoporous and precipitated alumina were synthesized as the base material for CO{sub 2} adsorbent. The porous alumina is doped with Ba to enhance its CO{sub 2} affinity due to the basicity of Ba. It is shown by gas chromatograph (GC) that the addition of Ba enhances the separation CO{sub 2} from N{sub 2}. It was found that mesoporous alumina has larger specific surface area and better selectivity …

TMVOC is a numerical simulator for three-phase non-isothermal flow of water, soil gas, and a multicomponent mixture of volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) in multidimensional heterogeneous porous media. It is an extension of the TOUGH2 general-purpose simulation program developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. TMVOC is designed for applications to contamination problems that involve hydrocarbon fuel or organic solvent spills in saturated and unsaturated zones. It can model contaminant behavior under ''natural'' environmental conditions, as well as for engineered systems, such as soil vapor extraction, groundwater pumping, or steam-assisted source remediation. TMVOC is upwards compatible with T2VOC (Falta et al., 1995) and can be initialized from T2VOC-style initial conditions. The main enhancements in TMVOC relative to T2VOC are as follows: a multicomponent mixture of volatile organic chemicals can be modeled; any and all combinations of the three phases water-oil-gas are treated; several non-condensible gases may be present; diffusion is treated in all phases in a manner that is fully coupled with phase partitioning. This paper gives a brief summary of the methodology used in TMVOC as well as highlighting some implementation issues. Simulation of a NAPL spill and subsequent remediation is discussed for a 2-D vertical section of a saturated-unsaturated …

An infrared imaging system has been installed on NSTX (National Spherical Torus Experiment) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory to measure the surface temperatures on the lower divertor and center stack. The imaging system is based on an Indigo Alpha 160 x 128 microbolometer camera with 12 bits/pixel operating in the 7-13 {micro}m range with a 30 Hz frame rate and a dynamic temperature range of 0-700 degrees C. From these data and knowledge of graphite thermal properties, the heat flux is derived with a classic one-dimensional conduction model. Preliminary results of heat flux scaling are reported.

Speedup, a commercial software package for the dynamic modeling of chemical processes, has been coupled with the PVM software to allow a single process model to be distributed over several computers running in parallel. As an initial application, this coarse distribution technique was applied to a batch chemical plant containing 16 unit operations. Computation time for this problem was reduced by a factor of 4.7 using only three parallel processors in the UNIX computing environment. Better than linear acceleration was achieved from the significant reduction in computation required to reinitialize the smaller subprocesses at discontinuities in the solution. The process was physically divided at points that naturally separated the overall plant into distinct subprocesses. This facilitated the computation by minimizing the interconnection between the parallel units. Techniques were developed to make efficient material and energy transfers between the modeled subprocesses based on actual material transfers used in plant operations.

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "We are reviewing the Army's plans for deploying and sustaining Stryker brigades. We plan to complete our review and report the results in June 2003. In the meantime, the Army will be conducting an operational evaluation of the first Stryker brigade from late April through May 2003 as required by law. The purpose of this letter is to bring attention to issues concerning the adequacy of the Army's proposed operational evaluation plan. The operational evaluation is intended to facilitate an understanding of the initial brigade's overall capabilities. The evaluation was first directed by the conference report accompanying the 2001 defense authorization act. Subsequently, Congress included the requirement in Section 113 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2002, which provides that (1) the Secretary of the Army is to evaluate the brigade's execution of combat missions across the full spectrum of potential threats and operational scenarios, (2) the Department of Defense's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) must approve the Army's operational evaluation plan before the evaluation may be conducted, and (3) the Secretary of Defense is to certify to Congress that the results of …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and the Census, House Committee on Government Reform asked GAO to testify on its experiences with the use of data mining as part of its audits and investigations of various government programs. GAO's testimony focused on (1) examples and benefits of the use of data mining in audits and investigations and (2) some of the future uses and challenges in expanding the use of data mining in audits of federal programs. Much of GAO's experience with data mining to date relates to its audits of the Department of Defense's (DOD) credit card programs."

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This report discusses about the Homeland Security on Protecting Airliners from Terrorist Missiles where Recent events have focused attention on the threat that terrorists with shoulder fired surface-to-air missiles pose to commercial airliners. Most believe that no single solution exists to effectively mitigate this threat.

The report discusses the issues regarding the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-296, 116 Stat. 2135), which contains provisions to arm pilots of passenger aircraft and gives deputized pilots the authority to use force, including lethal force, to defend the flight deck against criminal and terrorist threats. The report includes the legislative Background, implementation issues, equipment, training, operational procedures and costs.

The entry into force, on January 1, 1994, of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has eliminated the advantage that the beneficiaries of the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (CBERA) and related provisions of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) had enjoyed in trade with the United States relative to Mexico, and gave Mexico an increasingly significant competitive edge over the CBERA countries. The scheduled further implementation of the NAFTA would have resulted in a substantial advantage to Mexico over the CBERA countries and vitiate in part the purpose of the CBERA.

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The Superfund program for cleaning up the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites was created by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, or CERCLA (P.L. 96-510, as amended). This report discusses recent development and background issues, superfund issues, revenue issues, comprehensive reauthorization, and legislation regarding superfund program.