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Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In this statement, the Comptroller General discusses the fiscal policy challenges facing Congress and the nation. The focus of tax administration and budgeting are shifting because of current and projected budget surpluses. The Comptroller General speaks of the need for fiscal responsibility when using surplus projections to design tax and spending policies. These projections are based on a set of assumptions that may or may not hold. They are not a precise prediction of a future and should be used as a reference point when making policy decisions. Although the projected surpluses can provide an opportunity to respond to pent-up demands for additional spending or tax cuts, Congress must balance those demands with the nation's long-term economic health."

Problems with pipeline plugs at Hanford have occurred throughout its tank farm system. Most cross-site transfer lines at Hanford are no longer functional due to these plugs. Waste transfers frequently led to partial line plugs, resulting in substantial amounts of water being added to the tank system in an attempt to free the lines. In response to these plugs, the Hanford tank farm developed waste acceptance criteria that a waste must pass before it can be transferred (Shekarriz et al., 1997). The criteria, which include physical properties such as viscosity, specific gravity, and percent solids, are based primarily on past operational experience. Unfortunately, the chemistry of the waste solutions was not included in the criteria even though the tank farm operators are fully aware of its importance. Pipeline plugs have also occurred during relatively short waste transfers at Hanford. In FY 2000, the effort to saltwell pump 50,000 gal of filtered waste from tank U-103 to tank SY-102 was delayed for several weeks due to a plugged pipeline. Attempts to locate the plug(s) determined that it had occurred in the 02-A flex and that other plugs were possible in each of the SY-farm flexes. Modifications such as larger flex jumpers …

Corrosion and plate-out tests were performed on 304L and 316L stainless steel in pretreated Envelope B and Envelope C solutions. Flat coupons of the two stainless steels were exposed to 100 degrees C liquid and to 74 degrees C and 88 degrees C vapor above the solutions for 61 days. No significant corrosion was observed either by weight-loss measurements or by microscopic examination. Most coupons had small weight gains due to plate-out of solids, which remained to some extent even after 24-hour immersion in 1 N nitric acid at room temperature. Plate-out was more significant in the Envelope B coupons, with film thickness from less than 0.001 in. to 0.003-inches.

Rheological and physical properties testing were conducted on actual AN-107 and AW-101 pretreated feed samples prior to the addition of glass formers. Analyses were repeated following the addition of glass formers. The AN-107 and AW-101 pretreated feeds were tested at the target sodium values of nominally 6, 8, and 10 M. The AW-101 melter feeds were tested at these same concentrations, while the AN-107 melter feeds were tested at 5, 6, and 8 M with respect to sodium. These data on actual waste are required to validate and qualify results obtained with simulants.

The primary objective of the Advanced Emissions Control Development Program (AECDP) is to develop practical, cost-effective strategies for reducing the emissions of hazardous air pollutants (HAPs, or air toxics) from coal-fired boilers. The project goal is to effectively control air toxic emissions through the use of conventional flue gas cleanup equipment such as electrostatic precipitators (ESPs), fabric filters (baghouses), and wet flue gas desulfurization (WFGD) systems. Development work initially concentrated on the capture of trace metals, fine particulate, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen fluoride. Recent work has focused almost exclusively on the control of mercury emissions.

Past approaches for assessing the impacts of transporting spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste have not been effectively implemented or have used relatively simple approaches. The Yucca Mountain Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) analysis considers 83 origins, 34 fuel types, 49,914 legal weight truck shipments, 10,911 rail shipments, consisting of 59,250 shipment links outside Nevada (shipment kilometers and population density pairs through urban, suburban or rural zones by state), and 22,611 shipment links in Nevada. There was additional complexity within the analysis. The analysis modeled the behavior of 41 isotopes, 1091 source terms, and used 8850 food transfer factors (distinct factors by isotope for each state). The model also considered different accident rates for legal weight truck, rail, and heavy haul truck by state, and barge by waterway. To capture the all of the complexities of the transportation analysis, a Microsoft{reg_sign} Access database was created. In the Microsoft{reg_sign} Access approach the data is placed in individual tables and equations are developed in queries to obtain the overall impacts. While the query might be applied to thousands of table entries, there is only one equation for a particular impact. This greatly simplifies the validation effort. Furthermore, in Access, data in tables …

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This report addresses inquiries from congressional offices for information on the federal statutes, regulations and guidelines concerning restrictions on the acceptance of personal gifts by the President of the United States.

Rheological and physical properties testing were conducted on actual AN-107 and AW-101 pretreated feed samples prior to the addition of glass formers. Analyses were repeated following the addition of glass formers. The AN-107 and AW-101 pretreated feeds were tested at the target sodium values of nominally 6, 8, and 10 M. The AW-101 melter feeds were tested at these same concentrations, while the AN-107 melter feeds were tested at 5, 6, and 8 M with respect to sodium. These data on actual waste are required to validate and qualify results obtained with simulants.

The quest for metallic hydrogen has been going on for over one hundred years. Before hydrogen was first condensed into a liquid in 1898, it was commonly thought that condensed hydrogen would be a metal, like the monatomic alkali metals below hydrogen in the first column of the Periodic Table. Instead, condensed hydrogen turned out to be transparent, like the diatomic insulating halogens in the seventh column of the Periodic Table. Wigner and Huntington predicted in 1935 that solid hydrogen at 0 K would undergo a first-order phase transition from a diatomic to a monatomic crystallographically ordered solid at {approx}25 GPa. This first-order transition would be accompanied by an insulator-metal transition. Though searched for extensively, a first-order transition from an ordered diatomic insulator to a monatomic metal is yet to be observed at pressures up to 120 and 340 GPa using x-ray diffraction and visual inspection, respectively. On the other hand, hydrogen reaches the minimum electrical conductivity of a metal at 140 GPa, 0.6 g/cm{sup 3}, and 3000 K. These conditions were achieved using a shock wave reverberating between two stiff sapphire anvils. The shock wave was generated with a two-stage light-gas gun. This temperature exceeds the calculated melting temperature …

Very low power, GHz frequency, ''radar-like'' sensors can measure a variety of motions produced by a human user of machine interface devices. These data can be obtained ''at a distance'' and can measure ''hidden'' structures. Measurements range from acoustic induced, 10-micron amplitude vibrations of vocal tract tissues, to few centimeter human speech articulator motions, to meter-class motions of the head, hands, or entire body. These EM sensors measure ''fringe motions'' as reflected EM waves are mixed with a local (homodyne) reference wave. These data, when processed using models of the system being measured, provide real time states of interface positions or other targets vs. time. An example is speech articulator positions vs. time in the user's body. This information appears to be useful for a surprisingly wide range of applications ranging from speech coding synthesis and recognition, speaker or object identification, noise cancellation, hand or head motions for cursor direction, and other applications.

The interaction of the detonation of a solid HE-charge with a non-premixed cloud of hydro-carbon fuel in a chamber was studied in laboratory experiments. Soap bubbles filled with a flammable gas were subjected to the blast wave created by the detonation of PETN-charges (0.2 g < mass < 0.5 g). The dynamics of the combustion system were investigated by means of high-speed photography and measurement of the quasi-static chamber pressure.

In this paper we present numerical simulations of the interaction of a blast wave with an acetylene bubble in a closed chamber. We model the system using the inviscid Euler equations for a mixture of ideal gases. The formulation specifies the thermodynamic behavior of the system using a Chemkin interface and includes the capability to model combustion as the ambient air mixes with the acetylene. The simulations are performed using a three-dimensional adaptive mesh refinement algorithm based on a second-order Godunov integration scheme. Simulations are compared with experimental measurements for the same configuration.

A theoretical model of combustion in explosions at large Reynolds, Peclet and Damkoehler numbers is described. A key feature of the model is that combustion is treated as material transformations in the Le Chatelier state plane, rather than ''heat release''. In the limit considered here, combustion is concentrated on thin exothermic sheets (boundaries between fuel and oxidizer). The products seem to expand along the sheet, thereby inducing vorticity on either side of the sheet that continues to feed the process. The results illustrate the linking between turbulence (vorticity) and exothermicity (dilatation) in the limit of fast chemistry--thereby demonstrating the controlling role that fluid dynamics plays in such problems.