A major tax cut, H.R. 1836, was enacted in June 2001, but contained sunsetted provisions. The House will consider, the week of April 15, making those tax provisions permanent. This report summarizes the provisions of the bill, analyzes effects, and considers the development of the legislation.

Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) and environmental barrier coatings (EBCs) are under development for hot-gas path components to allow higher gas-firing temperatures in advanced (high-efficiency, low-emission) gas turbines. Increasing dependence on the reliability of TBC and EBC components has driven the need for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methods to assess the condition, or ''health status,'' of these coatings. NDE methods based on elastic optical scatter and thermal imaging have been applied to TBC-coated test specimens that were thermally cycled and to EBC-coated SiC/SiC components that were run in 4.5 MW(e) field-test turbines. One primary interest is to develop NDE methods that can predict a prespall condition. Resulting data suggest a correlation between laser scatter data and thermal cycles for TBC-coated specimens, and thermal imaging results have demonstrated prespall detection for an EBC-coated SiC/SiC combustor liner.

Since January 2000, the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, the Chicago Department of Environment, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection (now part of the Office of Energy Assurance) have been collaborating on the development and implementation of guidelines that municipal governments can use in preparing for electric power disruptions. On March 5, 2002 Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), the electric company serving the Chicago metropolitan area, held a drill to test its emergency preparedness procedures. ComEd invited three communities in the metropolitan area--Buffalo Grove, Oak Brook, Riverside--to participate in the drill as part of their own emergency planning efforts to respond to electric power disruptions. Although ComEd had held joint exercises with the City of Chicago, this was the first time that a cooperative exercise with the suburban communities was conducted. The Infrastructure Assurance Center of Argonne National Laboratory, under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Assurance helped facilitate the drill in the communities. A series of meetings involving ComEd, community controllers (who helped organize the drill but did not participate directly), and Argonne personnel was held to lay out the ground rules for the drill and determine how it would operate. Attachment 1 …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In recent years, concerns have been raised that new courtrooms continue to be built for district judges, even though existing courtrooms appear to be under used. The judiciary wants to maintain its one-judge, one-courtroom policy because of concerns about the effect of shared courtroom space on judicial administration. The judiciary has not, however, determined whether courtroom sharing may be possible among senior judges--the likeliest candidates for such an arrangement because of their reduced caseloads. Some active and senior judges in areas with a courtroom shortage are currently sharing space. Many of these judges oppose courtroom sharing because they believe that it interferes with the courts business and harms the judicial process. The judiciary plans to have some senior judges share space in future courthouse projects. Significant courtroom sharing appears unlikely in the near future, even among senior judges."

In connection with the authors work on the apparent Iris Effect, they have acquired 2 years of additional data, and are redoing their analysis with the larger amount of data. So far, the results duplicate earlier results with greater statistical significance. They have also responded (successfully) to a number of criticisms of the initial publication. In particular, while differing estimates of cloudy and clear emissivity may be correct, they have shown that they reduce feedback factors by no more than 20%. The resulting feedback factors remain negative and large. Moreover, current data analyses suggest that the earlier estimates may be low for other reasons. They have also shown that all cloudy regions in the region covered by the GMS satellite are convective in origin. They are, however, continuing their work on an improved measure of cumulus activity. In particular, they are using TRMM data to determine thresholds in the T11 channel of GMS that are functions of time, position and SST. They have confirmed that the previous results had a very high statistical significance. However, they expect that the use of the improved measure of cumulus will improve this still further. They have completed their study of the possible reconciliation …

Planning for the transportation of large amounts of equipment, troops, and supplies presents a complex problem. Many options, including modes of transportation, vehicles, facilities, routes, and timing, must be considered. The amount of data involved in generating and analyzing a course of action (e.g., detailed information about military units, logistical infrastructures, and vehicles) is enormous. Software tools are critical in defining and analyzing these plans. Argonne National Laboratory has developed ELIST (Enhanced Logistics Intra-theater Support Tool), a simulation-based decision support system, to assist military planners in determining the logistical feasibility of an intra-theater course of action. The current version of ELIST (v.8) contains a discrete event simulation developed using the Java programming language. Argonne selected Java because of its object-oriented framework, which has greatly facilitated entity and process development within the simulation, and because it fulfills a primary requirement for multi-platform execution. This paper describes the model, including setup and analysis, a high-level architectural design, and an evaluation of Java.

The Bush Administration issued its plan for a national energy policy on May 16, 2001. The plan was controversial, characterized by some as leaner on conservation and renewables than Democratic proposals, and predisposed to trade off environmental considerations to increase supply. Comprehensive energy legislation was introduced in the Senate by both parties by late March (S. 388, S. 389, S. 596, S. 597). Bills reported by several House committees (H.R. 2436, H.R. 2460, H.R. 2511, and H.R. 2587) were combined in a single bill, H.R. 4, passed by the House, August 1, 2001. The House version of H.R. 4 would require a 5 billion gallon reduction in light-duty truck and SUV fuel consumption and would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to leasing.

Typical state of the art atmospheric general circulation models used in climate change studies have horizontal resolution of approximately 300 km. As computing power increases, many climate modeling groups are working toward enhancing the resolution of global models. An important issue that arises when resolution of a model is changed is whether cloud and convective parameterizations, which were developed for use at coarser resolutions, will need to be reformulated or re-tuned. We propose to investigate this issue and specifically cloud statistics using ARM data. The data streams produced by highly instrumented sections of Cloud and Radiation Testbeds (CART) of ARM program will provide a significant aid in the evaluation of cloud and convection parameterization in high-resolution models. Recently, we have performed multiyear global-climate simulations at T170 and T239 resolutions, corresponding to grid cell sizes of 0.7{sup 0} and 0.5{sup 0} respectively, using the NCAR Community Climate Model. We have also a performed climate change simulation at T170. On the scales of a T42 grid cell (300 km) and larger, nearly all quantities we examined in T170 simulation agree better with observations in terms of spatial patterns than do results in a comparable simulation at T42. Increasing the resolution to T239 …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Subtitle A of Title V of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) of 1999 requires that each financial institution, which is defined to include most insurance providers or companies, has "an affirmative and continuing obligation to respect the privacy of its customers and to protect the security and confidentiality of those customers' nonpublic personal information." This prohibits the disclosure of consumers' nonpublic personal information to any entity that is not an affiliate of, or related by common ownership or control, to the institution unless the consumer is given an opportunity to opt out of such disclosure. Also, financial institutions must provide consumers with privacy notices that explain the institution's policies and practices for disclosure. Subtitle A calls upon federal regulators to (1) issue regulations implementing disclosure-related requirements and (2) establish standards for safeguarding the privacy and integrity of customer information and records. The act also requires state insurance authorities to enforce its provisions by adopting regulations for both information disclosure and information safeguards. As of March 2002, all of the states and the District of Columbia have acted to ensure that insurance companies under their jurisdiction meet Subtitle …

In February, the President submits to Congress a series of budget volumes which contain the President’s budget proposalsforthe upcoming fiscal year, historical data, and analytical supplements. Early in the year, the Economic Report of the President is released by the Council of Economic Advisors, and the Congressional Budget Office issues its publications, Budget and Economic Outlook and Analysis of the President’s Budget. Neither CRS nor the Library of Congress can provide giveaway copies of these documents. This report provides brief descriptions, together with Internet addresses and Government Printing Office (GPO) stock numbers and prices for these documents. Information is also provided on how to find locations of government depository libraries, which can provide both printed copies for reference use and Internet access.

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A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In light of its continuing financial deterioration and its stated goal of eliminating federal operating assistance by December 2002, Amtrak undertook several steps to improve its financial condition, including changing in its routes and services. Amtrak has been unsuccessful in implementing its Network Growth Strategy to shift its route and service plans for new routes and expanded services on the freight tracks over which it operates. Two years after announcing the new strategy, Amtrak has only implemented three routes, one of which was later canceled. Amtrak still plans to implement the remaining three routes, although later than planned. Increased mail and express revenues were the cornerstone of the new strategy. However, Amtrak overestimated the mail and express revenue expected. According to Amtrak, this overestimation occurred because (1) it had no empirical basis for its revenue estimates and (2) express shippers were reluctant to enter into contracts for service that did not yet exist. Six of the planned route actions were canceled because Amtrak overestimated the revenues associated with them. Amtrak was unable to reach agreement with freight railroads because they were concerned about (1) Amtrak's plans …

The authors have designed and fabricated a 355 x 150 mm multilayer dielectric diffraction grating, 1800 l/mm for 1030 nm light, that exhibits >99% diffraction efficiency and a diffracted wavefront flatness of <0.15 {lambda}. This grating is an enabling component of a 1 ps, high rep-rate machining laser currently in operation at LLNL.

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Beginning in the 1980s, the National Park Service spent $11 million to develop and implement a maintenance management system. The system was eventually terminated because it failed to provide park managers with all the information they needed to manage their deferred maintenance workload. In 1998, the Park Service started a new asset management process to provide a systematic method for documenting deferred maintenance needs and tracking progress in reducing the amount of deferred maintenance. GAO found that the Park Service has made progress in developing a new asset management process. When finally implemented, the process should provide the agency with a (1) reliable inventory of its assets; (2) process for reporting on the condition of each asset; and (3) systemwide methodology for estimating deferred maintenance costs for each asset. Although the new process is promising, its success cannot be determined until staff in each of the park units are trained and the new asset management process is fully and properly implemented."

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OAK B188 Nuclear Energy Research Initiative Cooperative Agreement DE-FC03-99SF21902 Technical Progress Report 3Q99

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Stable isotope and tritium analyses of shallow ground waters in the Eastern Desert of Egypt showed that the waters were derived largely by evaporation of regional precipitation and at least partly from precipitation in the past 45 y. To estimate the ground water recharge rate, we developed an integrated hydrologic model based on satellite data, geologic maps, infiltration parameters, and spatial rainfall distribution. Modeling indicated that during a severe 1994 storm, recharge through transmission loss in Wadi El-Tarfa was 21% of the precipitation volume. From archival precipitation data, we estimate that the annual recharge rate for the El-Tarfa alluvial aquifer is 4.7 x 10{sup 6} m{sup 3}. Implications for the use of renewable ground waters in arid areas of Egypt and in neighboring countries are clear.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) studied 401(k) plan compliance with Internal Revenue Code requirements for tax-qualified plans. GAO found that IRS's estimates of noncompliance were inaccurate. The study, which audited a sample of 401(k) plans, did not provide information on the severity of the compliance violations identified and did not determine the number of plan participants or the amount of assets associated with noncompliance errors. Only 27 of the 73 study questions identified as compliance indicators conclusively demonstrated whether a plan was compliant or not. Consequently, the 44 percent reported to have one or more instances of noncompliance is at best an upper limit on the extent of noncompliance found. IRS has chosen specific types of private pension plans to study in a manner similar to the one conducted on 401(k) pension plans. The data that IRS collects will be analyzed to determine the prevalence and types of noncompliance among the plans studied."

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Numerical simulation of water injection in discrete fractured media with capillary pressure is a challenge. Dual-porosity models in view of their strength and simplicity can be mainly used for sugar-cube representation of fractured media. In such a representation, the transfer function between the fracture and the matrix block can be readily calculated for water-wet media. For a mixed-wet system, the evaluation of the transfer function becomes complicated due to the effect of gravity. In this work, they use a discrete-fracture model in which the fractures are discretized as one dimensional entities to account for fracture thickness by an integral form of the flow equations. This simple step greatly improves the numerical solution. Then the discrete-fracture model is implemented using a Galerkin finite element method. The robustness and the accuracy of the approach are shown through several examples. First they consider a single fracture in a rock matrix and compare the results of the discrete-fracture model with a single-porosity model. Then, they use the discrete-fracture model in more complex configurations. Numerical simulations are carried out in water-wet media as well as in mixed-wet media to study the effect of matrix and fracture capillary pressures.

The Route and Landmark Selection Tool (RULST) is a software program designed to assist military planners in defining geographical objects, such as routes, landmarks, spurs, and yards, at a given facility. Argonne National Laboratory is currently developing a prototype of this tool for use by the Military Traffic Management Command Transportation Engineering Agency (MTMCTEA). The primary objective of RULST is to populate database tables of facility objects for use in MTMCTEA models. RULST defines facility data for use in models such as Port Simulation (PORTSIM) and Transportation System Capability (TRANSCAP), which simulate the transportation of equipment through ports and military installations. The main purpose of RULST is to allow you to specify the relationships between landmarks and routes. The nodes, links, and landmarks that describe a facility are often predefined on the basis of the layout of the physical site.

This report presents the results of a large-scale settling test conducted with a K Basin sludge simulant that included metallic tungsten/cobalt (W/Co) fragments (density {approx}14.5 g/cm3) as a surrogate for uranium metal (density 19 g/cm3). The objective of the testing was to gain insight into how uranium metal is likely to be distributed within the K Basin sludge loaded into the large-diameter containers (LDCs) that will be used for storage at T Plant. In the LDCs, uranium metal will react with water and generate heat and hydrogen gas. During loading, transportation, and storage operations, the uranium metal distribution in the LDCs will have an impact on the thermal stability. Approximately 50 m3 of K Basin sludge have accumulated during the storage of more than 2100 metric tons of N Reactor fuel elements in two water-filled concrete pools (K East and K West Basins) in the 100K Area of the Hanford Site.

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