On December 15, 2000, Congress reached an agreement with the President and passed the remaining appropriations (H.R. 4577; H.Rept. 106-1033) for fiscal year (FY) 2001. The legislation, including tax cuts ($31.5 billion over 10 years), completes budget action in the 106th Congress for FY2001. The action followed extended disagreements over appropriations, which resulted in a series of continuing resolutions on appropriations that funded those parts of the government not covered by regular appropriations or permanent funding during the fall. The fiscal year had begun with only 2 of the 13 regular appropriations enacted into law.

This report compares selected House and Senate rules of procedure for various stages of the legislative process: referral of legislation to committees; scheduling and calling up measures; and floor consideration.

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Vladimir Putin, who was catapulted into the Kremlin following Boris Yeltsin's resignation, was elected President on March 26, 2000 by a solid majority that embraced his military campaign in Chechnya. Parties backing Putin did well in the December 1999 Duma election, giving Putin a stable parliamentary majority as well. Putin has moved to strengthen the central government vis-a-vis regional leaders, to bring TV and radio under tighter state control, and to modernize the armed forces. Federal forces have suppressed large-scale military resistance in Chechnya, but face the prospect of prolonged guerilla warfare.

A number of new or expanded tax benefits for health insurance are being discussed in the first months of the 107th Congress. Several were included in the President's FY2002 budget, including a new refundable tax credit. Proponents generally argue that changes are needed to extend coverage to the uninsured and to address efficiency and equity problems; opponents generally doubt that the changes under consideration would make much difference. One issue is whether new or expanded benefits would limit the reductions in general tax rates.

This report discusses the reasons for the U.S. current account deficit, popularly known as the trade deficit, and which is on the rise.

In the mid-90s the European community initiated the Standards, Measurements, and Testing (SMT) program to harmonize testing and measurement procedures in several industries. Within the program, a project was carried out called the European Wind Turbine Testing Procedure Development. The second part of that project, called Blade Test Methods and Techniques, included the United States and was devised to help blade-testing laboratories harmonize their testing methods. This report provides the results of those tests conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

This report describes the development and design details of an instrument that measures current in the range 10-6 to 10-13 a. and indicates or records this current on a single logarithmic scale. It is frequently desirable to measure a wide range of low current values without range switching. Since no instrument with such characteristics is commercially available, this study was made to determine whether or not the Beckman Model V Micromicroammeter could be modified to provide a logarithmic response. The feasibility of operating this instrument over six decades of input current has been demonstrated. As many as seven decades can be accommodated if a slight non-linearity in the lowest decade is tolerable. This non-linearity is insignificant in most applications. Fewer decades with increased readability and precision can also be obtained.

An experimental study of silica dissolution was performed to probe the evolution of permeability and porosity in siliceous diatomite during hot fluid injection such as water or steam flooding. Two competing mechanisms were identified. Silica solubility in water at elevated temperature causes rock dissolution thereby increasing permeability; however, the rock is mechanically weak leading to compressing of the solid matrix during injection. Permeability and porosity can decrease at the onset of fluid flow. A laboratory flow apparatus was designed and built to examine these processes in diatomite core samples.

The Underground Injection Control Regulations promulgated in 1980, under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, require Area-of-Review (AOR) studies be conducted as part of the permitting process for newly drilled or converted Class II injection wells. Existing Class II injection wells operating at the time regulations became effective were excluded from the AOR requirement. The AOR is the area surrounding an injection well or wells defined by either the radial distance within which pressure in the injection zone may cause migration of the injection and/or formation fluid into an underground source of drinking water (USDW) or defined by a fixed radius of not less than one-fourth mile. In the method where injection pressure is used to define the AOR radial distance, the AOR is also known as the ''zone of endangering influence.''

Downhole oil/water separator (DOWS) technology is available to separate oil from produced water at the bottom of an oil well. Produced water can be injected directly to a disposal formation rather than lifting it to the surface, treating it there, and reinjecting it. Because of a lack of detailed performance data on DOWS systems, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) provided funding to secure DOWS performance data. A large U.S. oil and gas operator offered to share its data with Argonne National Laboratory. This report summarizes data from the DOWS installation in eastern Texas.

This reports, DOWS technology reduced the quality of produced water that is handled at the surface by separating it from the oil downhole and simultaneously injecting it underground. The two primary components of a DOWS system are an oil/water separation system and at least one pump to lift oil to the surface and inject the water. Two basic types of DOWS have been developed -- one type using hydrocyclones to mechanically separate oil and water and one relying on gravity separation that takes place in the well bore.

This research project was pursued in three key areas. (1) Salt permeability testing under complex stress states; (2) Hydraulic and mechanical integrity investigations of the well casing shoe through benchscale testing; and (3) Geomechanical modeling of the fluid/salt hydraulic and mechanical interaction of a sealed cavern.

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A revised multigroup cross-section library based on Release 3 of ENDF/B-VI data has been produced and tested for light-water-reactor shielding and reactor pressure vessel dosimetry applications. This new broad-group library, which is designated BUGLE-96, represents an improvement over the BUGLE-93 data library released in February 1994 and replaces the data package for BUGLE-93 in the Radiation Safety Information Computational Center (formerly RSIC). The processing methodology is the same as that used for producing BUGLE-93 and is consistent with ANSI/ANS 6.1.2. The ENDF data were first processed into a fine-group, pseudo-problem-independent format and then collapsed into the final broad-group format. The fine-group library, which is designated VITAMIN-B6, contains 120 nuclides. The BUGLE-96 47-neutron-group/20-gamma-ray-group library contains the same 120 nuclides processed as infinitely dilute and collapsed using a weighting spectrum typical of a concrete shield. Additionally, nuclides processed with resonance self-shielding and weighted using spectra specific to BWR and PWR material compositions and reactor models are available. As an added feature of BUGLE-96, cross-section sets having upscatter data for four thermal neutron groups are included. The upscattering data should improve the application of BUGLE-96 to the calculation of more accurate thermal fluences, although more computer time will be required. Several new dosimetry …

The primary objective of this project was to enhance domestic petroleum production by demonstration and transfer of horizontal drilling technology in the Paradox basin, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. If this project can demonstrate technical and economic feasibility, then the technique can be applied to approximately 100 additional small fields in the Paradox basin alone, and result in increased recovery of 25 to 50 million barrels (40-80 million m3) of oil. This project was designed to characterize several shallow-shelf carbonate reservoirs in the Pennsylvania (Desmoinesian) Paradox Formation, choose the best candidate(s) for a pilot demonstration project to drill horizontally from existing vertical wells, monitor well performances, and report associated validation activities.

This report covers work performed during FY 1999-2000 in support of treatment demonstrations conducted for the Mercury Working Group of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Mixed Waste Focus Area. In order to comply with the requirements of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, as implemented by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), DOE must use one of these procedures for wastes containing mercury at levels above 260 ppm: a retorting/roasting treatment or an incineration treatment (if the wastes also contain organics). The recovered radioactively contaminated mercury must then be treated by an amalgamation process prior to disposal. The DOE Mixed Waste Focus Area and Mercury Working Group are working with the EPA to determine if some alternative processes could treat these types of waste directly, thereby avoiding for DOE the costly recovery step. They sponsored a demonstration in which commercial vendors applied their technologies for the treatment of two contaminated waste soils from Brookhaven National Laboratory. Each soil was contaminated with {approx}4500 ppm mercury; however, one soil had as a major radioelement americium-241, while the other contained mostly europium-152. The project described in this report addressed the need for data on the mercury vapor released by the solidified/stabilized mixed …

A 7-Tesla Fourier transform ion-cyclotron resonance (FTICR) mass spectrometer was modified to insert a surface inside the cell for ion-surface collisions leading to the dissociation of impacting ions. Modifications were made to the software/hardware to collide the ions brought into the cell and trap the resulting fragment and undissociated primary ions inside the cell. The trapping plates were also ramped to determine kinetic energy distributions of these ions. The surface-induced dissociation (SID) of benzene and chromium hexacarbonyl ions was first studied as test cases for the instrument. Then a systematic study of the SID of small protonated peptides formed by electrospray ionization was begun. A series of small alanine(A)-containing peptides, viz., AA, AAA, AAAA, AAAAA, and PAAAA were used in the study. In the absence of any direct comparisons of the SID processes with the commonly used technique of tandem mass spectrometry of collision-induced dissociations (CID) via collisions with a neutral gas, a comparative study of CID and SID using the same protonated peptides was made. Since multiple collisions are often used to enhance dissociation efficiency in CID, the CID was performed under single as well as multiple collisional activation conditions. Both on-resonance and sustained off-resonance irradiation excitation were used …

This report discusses the fees associated with automated teller machines (ATMs) that was increased as a result of a 1996 Visa U.S.A. and MasterCard International decision.

This paper will present a survey of the current published work and products available to do off-line data mining for computer network security information. Hundreds of megabytes of data are collected every second that are of interest to computer security professionals. This data can answer questions ranging from the proactive, ''Which machines are the attackers going to try to compromise?'' to the reactive, ''When did the intruder break into my system and how?'' Unfortunately, there's so much data that computer security professionals don't have time to sort through it all. What we need are systems that perform data mining at various levels on this corpus of data in order to ease the burden of the human analyst. Such systems typically operate on log data produced by hosts, firewalls and intrusion detection systems as such data is typically in a standard, machine readable format and usually provides information that is most relevant to the security of the system. Systems that do this type of data mining for security information fall under the classification of intrusion detection systems. It is important to point out that we are not surveying real-time intrusion detection systems. Instead, we examined what is possible when the analysis …

Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) measured the relative contribution of ethanol to engine particulate matter (PM) from four ethanol-diesel blended fuels using contemporary grain alcohol as a tracer in low {sup 14}C diesel fuel. An emulsifier (Span 85) or cosolvent (butyl alcohol) facilitated mixing of the 12-25% ethanol blends. We operated the laboratory test engine, a 1993 Cummins B5.9 diesel, at a steady-state medium load and collected PM samples on pre-combusted quartz filters following dilution of engine exhaust in a mini-dilution tunnel. The ethanol blends emitted less PM and NOX than the control. The cosolvent blends reduced PM more effectively than the emulsified blends with similar oxygen content. The distribution of the oxygen, not just the quantity, was an important factor in reducing PM emissions. Any bio-derived fuel component is easily traced on the fossil background. Schemes for measuring volatile fractions of soot and gaseous emissions can be implemented.