Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Attendance at meetings and speaking engagements by members of the Board of Managers of the Harris County Hospital District (RQ-0133-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the Polygraph Examiners Board may inspect a polygraph examiner’s work product in the examiner’s place of business without a search warrant, and related question (RQ-0140-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a junior college district may procure insurance using a designated broker of record (RQ-0135-JC)

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the process used by eight Michigan school districts to contract for Medicaid consulting and billing services, focusing on whether the process used by the school districts complied with Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) procurement regulations."

Six vitrification runs were conducted in the 5-inch Cylindrical Induction Melter (CIM5) to evaluate the system's ability to process potential product loading extremes that may be encountered during Am/Cm vitrification in the F-Canyon MPPF. This evaluation demonstrates the CIM5 system's ability to vitrify feed streams of the specified extremes.

A lattice-Monte Carlo approach was developed to simulate ferroelectric domain behavior. The model utilizes a Hamiltonian for the total energy that includes electrostatic terms (involving dipole-dipole interactions, local polarization gradients, and applied electric field), and elastic strain energy. The contributions of these energy components to the domain structure and to the overall applied field response of the system were examined. In general, the model exhibited domain structure characteristics consistent with those observed in a tetragonally distorted ferroelectric. Good qualitative agreement between the appearance of simulated electrical hysteresis loops and those characteristic of real ferroelectric materials was found.

Refrigerator energy use is a dominant component of total energy use for many low-income households. Poorly operating or inefficient refrigerators can place an unnecessary financial burden on those households or the public agencies that pay their electricity bills, such as housing authorities. This paper presents an analytic tool that is low cost and easy to use. The procedure can be implemented with minimal staff training. The tool enables housing providers or weatherization agencies to identify poorly operating or high use refrigerators and target them for replacement or repair. The use of the procedure is illustrated, and its value for participants in a bulk refrigerator purchase and replacement program is discussed.

Disilaoxacyclopentanes have proven to be excellent precursors to sol-gel type materials. These materials have shown promise as precursors for encapsulation and microelectronics applications. The polymers are highly crosslinked and are structurally similar to traditional sol-gels, but unlike typical sol-gels they are prepared without the use of solvents and water, they have low VOC's and show little shrinkage during processing.

This report covers the accomplishments of the home energy ratings systems/energy-efficient mortgages (HERS/EEMs) pilot states from 1993 through 1998, including such indicators as funding, ratings and EEMs achieved, active raters, and training and marketing activities. A brief description of each HERS program's evolution is included, as well as their directors' views of the programs' future prospects. Finally, an analysis is provided of successful HERS program characteristics and factors that appear to contribute to HERS program success.

Interfaces play an important role in determining the effect of electric fields on the mechanism of the formation spinel by solid-state reaction. The reaction occurs by the movement of phase boundaries but the rate of this movement can be affected by grain boundaries in the reactants or in the reaction product. Only by understanding these relationships will it be possible to engineer their behavior. As a particular example of such a study, MgIn{sub 2}O{sub 4} can be formed by the reaction between single-crystal MgO substrate and a thin film of In{sub 2}O{sub 3} with or without an applied electric field. High-resolution backscattered electron (BSE) imaging and electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) has been used to obtain complementary chemical and crystallographic information.

A wide variety of waste simulants were developed over the past few years to test various retrieval, pretreatment and waste immobilization technologies and unit operations. Experiments can be performed cost-effectively using non-radioactive waste simulants in open laboratories. This document reviews the composition of many previously used waste simulants for remediation of tank wastes at the Hanford reservation. In this review, the simulants used in testing for the retrieval, pretreatment, and vitrification processes are compiled, and the representative chemical and physical characteristics of each simulant are specified. The retrieval and transport simulants may be useful for testing in-plant fluidic devices and in some cases for filtration technologies. The pretreatment simulants will be useful for filtration, Sr/TRU removal, and ion exchange testing. The vitrification simulants will be useful for testing melter, melter feed preparation technologies, and for waste form evaluations.

There has been an increasing amount of interest in silsesquioxanes and polysilsesquioxanes. They have been used as models for silica surfaces and have been shown to have great potential for several industrial applications. Typical synthesis of polysilsesquioxanes involves the hydrolysis of organotricholorosilanes and/or organotrialkoxysilanes in the presence of acid or base catalysts, usually in the presence of organic solvents.

The authors report on Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) and de Haas-van Alphen (dHvA) results for the highly two-dimensional (2D) organic superconductors {kappa}-(ET){sub 2}I{sub 3} ({Tc} = 3.5 K) and {beta}{double_prime}-(ET){sub 2}SF{sub 5}CH{sub 2}CF{sub 2}SO{sub 3} ({Tc} = 4.4 K). The SdH oscillations of both materials show an apparent deviation from the well-understood 2D dHvA signal at low temperatures and high magnetic fields. For {kappa}-(ET){sub 2}I{sub 3}, the mechanism leading to this behavior still needs to be clarified. For {beta}{double_prime}-(ET){sub 2}SF{sub 5}CH{sub 2}CF{sub 2}SO{sub 3}, an anomalous steady background part of the magnetoresistance seems to account for the observed discrepancies.

In a previous study of tangent site chains near a surface, the inhomogeneous density profiles were found through Density Functional theory. In the current study, the surface tensions of these systems are found from the results of the previous study through a thermodynamic integration. The calculated surface tensions are then compared to those found directly through computer simulation. Both the surface tension and surface excess for polymeric systems are shown to qualitatively differ from those of atomic systems, although certain similarities are seen at high densities.

The Wind Powering America Initiative is a regionally-based effort to increase the use of clean wind energy in the United States over the next two decades. The purpose of this brochure is to provide a brief description of the initiative, its goals, benefits, and strategy as well as a list of contacts for those interested in obtaining more information.

This report summarizes work done after 2 years of a 3-year project. Using analytic electron microscopic and selective laser spectroscopic techniques, the authors first examined lanthanide orthophosphate crystals of YPO{sub 4} and LuPO{sub 4} that accumulated self-radiation damage from dopant (1 wt.%) {sup 244}Cm ions for 17 years. Although the accumulated dose of radiation (> 10{sup 18} alpha-decay events/mg) is significantly high, the samples that they examined physically remain crystalline on a macroscopic scale. Amorphization is not evident, even though isolated defects of various sizes were observed. Microscopic radiation effects in the crystals were manifested by (1) individual defect clusters of 2 to 5 nm size, which resemble disordered fission tracks, and (2) bubbles of 5 to 20 nm that are attributed to accumulation of He atoms generated during alpha decay events. These bubbles are relatively mobile and easily coalesce in electron microscopy studies due to enhanced diffusion arising from electron irradiation. They have observed that, when exposed to an electron beam, the bubbles aggregated as a function of exposure time. This observation thus provides additional evidence that the bubbles developed from the aggregation of helium atoms that were created from alpha-decay of Cm-244, and the local lattice recovered from …

It is convenient to consider 2 broad categories of climate-related modeling studies for which it is necessary to specify some kind of lower boundary conditions. The first of these categories is the use of general circulation or weather forecasting models, perhaps modified to carry out climate simulations. In these models, one normally has to specify something about the albedo of the surface to get the radiation balance right, the surface roughness to get the momentum exchange right, and the surface moisture availability to get the surface heat and water vapor fluxes right. Correctly specifying the surface moisture availability can be a major problem and may involve a sophisticated land surface parameterization scheme to take into account plant and soil characteristics. It is reasonable to expect that misrepresenting the water vapor flux by 10--20% on average over continental scales could lead to significant errors in simulated precipitation, temperatures, and circulation patterns. The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program is focused, however, on clouds and radiation; and it has chosen Cloud and Radiation Testbeds (CART) as the principal tool with which to carry out its work. In this context, what the authors are concerned about for the lower boundary conditions is somewhat different. …

The U.S. Department of Energy's Rebuild America is partnering with public and private housing organizations throughout the nation to make building improvements and provide solutions to housing needs while saving energy and reducing utility costs. This paper describes the partnership development, technical assistance, and other types of support Rebuild America offers that excites housing organizations to form Rebuild America partnerships. Successful partnerships are highlighted that demonstrate the wide-range of projects Rebuild America partners are performing, with a detailed description of four notable case studies.

Models are presented of sodium tellurite glasses in the composition range (Na{sub 2}0){sub x}-(TeO{sub 2}){sub 1{minus}x}. 0.1 < x < 0.3. The models combine self-consistently data from three different and complementary sources: sodium-23 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), neutron diffraction, and x-ray diffraction. The models were generated using the Reverse Monte Carlo algorithm, modified to include NMR data in addition to diffraction data. The presence in the models of all five tellurite polyhedra consistent with the Te{sup +4} oxidation state were found to be necessary to achieve agreement with the data. The distribution of polyhedra among these types varied from a predominance of highly bridged species at low sodium content, to polyhedra with one or zero bridging oxygen at high sodium content. The models indicate that the sodium cations themselves form sodium oxide clusters particularly at the x = 0.2 composition.

Since the 1997 Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Science Team Meeting, the North Slope of Alaska and Adjacent Arctic Ocean (NSA/AAO) Cloud and Radiation Testbed (CART) site has come into being. Much has happened even since the 1998 Science Team Meeting at which this paper was presented. To maximize its usefulness, this paper has been updated to include developments through July 1998.

Measurements at the central facility of the Southern Great Plains (SGP) Cloud and Radiation Testbed (CART) are intended to verify, improve, and develop parameterizations in radiative flux models that are subsequently used in General Circulation Models (GCMs). The reliability of this approach depends upon the representativeness of the local measurements at the central facility for the site as a whole or on how these measurements can be interpreted so as to accurately represent increasingly large scales. The variation of surface energy budget terms over the SGP CART site is extremely large. Surface layer measurements of the sensible heat flux (H) often vary by a factor of 2 or more at the CART site (Coulter et al. 1996). The Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) effectively integrates the local inputs across large scales; because the mixed layer height (h) is principally driven by H, it can, in principal, be used for estimates of surface heat flux over scales on the order of tens of kilometers. By combining measurements of h from radiosondes or radar wind profiles with a one-dimensional model of mixed layer height, they are investigating the ability of diagnosing large-scale heat fluxes. The authors have developed a procedure using the model …

Mercury stabilization and solidification is a significant challenge for conventional stabilization technologies. This is because of the stringent regulatory limits on leaching of its stabilized products. In a conventional cement stabilization process, Hg is converted at high pH to its hydroxide, which is not a very insoluble compound; hence the preferred route for Hg sulfidation to convert it into insoluble cinnabar (HgS). Unfortunately, efficient formation of this compound is pH-dependent. At a high pH, one obtains a more soluble Hg sulfate, in a very low pH range, insufficient immobilization occurs because of the escape of hydrogen sulfide, while efficient formation of HgS occurs only in a moderately acidic region. Thus, the pH range of 4 to 8 is where stabilization with Chemically Bonded Phosphate Ceramics (CBPC) is carried out. This paper discusses the authors experience on bench-scale stabilization of various US Department of Energy (DOE) waste streams containing Hg in the CBPC process. This process was developed to treat DOE's mixed waste streams. It is a room-temperature-setting process based on an acid-base reaction between magnesium oxide and monopotassium phosphate solution that forms a dense ceramic within hours. For Hg stabilization, addition of a small amount (< 1 wt.%) of Na{sub …

The 200 Area Treated Effluent Disposal Facility (TEDF) consists of a pair of infiltration basins that receive wastewater originating from the 200 West and 200 East Areas of the Hanford Site. TEDF has been in operation since 1995 and is regulated by State Waste Discharge Permit ST 4502 (Ecology 1995) under the authority of Chapter 90.48 Revised Code of Washington (RCW) and Washington Administrative Code (WAC) Chapter 173-216. The permit stipulates monitoring requirements for effluent (or end-of-pipe) discharges and groundwater monitoring for TEDF. Groundwater monitoring began in 1992 prior to TEDF construction. Routine effluent monitoring in accordance with the permit requirements began in late April 1995 when the facility began operations. The State Waste Discharge Permit ST 4502 included a special permit condition (S.6). This condition specified a statistical study of the variability of permitted constituents in the effluent from TEDF during its first year of operation. The study was designed to (1) demonstrate compliance with the waste discharge permit; (2) determine the variability of all constituents in the effluent that have enforcement limits, early warning values, and monitoring requirements (WHC 1995); and (3) determine if concentrations of permitted constituents vary with season. Additional and more frequent sampling was conducted …

The in vitro volubility of airborne uranium dusts collected at a former uranium processing facility now undergoing safe shutdown, decontamination and dismantling was evaluated by immersing air filters from high volume samplers in simulated lung fluid and measuring the {sup 238}U in sequential dissolution fractions using specific radiochemical analysis for uranium. X rays and photons from the decay of uranium and thorium remaining on the filter after each dissolution period were also directly measured using a planar germanium detector as a means for rapidly evaluating the volubility of the uranium bearing dusts. Results of these analyses demonstrate that two -distinct types of uranium bearing dusts were collected on the filters depending upon the location of the air samplers. The first material exhibited a dissolution half-time much less than one day and was most likely UO{sub 3}. The dissolution rate of the second material, which was most likely U{sub 3}O{sub 8}, exhibited two components. Approximately one-third of this material dissolved with a halftime much less than one day. The remaining two-thirds of the material dissolved with half times between 230 {+-} 16 d and 1350 {+-} 202 d. The dissolution rates for uranium determined by radiochemical analysis and by gamma spectrometry …