A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "For fiscal years 1992 through 2000, the U.S. government provided assistance to help the 12 newly independent states of the former Soviet Union develop the sustainable institutions, traditions, and legal foundations that ensure a strong rule of law. This report (1) assesses the extent to which the program has had an impact on the development of the rule of law and whether the program results are sustainable and (2) analyzes the factors that may have affected the program's impact and sustainability. GAO found that the U.S. government's rule of law assistance program has had limited impact so far, and results may not be sustainable in many cases. The impact and sustainability of the U.S. rule of law assistance programs have been constrained by several factors, including limited political consensus on reforms, a shortage of domestic resources for many of the more expensive innovations, and weaknesses in the design and management of assistance programs by U.S. agencies."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Recent U.S. military operations have shown that land mines continue to pose a significant threat to U.S. forces. U.S. land mine detection capabilities are limited and largely unchanged since the Second World War. Improving the Department of Defense's (DOD) land mine detection capability is a technological challenge This report reviews DOD's strategy for identifying the most promising land mine detection technologies. GAO found that DOD's ability to substantially improve its land mine detection capabilities may be limited because DOD lacks an effective strategy for identifying and evaluating the most promising technologies. Although DOD maintains an extensive program of outreach to external researchers and other nations' military research organizations, it does not use an effective methodology to evaluate all technological options to guide its investment decisions. DOD is investing in several technologies to overcome the mine detection problem, but it is not clear that DOD has chosen the most promising technologies. Because DOD has not systematically assessed potential land mine detection technologies against mission needs, GAO did its own assessment. GAO found that the technologies DOD is exploring are limited in their ability to meet mission needs …

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 county may pay accrued vacation or compensatory time to two sheriff’s deputies if, when the time accrued, the county did not permit such payments, and related question (RQ-0324-JC)

We find the annihilation rate of positronium (Ps) within silica sodalite. Positron density and the electronic density seen by positrons are compared with a semi-empirical ''free volume'' model.

This report discusses the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which is a block grant program under which the federal government provides states annual grants to operate multi-component home energy assistance programs for needy households.

This grant had as its focus (i) to develop chemistry and enzymology to permit the enzymatic synthesis of 2' fluoro modified Sanger sequencing reactions, which would be resistant to fragmentation during MALDI process, (ii) to develop rapid MALDI analyses of DNA sequence polymorphisms using Peptide Nucleic Acid (PNA) DNA analogs in conjunction with solid phase chemistry (iii) to study the fundamental mechanisms occurring in the MALDI analysis of nucleic acids.

The increased use of object-oriented toolkits in large-scale scientific simulation presents new opportunities and challenges for the use of automatic (or algorithmic) differentiation (AD) techniques, especially in the context of optimization. Because object-oriented toolkits use well-defined interfaces and data structures, there is potential for simplifying the AD process. Furthermore, derivative computation can be improved by exploiting high-level information about numerical and computational abstractions. However, challenges to the successful use of AD with these toolkits also exist. Among the greatest challenges is balancing the desire to limit the scope of the AD process with the desire to minimize the work required of a user. They discuss their experiences in integrating AD with the PETSc, PVODE, and TAO toolkits and the plans for future research and development in this area.

Geothermal development can generally be broken down into distinct phases: Exploration and Leasing; Project Development And Feasibility Studies; Well Field Development; Project Finance, Construction and Start-up Operations; and Commercial Operations. Each phase represents different levels of cost and risk and different types of management teams that are needed to assess and manage the project and associated risk. Orderly transitions of management at each major phase are needed. Exploration programs are largely science based, the primary focus of the science based investigations should be to: secure the lease position, and develop sufficient information to identify and characterize an economical geothermal resource. Project development specialists build on the exploration data to: pull together a project design, develop a detailed cost estimate; prepare an environmental assessment; and collect all data needed for project financing. Construction specialist build from the development phase to: develop detailed engineering, procure equipment and materials, schedule and manage the facilities construction programs, and start and test the power plant. Operations specialists take over from construction during start-up and are responsible for sustainable and reliable operations of the resource and power generation equipment over the life of the project.

Aqueous radioactive wastes from Savannah River Site (SRS) separations and vitrification processes are contained in large underground carbon steel tanks. Inspections made during 2000 to evaluate these vessels and other waste handling facilities along with evaluations based on data from previous inspections are the subject of this report.

The High Level Waste Tank Farms store and process high-level liquid wastes from a number of sources including F- and H-Canyons. These wastes are made alkaline prior to transfer to the Tank Farm and are subject to acceptance based on their composition. These wastes may contain significant concentrations of ammonia from flushing of the process vessel vent system. The Authorization Basis for the Tank Farm limits ammonia concentrations in canyon receipts to control flammability in pump tanks and waste tanks. However, during flushing of the canyon process vessel vent systems, the current limits pose significant operational restrictions. It was originally thought that the current limits based on data obtained by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), on a Hanford salt solution might be overly conservative with respect to salt solutions normally found in SRS Pump Tanks. However, on investigation of the possible range of concentrations based on canyon transfer data, it was found that pump tank salt solution concentrations probably did not differ significantly from the salt solution tested by PNNL. This report documents the work performed as originally described in the task technical plan.

The Savannah River Site Operations Office of the U.S. Department of Energy is submitting this Delisting Petition to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region IV. This petition seeks exclusion of certain solid wastes generated at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina from the list of Resource Conservation and Recovery Act hazardous wastes contained in 40 CFR 261.24 and 40 CFR 261.31.

This fact sheet explains the basics of caulking and weather stripping, and provides a comparison of the types of products available for these two weatherization techniques.

The A/M Area, a industrial area of the Savannah River Site, is a known source area for volatile organic contaminants. In an effort to track the movement of these contaminants in the subsurface, monitoring wells are installed. The soil samples collected and analyzed for this report were used to assist the field personnel in setting the screen zones of 8 wells installed from 3Q00 through 2Q01. These samples were collected in the Crouch Branch Aquifer, which was the aquifer the well screens were installed.

The A/M-Area of the Savannah River Site is a known area of solvent release to the subsurface. The Solvent Storage Tank Area is an area of documented dense non-aqueous phase liquids (DNAPL) in the subsurface. June 30, 2000 a remediation using the Dynamic Underground Stripping (DUS) treatment technology commenced. This technology injects steam into the subsurface through a series of injection wells located within the treatment zone. The steam is pulled through the subsurface to an extraction well where it is removed. The heating of the subsurface causes the DNAPL present to be volatilized and removed through the extraction well.

Bimonthly newsletter from DOE's Office of Industrial Technologies to promote the use of energy-efficient industrial systems.

This report describes the groundwater monitoring and corrective-action program at the M-Area Hazardous Waste Management Facility (HWMF) and the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) HWMF at the Savannah River Site (SRS) during 2000. This program is required by South Carolina Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Hazardous Waste Permit SC1890008989 and Section 264.100(g) of the South Carolina Hazardous Waste Management Regulations.

This report summarizes the Groundwater Monitoring Program conducted by SRS during second quarter 2000. It includes the analytical data, field data, data review, quality control, and other documentation for this program; provides a record of the program's activities; and serves as an official record of the analytical results.

This program investigated the potential for Alkali Metal Thermal to Electric Converter (AMTEC) technology to be useful in automotive power system applications. AMTEC, a thermally regenerative electrochemical energy conversion system, converts heat into electricity from a heat source at 750 C to 850 C and a radiator at 200 C to 350 C. AMTEC uses external combustion with correspondingly low emission of NO{sub x} and hydrocarbons, and can tolerate essentially any hydrocarbon fuel. Efficiencies of 20% to 30% are projected to be feasible for systems of 25 kWe to 40 kWe peak output. The research program has shown that there are significant advantages to be achieved if AMTEC systems can be made cost effective for vehicle applications. Among these are (1) higher efficiency at part load than IC engines can yield, (2) omnifuel capability, and (3) low noise and low emission of pollutants. Demonstrated lifetimes already above 12,000 hours should be adequate for most vehicle applications. In major production, AMTEC costs are projected to reach $1/Watt, a value still too high for widespread automotive main power application. AMTEC's unique capabilities for low emissions, all-fuel operation, and insensitivity to ambient temperature, however, do make it a potential option for specialized vehicle …

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The President can provide and fund emergency humanitarian assistance through several sources authorized and appropriated by Congress. These are: funds appropriated to the Office of Foreign Disaster Administration (OFDA) in the Agency for international Development (FY2001 appropriations of$299 million), U.S. Department ofAgriculture food aid programs under P.L. 480 Food for Peace (FY2001 appropriations of $837 million) and section 416 (b) of the Agriculture Act of 1949, the State Department Emergency Refugee and Migration Account, a contingency account which can contain as much as $100 million for assistance to refugees fleeing persecution, and funds appropriated to the Department of Defense, Office of humanitarian and Refugee Affairs (FY2001 appropriation of $55.9 million).