No plant and animal species protected under the ESA, candidates for such protection, or species listed by the Washington state government were observed in the vicinity of the proposed sites. Piper's daisy may still occur in some of the burial grounds. This is a Washington State Sensitive plant species, and as such is a Level III resource under the Hanford Site Biological Resources Management Plan. Compensatory mitigation is appropriate for this species when adverse impacts cannot be avoided. The Ecological Compliance Assessment Project (ECAP) staff should consulted prior to the initiation of major work activities within areas where this species has been identified (218-E-12, 218-E-10). The stalked-pod and crouching milkvetch are relatively common throughout 200 West area, therefore even if the few individuals within the active burial grounds are disturbed, it is not likely that the overall local population will be adversely affected. The Watch List is the lowest level of listing for plant species of concern in the State of Washington. No adverse impacts to species or habitats of concern are expected to occur from routine maintenance within the active portions of the 218-W-4C, 218-W-4B, 218-W-3, 218-W-3A, and 218-W-5 burial grounds, as well as the portion of 218-E-12B currently …

A wide array of field observations, in situ testing, and rock and water sampling (and subsequent analyses) within the unsaturated zone of Yucca Mountain demonstrate the importance of fractures to flow and transport in the welded tuffs. The abundance of fractures and the spatial variability in their hydraulic properties, along with the heterogeneity within lithologic formations, make evaluation of unsaturated processes occurring within the potential repository horizon complex. Fracture mapping and field testing show that fractures are well connected, yet considerable variation is seen within and between units comprising the potential repository horizon with regard to fracture trace length, spacing, permeability, and capillarity. These variations have important implications for the distribution and movement of water and solutes through the unsaturated zone. Numerical models designed to assess such phenomena as unsaturated flow, transport, and coupled thermal-hydrological processes each require their own conceptual model for fracture networks, in order to identify the subset of all fractures that is relevant to the particular study. We evaluate several process-dependent conceptual models for fractures and identify the relevant fracture subsets related to these processes.

This report discuss issues that received congressional attention in the 107th Congress, such as The impact of air quality regulations, key water quality issues, superfund, solid/hazardous wastes, multibillion dollar cleanup and compliance programs, climate change, pesticides, EPA budget, and Science and Technology.

This report presents the information related to the fishery, aquaculture, and marine mammal legislation enacted by the 107th congress

Acoustical signal processing problems can lead to some complex and intricate techniques to extract the desired information from noisy, sometimes inadequate, measurements. The challenge is to formulate a meaningful strategy that is aimed at performing the processing required even in the face of uncertainties. This strategy can be as simple as a transformation of the measured data to another domain for analysis or as complex as embedding a full-scale propagation model into the processor. The aims of both approaches are the same--to extract the desired information and reject the extraneous, that is, develop a signal processing scheme to achieve this goal. In this paper, we briefly discuss this underlying philosophy from a ''bottom-up'' approach enabling the problem to dictate the solution rather than visa-versa.

The Overture framework is an object-oriented environment for solving partial differential equations on over-lapping grids. We describe some of the tools in Overture that can be used to generate grids and solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Overture contains a collection of C++ classes that can be used to write PDE solvers either at a high level or at a lower level for efficiency. There are also a number of tools provided with Overture that can be used with no programming effort. These tools include capabilities to: repair computer-aided-design (CAD) geometries and build global surface triangulations; generate surface and volume grids with hyperbolic grid generation; generate composite overlapping grids; generate hybrid (unstructured) grids; and solve particular PDEs such as the incompressible and compressible Navier-Stokes equations.

Each year, as part of its ongoing commitment to safe operating practices Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) conducts prescribed burns at its Site 300 complex. LLNL consistently adheres to stringent, self-imposed safety standards in all of its activities, and the annual prescribed burning at Site 300 is done to prevent an accumulation of vegetative fuels (primarily grasses) that could cause an unacceptable risk of wildfire ignition. The LLNL prescribed burn procedure (Burklin, 2001) calls for the sequential, controlled burning individual small land plots by the LLNL Fire Department. Essentially the same burning procedure is repeated on a yearly basis. The burns usually are conducted in May and June; however, on rare occasions the burning has been done as late in the year as July. To the best of our knowledge there has never been an environmental problem caused by the smoke from these prescribed burns. Indeed, the avoidance of undesirable environmental impacts is inherent in the very concept of prescription burning. In order to better understand, in a quantitative sense, the atmospheric dispersion of smoke from prescribed burns at Site 300, and to examine how smoke behavior might differ for different burn months and burn-plot terrain, the National Atmospheric Release …

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A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Metropolitan Area Acquisition (MAA) program provides local telecommunications services to federal agencies in certain U.S. cities. The General Services Administration (GSA) began the program in 1997 to achieve immediate, substantial, and sustained price reductions for local telecommunications for agencies; to expand their choices of high-quality services; and to encourage cross-agency sharing of resources. Service providers that are awarded contracts under the program are allowed to compete for GSA's FTS2001 long distance service contracts, so that federal agencies may potentially acquire end-to-end local and long distance telecommunications services from one source. Only five of the 19 metropolitan areas that were scheduled to switch from existing services to MAA services by or before March 2002 have done so. Although the program was intended to take advantage of emerging competition in the local telecommunications market, it has been beset by implementation challenges, including access and use of building riser cabling, the transfer of local numbers between service providers, and a contractor's financial problems. On top of the cost of the contract services, GSA charges customer agencies fees that range from about nine to 97 percent or from $1.20 …