Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, established in 1996, is a bilateral and multilateral effort to provide debt relief to poor countries to help them achieve economic growth and debt sustainability. Multilateral creditors are having difficulty financing their share of the initiative, even with assistance from donors. Under the existing initiative, many countries are unlikely to achieve their debt relief targets, primarily because their export earnings are likely to be significantly less than projected by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). In a recently issued report, GAO assessed (1) the projected multilateral development banks' funding shortfall for the existing initiative and (2) the amount of funding, including development assistance, needed to help countries achieve economic growth and debt relief targets. The Treasury, World Bank, and African Development Bank commented that historical export growth rates are not good predictors of the future because significant structural changes are under way in many countries that could lead to greater growth. We consider these historical rates to be a more realistic gauge of future growth because of these countries' reliance on highly volatile primary commodities and other vulnerabilities such …

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "On March 4, 2004, GAO testified before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, House Committee on Financial Services, at a hearing on oversight of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and discussed the results of our 2003 and 2002 audits of FDIC's financial statements. This letter responds to subsequent questions that the Chairwoman asked GAO to answer for the record."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Federal agencies must have the capacity to serve the public during disruptions to normal operations. This depends, in part, on continuity efforts that help agencies marshal, manage, and maintain their most important asset--their people, or human capital. GAO identified the human capital considerations relevant to federal continuity efforts; described efforts by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to address these considerations relevant to continuity of operations (COOP); and described the role Federal Executive Boards (FEB) play in coordinating such efforts outside Washington, D.C."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In 2001, the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Administration for Children and Families (ACF) implemented the Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSR) to increase states' accountability. The CFSR uses states' data profiles and statewide assessments, as well as interviews and an on-site case review, to measure state performance on 14 outcomes and systemic factors, including child well-being and the provision of caseworker training. The CFSR also requires progress on a program improvement plan (PIP); otherwise ACF may apply financial penalties. This report examines (1) ACF's and the states' experiences preparing for and conducting the statewide assessments and on-site reviews; (2) ACF's and the states' experiences developing, funding, and implementing items in PIPs; and (3) any additional efforts that ACF has taken beyond the CFSR to help ensure that all states meet federal goals related to children's safety, permanency, and well-being."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Having grown to over $7.5 trillion in assets, mutual funds have become vital components of the financial security of more than 95 million American investors. However, in 2003, various allegations of misconduct and abusive practices involving mutual funds came to light. Therefore, ensuring that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has primary oversight of the mutual fund industry, has the necessary resources and strategic focus to adequately oversee fund practices has never been more important. To assess how SEC is positioned to oversee mutual funds, GAO reviewed (1) how the abusive mutual fund practices were identified and SEC's subsequent responses, (2) SEC's plans for increasing its staffing in the divisions and offices responsible for overseeing mutual funds and its progress in developing a new strategic plan to guide staff deployment, and (3) the challenges SEC faces in overseeing the mutual fund industry."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) requires federal agencies to minimize the paperwork burden they impose on the public. The act also requires agencies to obtain approval from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) before collecting covered information. At Congress's request, GAO examined changes during the past fiscal year in federal agencies' paperwork burden estimates and their causes, focusing on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). GAO also examined changes in the number of violations of the PRA."

This research was conducted to investigate the feasibility of applying microbial biodegradation as a treatment technology for wastes containing radioactive elements and organic solvents (mixed wastes). In this study, we focused our efforts on the treatment of wastes generated by biomedical research as the result of purifying tritium labeled compounds by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). These wastes are typically 80 percent water with 20 percent acetonitrile or methanol or a mixture of both. The objective was to determine the potential of using biodegradation to treat the solvent component of tritiated mixed waste to a concentration below the land disposal restriction standard (1mg/L for acetonitrile). Once the standard is reached, the remaining radioactive waste is no longer classified as a mixed waste and it can then be solidified and placed in a secure landfill. This investigation focused on treating a 10 percent acetonitrile solution, which was used as a non-radioactive surrogate for HPLC waste, in a bioreactor. The results indicated that the biodegradation process could treat this solution down to less than 1 mg/L to meet the land disposal restriction standard.

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Methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) has received high attention as it contributed to cleaner air and contaminated thousands of underground storage tank sites. Because MTBE is very water soluble, it is more difficult to remove from water by conventional remediation techniques. Therefore, biodegradation of MTBE has become a remediation alternative. In order to understand the transport and transformation processes, they present a closed form solution as a screening tool in this paper. The possible reaction pathways of first-order reactions are described as a reaction matrix. The singular value decomposition is conducted analytically to decouple the partial differential equations of the multi-species transport system coupled by the reaction matrix into multiple independent subsystems. Therefore, the complexity of mathematical description for the reactive transport system is significantly reduced and analytical solutions may be previously available or easily derived.

A novel, but general, arrangement of parallel sets of gratings is presented that can effectively increase the dispersion of pulse compressors and expanders by over an order of magnitude. These arrangements will dramatically reduce the footprint of the pulse compressors and expanders used in CPA.

The successful commercialization of fuel cells will depend on the achievement of competitive system costs and efficiencies. System cost directly impacts the capital equipment component of cost of electricity (COE) and is a major contributor to the O and M component. The replacement costs for equipment (also heavily influenced by stack life) is generally a major contributor to O and M costs. In this project, they worked with the SECA industrial teams to estimate the impact of general manufacturing issues of interest on stack cost using an activities-based cost model for anode-supported planar SOFC stacks with metallic interconnects. An earlier model developed for NETL for anode supported planar SOFCs was enhanced by a linkage to a performance/thermal/mechanical model, by addition of Quality Control steps to the process flow with specific characterization methods, and by assessment of economies of scale. The 3-dimensional adiabatic performance model was used to calculate the average power density for the assumed geometry and operating conditions (i.e., inlet and exhaust temperatures, utilization, and fuel composition) based on publicly available polarizations curves. The SECA team provided guidance on what manufacturing and design issues should be assessed in this Phase I demonstration of cost modeling capabilities. They considered the …

The outer can welder (OCW) in the FB-Line Facility at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is a Gas Tungsten Arc Weld (GTAW) system used to create outer canisters compliant with the Department of Energy 3013 Standard, DOE-STD-3013-2000, Stabilization, Packaging, and Storage of Plutonium-Bearing Materials. The key welding parameters controlled and monitored on the outer can welder Data Acquisition System (DAS) are weld amperage, weld voltage, and weld rotational speed. Inner 3013 canisters from the Bagless Transfer System that contain plutonium metal or plutonium oxide are placed inside an outer 3013 canister. The canister is back-filled with helium and welded using the outer can welder. The completed weld is screened to determine if it is satisfactory by reviewing the OCW DAS key welding parameters, performing a helium leak check, performing a visual examination by a qualified weld inspector, and performing digital radiography of the completed weld. Canisters with unsatisfactory welds are cut open and repackaged. Canisters with satisfactory welds are deemed compliant with the 3013 standard for long-term storage.

Saltwater, or brine, underlies fresh water in many aquifers, with a transition zone separating them. Pumping fresh water by wells located above the transition zone produces upconing of the latter, eventually salinizing the pumped water, forcing shut-off. The salinity of the pumped water depends on the pumping rate, on the location of the well's screen, on the fresh water flow regime, and on the difference in density between fresh and salt water, expressed as a dimensionless factor called density difference factor (DDF). Following the well's shut-off, the upconed saltwater mound undergoes decay, tending to return to the pre-pumping regime. In this paper, the upconing-decay processes in an axially symmetrical system are investigated to discover how they are affected by the DDF and by the dispersivities. The code FEAS-Brine, developed for the simulation of coupled density-dependent flow and salt transport, is used. In this code, the flow equation is solved by the Galer:wqkin finite element method (FEM), while the advective-dispersive salt transport equation is solved in the Eulerian-Lagrangian framework. This code does not suffer from the instability constraint on the Peclet number in the vicinity of the pumping well, where advection dominates the salt transport. Simulation results show that upconing is …

The Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) has been requested to perform sulfur (S) analysis on digested radioactive sludge and supernatant samples by Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission Spectrometry (ICP-ES). The amount of sulfur is a concern because there are sulfur limits for the incoming feed, due to glass melter, process vessel, and off-gas line corrosion concerns and limited sulfur solubility in the glass wasteform. Recent changes in the washing strategy and stream additions change the amount of sulfur in the sludge. Increasing the sulfur concentration in the sludge challenges the current limits, so accurately determining the amount of sulfur present in a sludge batch is paramount. There are two important figures of merit that need to be evaluated for this analysis. The first is the detection limit (LOD), the smallest concentration of an element that can be detected with a defined certainty. This issue is important since the sulfur concentration in these process streams is l ow. Another critical analytical parameter is the effect on the S quantitation from potential spectral interferences. Spectral interferences are caused by background emission from plasma recombination events, scattered and stray light from the line emission of high concentration elements, or molecular band emission and from …

Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) researchers modeled ion exchange removal of cesium from dissolved salt waste solutions. The results assist in evaluating proposed configurations for an ion exchange process to remove residual cesium from low curie waste streams. A process for polishing (i.e., removing small amounts) of cesium may prove useful should supernate draining fail to meet the Low Curie Salt (LCS) target limit of 0.1 Ci of Cs-137 per gallon of salt solution. Cesium loading isotherms and column breakthrough curves for Low Curie dissolved salt solutions were computed to provide performance predictions for various column designs.

The initial performance of five different types of Li-ion rechargeable batteries, from Quallion Corp, UltraLife Battery and Toshiba, was measured and compared. Cell characterization included variable-rate constant-current cycling, various USDOE pulse-test protocols and full-spectrum electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. Changes in impedance and capacity were monitored during electrochemical cycling under various conditions, including constant-current cycling over 100 percent DOD at a range of temperature and pulse profile cycling over a very narrow range of DOD at room temperature. All cells were found to maintain more than 80 percent of their rated capacity for more than 400 constant current 100 percent DOD cycles. The power fade (or impedance rise) of the cells varied considerably. New methods for interpreting the pulse resistance data were evaluated for their usefulness in interpreting performance mechanism as a function of test protocol and cell design.

The Yucca Mountain site has a dry climate and deep water table, with the repository located in the middle of an unsaturated zone approximately 600 m thick. Radionuclide transport processes from the repository to the water table are sensitive to the unsaturated zone flow field, as well as to sorption, matrix diffusion, radioactive decay, and colloid transport mechanisms. The unsaturated zone flow and transport models are calibrated against both physical and chemical data, including pneumatic pressure, liquid saturation, water potential, temperature, chloride, and calcite. The transport model predictions are further compared with testing specific to unsaturated zone transport: at Alcove 1 in the Exploratory Studies Facility (ESF), at Alcove 8 and Niche 3 of the ESF, and at the Busted Butte site. The models are applied to predict the breakthroughs at the water table for nonsorbing and sorbing radionuclides, with faults shown as the important paths for radionuclide transport. Daughter products of some important radionuclides, such as {sup 239}Pu and {sup 241}Am, have faster transport than the parents and must be considered in the unsaturated zone transport model. Colloid transport is significantly affected by colloid size, but only negligibly affected by lunetic declogging (reverse filtering) mechanisms. Unsaturated zone model uncertainties …

OAK-B135 Rate-Controlling Mechanisms in Five-Power-Law Creep. The initial grant emphasized the rate-controlling processes for five power-law creep. The effort has six aspects: (1) Theory of Taylor hardening from the Frank dislocation network in five power law substructures. (2) The dual dynamical and hardening nature of dislocations in five power law substructures. (3) Determination of the existence of long-range internal stress in five-power law creep dislocation substructures. (4) Dynamic recovery mechanisms associated with dislocation heterogeneities during five power law creep. (5) Versatility of five power law creep concept to other (hcp) crystal structures. (6) Writing of a book on ''Fundamental of Creep in Metals and Alloys'' by M.E. Kassner and Maria-Teresa Perez-Frado (postdoctoral scholar, funded by this project) Elsevier Press, 2004, in press. These areas are consistent with the original goals of this project as delineated in the original proposal to Basic Energy Sciences. The progress in each of these areas will be discussed separately and there will be an attempt to tie each aspect together so as to allow a summary regarding the conclusions with respect to the rate-controlling mechanisms of five power-law creep.

Audio information stored in the undulations of grooves in a medium such as a phonograph disc record or cylinder may be reconstructed, without contact, by measuring the groove shape using precision optical metrology methods and digital image processing. The viability of this approach was recently demonstrated on a 78 rpm shellac disc using two dimensional image acquisition and analysis methods. The present work reports the first three dimensional reconstruction of mechanically recorded sound. The source material, a celluloid cylinder, was scanned using color coded confocal microscopy techniques and resulted in a faithful playback of the recorded information.

I would like to determine how accurately a variety of neutron transport code packages (code and cross section libraries) can calculate simple integral parameters, such as K{sub eff}, for systems that are sensitive to thermal neutron scattering. Since we will only consider theoretical systems, we cannot really determine absolute accuracy compared to any real system. Therefore rather than accuracy, it would be more precise to say that I would like to determine the spread in answers that we obtain from a variety of code packages. This spread should serve as an excellent indicator of how accurately we can really model and calculate such systems today. Hopefully, eventually this will lead to improvements in both our codes and the thermal scattering models that they use in the future. In order to accomplish this I propose a number of extremely simple systems that involve thermal neutron scattering that can be easily modeled and calculated by a variety of neutron transport codes. These are theoretical systems designed to emphasize the effects of thermal scattering, since that is what we are interested in studying. I have attempted to keep these systems very simple, and yet at the same time they include most, if not …

The sulfur found on the surfaces of stainless steel 303 (SS303) after nitric acid passivation originated from the MnS inclusions in the steel. The nitric acid attacked and dissolved these MnS inclusions, and redeposited micron-sized elemental sulfur particles back to the surface. To develop an alternative passivation procedure for SS303, citric and phosphoric acids have been evaluated. The experimental results show neither acid causes a significant amount of sulfur deposit. Thus, these two acids can be used as alternatives to nitric acid passivation for NIF applications. For SS303 previously passivated by nitric acid, NaOH soak can be used as a remedial cleaning process to effectively remove the sulfur deposits.

Metal oxide nanocrystals deposited on metal surfaces have novel electronic properties due to interface and nanoscale effects. Crystals and nanoscale ribbons of MoO{sub 3} are highly effective catalysts and field emitters. This renders MoO{sub 3} an interesting prototype. Whilst MoO{sub 3} exists as bilayers in the bulk crystal5, in this work, monolayer MoO{sub 3} nanocrystals were grown epitaxially on Au(111). Ab initio calculations reveal that Au stabilizes the MoO{sub 3} monolayer through electronic charge redistribution at the interface. The Mo-O bonds are able to rotate about one another, allowing the MoO{sub 3} monolayer to adjust to the Au lattice. As a result, the monolayer is semimetallic, unlike bulk MoO{sub 3} which is semiconducting. This remarkable flexibility of the oxide lattice suggests the possibility of tuning electronic properties of transition metal oxides via interface interactions. The overall surface pattern obtained is affected by an interplay between the Au(111) surface reconstruction and the edges of the deposited MoO{sub 3} islands.

This report provides Congress with a broad overview of significant congressional and presidential regulatory reform efforts within the past 20 to 30 years.

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