Quarterly newsletter of the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Records Division discussing news and activities of the organization as well as other information related to crime records and other safety issue within Texas, along with a departmental directory.

Monthly newsletter of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality containing information on environmental topics of interest to the general public and other groups including municipalities, businesses, corporate environmental managers, school teachers, and nonprofit organizations.

Monthly publication documenting statistics related to economic information in the Mexico-Texas border areas including types of border crossings, employment, customs revenues, and other related data.

Monthly newsletter documenting statistics related to employment in Texas including nonagricultural job trends, labor force numbers, and other relevant indicators as well as information on related topics.

Newsletter for participants of the annual Texas Hummingbird Roundup, containing articles related to hummingbirds and providing a breakdown of information about where in Texas various hummingbirds were sighted.

Magazine discussing natural resources, parks, hunting and fishing, and other information related to the outdoors in Texas.

Monthly travel magazine discussing locations and events in Texas to encourage travel within the state.

Final report of the Antitrust Modernization Commission, established by Congress to examine whether there is a need to modernize U.S. antitrust laws and to identify and study-related issues. It includes an overview of the topic and summary of the Commission's recommendations, with sections on substantive standards of antitrust law, enforcement instittutions and processes, civil and criminal remedies, and government exceptions to free-market competition, as well as individual statements from the commissioners and supplementary information.

Performing sorbent testing for mercury control at a large scale is a very expensive endeavor and requires months of planning and careful execution. Even with good planning, there are plant limitations on what operating/design parameters can be varied/tested and when. For parameters that cannot be feasibly tested at the full scale (lower/higher gas flow, different bag material, cleaning methods, sorbents, etc.), an alternative approach is used to perform tests on a slipstream unit using flue gas from the plant. The advantage that a slipstream unit provides is the flexibility to test multiple operating and design parameters and other possible technology options without risking major disruption to the operation of the power plant. Additionally, the results generated are expected to simulate full-scale conditions closely, since the flue gas used during the tests comes directly from the plant in question. The Energy & Environmental Research Center developed and constructed a mobile baghouse that allows for cost-effective testing of impacts related to variation in operating and design parameters, as well as other possible mercury control options. Multiple sorbents, air-to-cloth ratios, bag materials, and cleaning frequencies were evaluated while flue gas was extracted from Big Brown when it fired a 70% Texas lignite-30% Powder …

This report describes evaluation of collapse evolution for selected LLNL underground nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). The work is being done at the request of NSTec and supports the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Association Nevada Site Office Borehole Management Program (BMP). The primary objective of this program is to close (plug) weapons program legacy boreholes that are deemed no longer useful. Safety decisions must be made before a crater area, or potential crater area, can be reentered for any work. Our statements on cavity collapse and crater formation are input into their safety decisions. The BMP is an on-going program to address hundreds of boreholes at the NTS. Each year NSTec establishes a list of holes to be addressed. They request the assistance of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory Containment Programs to provide information related to the evolution of collapse history and make statements on completeness of collapse as relates to surface crater stability. These statements do not include the effects of erosion that may modify the collapse craters over time. They also do not address possible radiation dangers that may be present. Subject matter experts from the LLNL Containment …

Summary describing the work completed at C & C Technologies, Inc. for 'Deepwater Program: The Archaeological and Biological Analysis of World War II Shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico: A Pilot Study of the Artificial Reef Effect in Deepwater.' It includes background information on the project funding and sponsorship, goals, methodology, and findings.

The objective of this research is to find, identify, and study each vessel that was a casualty of German U-boats. The second point of their research is to determine the biological effects of the boats on the environment.

This document relates to the Department of Defenses restructuring of principle Federal agencies to create an environment of operational stability.

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The Grays River Watershed and Biological Assessment was funded to address degradation and loss of spawning habitat for chum salmon (Onchorhynchus keta) and fall Chinook salmon (Onchoryhnchus tshawytscha). In 1999, the National Marine Fisheries Service listed lower Columbia River chum salmon as a threatened Evolutionarily Significant Unit (ESU) under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). The Grays River watershed is one of two remaining significant chum salmon spawning locations in this ESU. Runs of Grays River chum and Chinook salmon have declined significantly during the past century, largely because of damage to spawning habitat associated with timber harvest and agriculture in the watershed. In addition, approximately 20-25% of the then-remaining chum salmon spawning habitat was lost during a 1999 channel avulsion that destroyed an important artificial spawning channel operated by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). Although the lack of stable, high-quality spawning habitat is considered the primary physical limitation on Grays River chum salmon production today, few data are available to guide watershed management and channel restoration activities. The objectives of the Grays River Watershed and Biological Assessment project were to (1) perform a comprehensive watershed and biological analysis, including hydrologic, geomorphic, and ecological assessments; (2) …

The results from the last six years of x-ray spectroscopy and spectropolarimetry of high energy density Z-pinch plasmas complemented by experiments with the electron beam ion trap (EBIT) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are presented. The two topics discussed are the development of M-shell x-ray W spectroscopic diagnostics and K-shell Ti spectropolarimetry of Z-pinch plasmas. The main focus is on radiation from a specific load configuration called an 'X-pinch'. X-pinches are excellent sources for testing new spectral diagnostics and for atomic modelling because of the high density and temperature of the pinch plasmas, which scale from a few {micro}m to several mm in size. They offer a variety of load configurations, which differ in wire connections, number of wires, and wire materials. In this work the study of X-pinches with tungsten wires combined with wires from other, lower-Z materials is reported. Utilizing data produced with the LLNL EBIT at different energies of the electron beam the theoretical prediction of line positions and intensity of M-shell W spectra were tested and calibrated. Polarization-sensitive X-pinch experiments at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) provide experimental evidence for the existence of strong electron beams in Ti and Mo X-pinch plasmas and …

This document provides an overview of the metadata, which are needed to characterizeATLAS event data at different levels (a complete run, data streams within a run, luminosity blocks within a run, individual events).

X-ray cluster measurements interpreted with a universal baryon/gas mass fraction can theoretically serve as a cosmological distance probe. We examine issues of cosmological sensitivity for current (e.g., Chandra X-ray Observatory, XMM-Newton) and next generation (e.g., Con-X, XEUS) observations, along with systematic uncertainties and biases. To give competitive next generation constraints on dark energy, we find that systematics will need to be controlled to better than 1percent and any evolution in f_gas (and other cluster gas properties) must be calibrated so the residual uncertainty is weaker than (1+z)0.03.

The physical and transport properties of porous rocks can be altered by a variety of diagenetic, metamorphic, and tectonic processes, and the changes that result are of critical importance to such industrial applications as resource recovery, carbon dioxide sequestration, and waste isolation in geologic formations. These inter-relationships between rocks, pore fluids, and deformation are also the key to understanding many natural processes, including: dynamic metamorphism, fault mechanics, fault stability, and pressure solution deformation. Here, we propose work to investigate the changes of permeability and pore geometry owing to inelastic deformation by solution-transfer, brittle fracturing, and dislocation creep. The work would study the relationship of deformation and permeability reduction in fluid-filled quartz and calcite rocks and investigate the effects of loading configuration on the evolution of porosity and permeability under hydrothermal conditions. We would use a combination of techniques, including laboratory experiments, numerical calculations, and observations of rock microstructure. The laboratory experiments provide mechanical and transport data under conditions that isolate each particular mechanism. Our apparatus are designed to provide simultaneous measurements of pore volume, permeability, axial and volumetric strain rates while being loaded under isostatic or conventional triaxial loading. Temperatures up to 1400 K may be obtained, while confining pressures …

Description. Individual raw data streams from instrumentation at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program Climate Research Facility (ACRF) fixed and mobile sites are collected and sent to the Data Management Facility (DMF) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for processing in near real time. Raw and processed data are then sent daily to the ACRF Archive, where they are made available to users. For each instrument, we calculate the ratio of the actual number of data records received daily at the Archive to the expected number of data records. The results are tabulated by (1) individual data stream, site, and month for the current year and (2) site and fiscal year (FY) dating back to 1998.

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) contracted with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to provide technical analytical support for system-wide fish passage information (BPA Project No. 2006-010-00). The goal of this project was to produce rigorous technical analysis products using independent analysts and anonymous peer reviewers. In the past, regional parties have interacted with a single entity, the Fish Passage Center to access the data, analyses, and coordination related to fish passage. This project provided an independent technical source for non-routine fish passage analyses while allowing routine support functions to be performed by other well-qualified entities.

Fabrication development of high efficiency quantum well (QW) thermoelectric continues with the P-type and N-type Si/Si{sub 80}Ge{sub 20} films with encouraging results. These films are fabricated on Si substrates and are being developed for low as well as high temperature operation. Both isothermal and gradient life testing are underway. One couple has achieved over 4000 hours at T{sub H} of 300 C and T{sub C} of 50 C with little or no degradation. Emphasis is now shifting towards couple and module design and fabrication, especially low resistance joining between N and P legs. These modules can be used in future energy conversion systems as well as for air conditioning.

Self-consistent Vlasov-Poisson simulations of beams with high space-charge intensity often require specification of initial phase-space distributions that reflect properties of a beam that is well adapted to the transport channel--both in terms of low-order rms (envelope) properties as well as the higher-order phase-space structure. Here, we first review broad classes of kinetic distributions commonly in use as initial Vlasov distributions in simulations of unbunched or weakly bunched beams with intense space-charge fields including: the Kapchinskij-Vladimirskij (KV) equilibrium, continuous-focusing equilibria with specific detailed examples, and various non-equilibrium distributions, such as the semi-Gaussian distribution and distributions formed from specified functions of linear-field Courant-Snyder invariants. Important practical details necessary to specify these distributions in terms of usual accelerator inputs are presented in a unified format. Building on this presentation, a new class of approximate initial kinetic distributions are constructed using transformations that preserve linear-focusing single-particle Courant-Snyder invariants to map initial continuous-focusing equilibrium distributions to a form more appropriate for non-continuous focusing channels. Self-consistent particle-in-cell simulations are employed to show that the approximate initial distributions generated in this manner are better adapted to the focusing channels for beams with high space-charge intensity. This improved capability enables simulation applications that more precisely probe intrinsic stability …

This report describes the results of groundwater monitoring near the K Basins for the period January, February, and March 2007.