Bill introduced by the Texas House of Representatives relating to liability of certain electric utilities that allow certain uses of land that the electric utility owns, occupies, or leases.

Bill introduced by the Texas House of Representatives relating to the Weatherford College District service area.

Bill introduced by the Texas House of Representatives relating to the authority of a county to advertise on leased vehicles.

Bill introduced by the Texas House of Representatives relating to the use of legislatively produced audio or visual materials.

Bill introduced by the Texas House of Representatives relating to the continuation and functions of the Department of Information Resources and certain procurement functions of the comptroller of public accounts.

Bill introduced by the Texas Senate relating to discovery in a criminal case.

This report discusses the broadband loan and grant programs at Rural Utilities Service (RUS) that is intended to accelerate the deployment of broadband services in rural America. “Broadband” refers to high-speed Internet access and advanced telecommunications services for private homes, commercial establishments, schools, and public institutions.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The military departments' Corrosion Control and Prevention Executives (Corrosion Executives) coordinated with the Department of Defense's (DOD) Corrosion Policy and Oversight Office (Corrosion Office) on reviews of their respective strategic plans. GAO's prior work has found that linking the goals of component organizations to departmental strategic goals is a practice that, if consistently applied, should improve the usefulness of plans to decision makers. However, the military departments varied in the extent that their strategic plans show clear linkage to the 10 goals and objectives included in the DOD Corrosion Prevention and Mitigation Strategic Plan. The Army's strategic plan showed clear linkage to all 10 of the goals and objectives. The Air Force's plan clearly linked to half of the goals and objectives and the Navy's plan clearly linked to 3 of the goals and objectives. GAO's review of the military departments' strategic plans found no inconsistencies with DOD Instruction 5000.67, which establishes policy, assigns responsibilities, and provides guidance for managing programs to prevent or mitigate corrosion. Without consistency or a clear linkage between the strategic plans of the military departments and the overarching goals and objectives …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins ""

The Savannah River Site (SRS) is repurposing its vast array of assets to solve future national issues regarding environmental stewardship, national security, and clean energy. The vehicle for this transformation is Enterprise SRS which presents a new, strategic view of SRS as a united endeavor for “all things nuclear” as opposed to a group of distinct and separate entities with individual missions and organizations. Key among the Enterprise SRS strategic initiatives is the integration of research into facilities in conjunction with ongoing missions to provide researchers from other national laboratories, academic institutions, and commercial entities the opportunity to demonstrate their technologies in a relevant environment and scale prior to deployment. To manage that integration of research demonstrations into site facilities, The DOE Savannah River Operations Office, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, and the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) have established a center for applied nuclear materials processing and engineering research (hereafter referred to as the Center). The key objective of this initiative is to bridge the gap between promising transformational nuclear materials management advancements and large-scale deployment of the technology by using SRS assets (e.g. facilities, staff, and property) for those critical engineering-scale demonstrations necessary to assure the successful deployment of …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO's 2013 annual report identifies 31 new areas where agencies may be able to achieve greater efficiency or effectiveness. Seventeen areas involve fragmentation, overlap, or duplication. For example, GAO reported that the Department of Defense could realize up to $82 million in cost savings and ensure equivalent levels of performance and protection by taking action to address its fragmented approach to developing and acquiring combat uniforms. Additionally, GAO reported that a total of 31 federal departments and agencies collect, maintain, and use geospatial information. Better planning and implementation could help reduce duplicative investments and save of millions of dollars."

This report provides an overview of Guatemala’s current political and economic conditions, relations with the United States, and several issues likely to figure in future decisions by Congress and the Administration regarding Guatemala.

Proceedings of the Senate of Texas for the sixtieth day of the Regular session of the 83rd Legislature documenting legislation, reports, discussions, votes, and points-of-order.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "According to our nationwide survey of state testing directors, all states reported that their policies and procedures included 50 percent or more of the leading practices to prevent test irregularities in the following five areas—security plans, security training, security breaches, test administration and protecting secure materials. Additionally, of the 28 states that administered computer-based assessments, the majority reported including half or more of the leading practices in computer-based testing. However, states varied in the extent to which they incorporated elements of certain categories of leading practices. For example, 22 states reported having all of the leading practices for security training, but four states reported having none of the practices in this category. Although state officials reported having a variety of security policies and procedures in place, many reported feeling vulnerable to cheating at some point during the testing process."

This report covers additions and changes to the list of recipients of the medal since the release of the committee print. The Medal of Honor (MOH) is the nation's highest award for military valor. It is presented by the President in the name of Congress and thus is often called the Congressional Medal of Honor.

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A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has taken several steps to strengthen its safeguards program since GAO's 2005 report, including increasing the number of countries that are subject to a broader range of safeguards measures, upgrading its analytical laboratories, and producing its first long-term strategic plan. However, the agency faces two critical challenges in further improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the safeguards program. First, several countries have raised concerns about IAEA's plans to expand implementation of what it calls the "state-level concept" to all countries with safeguards agreements by 2014. The state-level concept is an approach in which the agency considers a broad range of information about a country's nuclear capabilities and tailors its safeguards activities in each country accordingly. IAEA officials told GAO that broader implementation of this approach would allow the agency to better allocate resources by reducing safeguards activities where there is no indication of undeclared nuclear activities and to focus its efforts on any issues of safeguards concern. However, IAEA has not clearly defined and communicated how it will implement the state-level concept. As a result, several countries are concerned that …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins ""

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The purpose of this project is to quantify the interfacial transport of water into the most prevalent nuclear reprocessing solvent extractant mixture, namely tri-butyl- phosphate (TBP) and dodecane, via massively parallel molecular dynamics simulations on the most powerful machines available for open research. Specifically, we will accomplish this objective by evolving the water/TBP/dodecane system up to 1 ms elapsed time, and validate the simulation results by direct comparison with experimentally measured water solubility in the organic phase. The significance of this effort is to demonstrate for the first time that the combination of emerging simulation tools and state-of-the-art supercomputers can provide quantitative information on par to experimental measurements for solvent extraction systems of relevance to the nuclear fuel cycle. Results: Initially, the isolated single component, and single phase systems were studied followed by the two-phase, multicomponent counterpart. Specifically, the systems we studied were: pure TBP; pure n-dodecane; TBP/n-dodecane mixture; and the complete extraction system: water-TBP/n-dodecane two phase system to gain deep insight into the water extraction process. We have completely achieved our goal of simulating the molecular extraction of water molecules into the TBP/n-dodecane mixture up to the saturation point, and obtained favorable comparison with experimental data. Many insights into …

Iodine-129 is one of the key risk drivers for several Savannah River Site (SRS) performance assessments (PA), including that for the Low-Level Waste Disposal Facility in E-Area. In an effort to reduce the uncertainty associated with the conceptual model and the input values used in PA, several studies have recently been conducted dealing with radioiodine geochemistry at the SRS. The objective of this report was to review these recent studies and evaluate their implications on SRS PA calculations. For the first time, these studies measured iodine speciation in SRS groundwater and provided technical justification for assuming the presence of more strongly sorbing species (iodate and organo-iodine), and measured greater iodine sediment sorption when experiments included these newly identified species; specifically they measured greater sorption coefficients (K{sub d} values: the concentration ratio of iodine on the solid phase divided by the concentration in the aqueous phase). Based on these recent studies, new best estimates were proposed for future PA calculations. The new K{sub d} values are greater than previous recommended values. These proposed K{sub d} values reflect a better understanding of iodine geochemistry in the SRS subsurface environment, which permits reducing the associated conservatism included in the original estimates to account …

This report discusses state and local restrictions upon employing unauthorized aliens in light of the May 26, 2011, decision by the Supreme Court in Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America v. Whiting.

We are establishing a theoretical procedure to identify most potential candidates of CO{sub 2} solid sorbents from a large solid material databank to meet the DOE programmatic goal for energy conversion; A further objective is to explore the optimal working conditions for the promised CO{sub 2} solid sorbents, especially from room to warm T ranges with optimal energy usage, used for both pre- and post-combustion capture technologies.

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