In this special issue of Alternative Fuel News, the authors summarize DOE's current position on the local government and private fleet rulemaking that has been under consideration. The authors also look at the new area of focus, niche markets. Your participation and input are invited as the authors craft new directions for the nation's transportation future.

Planning, preparation, and submittal of safety analysis reports might be pursued in a manner similar to a quality-related procurement, where customer needs, expectations and acceptance criteria are established in advance. Then the product/service provider, the contractor, should apply various quality control processes to assure the desired characteristics of the product safety analysis documents. Improving the quality and acceptability to DOE of safety documents at first submittal should result in a more expeditious DOE review and approval process, thereby reducing costs of network and recycle through reviews.

Over the past 12 months, Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico (SNL/NM), has successfully conducted an evaluation of its nuclear material holdings. As a result, approximately 46% of these holdings (36% by mass) have been reclassified as no defined use (NDU). Reclassification as NDU allows Sandia to determine the final disposition of a significant percentage of its legacy nuclear material. Disposition will begin some time in mid CY2000. This reclassification and the proposed disposition of the material has resulted in an extensive coordination effort lead by the Nuclear Materials Management Team (NMMT), which includes the nuclear material owners, the Radioactive Waste/Nuclear Material Disposition Department (7135), and DOE Albuquerque Operations Office. The process of identifying and reclassifying the cats and dogs or miscellaneous lots of nuclear material has also presented a number of important lessons learned for other sites in the DOE complex.

This report examines military airstrikes and ground operations that Russia launched against its Chechnya region in late September 1999. It provides background information on earlier Chechen guerrilla attacks on the neighboring Dagestan region of Russia and on the unsolved terrorist bombing of several apartment buildings in Russia. Current problems of governance in Chechnya are discussed, as well as Chechnya’s response to the Russian offensive. The concerns of the United States and other Western governments about the conflict are examined. A map is included. This report supersedes CRS Report RS20358, Chechnya Conflict.

This specification establishes the performance requirements and provides references to the requisite codes and standards to be applied to the Double-Shell Tank (DST) Process Waste Sampling Subsystem which supports the first phase of Waste Feed Delivery.

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Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the white-collar exemptions to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), focusing on: (1) how shifts in the American economy have affected the exemptions in today's work place; (2) how the regulations underpinning the exemptions have changed in the decades since the enactment of the FLSA; (3) why both employer and employee representatives believe that adjustments are needed to update the regulatory structure; and (4) why the need to balance the interests of both employers and employees suggests that comprehensive review is key to equitable regulatory reform."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Air Force's accounting and reporting on the costs of the foreign military sales (FMS) program."

The influences of freezing-point-depressants on ice slurry characteristics in the form of ice slurry fluidity and on the microscale ice particle features are studied. The results identify microscale features of ice particles such as surface roughness that greatly influence slurry fluidity that are altered favorably by the use of a freezing point depressant. The engineering of a workable and efficient ice slurry cooling system depends very strongly on the characteristics of the individual ice particles in the slurry and, in turn, on the method of ice production. Findings from this study provide guidance on the fluidity and handleability of slurry produced by several methods currently under development and already many achieved.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) progress in implementing its modernization effort and the challenges that remain."

Electron and hole transport in compensated, InGaAsN ({approx} 2% N) are examined through Hall mobility, photoconductivity, and solar cell photoresponse measurements. Short minority carrier diffusion lengths, photoconductive-response spectra, and doping dependent, thermally activated Hall mobilities reveal a broad distribution of localized states. At this stage of development, lateral carrier transport appears to be limited by large scale (>> mean free path) material inhomogeneities, not a random alloy-induced mobility edge.

Although subway ventilation has been studied extensively, very little has been published on dispersion of contaminants in the subway environment. This paper presents a model that predicts dispersion of contaminants in a complex subway system. It accounts for the combined transient effects of train motion, station airflows, train car air exchange rates, and source release properties. Results are presented for a range of typical subway scenarios. The effects of train piston action and train car air exchange are discussed. The model could also be applied to analyze the environmental impact of hazardous materials releases such as chemical and biological agents.

NREL PV Working With Industry is a quarterly newsletter devoted to the research, development, and deployment performed by NREL staff in concert with their industry and university partners. The First Quarter, 2000, issue offers an in-depth look at the PV Program's Five Year Plan and the PV industry's progress in developing a 20-year roadmap. The editorialist is Roger Little, President and CEO of Spire Corporation and a member of the NCPV Advisory Board.

The Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) was the source of $18 billion of oil and natural gas during 1998. This amounted to 25% of the nation's natural gas production and nearly 20% of the nation's crude oil. Nearly all of this output comes from the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico, where supporting infrastructure is already in place and there is little environmental opposition. Except for one sale in Alaska, no leases have been auctioned since 1991 in any other OCS region. The deep waters off Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas are the current focus of producer interest in the OCS.

Raley's, a large retail grocery company based in Northern California, began operating heavy-duty trucks powered by liquefied natural gas (LNG) in 1997, in cooperation with the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District (SMAQMD). The US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Heavy Vehicle Technologies (OHVT) sponsored a research project to collect and analyze data on the performance and operation costs of eight of Raley's LNG trucks in the field. Their performance was compared with that of three diesel trucks operating in comparable commercial service. The objective of the DOE research project, which was managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), was to provide transportation professionals with quantitative, unbiased information on the cost, maintenance, operational, and emissions characteristics of LNG as one alternative to conventional diesel fuel for heavy-duty trucking applications.

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This report is part on the ongoing effort at Brown University and Ohio State University to develop structure based models of coal combustion. A very fundamental approach is taken to the description of coal chars and their reaction processes, and the results are therefore expected to have broad applicability to the spectrum of carbon materials of interest in energy technologies. This quarter, our work on structure development in carbons continued. A combination of hot stage in situ and ex situ polarized light microscopy was used to identify the preferred orientational of graphene layers at gas interfaces in pitches used as carbon material precursors. The experiments show that edge-on orientation is the equilibrium state of the gas/pitch interface, implying that basal-rich surfaces have higher free energies than edge-rich surfaces in pitch. This result is in agreement with previous molecular modeling studies and TEM observations in the early stages of carbonization. The results may have important implications for the design of tailored carbons with edge-rich or basal-rich surfaces. In the computational chemistry task, we have continued our investigations into the reactivity of large aromatic rings. The role of H-atom abstraction as well as radical addition to monocyclic aromatic rings has been examined, …

The authors measured static x-ray speckle contrast variation with the incident photon energy across sample-specific absorption edges. They propose that the variation depends strongly on the spectral response function of the monochromator. Speckle techniques have been introduced to the x-ray regime during recent years. Most of these experiments, however, were done at photon energies above 5 keV. They are working on this technique in the 1 to 4 keV range, an energy range that includes many important x-ray absorption edges, e.g., in Al, Si, P, S, the rare-earths, and others. To their knowledge, the effect of absorption edges on speckle contrast has not yet been studied. In this paper, they present their initial measurements and understanding of the observed phenomena.