Long-term stewardship (LTS) can be defined as the system of activities needed to protect human health and the environment from hazards left remaining at a site as a result of a cleanup decision. Although the general consensus has been that remediation decisions and LTS decisions should be made conjointly, the general practice has been to separate them. This bifurcation can result in LTS plans that are difficult to implement and enforce and disproportionately costly for the benefit they provide. Worse still, they can be ineffective and result in harmful exposures to humans and the environment. Sites that have not yet made cleanup decisions and that can still integrate LTS planning into that decision making would benefit from a process built on a systematic review of the LTS risks and costs associated with remedial alternatives that include allowing on-site residual contamination. Sites that must develop LTS plans in response to previously determined cleanup decisions are even more in need of a process that involves close scrutiny of the risks and costs of possible LTS plan components. An LTS planning decision process usable by both categories of sites has been developed and is being used at the US Department of Energy (DOE) …

This report discusses the ongoing debate about whether or not to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for energy development. The report discusses arguments for and against such development and focuses especially on related pieces of legislation that directly affects the future of the ANWR.

The smut that appeared on the universal covers after the OAB cleaning process consists of sub-micron size aluminum particles originating from the machining of these parts prior to cleaning. The rigorous gross and precision cleanings with Brulin in the OAB cleaning process could not completely wash these fine particles away from the surfaces. However, applying a phosphoric acid etch before the cleaning helped to remove these fine aluminum particles. Experimental results again showed that an acid etching before cleaning is essential in preventing the occurrence of smut in aluminum alloy after gross/precision cleaning. A mechanism, based on the electrostatic {zeta}-potential, is proposed to explain the occurrence of smut that is often encountered during the cleaning of aluminum alloys.

A comparison of methods is used to evaluate the intake of transuranics influenced by chelation therapy. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the mechanistic method by using it to validate Hall's method and Jech's method. This is accomplished by using the mechanistic method to generate a known set of data suitable for benchmarking all three methods.

Traces of tritiated water (HTO) were detected at [the]World Trade Center (WTC) ground zero after the 9/11/01 terrorist attack. A method of ultralow-background liquid scintillation counting was used after distilling HTO from the samples. A water sample from the WTC sewer, collected on 9/13/01, contained 0.174 plus or minus 0.074 (2s) nCi/L of HTO. A split water sample, collected on 9/21/01 from the basement of WTC Building 6, contained 3.53 plus or minus 0.17 and 2.83 plus or minus 0.15 nCi/L, respectively. Several water and vegetation samples were analyzed from areas outside the ground zero, located in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Kensico Reservoir. No HTO above the background was found in those samples. All these results are well below the levels of concern to human exposure.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Congress is considering expanding the number of federal agencies required to prepare audited financial statements to include all executive branch agencies that have budget authority of $25 million or more. The Federal Financial Management Improvement Act of 1996 builds on the Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act by encouraging agencies to have systems that generate timely, accurate, and useful information with which to make informed decisions on an ongoing basis. The 26 non-CFO Act agencies that GAO surveyed reported that they anticipate significant benefits from audited financial statements."

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Wind and Geothermal Technologies (DOE) is funding advanced geothermal research through University Geothermal Research solicitations. These solicitations are intended to generate research proposals in the areas of fracture permeability location and characterization, reservoir management and geochemistry. The work funded through these solicitations should stimulate the development of new geothermal electrical generating capacity through increasing scientific knowledge of high-temperature geothermal systems. In order to meet this objective researchers are encouraged to collaborate with the geothermal industry. These objectives and strategies are consistent with DOE Geothermal Energy Program strategic objectives.

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Nanometer sized diamond is a constituent of diverse systems ranging from interstellar dusts and meteorites [1] to carbonaceous residues of detonations [2] and diamond-like films [3-5]. Many of the properties of bulk diamond have been well understood for decades, those of nanodiamond are mostly unexplored. We present a combined theoretical and experimental study showing that diamond has unique properties not only as a bulk material but also at the nanoscale, where size reduction and surface reconstruction effects are fundamentally different from those found, e.g. in Si and Ge.

Electronic office equipment has proliferated rapidly over the last twenty years and is projected to continue growing in the future. Efforts to reduce the growth in office equipment energy use have focused on power management to reduce power consumption of electronic devices when not being used for their primary purpose. The EPA ENERGY STAR[registered trademark] program has been instrumental in gaining widespread support for power management in office equipment, and accurate information about the energy used by office equipment in all power levels is important to improving program design and evaluation. This paper presents the results of a field study conducted during 2001 to measure the power levels of new monitors and personal computers. We measured off, on, and low-power levels in about 60 units manufactured since July 2000. The paper summarizes power data collected, explores differences within the sample (e.g., between CRT and LCD monitors), and discusses some issues that arise in m etering office equipment. We also present conclusions to help improve the success of future power management programs.Our findings include a trend among monitor manufacturers to provide a single very low low-power level, and the need to standardize methods for measuring monitor on power, to more accurately …

This paper presents the results from a joint research initiative between NASA Ames Research Center and Lawrence Berkeley National lab. The objective of the research is to produce activated carbon from life support wastes and to use the activated carbon to adsorb and chemically reduce the NO{sub x} and SO{sub 2} contained in incinerator flue gas. Inedible biomass waste from food production is the primary waste considered for conversion to activated carbon. Results to date show adsorption of both NO{sub x} and SO{sub 2} in activated carbon made from biomass. Conversion of adsorbed NO{sub x} to nitrogen has also been observed.

The primary objective of this study was to refine the conceptual groundwater flow model for the 200-West Area and vicinity. This is the second of two reports that combine to cover the 200 Area Plateau, an area that holds the largest inventory of radionuclide and chemical waste on the Hanford Site.

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Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In light of the fourth anniversary of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, which established Congress' expectation that IRS modernize to better meet taxpayer needs, GAO gave an overview of IRS's current performance and resources and then assessed the progress that IRS has made modernizing and the risks to continued progress. Overall, IRS has seen increased workload, decreased staffing, and significant changes in the allocation of resources between taxpayer assistance programs and its compliance and collection programs. Between 1995 and 2001, IRS's workload, measured by returns filed, increased by 10 percent while aggregate staffing declined by 14 percent. Over the same time, there was a significant internal reallocation of resources with a disproportionate decline in compliance and collection program staffing to accommodate more emphasis on taxpayer service, such as telephone assistance, and to information systems operation and investment. Electronic filing of returns increased but not enough to reduce paper returns sufficiently to free significant processing resources for use elsewhere. The reallocation of resources shows signs of beginning to produce more accurate service for taxpayers, but the compliance and collection programs have seen large …

Accurate predictions of a polymer component's functional lifetime at best arc tenuous when one has only relatively short term chemical or mechanical property data to extrapolate. We have analyzed a series of silica-filled siloxanes to determine the chemical and microstructural signatures of aging, and we are incorporating these data into rational methodologies for assessing a component's lifetime measured against as-designed engineering properties. We are monitoring changes in mechanical properties, crystallization kinetics, cross-link density changes, and motional dynamics with a variety of analysis methods: Modulated DSC, Dynamic Mechanical Analysis, and Solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Previous work has shown that the addition of phenyl side groups to polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymer chains reduces the rate and extent of crystallization of the co-polymer compared to that of pure PDMS. Crystallization has been observed in copolymer systems up to 6.5 mol % phenyl composition by DSC and up to 8 mol % phenyl by XRD. The PDMS-PDPS-silica composite materials studied here are silica reinforced random block copolymers consisting of dimethyl and diphenyl monomer units with 11.2 mol. % polydiphenylsiloxane. Based on this previous work, it is not expected that this material would exhibit crystallization in the polymer network; however, these silicones do, in fact, exhibit …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spent $21 billion in fiscal year 2001 to treat 3.8 million veterans--most of whom had service-connected disabilities or low incomes. Since 1997, VA has used the Veterans Equitable Resource Allocation (VERA) system to allocate most of its medical care appropriation. GAO found that VERA has had a substantial impact on network resource allocations and workloads. VERA shifted $921 million from networks primarily in the northeast and midwest to networks in the south and west in fiscal year 2001. VERA, along with other VA initiatives, has provided an incentive for networks to serve more veterans. In GAO's view, VERA's overall design is a reasonable approach to allocating resources according to workloads. It provides a predetermined dollar amount per veteran served to each of VA's 22 health care networks. This amount varies depending upon the health care needs of the veteran served and local cost differences. However, GAO identified weaknesses in VERA's implementation. First, VERA excludes about one fifth of VA's workload in determining each network's allocation. Second, VERA does not account well for cost differences among networks resulting from variation in their patients' …

Thin-disk laser configurations have recently been demonstrated at cw output povters exceeding 1 kW [1]. Thin-disk lasers enable the generation of high average power by minimizing the distance over which waste heat is transported. A disk-laser of transverse dimensions significantly larger than its thickness will sustain laser output with intensity proportional to the thermal flux it dissipates. The fracture strength of the laser material limits the maximum temperature difference of a credible design. Further increases in the heat dissipation capacity of a disk varies inversely with the disk thickness (t) thus, the average laser output intensity of a thin/disk laser scales as 1/t; that is, to maximize the output intensity we must use the thinnest possible disk that is consistent with the pump geometry. The main challenge for the laser designer is then to coerce a thin gain sample into absorbing pump power efficiently. For this purpose, use of a highly absorbing gain medium is desirable in combination with a pumping geometry that allows multi-passing of the pump light. An important feature of the thin-disk laser is that one-dimensional thermal gradients away from the edges are made to align with the extraction beam Thus, as long as pumping and cooling …