A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO determined the potential cost of equipping and maintaining the capability of cities to respond to a terrorist incident involving a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear device (CBRN), focusing on the: (1) views of federal, state, and local officials on equipment they believed would provide various levels of capability to respond to a CBRN incident; and (2) potential procurement and sustainment costs of these items."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed its prior work and observations on federal efforts to combat terrorism, focusing on: (1) the foreign- and domestic-origin terrorism threats, as GAO understands them from intelligence analyses; (2) the growth in federal programs to provide training and equipment to local first responders--police, fire, and emergency medical services--and the expansion of the federal response elements and teams to deal with a possible chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) terrorist attack; and (3) steps the executive branch has taken to better manage federal efforts to combat terrorism and some opportunities GAO sees for additional focus and direction."

Commensurate scale relations are perturbative QCD predictions which relate observable to observable at fixed relative scale, such as the ''generalized Crewther relation'', which connects the Bjorken and Gross-Llewellyn Smith deep inelastic scattering sum rules to measurements of the e{sup +}e{sup {minus}} annihilation cross section. We show how conformal symmetry provides a template for such QCD predictions, providing relations between observables which are present even in theories which are not scale invariant. All non-conformal effects are absorbed by fixing the ratio of the respective momentum transfer and energy scales. In the case of fixed-point theories, commensurate scale relations relate both the ratio of couplings and the ratio of scales as the fixed point is approached. In the case of the {alpha}{sub V} scheme defined from heavy quark interactions, virtual corrections due to fermion pairs are analytically incorporated into the Gell-Mann Low function, thus avoiding the problem of explicitly computing and resuming quark mass corrections related to the running of the coupling. Applications to the decay width of the Z boson, the BFKL pomeron, and virtual photon scattering are discussed.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO examined the type and extent of consumer education that occurred since the revised children's sleepwear safety standard went into effect in January 1997, focusing on three voluntary point-of-sale practices that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and others recognize as important for informing consumers about the new standard."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Department of Transportation's (DOT) new rule on credit assistance for surface transportation projects. GAO noted that: (1) the final rule would implement the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act of 1998 to provide credit assistance to surface transportation projects; (2) the Act authorizes DOT to provide secured loans, lines of credit, and loan guarantees to public and private project sponsors of eligible surface transportation projects; and (3) DOT complied with applicable requirements in promulgating the rule."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) new rule on reducing interstate ozone transport of nitrogen oxides. GAO noted that: (1) in accordance with section 126 of the Clean Air Act, the rule contains EPA's final action on petitions filed by eight northeastern states seeking to mitigate significant transport of nitrogen oxides, one of the main precursors of ground-level ozone, across state lines; (2) in the rule, EPA determines that portions of six of the petitions are technically meritorious; (3) those portions will be automatically deemed granted or denied at certain later dates pending actions by the states and EPA regarding state submittals in response to the final nitrogen oxides state implementation plan call; and (4) EPA complied with applicable requirements in promulgating the rule."

This is the final report in which effects of strain-rate, temperature, and stress-state on the yield stress and the strain hardening behavior of many common steels used in automobile construction were investigated. The yield and flow stresses were found to exhibit very high rate sensitivities for most of the steels while the hardening rates were found to be insensitive to strain rate and temperature at lower temperatures or at higher strain rates. This behavior is consistent with the observation that overcoming the intrinsic Peierls stress is shown to be the rate-controlling mechanism in these materials at low temperatures. The dependence of the yield stress on temperature and strain rate was found to decrease while the strain hardening rate increased. The Mechanical Threshold Stress (MTS) model was adopted to model the stress-strain behavior of the steels. Parameters for the constitutive relations were derived for the MTS model and also for the Johnson-Cook (JC) and the Zerilli-Armstrong (ZA) models. The results of this study substantiate the applicability of these models for describing the high strain-rate deformation of these materials. The JC and ZA models, however, due to their use of a power strain hardening law were found to yield constitutive relations for …

The goal of this research is the understanding of elementary chemical and physical processes important in the combustion of fossil fuels. Interest centers on reactions involving short-lived chemical intermediates and their properties. High-resolution, high-sensitivity, laser absorption methods are augmented by high temperature flow-tube reaction kinetics studies with mass-spectrometric sampling. These experiments provide information on the energy levels, structures and reactivity of molecular free radical species and, in turn, provide new tools for the study of energy flow and chemical bond cleavage in the radicals in chemical systems. The experimental work is supported by theoretical and computational work using time-dependent quantum wavepacket calculations that provide insights into energy flow between the vibrational modes of the molecule. The work of group members Fockenberg and Muckerman is described in separate abstracts of this volume.

The goal of this research is the understanding of elementary chemical and physical processes important in the combustion of fossil fuels. Interest centers on reactions and properties of short-lived chemical intermediates. High-resolution, high-sensitivity, laser absorption methods are augmented by high-temperature, flow-tube reaction kinetics studies with mass-spectrometric sampling. These experiments provide information on the energy levels, structures and reactivity of molecular free radical species and, in turn, provide new tools for the study of energy flow and chemical bond cleavage in radicals involved in chemical systems. The experimental work is supported by theoretical studies using time-dependent quantum wavepacket calculations, which provide insight into energy flow among the vibrational modes of polyatomic molecules and interference effects in multiple-surface dynamics.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) oversight of and the funding for capital development at general aviation airports, focusing on: (1) the adequacy of FAA's oversight and enforcement of general aviation airports' compliance with federal requirements related to the use of their land; and (2) how general aviation airports' planned capital development costs compare with funding levels."

The performance of the Beamlet laser with one dimensional smoothing by spectral dispersion (1D SSD) implemented is investigated. Measurements of the near field beam quality, nonlinear breakup, and transmission through spatial filter pinholes show a modest effect only at large SSD divergence. No measurable effect was found at the divergence level planned for indirect drive ignition experiments. The efficiency of conversion to the third harmonic was also measured with SSD present and found to be somewhat larger than expected from an ideal plane wave model.

A PC-based computer program was created for facility safety and source term analysis at Hanford The program has been successfully applied to mechanistic prediction of source terms from chemical reactions in underground storage tanks, hydrogen combustion in double contained receiver tanks, and proccss evaluation including the potential for runaway reactions in spent nuclear fuel processing. Model features include user-defined facility room, flow path geometry, and heat conductors, user-defined non-ideal vapor and aerosol species, pressure- and density-driven gas flows, aerosol transport and deposition, and structure to accommodate facility-specific source terms. Example applications are presented here.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed on the impact of payment reforms in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (BBA) on the Medicare Choice program."

Consider an axisymmetric equilibrium in a configuration where the current density j has only r and z components, and the magnetic field, accordingly, has only the {var_phi} component. Such configurations are of interest for magnetized target fusion (MTF) [1]: they include a simple diffuse Z pinch configuration and a MAGO configuration. Both can be, in principle, imploded by conducting shells to create a plasma with fusion-grade parameters. To be of interest for fusion, these configurations have to provide MHD equilibria acceptable from the viewpoint of confinement requirements. In the present note the authors analyze possible equilibria and show that only equilibria where the plasma pressure is a function of a radial coordinate (no axial dependence) are possible. A framework for such an analysis is outlined, e.g., in Shafranov's survey in ``Reviews of Plasma Physics''. In an arbitrary geometry the analysis may be quite cumbersome. What the authors show here is, that in the geometry of the type of an axisymmetric Z pinch equilibrium analysis is reduced to a set of simple algebraic relations, and allows one to come to very robust and reliable conclusions with regard to the possible equilibria.

This document presents data from Savannah River Site routine effluent monitoring and environmental surveillance programs.

The mission at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is focused primarily on support of the national defense, nonproliferation, and environmental cleanup. SRS-through its prime operating contractor, Westinghouse Savannah River Company-continues to maintain a comprehensive environmental monitoring program.

When one considers the possibility of clandestine production of nuclear materials, one must consider the nature of the state. A Nuclear Weapon State (NWS) already has production facilities, and even though these might be safeguarded, the NWS could more easily hide the activities than could a Non-Nuclear Weapon State (NNWS). In this paper, some of the properties of production facilities are discussed in relation to how this would relate to vulnerability to detection. The observable and methods of detection are discussed, as well as the possibility that significant help by another country could totally eliminate one or more of the steps needed for a complete production cycle.

A relativistic electron beam pulse of high current density will heat a thin target plate to a plasma state as it traverses. The gradient of plasma temperature--Te is predominantly radial, and the gradient of plasma density--ne is predominantly axial. The cross product of these terms is significant at the vacuum-to-metal interface through which the beam enters. This cross product is a thermal source of magnetization, which can be much larger than the vacuum magnetic field of the electron beam, and it is of opposite polarity. The thermal energy density in the target can be hundreds of times larger than the energy density of the vacuum magnetic field of the beam. If the nose of the electron beam current pulse rises linearly with time then the thermal magnetization increases as time squared. Heat pushes electrons axially from the interior of the plate to the surfaces, and radially away from the beam axis. The electric field that arises from this effect is essentially the negative of the pressure gradient, it points outward.

This paper describes work in progress to develop a standard for interoperability among high-performance scientific components. This research stems from growing recognition that the scientific community must better manage the complexity of multidisciplinary simulations and better address scalable performance issues on parallel and distributed architectures. Driving forces are the need for fast connections among components that perform numerically intensive work and parallel collective interactions among components that use multiple processes or threads. This paper focuses on the areas we believe are most crucial for such interactions, namely an interface definition language that supports scientific abstractions for specifying component interfaces and a ports connection model for specifying component interactions.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO assessed the impact that delays in relocating utilities are having on the delivery and cost of federal-aid highway and bridge projects, focusing on the: (1) extent to which states are experiencing such delays and the causes and impacts of the delays; (2) number of states that are compensating construction contractors for the added costs incurred on their projects because of untimely relocations by utility companies; (3) available technologies, such as subsurface utility engineering; and (4) mitigation methods that states are using, such as incentives, penalties, and litigation, to encourage or compel cooperation by utility companies that are relocating utilities on federal-aid highway and bridge projects."

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