CRS Report for Congress entailing information about state charter school laws. Topics include, all 50 states.

The Clinton Administration is encouraging states and local educational agencies (LEAs) to administer new national tests to 4th-grade pupils in reading and 8th-grade pupils in mathematics each year beginning in 2000. Participation in the tests would be voluntary and would not affect a state or LEA’s eligibility for federal aid programs. These tests would be based on existing assessments that were developed with federal financial support. The federal government would oversee the development of the tests, paying the costs for this as well as technical assistance, and the initial round of test administration, using funds under the Fund for the Improvement of Education (FIE).

None

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether the board of an independent school district may hire as a teacher the spouse of a trustee (RQ-1075)

The dielectric wakefield transformer (DWT) is one route to practical high energy wakefield-based accelerators. Progress has been made in a number of areas relevant to the demonstration of this device. In this article we describe recent bench measurements and beam experiments using 7.8 and 15.6 GHz structures and discuss some remaining technical challenges in the development of the DWT.

One of the options to mitigate the effects of irradiation on reactor pressure vessels (RPVs) is to thermally anneal them to restore the toughness properties that have been degraded by neutron irradiation. Even though a postirradiation anneal may be deemed successful, a critical aspect of continued RPV operation is the rate of embrittlement upon reirradiation. There are insufficient data available to allow for verification of available models of reirradiation embrittlement or for the development of a reliable predictive methodology. This is especially true in the case of fracture toughness data. Under the U.S.-Russia Joint Coordinating Committee for Civilian Nuclear Reactor Safety (JCCCNRS), Working Group 3 on Radiation Embrittlement, Structural Integrity, and Life Extension of Reactor Vessels and Supports agreed to conduct a comparative study of annealing and reirradiation effects on RPV steels. The Working Group agreed that each side would irradiate, anneal, reirradiate (if feasible ), and test two materials of the other. Charpy V-notch (CVN) and tensile specimens were included. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) conducted such a program (irradiation and annealing, including static fracture toughness) with two weld metals representative of VVER-440 and VVER-1000 RPVs, while the Russian Research Center-Kurchatov Institute (RRC-KI) conducted a program (irradiation, annealing, reirradiation, …

This document describes the detailed contamination survey performed in the Shielded Materials Facility (SMF) South Cell and the four compartments used during the CsCl activities. Smears were obtained at each operating station in South Cell and analyzed at the 325 Building. The smear results indicate that the highest contamination levels are in Compartment 1 and South Cell proper, with significantly lower contamination levels measured in the other three compartments. Although some of the smears indicated the presence of alpha contamination, it will be shown that the source of the alpha contamination was cross-contamination during processing in the 325 Building hot cells and that the SMF is free of alpha contamination. The alpha-free status of South Cell is consistent with process knowledge of previous South Cell activities.

Relationships for estimating effectiveness factors for porous-solid-catalyzed fluid reactions can result from assuming approximations to temperature and concentration profiles. Approximations designed to simplify the outcome result in simple, explicit, analytic relationships for both isothermal and nonisothermal nth-order reaction systems. For isothermal systems, formulas developed predict effectiveness within 25% of the true isothermal effectiveness factors ({eta}`s) over the range 0.1 > {eta} > 0.99. For isothermal or endothermic reaction systems with {eta} > 0.65, errors are less than 10%. Even in the maximum-error region, estimates for endothermic systems are within a factor of two of those obtained by solution of the rigorous heat and mass transfer equations. For isothermal or endothermic systems with {eta} > 0.95, errors are less than 1%. Thus the formulas can also serve diagnostic uses that confirm presence or absence of significant internal heat or mass transport effects in porous reacting systems. Extension of the approach to non-nth-order reactions is possible; formulas are derived for simple isothermal and nonisothermal Langmuir-Hinshelwood reaction systems. Application of the work to exothermic reactions was not tested, but steeper gradients in such systems would tend to degrade accuracy of the relationships. The equations derived in this work are simpler and easier of …

A universal limitation of RF and imaging front-end sensors is that they easily produce data at a higher rate than any general-purpose computer can continuously handle. Therefore, Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a custom Reconfigurable Computing Array board to support a large variety of processing applications including wideband RF signals, LIDAR and multi-dimensional imaging. The boards design exploits three key features to achieve its performance. First, there are large banks of fast memory dedicated to each reconfigurable processor and also shared between pairs of processors. Second, there are dedicated data paths between processors, and from a processor to flexible I/O interfaces. Third, the design provides the ability to link multiple boards into a serial and/or parallel structure.

Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 173-303-640 specifies that corrosion protection must be designed into tank systems that treat or store dangerous wastes. Project W-320, Waste Retrieval Sluicing System (WRSS), utilizes underground encased waste transfer piping between tanks 241-C-106 and 241-AY-102. Corrosion protection is afforded to the encasements of the WRSS waste transfer piping through the application of earthen ionic currents onto the surface of the piping encasements. Cathodic protection is used in conjunction with the protective coatings that are applied upon the WRSS encasement piping. WRSS installed two new two rectifier systems (46 and 47) and modified one rectifier system (31). WAC 173-303-640 specifies that the proper operation of cathodic protection systems must be confirmed within six months after initial installation. The WRSS cathodic protection systems were energized to begin continuous operation on 5/5/98. Sixteen days after the initial steady-state start-up of the WRSS rectifier systems, the operational testing was accomplished with procedure OTP-320-006 Rev/Mod A-0. This operational test report documents the OTP-320-006 results and documents the results of configuration testing of integrated piping and rectifier systems associated with the W-320 cathodic protection systems.

Safe Pu management is an important and urgent task with profound environmental, national, and international security implications. Presidential Policy Directive 13 and analyses by scientific, technical, and international policy organizations brought about a focused effort within the Department of Energy (DOE) to identify and implement long-term disposition paths for surplus Pu. The principal goal is to render surplus Pu as inaccessible and unattractive for reuse in nuclear weapons as Pu in spent reactor fuel. In the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision for the Storage and Disposition of Weapons- Usable Fissile Materials (1997), DOE announced pursuit of two disposition technologies: (1) irradiation of Pu as MOX fuel in existing reactors and (2) immobilization of Pu into solid forms containing fission products as a radiation barrier. DOE chose an immobilization approach that includes �use of the can-in-canister option.. . for a portion of the surplus, non-pit Pu material.� In the can-in-canister approach, cans of glass or ceramic forms containing Pu are encapsulated within canisters of HLW glass. In support of the selection process, a technical evaluation of retrievability and recoverability of Pu from glass and ceramic forms by a host nation and by rogue nations or subnational groups was …

We present recent results of x-ray laser amplification of spontaneous emission in Ne-like and Ni-like transient collisional excitation schemes. The plasma formation, ionization and collisional excitation can be optimized using two laser pulses of 1 ns and 1 ps duration at table-top energies of 5 J in each beam. High gain of 35 cm{sup -1} has been measured on the 147 {Angstrom} 4d{r_arrow}4p J=0{r_arrow}1 transition of Ni-like Pd and is a direct consequence of the nonstationary population inversion produced by the high intensity picosecond pulse. We report the dependence of the x-ray laser line intensity on the laser plasma conditions and compare the experimental measurements with hydrodynamic and atomic kinetics simulations for Ne-like and Ni-like lasing.

The objectives of the program are to provide an improved thermal barrier coating (TBC) system with increased temperature capability and improved reliability relative to current state of the art TBC systems. The development of such a coating system is essential to the Advanced Turbine Systems (ATS) engine meeting its objectives. The base program consists of three phases: Phase 1, Program Planning -- Complete; Phase 2, Development; Phase 3, Selected Specimen -- Bench Test. Work is being performed in Phase 2 and 3 of the program.

The overall objective of this program was to develop regenerable sorbents for use in the temperature range of 343 to 538 C (650 to 1000 F) to remove hydrogen sulfide (H{sub 2}S) from coal-derived fuel gases in a fluidized-bed reactor. The goal was to develop sorbents that are capable of reducing the H{sub 2}S level in the fuel gas to less than 20 ppmv in the specified temperature range and pressures in the range of 1 to 20 atmospheres, with chemical characteristics that permit cyclic regeneration over many cycles without a drastic loss of activity, as well as physical characteristics that are compatible with the fluidized bed application.

The results of molecular dynamics (MD) displacement cascade simulations in bcc iron have been used to obtain effective cross sections for two measures of primary damage production: (1) the number of surviving point defects expressed as a fraction of the displacements calculated using the standard secondary displacement model of Norgett, Robinson, and Torrens (NRT), and (2) the fraction of the surviving interstitials contained in clusters that formed during the cascade event. Primary knockon atom spectra for iron obtained from the SPECTER code have been used to weight these MD-based damage production cross sections in order to obtain spectrally-averaged values for several locations in commercial fission reactors and materials test reactors. An evaluation of these results indicates that neutron energy spectrum differences between the various enviromnents do not lead to significant differences between the average primary damage formation parameters. In particular, the defect production cross sections obtained for PWR and BWR neutron spectra were not significantly different. The variation of the defect production cross sections as a function of depth into the reactor pressure vessel wall is used as a sample application of the cross sections. A slight difference between the attenuation behavior of the PWR and BWR was noted; this …

None

None

None

There is no general federal statute proscribing criminal attempts; the federal criminal statutes are written in such a manner so as to include only the attempt to commit a specific substantive crime or substantive offense. Therefore, a specific in intent crime would require that the offender specifically intended to devise a scheme intended to commit the crime. The government, on the other hand, must present proof by inferences from the circumstances that the offender possessed the specific intent to commit the crime. This approach to the law has led to a patchwork of attempt statutes- leaving gaps in coverage, and failing to satisfactorily define exactly what constitutes an attempt in all circumstances an attempt in all circumstances. It is also the intent of the legislation to fill the gaps found in the current attempt statutes. This report will be updated if legislative activity warrant.