Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed its reviews of agency compliance with a number of procedural and analytical requirements in federal rulemaking."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Department of the Treasury's progress in implementing the cross-service provision of the Debt Collection Improvement Act (DCIA) of 1996, focusing on the: (1) status of nontax delinquent debts that federal agencies have referred to Treasury for cross-servicing and Treasury's actions to encourage these referrals; (2) Treasury's cross-servicing process for collecting referred debts; (3) Treasury's method for allocating debts to private collection agencies (PCA) for collection; and (4) Treasury's estimated cross-servicing costs and related fees earned on collections."

The intense ion beams in a heavy ion Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) driver and fusion chamber are non-neutral plasmas whose dynamics are largely dominated by space charge. We propose to develop a ''source-to-target'' Heavy Ion Fusion (HIF) beam simulation capability: a description of the kinetic behavior of this complex, nonlinear system which is both integrated and detailed. We will apply this new capability to further our understanding of key scientific issues in the physics of ion beams for IFE. The simulations will entail self-consistent field descriptions that require interprocessor communication, but are scalable and will run efficiently on terascale architectures. This new capability will be based on the integration of three types of simulations, each requiring terascale computing: (1) simulations of acceleration and confinement of the space-charge-dominated ion beams through the driver (accelerator, pulse compression line, and final focusing system) which accurately describe their dynamics, including emittance growth (phase-space dilution) effects; these are particle-in-cell (PIC) models; (2) electromagnetic (EM) and magnetoinductive (Darwin) simulations which describe the beam and the fusion chamber environment, including multibeam, neutralization, stripping, beam and plasma ionization processes, and return current effects; and (3) highly detailed simulations (6f, multispecies PIC, continuum Vlasov), which can examine electron effects …

Report documenting Formal Design Review conducted on portable exhausters used to support rotary mode core sampling of Hanford underground radioactive waste tanks with focus on Safety Class design features and control requirements for flammable gas environment operation and air discharge permitting compliance.

This report brief provides an overview of legislation to reauthorize the ESEA, Goals 2000, ERDDIA, and NESA.

This Training Implementation Matrix (TIM) describes how the Spent Nuclear Fuel Project (SNFP) implements the requirements of DOE Order 5480.20A, Personnel Selection, Qualification, and Training Requirements for Reactor and Non-Reactor Nuclear Facilities. The TIM defines the application of the selection, qualification, and training requirements in DOE Order 5480.20A at the SNFP. The TIM also describes the organization, planning, and administration of the SNFP training and qualification program(s) for which DOE Order 5480.20A applies. Also included is suitable justification for exceptions taken to any requirements contained in DOE Order 5480.20A. The goal of the SNFP training and qualification program is to ensure employees are capable of performing their jobs safely and efficiently.

This sampling and analysis plan (SAP) identifies characterization objectives pertaining to sample collection, laboratory analytical evaluation, and reporting requirements for vapor samples from the primary ventilation systems of the AN, AP, AW, and AY/AZ tank farms. Sampling will be performed in accordance with Data Quality Objectives for Regulatory Requirements for Hazardous and Radioactive Air Emissions Sampling and Analysis (Air DQO) (Mulkey 1999). The sampling will verify if current air emission estimates used in the permit application are correct and provide information for future air permit applications. Vapor samples will be obtained from tank farm ventilation systems, downstream from the tanks and upstream of any filtration. Samples taken in support of the DQO will consist of SUMMA{trademark} canisters, triple sorbent traps (TSTs), sorbent tube trains (STTs), polyurethane foam (PUF) samples. Particulate filter samples and tritium traps will be taken for radiation screening to allow the release of the samples for analysis. The following sections provide the general methodology and procedures to be used in the preparation, retrieval, transport, analysis, and reporting of results from the vapor samples.

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The 2-D structure of plasma density turbulence in a magnetically confined plasma can potentially be measured using a Thomson scattering system made from components of the Nova laser of LLNL. For a plasma such as NSTX at PPPL, the laser would form an {approximately}10 cm wide plane sheet beam passing vertically through the chamber across the magnetic field. The scattered light would be imaged by a CCD camera viewing along the direction of the magnetic field. The laser energy required to make 2-D images of density turbulence is in the range 1--3 kJ, which can potentially be obtained from a set of frequency-doubled Nd:Glass amplifiers with diameters in the range of 208--315 mm. A laser pulse width of 100 nsec would be short enough to capture the highest spatial frequency components of the expected density fluctuations.

A fully kinetic assessment of the stability properties of toroidal drift modes has been obtained for a case for the Large Helical Device (LHD) [A.Iiyoshi, et al., Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research, 1998, Nucl.Fusion 39, 1245 (1999)]. This calculation retains the important effects in the linearized gyrokinetic equation, using the lowest-order ''ballooning representation'' for high toroidal mode number instabilities in the electrostatic limit. Results for toroidal drift waves destabilized by trapped particle dynamics and ion temperature gradients are presented, using three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics equilibria reconstructed from experimental measurements. The effects of helically-trapped particles and helical curvature are investigated.

Wire array Z-pinches on the Z accelerator provide the most intense laboratory source of soft x-rays in the world. The unique combination of a highly-Planckian radiation source with high x-ray production efficiency (15% wall plug), large x-ray powers and energies ( >150 TW, {ge}1 MJ in 7 ns), large characteristic hohlraum volumes (0.5 to >10 cm{sup 3}), and long pulse-lengths (5 to 20 ns) may make Z-pinches a good match to the requirements for driving high-yield scale ICF capsules with adequate radiation symmetry and margin. The Z-pinch driven hohlraum approach of Hammer and Porter [Phys.Plasmas, 6, 2129(1999)] may provide a conservative and robust solution to the requirements for high yield, and is currently being studied on the Z accelerator. This paper describes a multiple region, 0-d hohlraum energetic model for Z-pinch driven hohlraums in four configurations. The authors observe consistency between the models and the measured x-ray powers and hohlraum wall temperatures to within {+-}20% in flux, for the four configurations.

This Record of Technical Change updates the technical information included in ''Corrective Action Investigation Plan for Corrective Action Unit 261: Test Cell A Leachfield System, Nevada Test Site, Nevada,'' Revision 0, DOE/NV--515.

Approximately 800,000 balloon-borne radiosondes are hand-launched each year, a cost and labor-intensive procedure. Development of a low-cost Automatic Radiosonde Launcher would allow the manual procedure to be replaced with a reliable and less expensive process. Balloon-borne radiosondes provide essential meteorological data used by forecasters and researchers around the globe. The National Weather service alone launches tens of thousands of sondes from sites across the US. Although worldwide launching of radiosondes has been done for many years, it remains a labor intensive and therefore expensive operation. Using its own funding and, more recently with the help of a Phase I SBIR grant, Visidyne, Inc. has begun investigating the feasibility of building an Automatic Radiosonde Launcher (ARL) that can be built at a cost that will be acceptable to the commercial marketplace. That work has led to the issuing of four patents covering important innovations that will allow us to meet that goal. Under the recent Phase I effort, solutions to many of the key problems have been tested in the laboratory and in real-world demonstrations in the field. The balloon filling, battery wetting, and launch release mechanisms were designed, built, and tested. A breadboard launcher was constructed and tested to prove …

Development of a novel metal matrix composite based on the Al-B alloy system has been undertaken. Preparation of this discontinuously reinforced material is based on the precipitation of high aspect ratio AlB{sub 2} from an Al-B alloy. This paper describes a number of efforts forced on preparing high volume fractions (> 30 v%) of AlB{sub 2} in aluminum. New insights into the behavior of the Al-B alloys system allowed this effort to be successful.

High aspect ratio structures are often present in MEMS devices and EPON SU-8 is often used to produce such structures because of its low cost. It is essential to know the mechanical properties of SU-8 for producing reliable MEMS products. However, the mechanical properties of SU-8 may depend on the manufacturing process and the size of the structure, which is in the micron domain. Hence, one needs to test specimens that are similar in size to MEMS structures to determine if the mechanical properties change with processing protocol. In this work, the authors applied the newly developed technique SIEM (Speckle Interferometry with Electron Microscopy) to the determination of SU-8's mechanical properties.

Bimonthly newsletter from DOE's Office of Industrial Technologies to promote the use of energy-efficient industrial systems.

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Automatic differentiation is a powerful technique for evaluating derivatives of functions given in the form of a high-level programming language such as Fortran, C, or C++. The program is treated as a potentially very long sequence of elementary statements to which the chain rule of differential calculus is applied over and over again. Combining automatic differentiation and the organizational structure of toolkits for parallel scientific computing provides a mechanism for evaluating derivatives by exploiting mathematical insight on a higher level. In these toolkits, algorithmic structures such as BLAS-like operations, linear and nonlinear solvers, or integrators for ordinary differential equations can be identified by their standardized interfaces and recognized as high-level mathematical objects rather than as a sequence of elementary statements. In this note, the differentiation of a linear solver with respect to some parameter vector is taken as an example. Mathematical insight is used to reformulate this problem into the solution of multiple linear systems that share the same coefficient matrix but differ in their right-hand sides. The experiments reported here use ADIC, a tool for the automatic differentiation of C programs, and PETSC, an object-oriented toolkit for the parallel solution of scientific problems modeled by partial differential equations.

Tiled displays are an emerging technology for constructing high-resolution semi-immersive visualization environments capable of presenting high-resolution images from scientific simulation [EVL, PowerWall]. In this way, they complement other technologies such as the CAVE [Cruz-Niera92] or ImmersaDesk, [Czernuszenko97], which by design give up pure resolution in favor of width of view and stereo. However, the largest impact may well be in using large-format tiled displays as one of possibly multiple displays in building ''information'' or ''active'' spaces that surround the user with diverse ways of interacting with data and multimedia information flows [IPSI, Childers00, Raskar98, ROME, Stanford, UNC]. These environments may prove to be the ultimate successor of the desktop metaphor for information technology work.

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The recently proposed plane-to-vortex beam optical transformation is discussed. The matrix relation for the inverse (vortex-to-plane) transformation is presented. The requirements are formulated in terms of the Courant-Snyder (Twiss) parameters.

A study was performed to compare the effectiveness of several advanced ultrasonic techniques when used to determine the strength of diffusion bonded beryllium-copper, which heretofore have each been applied to only a few material systems. The use of integrated backscatter calculations, frequency domain reflection coefficients, and time-of-flight variance was compared in their ability to characterize the bond strength in a series of beryllium-copper diffusion bond samples having a wide variation in bond quality. Correlation of integrated backscatter calculations and time-of-flight variance with bond strength was good. Some correlation of the slope of the frequency based reflection coefficient was shown for medium and high strength bonds, while its Y-intercept showed moderate correlation for all bond strengths.