Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Energy's (DOE) complex of research and nuclear facilities is not inspected or licensed by an independent external regulator, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Instead, DOE and its predecessors have, since 1946, been granted legislative authority to self-regulate nuclear and worker safety in the department's facilities. DOE officials told GAO that (1) the department's current position on external regulation is "neutral" because the Secretary has insufficient information on which to make a decision; (2) another study is needed to develop data on the costs and benefits of making the transition to, and operating under, external regulation, and (3) a realistic implementation plan cannot be developed for the six to nine months DOE estimates the study will take. On the other hand, NRC and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) report that they are prepared to begin regulating the department's 10 science laboratories. The cost of upgrading DOE facilities to regulator standards may not be significant for a variety of reasons. First, NRC concluded from its simulations that few changes to DOE facilities are needed to meet it's licensing requirements. Second, NRC stated that …

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To meet long-standing concerns about the Department of Defense's (DOD) organization and management of national security space activities, Congress chartered the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization to study the organization and management of space activities that support U.S. national security interests and make recommendations for improvements. DOD has decided to take actions related to 10 of the commission's 13 recommendations. These include recommendations for organizational changes aimed at consolidating some activities, changing chains of command, opening lines of communications, and modifying policies to achieve greater responsibility and accountability. Many changes have been implemented within the last few months, and thus related processes and procedures have not been completed. As a result, it is too early to determine whether these changes will enable DOD to promote and protect U.S. interests in space more effectively. Moreover, DOD has not yet completed plans for achieving some long-range goals, such as developing a cadre of space professionals and integrating military and intelligence space activities. The Secretary of Defense chose not to implement three of the commission's recommendations and is instead (1) opting to establish a focal …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "During World War I, the U.S. Army operated a large research facility to develop and test chemical weapons and explosives in the area that became the Spring Valley neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Buried ordnance, discovered there in 1993, led to the designation by the Department of Defense (DOD) of 61 acres as a formerly used defense site. Through fiscal year 2001, DOD had spent over $50 million to identify and remove hazards at the site. The government entities involved have identified and removed a large number of hazards, but the number remaining is unknown. The health risks influencing cleanup activities at Spring Valley are the possibility of injury or death from exploding or leaking ordnance and containers of chemical warfare agents and potential long-term health problems from exposure to arsenic-contaminated soil. As of April 2002, the U.S. Army estimated that the remaining cleanup activities would cost $7.1 million and take 5 years, but these estimates are unreliable. This testimony summarized a June report (See GAO-02-556)."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In examining the efforts of the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation to ensure that recipients corrected single audit report findings, GAO found that each agency had procedures for obtaining and distributing the audit reports to appropriate officials for action. However, they often did not issue the required written management decisions or have documentary evidence of their evaluations of and conclusions on recipients' actions to correct the audit findings. In addition, program managers did not summarize and communicate information on single audit results and recipient actions to correct audit findings to agency management."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Courts Administration Act of 1992 requires GAO to review certain aspects of the Judicial Survivors' Annuities System (JSAS), one of several survivor benefit plans applicable to federal employees. JSAS provides annuities to surviving spouses and dependent children of deceased Supreme Court Justices, judges of the United States, and other participating judicial officials. For the 3 years covered by GAO's review, the judges' contributions represented more than 50 percent of the JSAS normal costs for fiscal year 1999, but less than 50 percent for fiscal years 2000 and 2001. To cover 50 percent of JSAS estimated future normal costs, the judges' contributions would need to increase by 0.1 percentage point above the 2.2 percent of salaries paid by retired judges. However, increasing required contributions could reduce the judges' rate of participation even though increasing participation was one of the main reasons for enhancing JSAS benefits and reducing judges' contributions in 1992."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spent $500 million and the Department of Defense (DOD) spent $240 million for medical and surgical supplies in fiscal year 2001. Since the 1980s, To achieve greater efficiencies through improved acquisition processes and increased sharing of medical resources, VA and DOD signed a memorandum of agreement in 1999 to combine their buying power. VA and DOD saved $170 in 2001 by jointly procuring pharmaceuticals, by agreeing on particular drugs to be purchased, and contracting with the manufacturers for discounts based on their combined larger volume. VA and DOD have not awarded joint national contracts for medical and surgical supplies as envisioned by their memorandum of agreement, and it is unlikely that the two departments will have joint national contracts for supplies anytime soon. However, a few VA and DOD facilities have yielded modest savings through local joint contracting agreements. The lack of progress have made in jointly contracting for medical and surgical supplies has, in part, been the result of their different approaches to standardizing medical and surgical supplies. Other impediments to joint purchasing have been incomplete procurement data and the inability …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Commercial Activities Panel is a congressionally mandated panel to study, and make recommendations for improving, the policies and procedures governing the transfer of commercial activities from government to contractor personnel. The growing controversy surrounding competitions under the Office of Management and Budget's Circular A-76 to determine whether the government should obtain commercially available goods and services from the public or private sectors led to the establishment of this Panel. In establishing the Panel, several steps were taken to ensure representation from all major stakeholders as well as to ensure a fair and balanced process. To ensure a broad range of views on the Panel, a Federal Register notice was used to seek suggestions for the Panel's composition. As the Panel began its work, it recognized the need for a set of principles for sourcing decisions. These principles provide for an assessment of what does or does not work in the current A-76 process and provide a framework for identifying needed changes. Many of the Panel's recommendations can be accomplished administratively under existing law, and the Panel recommends that they be implemented as soon as practical. The Panel …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO's review of the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation efforts to ensure that federal award recipients corrected single audit findings found that required documentation of management decisions and the evaluation of and conclusions on the adequacy of recipient actions to correct single audit findings was lacking. The Federal Audit Clearinghouse received 34,000 single audit reports during calendar year 2000 with six thousand of these containing audit findings. Despite these impressive figures, questions exist about whether (1) all required single audits are performed, (2) federal award recipients are adequately monitoring subrecipent use of federal awards and the correction of single audit findings, and (3) the audits are performed in accordance with government auditing standards."

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) aims to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in order to ''prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system'' and promote sustainable development. The Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in 1997 and appears likely to be ratified by 2002 despite the US withdrawing, aims to provide means to achieve this objective. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is one of three ''flexibility mechanisms'' in the Protocol, the other two being Joint Implementation (JI) and Emissions Trading (ET). These mechanisms allow flexibility for Annex I Parties (industrialized countries) to achieve reductions by extra-territorial as well as domestic activities. The underlying concept is that trade and transfer of credits will allow emissions reductions at least cost. Since the atmosphere is a global, well-mixed system, it does not matter where greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. The CDM allows Annex I Parties to meet part of their emissions reductions targets by investing in developing countries. CDM projects must also meet the sustainable development objectives of the developing country. Further criteria are that Parties must participate voluntarily, that emissions reductions are ''real, measurable and long-term'', and that they are additional to those that would have occurred anyway. …

The sensitivity of the release of radionuclides from the engineered barrier system in the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository to the solubility of uranium is investigated. Factors ranging from 0.1 up to 100 were applied to the nominal uranium solubility assumed in one of the TSPA models used in support of the site recommendation for the repository. At times earlier than about 50,000 years, the release rate of uranium is proportional to the change in the solubility. By 100,000 years, the proportionality continues to hold when the solubility is reduced, but when the solubility is increased, the release rate changes by a factor less than the factor applied to the solubility. At times beyond about 300,000 years, when the solubility is varied from 0.1 to 100 times its nominal value, the release rate changes by less than a factor of 20. Over the same range of changes in the uranium solubility, changes in the release rates of uranium decay products are less than a factor of three. Because uranium and its decay products make relatively small contributions to the dose rate, the changes in the dose rate at a well located 20 km from the repository are estimated to be less …

When evaluating waste form performance, the term ''durability'' often appears in casual discourse, but in the technical literature, the focus is often on waste form ''degradation'' in terms of mass lost per unit area per unit time. Waste form degradation plays a key role in developing models of the long-term performance in a repository environment, but other factors also influence waste form performance. These include waste form geometry; density, porosity, and cracking; the presence of cladding; in-package chemistry feedback; etc. The paper proposes a formal definition of waste form ''durability'' which accounts for these effects. Examples from simple systems as well as from complex models used in the Total System Performance Assessment of Yucca Mountain are provided. The application of ''durability'' in the selection of bounding models is also discussed.

The Seiberg-Witten map for noncommutative Yang-Mills theories is studied and methods for its explicit construction are discussed which are valid for any gauge group. In particular the use of the evolution equation is described in some detail and its relation to the cohomological approach is elucidated. Cohomological methods which are applicable to gauge theories requiring the Batalin-Vilkoviskii antifield formalism are briefly mentioned. Also, the analogy of the Weyl-Moyal star product with the star product of opestring field theory and possible ramifications of this analogy are briefly mentioned.

A second-order response matrix method is developed for solving the diffusion equation in a coarse-mesh grid. In this method, the problem domain is divided into a grid of coarse meshes (nodes) of the size of a fuel assembly. Then, by using the fact that all nodes have the same eigenvalue, an equation is developed for the node interface current to flux ratio. The fine-mesh solution in the domain is then obtained by evaluating perturbation expressions for the core eigenvalue and the flux with the node interface current to flux ratios and the precomputed Green's functions for the unique assemblies in the system. The Green's functions and the perturbation expressions for the eigenvalue and flux are based on a high-order boundary condition perturbation method developed recently. Two example problems are used to assess the accuracy of the new method.

The Seiberg-Witten map for noncommutative Yang-Mills theories is studied and methods for its explicit construction are discussed which are valid for any gauge group. In particular the use of the evolution equation is described in some detail and its relation to the cohomological approach is elucidated. Cohomological methods which are applicable to gauge theories requiring the Batalin-Vilkoviskii antifield formalism are briefly mentioned. Also, the analogy of the Weyl-Moyal star product with the star product of opestring field theory and possible ramifications of this analogy are briefly mentioned.

The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether nitrated organic compounds could be formed during operation of the Caustic-Side Solvent Extraction (CSSX) process, and whether such compounds would present a safety concern. The CSSX process was developed to remove cesium from alkaline high-level salt waste stored at the US Department of Energy Savannah River Site (SRS). The solvent is composed of the cesium extractant calix[4]arene-bis-(4-tert-octylbenzo-crown-6) (BOBCalixC6), a fluorinated alcohol phase modifier, tri-n-octylamine (TOA), and an isoparaffinic diluent (Iospar{reg_sign}). During the CSSX process, the solvent is expected to be exposed to high concentrations of nitrate and nitrite dissolved in the alkaline waste feed. The solvent will also be exposed to dilute (50 mM) nitric acid solutions containing low concentrations of nitrite during scrubbing, followed by stripping with 1 mM nitric acid. The solvent is expected to last for one year of plant operation, and the temperatures the solvent may experience during the process could range from as low as 15 C to as high as 35 C. Excursions from standard process conditions could result in the solvent experiencing higher temperatures, as well as concentrations of nitrate, nitrite, and most importantly nitric acid, that exceed normal operating conditions. Accordingly, conditions may …

The TRIUMF/ISAC facility, now a world leader in rare isotope production and acceleration, is constructing ISAC-II [1, 2], that will allow the acceleration of ion beams with 3 {le} A/q {le} 7 to an energy of at least 6.5 MeV/u for masses up to 150. The upgrade will include the addition of a superconducting heavy-ion linac delivering an effective voltage of 43 MV. The first order design of the new transfer lines and post-accelerator have been optimized to provide simultaneous acceleration of several charge states (multicharge). The quarter wave resonators providing the acceleration have inherent rf electric and magnetic asymmetric components that complicate multi-charge acceleration and can lead to transverse emittance growth. In particular we report the realistic field simulations of the medium beta section of the SC-DTL for multi-charge acceleration.

The technique of using a nsec prepulse to create and ionize the plasma followed by a psec pulse to heat the plasma has enabled us to achieve saturated laser output for low-Z neon-like and nickel-like ions driven by small lasers with less than ten joules of energy. In this work we model recent experiments done using the COMET laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to illuminate slab targets of Pd up to 1.25 cm long with a 2 joule, 600 ps prepulse followed 700 psec later by a 6 joule, 6 psec drive pulse. The experiments measure the two-dimensional near-field and far-field laser patterns for the 14.7 nm Ni-like Pd x-ray laser line. This line has already demonstrated saturated output. The experiments are modeled using the LASNEX code to calculate the hydrodynamic evolution of the plasma and provide the temperatures and densities to the CRETIN code, which then does the kinetics calculations to determine the gain. Using a ray tracing code to calculate the near and far-field patterns, the simulations are then compared with experiments. We also present several new schemes that we are modeling. The first scheme is Pd-like Nd that has a promising 5d-5p laser line near 24.3 …

We have studied the non-ideal propagation of detonation waves in LX-10 and in the insensitive explosive TATB. Explosively-driven, 5.8-mm-diameter, 0.125-mm-thick aluminum flyer plates were used to initiate 38-mm-diameter, hemispherical samples of LX-10 pressed to a density of 1.86 g/cm{sup 3} and of TATB at a density of 1.80 g/cm{sup 3}. The TATB powder was a grade called ultrafine (UFTATB), having an arithmetic mean particle diameter of about 8-10 {micro}m and a specific surface area of about 4.5 m{sup 2}/g. Using PMMA as a transducer, output pressure was measured at 5 discrete points on the booster using a Fabry-Perot velocimeter. Breakout time was measured on a line across the booster with a streak camera. Each of the experimental geometries was calculated using the Ignition and Growth Reactive Flow Model, the JWL++ Model and the Programmed Burn Model. Boosters at both ambient and cold (-20 C and -54 C) temperatures have been experimentally and computationally studied. A comparison of experimental and modeling results is presented.

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This report provides information about the Constitutional Principles and Federal Statutes on Child Pornography. Child pornography is material that visually depicts sexual conduct by children.

This report is categorized into four categories: (I) Passenger Rail Service Deficits Prior to Amtrak, (II) Original Expectations for Amtrak: Administration, (III) Early Returns on Amtrak's Progress Toward Profitability, (IV) Have the Original Pre-Conditions for Amtrak Profitability Been Met?

The principal aim of this effort is to develop models of long-term metal waste form (MWF) degradation that are credible, mechanistically based, and empirically calibrated. Utilizing new experimental data and analyses, this paper outlines an updated approach and summarizes the progress made. The current modeling approach emphasizes the analysis of constituent release data from immersion tests. A significant amount of recently obtained immersion test data is described. Test solutions included both mild (well-water), and aggressive (high-chloride and strongly acidic) environments. In addition to predominant constituents Fe, Zr, Cr,, and Ni, MWF test samples included: U, Pu, Tc, and Np. Guided by analysis of new immersion test data, a mechanistic model has been developed that describes the time dependence of MWF corrosion leading to passivation. A common functional form relates MWF degradation from different passivating solution environments via scale factors for magnitude and passivation time. Passivation is identified as the most important factor governing long-term durability, along with the long-term stability of oxide barrier layers that cause passivation. Experimental data demonstrated passivation behavior in nominal well water, concentrated well water, an aggressive high-chloride solution, but not in a strong acid. Credible bounding estimates of long-term corrosion for nominal well water solution …

Fermilab, in collaboration with LBNL and BNL, has developed a quadrupole (MQXB) for installation in the interaction region inner triplets of the LHC. This magnet is required to have an operating gradient of 215 T/m across a 70 mm coil bore, and to operate in superfluid helium at 1.9K. Two 5.5 m long MQXB magnets are combined with a dipole orbit corrector to form a single cryogenic unit (LQXB). This paper discusses the construction and test of the first full-scale production-quality LQXB.

To put the development of the X-ray laser in historic context, this paper presents some of the motivation and history of the development of the X-ray laser from the perspective of a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where the first X-ray laser was demonstrated in the early 1980's using a nuclear device as the driver.