As part of a program to characterize and baseline selected environmental parameters in the region around the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, ambient radon-222 monitoring was conducted in the rural community of Amargosa Valley, the community closest to the proposed repository site. Passive integrating radon monitors and a continuous radon monitoring instrument were deployed adjacent to the Community Environmental Monitoring Program (CEMP) (http://www.cemp.dri.edu/index.html) station located in the Amargosa Valley Community Center near the library. The CEMP station provided real-time ambient gamma exposure and meteorological data used to correct the integrated radon measurements as well as verify meteorological data collected by the continuous radon monitoring instrument. Additionally, different types of environmental enclosures that housed the monitors and instrument were used to determine if particular designs influenced the ambient radon measurements.

Aqueous radioactive wastes from Savannah River Site (SRS) separations and vitrification processes are contained in large underground carbon steel tanks. The 2007 inspection program revealed that the structural integrity and waste confinement capability of the Savannah River Site waste tanks were maintained. A very small amount of material had seeped from Tank 12 from a previously identified leaksite. The material observed had dried on the tank wall and did not reach the annulus floor. A total of 5945 photographs were made and 1221 visual and video inspections were performed during 2007. Additionally, ultrasonic testing was performed on four Waste Tanks (15, 36, 37 and 38) in accordance with approved inspection plans that met the requirements of WSRC-TR-2002- 00061, Revision 2 'In-Service Inspection Program for High Level Waste Tanks'. The Ultrasonic Testing (UT) In-Service Inspections (ISI) are documented in a separate report that is prepared by the ISI programmatic Level III UT Analyst. Tanks 15, 36, 37 and 38 are documented in 'Tank Inspection NDE Results for Fiscal Year 2007'; WSRC-TR-2007-00064.

This report discusses issues for Congress in 2008, which include but are not necessarily limited to the Coast Guard's overall management of Deepwater acquisition, the status of certain Deepwater acquisition programs, and the so-called revolving door issue.

This report provides background information and oversight issues for Congress on the Coast Guard's Deepwater acquisition programs for replacing and modernizing the service's aging fleet of deepwater-capable ships and aircraft.

This report summarizes action on more than 360 energy efficiency and renewable energy bills introduced during the 110th Congress.1 These bills cover a wide range of policy and issue areas that include appropriations, authorizations, budget, research and development (R&D), grants, loans, financing, regulation (including a renewable fuel standard), tax incentives, goals, plans, impacts, and the environment/climate change.2 Most of these bills have focused on grants and tax incentives. The bills also cover a range of sectors and topics that include buildings, defense, education, federal lands and energy management, farms, American Indians, and international activities. Thus far, the sector of international activities has generated the greatest number of bills. For each bill listed in this report, a brief description and a summary of action are given, including references to committee hearings and reports.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Congress and the President need to have reliable, useful and timely financial and performance information to make sound decisions on the current and future direction of vital federal government programs and policies. Unfortunately, except for the 2007 Statement of Social Insurance, GAO was again unable to provide assurance on the reliability of the consolidated financial statements of the U.S. government (CFS) due primarily to certain material weaknesses in the federal government's internal control. GAO has reported that unless these weaknesses are adequately addressed, they will, among other things, (1) hamper the federal government's ability to reliably report a significant portion of its assets, liabilities, costs, and other related information; and (2) affect the federal government's ability to reliably measure the full cost as well as the financial and nonfinancial performance of certain programs and activities. This testimony presents the results of GAO's audit of the CFS for fiscal year 2007 and discusses the federal government's long-term fiscal outlook."

The Educational and Cultural Exchange Visitor program has become a gateway for foreign medical graduates (FMGs) to gain admission to the United States as nonimmigrants for the purpose of graduate medical education and training. These FMGs either enter under the J-1 nonimmigrant visa or receive waivers that require them to work in a designated healthcare professional shortage area for a minimum of three years. The ability of states to request such waivers is known as the "Conrad State Program," and was added temporarily to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) in 1994. It has been extended by the last several Congresses. Legislation has been introduced in the 110th Congress to address the program's expiration.

The Hanford Site environmental report is prepared annually for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in accordance with regulatory requirements. The report provides an overview of activities at the site; demonstrates the status of the site’s compliance with applicable federal, state, and local environmental laws and regulations, executive orders, and DOE policies and directives; and summarizes environmental data that characterize Hanford Site environmental management performance. The report also highlights signifi cant environmental and public protection programs and efforts. Some historical and early 2008 information is included where appropriate.

Image smoothing is a fundamental operation in computer vision and image processing. This work has two main thrusts: (1) implementation of a bilateral filter suitable for use in smoothing, or denoising, 3D volumetric data; (2) implementation of the 3D bilateral filter in three different parallelization models, along with parallel performance studies on two modern HPC architectures. Our bilateral filter formulation is based upon the work of Tomasi [11], but extended to 3D for use on volumetric data. Our three parallel implementations use POSIX threads, the Message Passing Interface (MPI), and Unified Parallel C (UPC), a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) language. Our parallel performance studies, which were conducted on a Cray XT4 supercomputer and aquad-socket, quad-core Opteron workstation, show our algorithm to have near-perfect scalability up to 120 processors. Parallel algorithms, such as the one we present here, will have an increasingly important role for use in production visual analysis systems as the underlying computational platforms transition from single- to multi-core architectures in the future.

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In 2001, under DOE's Superconductivity Partnership Initiative (SPI), E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. (Dupont) was awarded a cost-share contract to build a fully functional full-scale model high temperature superconducting reciprocating magnet unit specifically designed for the koalin clay industry. After competitive bidding, American Superconductor (AMSC) was selected to provide the coil for the magnet. Dupont performed the statement of work until September 2004, when it stopped work, with the concurrence of DOE, due to lack of federal funds. DOE had paid all invoices to that point, and Dupont had provided all cost share. At this same time, Dupont determined that this program did not fit with its corporate strategies and notified DOE that it was not interesting in resuming the program when funding became available. AMSC expressed interest in assuming performance of the Agreement to Dupont and DOE, and in March 2005, this project was transferred to AMSC by DOE amendment to the original contract and Novation Agreement between AMSC and Dupont. Design drawings and some hardware components and subassemblies were transferred to AMSC. However, no funding was obligated by DOE and AMSC never performed work on the project. This report contains a summary of the work …

The Department of Energy (DOE) and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) entered into an Interagency Agreement to transfer approximately 40 metric tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) to TVA for conversion to fuel for the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant. Savannah River Site (SRS) inventories included a significant amount of this material, which resulted from processing spent fuel and surplus materials. The HEU is blended with natural uranium (NU) to low enriched uranium (LEU) with a 4.95% 235U isotopic content and shipped as solution to the TVA vendor. The HEU Blend Down Project provided the upgrades needed to achieve the product throughput and purity required and provided loading facilities. The first blending to low enriched uranium (LEU) took place in March 2003 with the initial shipment to the TVA vendor in July 2003. The SRS Shipments have continued on a regular schedule without any major issues for the past 5 years and are due to complete in September 2008. The HEU Blend program is now looking to continue its success by dispositioning an additional approximately 21 MTU of HEU material as part of the SRS Enriched Uranium Disposition Project.

This report

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The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) used an array of {sup 3}He proportional counters to measure the rate of neutral-current interactions in heavy water and precisely determined the total active ({nu}{sub x}) {sup 8}B solar neutrino flux. This technique is independent of previous methods employed by SNO. The total flux is found to be 5.54{sub -0.31}{sup +0.33}(stat){sub -0.34}{sup +0.36}(syst) x 10{sup 6} cm{sup -2}s{sup -1}, in agreement with previous measurements and standard solar models. A global analysis of solar and reactor neutrino results yields {Delta}m{sup 2} = 7.94{sub -0.26}{sup +0.42} x 10{sup -5} eV{sup 2} and {theta} = 33.8{sub -1.3}{sup +1.4} degrees. The uncertainty on the mixing angle has been reduced from SNO's previous results.

Iraq's current government, the result of a U.S.-supported election process designed to produce democracy, is instead a sectarian government incapable of reconciliation. The Administration says that the passage of some key laws represents progress on national reconciliation, and is a result of the U.S. "troop surge." Others say that combat among Shiite groups since March 2008, possibly motivated by provincial elections planned for October 2008, shows that force will not stabilize Iraq.

The candidate division Korarchaeota comprises a group of uncultivated microorganisms that, by their small subunit rRNA phylogeny, may have diverged early from the major archaeal phyla Crenarchaeota and Euryarchaeota. Here, we report the initial characterization of a member of the Korarchaeota with the proposed name,"Candidatus Korarchaeum cryptofilum," which exhibits an ultrathin filamentous morphology. To investigate possible ancestral relationships between deep-branching Korarchaeota and other phyla, we used whole-genome shotgun sequencing to construct a complete composite korarchaeal genome from enriched cells. The genome was assembled into a single contig 1.59 Mb in length with a G + C content of 49percent. Of the 1,617 predicted protein-coding genes, 1,382 (85percent) could be assigned to a revised set of archaeal Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COGs). The predicted gene functions suggest that the organism relies on a simple mode of peptide fermentation for carbon and energy and lacks the ability to synthesize de novo purines, CoA, and several other cofactors. Phylogenetic analyses based on conserved single genes and concatenated protein sequences positioned the korarchaeote as a deep archaeal lineage with an apparent affinity to the Crenarchaeota. However, the predicted gene content revealed that several conserved cellular systems, such as cell division, DNA replication, and tRNA …

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This literature review presents treatment options for nitrate, iodine-129, and uranium, which are present in groundwater at the 200-ZP-I Groundwater Operable Unit (OU) within the 200 West Area of the Hanford Site. The objective of this review is to determine available methods to treat or sequester these contaminants in place (i.e., in situ) or to pump-and-treat the groundwater aboveground (i.e., ex situ). This review has been conducted with emphasis on commercially available or field-tested technologies, but theoretical studies have, in some cases, been considered when no published field data exist. The initial scope of this literature review included only nitrate and iodine-I 29, but it was later expanded to include uranium. The focus of the literature review was weighted toward researching methods for treatment of nitrate and iodine-129 over uranium because of the relatively greater impact of those compounds identified at the 200-ZP-I OU.

This report discusses the Navy procurement program and new kind of destroyer called the DDG-1000. The report discusses the issues for Congress, which is whether to approve, modify, or reject the Navy's proposals for the DDG-1000 program.

Names for Navy ships traditionally have been chosen and announced by the Secretary of the Navy. Congress in recent years has proposed, and sometimes passed, legislation regarding the naming of specific ships.

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Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Oil and gas production from federal lands and waters is critical to meeting the nation's energy needs. This production provided about 31 percent of all oil and 29 percent of all natural gas produced in the United States in fiscal year 2007. Every five years, the federal government decides the areas in the offshore waters of the United States it will offer for leasing and establishes a schedule for individual lease sales. The Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) has conducted these sales at least once per year for at least the past 30 years. During the sales, oil and gas companies bid for the rights to explore and develop the oil and gas resources on these leases and also agree to pay the federal government royalties on the resources produced. In 1995, a time when oil and natural gas prices were significantly lower than they are today, Congress passed the Outer Continental Shelf Deep Water Royalty Relief Act (DWRRA), which authorized MMS to provide "royalty relief" on oil and gas produced in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico from certain leases issued from …

An advanced simulation environment to model incompressible MHD flows relevant to blanket conditions in fusion reactors has been developed at HyPerComp in research collaboration with TEXCEL. The goals of this phase-II project are two-fold: The first is the incorporation of crucial physical phenomena such as induced magnetic field modeling, and extending the capabilities beyond fluid flow prediction to model heat transfer with natural convection and mass transfer including tritium transport and permeation. The second is the design of a sequence of benchmark tests to establish code competence for several classes of physical phenomena in isolation as well as in select (termed here as “canonical”,) combinations. No previous attempts to develop such a comprehensive MHD modeling capability exist in the literature, and this study represents essentially uncharted territory. During the course of this Phase-II project, a significant breakthrough was achieved in modeling liquid metal flows at high Hartmann numbers. We developed a unique mathematical technique to accurately compute the fluid flow in complex geometries at extremely high Hartmann numbers (10,000 and greater), thus extending the state of the art of liquid metal MHD modeling relevant to fusion reactors at the present time. These developments have been published in noted international journals. …