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 regional haze regulations. GAO noted that: (1) the rule calls for states to establish goals and emission reduction strategies for improving visibility in all 156 mandatory Class I national parks and wilderness areas; (2) specific provisions are included in the rule allowing nine western states to implement the recommendations of the Grand Canyon Visibility Transport Commission within the framework of the national regional haze program; and (3) EPA complied with applicable requirements in promulgating the rule."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the Department of Defense's (DOD) management and oversight of its animal research programs, focusing on the extent projects funded or performed by DOD utilizing animals: (1) were directed toward military objectives; (2) unnecessarily duplicated other research; and (3) incorporated alternatives that reduced, replaced, or refined the use of animals."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on: (1) the status of competition in the subscription television market; (2) the extent to which ownership ties between cable companies and program suppliers may be affecting the development of competition; and (3) key factors that may influence the development of competition in the future."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Air Force's budget formulation process for its flying hour program for fiscal years (FY) 1997 through 1999, focusing on: (1) the extent to which the Air Force has flown the hours requested in its budget; (2) the process that the Air Force uses to determine flying hour requirements; (3) how the requirements and specific cost factors are used to develop the budget estimate for the flying hour program; and (4) program funding and obligations incurred in FY 1997 and FY 1998 and the reasons for the differences."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on households collecting Food Stamp benefits for persons disqualified for intentional program violations, focusing on: (1) how many individuals were included as members of food stamp households in four states while disqualified from the program in calendar year 1997 and estimated the value of the benefits that were improperly issued to those households; and (2) why these individuals were improperly included in households and what actions the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and state agencies could take to detect and prevent disqualified participation."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the progress being made in addressing the year 2000 computing challenge, focusing on: (1) the federal government's progress and the challenges that remain in correcting its systems; (2) state and local government year 2000 issues; and (3) the readiness of key public infrastructure."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Air Force's C-17 logistics support plan, focusing on the: (1) C-17's core logistics capabilities; (2) cost effectiveness of the planned support strategy; and (3) Air Force's implementation of the plan under current law."

This project reactivates ARCO's idle Pru Fee lease in the Midway-Sunset field, California and conducts a continuous steamflood enhanced oil recovery demonstration aided by an integration of modern reservoir characterization and simulation methods. Cyclic steam was used to reestablish baseline production within the reservoir characterization phase of the project completed in December 1996. During the demonstration phase begun in January 1997, a continuous steamflood enhanced oil recovery is testing the incremental value of this method as an alternative to cyclic steaming. Other economically marginal Class III reservoirs having similar producibility problems will benefit from insight gained in this project. The objective of the project are: (1) to return the shut-in portion of the reservoir to optimal commercial production; (2) to accurately describe the reservoir and recovery process; and (3) to convey the details of this activity to the domestic petroleum industry, especially to other producers in California, through an aggressive technology transfer program.

We consider phenomenological implications of susy models with spontaneously broken CP-symmetry. In particular, we analyze CP-asymmetries in B decays and find that the predictions of these models are vastly different from those of the SM. These features are common to NMSSM-like models with an arbitrary number of sterile superfields and the MSSM with broken R-parity.

Microfabrication technology has been applied to the development of a miniature, multi-channel gas phase chemical laboratory that provides fast response, small size, and enhanced versatility and chemical discrimination. Each analysis channel includes a sample concentrator followed by a gas chromatographic separator and a chemically selective surface acoustic wave detector array to achieve high sensitivity and selectivity. The performance of the components, individually and collectively, is described. The design and performance of novel micromachined acoustic wave devices, with the potential for improved chemical sensitivity, are also described.

RF and mm-wave photonic devices and circuits have been developed at Sandia National Laboratories for applications ranging from RF optical data links to optical generation of mm-wave frequencies. This talk will explore recent high-speed photonics technology developments at Sandia including: (1) A monolithic optical integrated circuit for all-optical generation of mm-waves. Using integrated mode-locked diode lasers, amplifiers, and detectors, frequencies between 30 GHz and 90 GHz are generated by a single monolithic (Al,Ga)As optical circuit less than 2mm in its largest dimension. (2) Development of polarization-maintaining, low-insertion-loss, low v-pi, Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) modulators with DC-to-potentially-K-band modulation bandwidth. New low-loss polarization-maintaining waveguide designs using binary alloys have been shown to reduce polarization crosstalk in undoped (Al,Ga)As waveguides, yielding high extinction ratio (>40dB) and low on-chip loss (<6dB) in Mach-Zehnder interferometers. RF drive voltage is reduced through use of 45rnrn-active length devices with modulator sensitivity, v-pi, less than 3V.

Nearly every new large-scale laser system application at LLNL has requirements for beam control which exceed the current level of available technology. For applications such as inertial confinement fusion, laser isotope separation, laser machining, and laser the ability to transport significant power to a target while maintaining good beam quality is critical. There are many ways that laser wavefront quality can be degraded. Thermal effects due to the interaction of high-power laser or pump light with the internal optical components or with the ambient gas are common causes of wavefront degradation. For many years, adaptive optics based on thing deformable glass mirrors with piezoelectric or electrostrictive actuators have be used to remove the low-order wavefront errors from high-power laser systems. These adaptive optics systems have successfully improved laser beam quality, but have also generally revealed additional high-spatial-frequency errors, both because the low-order errors have been reduced and because deformable mirrors have often introduced some high-spatial-frequency components due to manufacturing errors. Many current and emerging laser applications fall into the high-resolution category where there is an increased need for the correction of high spatial frequency aberrations which requires correctors with thousands of degrees of freedom. The largest Deformable Mirrors currently available …

The purpose of this analysis is to provide the design basis and general arrangement requirements of the non-potable water, waste water, compressed air and ventilation (post excavation) utilities required in support of the Cross Drift alcoves and niches.

A methodology for designing Unattended Monitoring Systems starting at a systems level has been developed at Sandia National Laboratories. This proven methodology provides a template that describes the process for selecting and applying appropriate technologies to meet unattended system requirements, as well as providing a framework for development of both training courses and workshops associated with unattended monitoring. The design and implementation of unattended monitoring systems is generally intended to respond to some form of policy based requirements resulting from international agreements or domestic regulations. Once the monitoring requirements are established, a review of the associated process and its related facilities enables identification of strategic monitoring locations and development of a conceptual system design. The detailed design effort results in the definition of detection components as well as the supporting communications network and data management scheme. The data analyses then enables a coherent display of the knowledge generated during the monitoring effort. The resultant knowledge is then compared to the original system objectives to ensure that the design adequately addresses the fundamental principles stated in the policy agreements. Implementation of this design methodology will ensure that comprehensive unattended monitoring system designs provide appropriate answers to those critical questions imposed by …

This report describes progress during the third year of the project entitled ''Improved Oil Recovery in Mississippian Carbonate Reservoirs in Kansas''. This project funded under the Department of Energy's Class 2 program targets improving the reservoir performance of mature oil fields located in shallow shelf carbonate reservoirs. The focus of this project is development and demonstration of cost-effective reservoir description and management technologies to extend the economic life of mature reservoirs in Kansas and mid-continent. The project introduced a number of potentially useful technologies, and demonstrated these technologies in actual oil field operations. Advanced technology was tailored specifically to the scale appropriate to the operations of Kansas producers. An extensive technology transfer effort is ongoing. Traditional technology transfer methods (e.g., publications and workshops) are supplemented with a public domain relational database and an online package of project results that is available through the Internet. The goal is to provide the independent complete access to project data, project results and project technology on their desktop. Included in this report is a summary of significant project results at the demonstration site (Schaben Field, Ness County, Kansas). The value of cost-effective techniques for reservoir characterization and simulation at Schaben Field were demonstrated to …

This sampling and analysis plan (SAP) identifies characterization objectives pertaining to sample collection, laboratory analytical evaluation, and reporting requirements for samples obtained from tank 241-AZ-102. The purpose of this sampling event is to obtain information about the characteristics of the contents of 241-AZ-102. Push mode core samples will be obtained from risers 15C and 24A to provide sufficient material for the chemical analyses and tests required to satisfy these data quality objectives. The 222-S Laboratory will extrude core samples, composite the liquids and solids, perform chemical analyses, and provide subsamples to the Process Chemistry Laboratory. The Process Chemistry Laboratory will prepare test plans and perform process tests to evaluate the behavior of the 241-AZ-102 waste undergoing the retrieval and treatment scenarios defined in the applicable DQOs. Requirements for analyses of samples originating in the process tests will be documented in the corresponding test plan.

A data warehouse that presents data from many of the genomics community data sources in a consistent, intuitive fashion has long been a goal of bioinformatics. Unfortunately, it is one of the goals that has not yet been achieved. One of the major problems encountered by previous attempts has been the high cost of creating and maintaining a warehouse in a dynamic environment. In this abstract we have outlined a meta-data based approach to integrating data sources that begins to address this problem. We have used this infrastructure to successfully integrate new sources into an existing warehouse in substantially less time than would have traditionally been required--and the resulting mediators are more maintainable than the traditionally defined ones would have been. In the final paper, we will describe in greater detail both our architecture and our experiences using this framework. In particular, we will outline the new, XML based representation of the meta-data, describe how the mediator generator works, and highlight other potential uses for the meta-data.

Micromachine accelerometers offer a way to enable critical functions only when a system encounters a particular acceleration environment. This paper describes the optical readout of a surface micromachine accelerometer containing a unique 24-bit code. The readout uses waveguide-based optics, which are implemented as a photonic integrated circuit (PIC). The PIC is flip-chip bonded over the micromachine, for a compact package. The shuttle moves 500 {micro}m during readout, and each code element is 17 {micro}m wide. The particular readout scheme makes use of backscattered radiation from etched features in the accelerometer shuttle. The features are etched to create corner reflectors that return radiation back toward the source for a one bit. For a zero bit, the shuttle is not etched, and the radiation scatters forward, away from the detector. This arrangement provides a large signal difference between a one and zero signal, since the zero signal returns virtually no signal to the detector. It is thus superior to schemes that interrogate the code vertically, which have a limited contrast between a one and a zero. Experimental results are presented for mock shuttle features etched into a silicon substrate. To simulate the shuttle moving under a fixed PIC, a commercially available waveguide …

Three-dimensional photonic lattices are engineered materials which are the photonic analogues of semiconductors. These structures were first proposed and demonstrated in the mid-to-late 1980's. However, due to fabrication difficulties, lattices active in the infrared are only just emerging. Wide ranges of structures and fabrication approaches have been investigated. The most promising approach for many potential applications is a diamond-like structure fabricated using silicon microprocessing techniques. This approach has enabled the fabrication of 3-D silicon photonic lattices active in the infrared. The structures display band gaps centered from 12{micro} down to 1.55{micro}.

Typical ASTM fracture testing determines J-integral resistance (J-R) curve or fracture toughness (JIC) based on specimens with high constraint geometry such as those specified in ASTM E1737-96. A three-term asymptotic solution with two parameters J and A2 (a constraint parameter) has been developed for characterizing the constraint effect of various geometries. The present paper extends the J-A2 characterization of a stationary crack tip to the regime of stable crack growth. Similar to the concept of J-controlled crack growth, the J-A2 description can be approximately used to characterize ductile crack growth under certain amount of crack extension. The region of J-A2 controlled crack growth is much larger than that controlled by J-integral alone. From the relationships between A2 and the test data, JIC and tearing modulus (TR), the coefficients used to define a J-R curve can be determined. For non-standard specimens or actual structures, once the constraint parameter A2 is determined, the J-R curves appropriate for these geometries can then be obtained. A procedure of transferring J-R curves determined from the standard ASTM procedure to non-standard specimens or flawed structures is outlined in the paper.

Concern over the possibility of global climate change as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere is resulting in increased interest in renewable energy technologies. The World Bank recently sponsored a study to determine whether solar thermal power plants can achieve cost parity with conventional power plants. The paper reviews the conclusions of that study.

Recently, Morel and McGhee described an alternate second-order form of the transport equation called the self adjoint angular flux (SAAF) equation that has the angular flux as its unknown. The SAAF formulation has all the advantages of the traditional even- and odd-parity self-adjoint equations, with the added advantages that it yields the full angular flux when it is numerically solved, it is significantly easier to implement reflective and reflective-like boundary conditions, and in the appropriate form it can be solved in void regions. The SAAF equation has the disadvantage that the angular domain is the full unit sphere and, like the even- and odd- parity form, S{sub n} source iteration cannot be implemented using the standard sweeping algorithm. Also, problems arise in pure scattering media. Morel and McGhee demonstrated the efficacy of the SAAF formulation for neutral particle transport. Here we apply the SAAF formulation to coupled electron-photon transport problems using multigroup cross-sections from the CEPXS code and S{sub n} discretization.

The authors present prism coupling measurements on Al{sub x}Ga{sub 1{minus}x}As native oxides showing the dependence of refractive index on composition (0.3 {le} x {le} 0.97), oxidation temperature (400 {le} T {le} 500), and carrier gas purity. Index values range from n = 1.490 (x = 0.9, 400) to 1.707 (x = 0.3, 500 C). The oxides are shown to adsorb moisture, increasing their index by up to 0.10 (7%). Native oxides of Al{sub x}Ga{sub 1{minus}x}As (x {le} 0.5) have index values up to 0.27 higher and are less hygroscopic when prepared with a small amount of O{sub 2} in the N{sub 2} + H{sub 2}O process gas. The higher index values are attributed to a greater degree of oxidation of the Ga in the film.

This document describes the system engineering process for implementing testing and evaluation processes and products within the River Protection Project (RPP).