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 an individual may be compensated for serving both as a constable and as a courtroom bailiff (ID# 39429)

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 Pampa Economic Development Corporation may contribute to a Clarendon College center im Pampa, Texas (ID# 39511)

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 a city council may require that certain or all requests for zoning variances be directed to the city council rather than the zoning board of adjustment (ID# 39261)

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 commissioners court in a county with a public defender's office must provide funding to pay court-appointed attorneys who are not members of the public defender's office (RQ-913)

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; Removal of persons appointed to county purchasing board and related questions (ID# 39418)

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 county may pay legal expenses incurred by sheriff in defending himself in a prosecution in criminal charges(ID# 39367).

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 Texas Hazard Communication Act, chapter 502, Health and Safety Code, which provides "employees" with accessibility to certain information regarding hazardous chemicals at work sites, is applicable to inmates of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (RQ-841)

This report provides an overview of free and reduced-rate TV time and discusses the policy, constitutional, and legal issues it raises.

Newsletter of the Texas Department of Health discussing the news, activities, and events of the organization and other information related to health in Texas. This issue has information on nonpolio enteroviruses, new legislation regarding spousal notification of possible HIV exposure, CDC funding for blood safety promotion and joint disease reduction, advances in needlestick prevention, and elevated mercury levels in King Mackerel.

A new technology has been proposed in which depleted uranium, in the form of oxides or silicates, is placed around the outside of the spent nuclear fuel waste packages in the geological repository. This concept may (1) reduce the potential for repository nuclear criticality events and (2) reduce long-term release of radionuclides from the repository. As a new concept, there are significant uncertainties.

Past operations at many Department of Energy (DOE) sites have resulted in the generation of several waste streams with high salt content. These wastes contain listed and characteristic hazardous constituents and are radioactive. The salts contained in the wastes are primarily chloride, sulfate, nitrate, metal oxides, and hydroxides. DOE has placed these types of wastes under the purview of the Mixed Waste Focus Area (MWFA). The MWFA has been tasked with developing and facilitating the implementation of technologies to treat these wastes in support of customer needs and requirements. The MWFA has developed a Technology Development Requirements Document (TDRD), which specifies performance requirements for technology owners and developers to use as a framework in developing effective waste treatment solutions. This project will demonstrate the use of polyester resins in encapsulating and solidifying DOE`s mixed wastes containing salts, as an alternative to conventional and other emerging immobilization technologies.

This document is an engineering study for evaluating alternatives to determine the most cost effective closure plan for the 209E Facility, Critical Mass Laboratory. This laboratory is located in the 200 East Area of the Hanford Site and contains a Critical Assembly Room and a Mix room were criticality experiments were once performed.

This document is a manual for the use of the FEHM application, a finite-element heat- and mass-transfer computer code that can simulate nonisothermal multiphase multicomponent flow in porous media. The use of this code is applicable to natural-state studies of geothermal systems and groundwater flow. A primary use of the FEHM application will be to assist in the understanding of flow fields and mass transport in the saturated and unsaturated zones below the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. The equations of heat and mass transfer for multiphase flow in porous and permeable media are solved in the FEHM application by using the finite-element method. The permeability and porosity of the medium are allowed to depend on pressure and temperature. The code also has provisions for movable air and water phases and noncoupled tracers; that is, tracer solutions that do not affect the heat- and mass-transfer solutions. The tracers can be passive or reactive. The code can simulate two-dimensional, two-dimensional radial, or three-dimensional geometries. In fact, FEHM is capable of describing flow that is dominated in many areas by fracture and fault flow, including the inherently three-dimensional flow that results from permeation to and from faults and fractures. …

Depleted uranium dioxide fill inside the waste package creates the potential for significant improvements in package performance based on uranium geochemistry, reduces the potential for criticality in a repository, and consumes DU inventory. As a new concept, significant uncertainties exist: fill properties, impacts on package design, post- closure performance.

A research program at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) which deals with the development and application of processes for the treatment of geothermal brines and sludges has led to the identification and design of cost-efficient and environmentally friendly treatment methodology. Initially the primary goal of the processing was to convert geothermal wastes into disposable materials whose chemical composition would satisfy environmental regulations. An expansion of the r and D effort identified a combination of biochemical and chemical processes which became the basis for the development of a technology for the treatment of geothermal brines and sludges. The new technology satisfies environmental regulatory requirements and concurrently converts the geothermal brines and sludges into commercially promising products. Because the chemical composition of geothermal wastes depends on the type of the resource, the emerging technology has to be flexible so that it can be readily modified to suit the needs of a particular type of resource. Recent conceptional designs for the processing of hypersaline and low salinity brines and sludges will be discussed.

A tissue-equivalent spherical proportional counter is used with a modified amplifier system to measure specific energy deposited from a uniform radiation field for short periods of time ({approximately}1 {micro}s to seconds) in order to extrapolate to dose in sub-micron tissue volumes. The energy deposited during these time intervals is compared to biological repair processes occurring within the same intervals after the initial energy deposition. The signal is integrated over a variable collection time which is adjusted with a square-wave pulse. Charge from particle passages is collected on the anode during the period in which the integrator is triggered, and the signal decays quickly to zero after the integrator feedback switch resets; the process repeats for every triggering pulse. Measurements of energy deposited from x rays, {sup 137}Cs gamma rays, and electrons from a {sup 90}Sr/{sup 90}Y source for various time intervals are taken. Spectral characteristics as a function of charge collection time are observed and frequency plots of specific energy and collection time-interval are presented. In addition, a threshold energy flux is selected for each radiation type at which the formation of radicals (based on current measurements) in mammalian cells equals the rate at which radicals are repaired.

Methanol as an alternative transportation fuel appears to be an effective intermediate agent, for reducing CO{sub 2} from the utility power and the transportation sectors. On the utilization side, methanol as a liquid fuel fits in well with the current infrastructure for storage and delivery to the automotive sector with better efficiency. On the production side, CO{sub 2} from fossil fuel plants together with natural gas and biomass can be used as feedstocks for methanol synthesis with reduced CO{sub 2}. Over the past several years, processes have emerged which have varying degrees of CO{sub 2} emission reduction depending on the feedstocks used for methanol synthesis process. This paper reviews the methanol processes from the point of view of production efficiency and CO{sub 2} emissions reduction. The processes include: (1) the Hydrocarb Process which primarily utilizes coal and natural gas and stores carbon, and (2) the Hynol Process which utilizes biomass (including carbonaceous wastes, municipal solid waste (MSW)) or coal and natural gas, and (3) the Carnol Process which utilizes natural gas and CO{sub 2} recovered from fossil fuel fired powered plant stacks, especially coal fired plants. The Carnol System consists of power generation, methanol production and methanol utilization as an …

The Nonproliferation Technology Section (NTS), formerly Environmental Technology Section (ETS), has conducted radiometric studies of Plant Vogtle since late 1986, seven months prior to its startup. This program has now been terminated as of May of this year, as support funding is no longer available, The present report presents the final 1997 measurements, as a closeout of this program of study, Plant Vogtle has two 1100 MWe pressurized water reactors developed by Westinghouse. Unit 1 started commercial operations in June 1987, and Unit 2 began in May 1989, During powered operations, NTS routinely detected neutron-activated isotopes in controlled releases but all activities had been orders of magnitude below the DOE guide values and EPA/CFR levels. The Vogtle release data and the NTS measurements have tracked well over the past ten years. These very sensitive ultra low-level measurements of the radioactive effluents have been important to both institutions, as they could address abnormal trends before they became health and compliance concerns.

We report the measurement of the pressure dependence for the bandgap energy E{sub g} and conduction-band mass m{sub c} for an 80{angstrom}-wide n-type In{sub 0.20}Ga{sub 0.80}As/GaAs single strained quantum well at 4.2K for pressures between 0 and 35 kbar and fields up to 30 tesla.

This report provides an overview of free and reduced-rate TV time and discusses the policy, constitutional, and legal issues it raises.