The Air Force F-22 fighter, also known as the Raptor, is the world's most capable air-to-air combat aircraft. The administration wants to end F-22 procurement at 187 aircraft, and the administration's proposed FY2010 budget does not request funding for the procurement of additional F-22s in FY2010. The administration argues, among other things, that 187 F-22s will be sufficient in conjunction with other U.S. tactical aircraft. The issue of F-22 procurement has emerged as one of the highest-profile items of debate on the FY2010 defense budget. This report discusses both sides of the debate in detail.

This report analyzes developments in the Francophone West African country of Guinea since the military's seizure of power in December 2008, Guinea's relations with the United States, and U.S. policy in the wake of the coup. It also provides background on Guinean history and politics.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Historically, the vast majority of VA patients have been men, but that is changing. VA provided health care to over 281,000 women veterans in 2008--an increase of about 12 percent since 2006--and the number of women veterans in the United States is projected to increase by 17 percent between 2008 and 2033. Women veterans seeking care at VA medical facilities need access to a full range of health care services, including basic gender-specific services--such as cervical cancer screening--and specialized gender-specific services--such as treatment of reproductive cancers. This testimony, based on ongoing work, discusses GAO's preliminary findings on (1) the on-site availability of health care services for women veterans at VA facilities, (2) the extent to which VA facilities are following VA policies that apply to the delivery of health care services for women veterans, and (3) some key challenges that VA facilities are experiencing in providing health care services for women veterans. GAO reviewed applicable VA policies, interviewed officials, and visited 19 medical facilities--9 VA medical centers (VAMC) and 10 community-based outpatient clinics (CBOC)--and 10 Vet Centers. These facilities were chosen based in part on the number of …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The National Weather Service's (NWS) weather products are a vital component of the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) air traffic control system. In addition to providing aviation weather products developed at its own facilities, NWS also provides staff onsite at each of FAA's en route centers--the facilities that control high-altitude flight outside the airport tower and terminal areas. Over the last few years, FAA and NWS have been exploring options for enhancing the efficiency of the aviation weather services provided at en route centers. GAO was asked to summarize its draft report that (1) determines the status and plans of efforts to restructure the center weather service units, (2) evaluates efforts to establish a baseline of the current performance provided by these units, and (3) evaluates challenges to restructuring them."

Sudan, geographically the largest country in Africa, has been ravaged by civil war intermittently for four decades. More than 2 million people have died in Southern Sudan over the past two decades due to war-related causes and famine, and millions have been displaced from their homes. The crisis in Darfur began in February 2003, when two rebel groups emerged to challenge the National Congress Party (NCP) government in Darfur. The crisis in Darfur in western Sudan has led to a major humanitarian disaster, with an estimated 2.45 million people displaced, more than 240,000 people forced into neighboring Chad, and an estimated 450,000 people killed. This report discusses this situation in detail and also discusses U.S. and international efforts to aid in resolving the crisis.

This report discusses in brief the current political state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as the crisis situation in eastern Congo that has displaced more than 250,000 civilians. It also describes U.S., U.N., and other international efforts to aid in resolving the crisis.

Document 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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether the Texas State Library and Archives Commission may require a state agency to create and maintain written minutes of the agency's public meetings (RQ-0781-GA).

Document 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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a judge of the statutory county court,the jurisdiction of which is limited to misdemeanor cases,is among the group of judges described in section 76.002 of the Government Code (RQ-0782-GA).

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This report provides the information related to the fishery, aquaculture, and marine mammal issues in the 111th Congress

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) commitment to assuring the health and safety of its workers includes the conduct of illness and injury surveillance activities that provide an early warning system to detect health problems among workers. The Illness and Injury Surveillance Program monitors illnesses and health conditions that result in an absence, occupational injuries and illnesses, and disabilities and deaths among current workers.

The nonlinear interaction of a plasma wave with resonant electrons results in a plateau in the electron distribution function close to the phase velocity of the plasma wave. As a result, Landau damping of the plasma wave vanishes and the resonant frequency of the plasma wave downshifts. However, this simple picture is invalid when the external driving force changes the plasma wave fast enough so that the plateau cannot be fully developed. A new model to describe amplification of the plasma wave including the saturation of Landau damping and the nonlinear frequency shift is proposed. The proposed model takes into account the change of the plasma wave amplitude and describes saturation of the Landau damping rate in terms of a single fluid equation, which simplifies the description of the inherently kinetic nature of Landau damping. A proposed fluid model, incorporating these simplifications, is verified numerically using a kinetic Vlasov code.

The purpose of this document is to release, into the Hanford Document Control System, FA1/0991, Sludge Particle Separation Efficiencies for the Rectangular SCS-CON-230 Container, by M. Epstein and M. G. Plys, Fauske & Associates, LLC, June 2009. The Sludge Treatment Project (STP) will retrieve sludge from the 105-K West Integrated Water Treatment System (IWTS) Settler Tanks and transfer it to container SCS-CON-230 using the Settler Tank Retrieval System (STRS). The sludge will enter the container through two distributors. The container will have a filtration system that is designed to minimize the overflow of sludge fines from the container to the basin. FAI/09-91 was performed to quantify the effect of the STRS on sludge distribution inside of and overflow out of SCS-CON-230. Selected results of the analysis and a system description are discussed. The principal result of the analysis is that the STRS filtration system reduces the overflow of sludge from SCS-CON-230 to the basin by roughly a factor of 10. Some turbidity can be expected in the center bay where the container is located. The exact amount of overflow and subsequent turbidity is dependent on the density of the sludge (which will vary with location in the Settler Tanks) and …

This project produced detailed data on the processes that affect methane and nitrous oxide emissions from rice agriculture and their inter-relationships. It defines the shifting roles and potential future of these gases in causing global warming and the benefits and tradeoffs of reducing emissions. The major results include: 1). Mechanisms and Processes Leading to Methane Emissions are Delineated. Our experiments have tested the standard model of methane emissions from rice fields and found new results on the processes that control the flux. A mathematical mass balance model was used to unravel the production, oxidation and transport of methane from rice. The results suggested that when large amounts of organic matter are applied, the additional flux that is observed is due to both greater production and reduced oxidation of methane. 2). Methane Emissions From China Have Been Decreasing Over the Last Two Decades. We have calculated that methane emissions from rice fields have been falling in recent decades. This decrease is particularly large in China. While some of this is due to reduced area of rice agriculture, the bigger effect is from the reduction in the emission factor which is the annual amount of methane emitted per hectare of rice. The …

This paper is focused on possible designs and predicted performances of two proposed high-energy, high-luminosity electron-hadron colliders: eRHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL, Upton, NY, USA) and LHeC at Organisation Europeenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN, Geneve, Switzerland). The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, BNL) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, CERN) are designed as versatile colliders. RHIC is colliding various species of hadrons staring from polarized protons to un-polarized heavy ions (such as fully stripped Au (gold) ions) in various combinations: polarized p-p, d-Au, Cu-Cu, Au-Au. Maximum energy in RHIC is 250 GeV (per beam) for polarized protons and 100 GeV/n for heavy ions. There is planed expansion of the variety of species to include polarized He{sup 3} and unpolarized fully stripped U (uranium). LHeC is designed to collide both un-polarized protons with energy up to 7 TeV per beam and fully stripped Pb (lead) ions with energy up to 3 TeV/n. Both eRHIC and LHeC plan to add polarized electrons (or/and positrons) to the list of colliding species in these versatile hadron colliders. In eRHIC 10-20 GeV electrons would collide with hadrons circulating in RHIC. In LHeC 50-150 GeV polarized leptons will collided with LHC's hadron beams. Both …

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) commitment to assuring the health and safety of its workers includes the conduct of illness and injury surveillance activities that provide an early warning system to detect health problems among workers. The Illness and Injury Surveillance Program monitors illnesses and health conditions that result in an absence, occupational injuries and illnesses, and disabilities and deaths among current workers.

The objective of this project is to develop a novel catalyst support technology based on unique engineered nanostructures for low temperature fuel cells which: (1) Achieves high catalyst activity and performance; (2) Improves catalyst durability over current technologies; and (3) Reduces catalyst cost. This project is directed at the development of durable catalysts supported by novel support that improves the catalyst utilization and hence reduce the catalyst loading. This project will develop a solid fundamental knowledge base necessary for the synthetic effort while at the same time demonstrating the catalyst advantages in Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFCs).

In 1986, 21 m3 of transuranic (TRU) waste was inadvertently disposed in a shallow land burial trench at the Area 5 Radioactive Waste Management Site on the Nevada Test Site. U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) TRU waste must be disposed in accordance with Title 40, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Part 191, Environmental Radiation Protection Standard for Management and Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel, High-Level, and Transuranic Radioactive Wastes. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is the only facility meeting these requirements. The National Research Council, however, has found that exhumation of buried TRU waste for disposal in a deep geologic repository may not be warranted when the effort, exposures, and expense of retrieval are not commensurate with the risk reduction achieved. The long-term risks of leaving the TRU waste in-place are evaluated in two probabilistic performance assessments. A composite analysis, assessing the dose from all disposed waste and interacting sources of residual contamination, estimates an annual total effective dose equivalent (TEDE) of 0.01 mSv, or 3 percent of the dose constraint. A 40 CFR 191 performance assessment also indicates there is reasonable assurance of meeting all requirements. The 40 CFR 191.15 annual mean TEDE for a member of the public …

Following a telephone interview with Materials and Systems Research, Inc. (MSRI) by members of the Hydrogen Safety Panel on December 4, 2008, a safety review team was dispatched to Salt Lake City, UT to perform a site-visit review. The major topic of concern was the presence of a hydrogen storage and dispensing shed on the MSRI premises close to both its own laboratory/office building and to the adjoining property. The metal shed contains 36 cylinders (two 18-cylinder "pods") of hydrogen all connected to a common manifold and used to supply hydrogen to a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) fuel cell project plus several other projects using an entire pod as a common supply. In busy times, MSRI uses and replaces one pod per week. As a result of the site visit, the safety review team has raised some concern with the shed’s location, design, use, and safety features as well as other components of the facility, including the laboratory area.

The overall goal of this proposal was to develop an innovative experimental facility that would allow for the measurement of real-time response of a material surface to plasma bombardment by employing in-situ high-energy ion beam analysis. This facility was successfully developed and deployed at U. Wisconsin-Madison and was named DIONISOS (Dynamics of IONic Implantation & Sputtering on Surfaces). There were several major highlights to the DIONISOS research which we will briefly highlight below. The full technical details of the DIONISOS development, deployment and research results are contained in the Appendices which contain several peer-reviewed publications and a PhD thesis devoted to DIONISOS. The DIONISOS results on deuterium retention in molybdenum were chosen as an invited talk at the 2008 International Conference on Plasma-Surface Interactions in Toledo, Spain.

The pressure-dependence of the quasi-static yield strength of vanadium in polycrystalline foils and powders has been measured up to 80 GPa at room temperature using an implementation of a non-hydrostatic diamond anvil cell technique [C. Meade and R. Jeanloz, J. Geophys. Res. 93, 3261 (1988)]. A new feature of this work is the use of an in-situ determination of the sample thickness. Following an initial increase in the strength with pressure, a decrease in the strength of vanadium was observed beginning at 40-50 GPa. We have measured the yield strength of vanadium up to 80 GPa under nonhydrostatic conditions. In this study, we used x-ray diffraction and absorption techniques to make in-situ measurements of the pressure gradient and the sample thickness. These measurements were used to evaluate the pressure-dependence of the material strength. We observed a decease in the yield strength of vanadium over the pressure range of 40-50 GPa. We propose that this change in the yieldstrength pressure-dependence is an indicator of the phase transition from bcc to rhombohedral.

The aim of commissioning new buildings is to ensure that they deliver, if not exceed, the performance and energy savings promised by their design. When applied to existing buildings, commissioning identifies the almost inevitable 'drift' from where things should be and puts the building back on course. In both contexts, commissioning is a systematic, forensic approach to quality assurance, rather than a technology per se. Although commissioning has earned increased recognition in recent years - even a toehold in Wikipedia - it remains an enigmatic practice whose visibility severely lags its potential. Over the past decade, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has built the world's largest compilation and meta-analysis of commissioning experience in commercial buildings. Since our last report (Mills et al. 2004) the database has grown from 224 to 643 buildings (all located in the United States, and spanning 26 states), from 30 to 100 million square feet of floorspace, and from $17 million to $43 million in commissioning expenditures. The recorded cases of new-construction commissioning took place in buildings representing $2.2 billion in total construction costs (up from 1.5 billion). The work of many more commissioning providers (18 versus 37) is represented in this study, as is more evidence …

This report provides background information and potential oversight issues for Congress on the CVN-78 program, which includes the CVN-78 and CVN-79 as the first two ships in the Navy's new Gerald R. Ford (CVN- 78) class of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (CVNs).

This report examines the de facto foreign exchange rate policies adopted by the monetary authorities of East Asia. In some cases, there is a perceived discrepancy between the official (de jure) exchange rate policy and the observed de facto exchange rate policy. This report will focus primarily on the de facto exchange rate policies.