This paper reports on a combined experimental and modeling investigation of NOx formation in nitrogen-diluted laminar methane diffusion flames seeded with ammonia. The methane-ammonia mixture is a surrogate for biomass fuels which contain significant fuel-bound nitrogen. The experiments use flue-gas sampling to measure the concentration of stable species in the exhaust gas, including NO, O2, CO, and CO2. The computations evolve a two-dimensional low Mach number model using a solution-adaptive projection algorithm to capture fine-scale features of the flame. The model includes detailed thermodynamics and chemical kinetics, differential diffusion, buoyancy, and radiative losses. The model shows good agreement with the measurements over the full range of experimental NH3 seeding amounts. As more NH3 is added, a greater percentage is converted to N2 rather than to NO. The simulation results are further analyzed to trace the changes in NO formation mechanisms with increasing amounts of ammonia in the fuel.

This is a select chronology of, and a finding guide for information on, congressional and presidential actions and documents related to major budget events in calendar year 2001, covering the FY2002 budget. Brief information is provided for the President’s budget, congressional budget resolutions, appropriations measures (regular, continuing, supplementals, and rescissions), budget reconciliation, House and Senate votes, line-item vetoes, publications, testimony, charts, and tables.

This report provides information about the Country Applicability of the U.S. Normal Trade Relations (Most-Favored-Nation) Status. The United States extends unlimited and permanent NTR treatment to all its trading partners.

The United States accords permanent normal-trade-relations (NTR) (formerly called most-favored-nation (MFN)) treatment to all its trading partners except four countries to which it is denied by law and 11 countries whose NTR status is temporary and subject to the conditions of Title IV of the Trade Act of 1974.

With the Nation's coal-burning utilities facing the possibility of tighter controls on mercury pollutants, the U.S. Department of Energy is funding projects that could offer power plant operators better ways to reduce these emissions at much lower costs. Mercury is known to have toxic effects on the nervous system of humans and wildlife. Although it exists only in trace amounts in coal, mercury is released when coal burns and can accumulate on land and in water. In water, bacteria transform the metal into methylmercury, the most hazardous form of the metal. Methylmercury can collect in fish and marine mammals in concentrations hundreds of thousands times higher than the levels in surrounding waters. One of the goals of DOE is to develop technologies by 2005 that will be capable of cutting mercury emissions 50 to 70 percent at well under one-half of today's costs. ADA Environmental Solutions (ADA-ES) is managing a project to test mercury control technologies at full scale at four different power plants from 2000--2003. The ADA-ES project is focused on those power plants that are not equipped with wet flue gas desulfurization systems. ADA-ES will develop a portable system that will be moved to four different utility power …

The original filter recommended by PNNL for the RASA is somewhat difficult to dissolve and has been discontinued by the manufacturer (3M) because the manufacturing process (substrate blown microfiber, or SBMF) has been superceded by a simpler process (scrim-free blown microfiber, or BMF). Several new potential filters have been evaluated by PNNL and by an independent commercial lab. A superior product has been identified which provides higher trapping efficiency, higher air flow, is easier to dissolve, and is thinner, accommodating more filters per RASA roll. This filter is recommended for all ground-based sampling, and with additional mechanical support, it could be useful for airborne sampling, as well.

This report outlines the approximately $8.3 billion in grants for economic and technical assistance to the States of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) by the United States in an effort to encourage a transition to democracy and free market economics. The report also covers the various departments and agencies providing grant assistance.

This report discusses The Former Soviet Union and U.S. Foreign Assistance. Seeking to encourage a transition to democracy and free-market economics in the states of the former Soviet Union (FSU) – Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan – the United States, since December 1991, has offered roughly $8.2 billion in grants for economic and technical assistance to the region. Most of the grant assistance has been provided through the Agency for International Development (USAID).

This report provides information about Health Insurance Continuation Coverage under COBRA. This report also provides background information on COBRA, on the COBRA population, and on legislation offering COBRA. Some believe that COBRA went too far in requiring employees to provide coverage.

The goal of these lectures, oriented towards the students just entering the field, is to provide an elementary introduction to QCD and the physics of nuclear interactions at high energies. We first introduce the general structure of QCD and discuss its main properties. Then we proceed to Glauber multiple scattering theory which lays the foundation for the theoretical treatment of nuclear interactions at high energies. We introduce the concept of Gribov's inelastic shadowing, crucial for the understanding of quantum formation effects. We outline the problems facing Glauber approach at high energies, and discuss how asymptotic freedom of QCD helps to resolve them, introducing the concepts of parton saturation and color glass condensate.

A program to identify and eliminate the causes of UV laser-induced damage and growth in fused silica and DKDP has developed methods to extend optics lifetimes for large-aperture, high-peak-power, UV lasers such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Issues included polish-related surface damage initiation and growth on fused silica and DKDP, bulk inclusions in fused silica, pinpoint bulk damage in DKDP, and UV-induced surface degradation in fused silica and DKDP in a vacuum. Approaches included an understanding of the mechanism of the damage, incremental improvements to existing fabrication technology, and feasibility studies of non-traditional fabrication technologies. Status and success of these various approaches are reviewed. Improvements were made in reducing surface damage initiation and eliminating growth for fused silica by improved polishing and post-processing steps, and improved analytical techniques are providing insights into mechanisms of DKDP damage. The NIF final optics hardware has been designed to enable easy retrieval, surface-damage mitigation, and recycling of optics.

The Hanford Site has 177 underground waste storage tanks that are known to retain and release bubbles composed of flammable gases. Characterizing and understanding the behavior of these bubbles is important for the safety issues associated with the flammable gases for both ongoing waste storage and future waste-retrieval operations. The retained bubbles are known to respond to small barometric pressure changes, though in a complex manner with unusual hysteresis occurring in some tanks in the relationship between bubble volume and pressure, or V-P hysteresis. With careful analysis, information on the volume of retained gas and the interactions of the waste and the bubbles can be determined.

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High-level nuclear waste is being vitrified, i.e., converted to a durable glass that can be stored in a safe repository for hundreds of thousands of years. Waste vitrification is accomplished in reactors call melters to which the waste is charged together with glass-forming additives. The mixture is electrically heated to a temperature as high as 1150 degree C (or even higher in advanced melters) to create a melt that becomes glass on cooling. This process is slow and expensive. Moreover, the melters that are currently in use or are going to be used in the U.S. are sensitive to clogging and thus cannot process melt in which solid particles are suspended. These particles settle and gradually accumulate on the melter bottom. Such particles, most often small crystals of spinel ( a mineral containing iron, nickel, chromium, and other minor oxides), inevitably occurred in the melt when the content of the waste in the glass (called waste loading) increases above a certain limit. To avoid the presence of solid particles in the melter, the waste loading is kept rather low, in average 15% lower than in glass formulated for more robust melters.

High-level nuclear waste is being vitrified, i.e., converted to a durable glass that can be stored in a safe repository for hundreds of thousands of years. Waste vitrification is accomplished in reactors called melters to which the waste is charged together with glass-forming additives. The mixture is electrically heated to a temperature as high as 1150 decrees C to create a melt that becomes glass on cooling.

The goal of this research was to use the interaction between a surfactant and a polymer for efficient displacement of tertiary oil by improving slug integrity, oil solubility in the displacing fluid and mobility control. Surfactant-polymer flooding has been shown to be highly effective in laboratory-scale linear floods. The focus of this proposal is to design an inexpensive surfactant-polymer mixture that can efficiently recover tertiary oil by avoiding surfactant slug degradation and viscous/heterogeneity fingering.

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Final report of the Amtrak Reform Council describing their activities and findings regarding the Council's proposed action plan for restructuring the national intercity rail passenger system in the face of Amtrak's failure to achieve operational self-sufficiency.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has projected that the failure of Superior Bank could cost the deposit insurance fund as much as $526 million. A major reason for the failure was Superior Bank's business strategy of originating and securing subprime loans on a large scale. In addition to the concentration in risky assets, the bank did not properly value and account for the interests that it had retained in pooled home mortgages. Superior's external auditor, Ernst & Young, also failed to detect the improper valuation of Superior's retained interest until the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and FDIC insisted that the issue be reviewed by the auditor's national office. Federal regulators did not identify and act on the bank's problems early enough to prevent a loss to the deposit insurance fund. Both OTS and FDIC were aware of the substantial concentration of retained interests that Superior held, but they took little action because of the apparently high level of earnings, the apparently adequate capital, and the belief that the bank's management was conservatively managing the institution."

The goal of this Strategic Initiative LDRD project was to establish at LLNL a new core capability in computational biology, combining laboratory strengths in high performance computing, molecular biology, and computational chemistry and physics. As described in this report, this project has been very successful in achieving this goal. This success is demonstrated by the large number of referred publications, invited talks, and follow-on research grants that have resulted from this project. Additionally, this project has helped build connections to internal and external collaborators and funding agencies that will be critical to the long-term vitality of LLNL programs in computational biology. Most importantly, this project has helped establish on-going research groups in the Biology and Biotechnology Research Program, the Physics and Applied Technology Directorate, and the Computation Directorate. These groups include three laboratory staff members originally hired as post-doctoral researchers for this strategic initiative.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) lacks management control of the Standard Procurement System (SPS). DOD has not (1) ensured that accountability and responsibility for measuring progress against commitments are clearly understood, performed, and reported; (2) demonstrated, on the basis of reliable data and credible analysis, that the proposed system solution will produce economic benefits commensurate with costs; (3) used data on progress against project cost, schedule, and performance commitments throughout a project's life cycle to make investment decisions; and (4) divided this large project into a series of incremental investment decisions to spread the risks over smaller, more manageable components. GAO found that DOD lacks the basic information needed to make informed decisions on how to proceed with the project. Nevertheless, DOD continues to push forward in acquiring and deploying additional versions of SPS. This testimony summarizes a July report (GAO-01-682)."

We describe some algorithms and tools that have been developed to generate composite overlapping grids on geometries that have been defined with computer aided design (CAD) programs. This process consists of five main steps. Starting from a description of the surfaces defining the computational domain we (1) correct errors in the CAD representation, (2) determine topology of the patched-surface, (3) build a global triangulation of the surface, (4) construct structured surface and volume grids using hyperbolic grid generation, and (5) generate the overlapping grid by determining the holes and the interpolation points. The overlapping grid generator which is used for the final step also supports the rapid generation of grids for block-structured adaptive mesh refinement and for moving grids. These algorithms have been implemented as part of the Overture object-oriented framework.