Alternative fuels and advanced technology vehicles are seen by proponents as integral to improving urban air quality, decreasing dependence on foreign oil, and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. However, major barriers—especially economics—currently prevent the widespread use of these fuels and technologies. The 112th Congress has debated alternative fuels and advanced technology vehicles directly and as it has addressed other key topics. On June 16, 2011 the Senate approved S.Amdt. 476 which would have eliminated the excise tax credit for blending ethanol in gasoline before its December 31, 2011 expiration date. Although the underlying legislation failed a cloture vote in the Senate, the amendment was approved 73-27. The prospects for further action increasing or extending biofuels and alternative fuels tax incentives may be limited in light of that vote.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The 1,002 exempt financial institutions make up a small percentage of the assets of the overall banking system—about 7 percent—and include industrial loan corporations (ILC), limited-purpose credit card banks, municipal deposit banks, trust banks with insured deposits, and savings and loans (S&L). Although exempt from the BHC Act, S&L holding companies are regulated by the Federal Reserve System Board of Governors (Federal Reserve) under the Home Owners’ Loan Act as amended. Excluding S&Ls, the number of exempt institutions drops to 57 that comprise less than 1 percent of banking system assets and there is a 3-year moratorium on the approval of federal deposit insurance on select exempt institutions that ends in 2013. These institutions vary by size, activities, and risks. Larger institutions such as ILCs provide banking services similar to those of commercial banks and carry many of the same risks. Other exempt institutions are smaller, provide only a few services such as credit card loans and related services, and thus have lower risk profiles."

This report gives an overview of the issues related to federal or state laws that condition the initial or ongoing receipt of governmental benefits on passing drug tests. These regulations are vulnerable to constitutional challenge, most often due to issues of personal privacy and Fourth Amendment protections against "unreasonable searches."

This document addresses the question of moving the DX magnets for p-Au operations. First the beam geometry is addressed. Next, the beam sizes are covered. Finally, a conclusion is presented.

Geothermal power promises clean, renewable, reliable and potentially widely-available energy, but is limited by high initial capital costs. New drilling technologies are required to make geothermal power financially competitive with other energy sources. One potential solution is offered by Thermal Spallation Drilling (TSD) - a novel drilling technique in which small particles (spalls) are released from the rock surface by rapid heating. While TSD has the potential to improve drilling rates of brittle granitic rocks, the coupled thermomechanical processes involved in TSD are poorly described, making system control and optimization difficult for this drilling technology. In this paper, we discuss results from a new modeling effort investigating thermal spallation drilling. In particular, we describe an explicit model that simulates the grain-scale mechanics of thermal spallation and use this model to examine existing theories concerning spalling mechanisms. We will report how borehole conditions influence spall production, and discuss implications for macro-scale models of drilling systems.

This report provides a brief history of the laws, regulations, and lawsuits related to the wolf's protected status. Fuller analyses of the concepts discussed in this report can be found in the companion report.

This report provides an overview of Hemp as an Agricultural Commodity. Industrial hemp is a variety of Cannabis sativa and is of the same species of Marijuana. However, hemp is genetically different and distinguished by its use and chemical makeup.

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This report discusses the political climate, development challenges and reform in Nigeria. The report also considers the social issues and security concerns of Nigeria. In addition, other issues are mentioned, as Congress provides oversight for over $600 million in U.S. foreign assistance programs to Nigeria.

Small underground nuclear explosions need to be confidently detected, identified, and characterized in regions of the world where they have never before occurred. We develop a parametric model of the nuclear explosion seismic source spectrum derived from regional phases that is compatible with earthquake-based geometrical spreading and attenuation. Earthquake spectra are fit with a generalized version of the Brune spectrum, which is a three-parameter model that describes the long-period level, corner-frequency, and spectral slope at high-frequencies. Explosion spectra can be fit with similar spectral models whose parameters are then correlated with near-source geology and containment conditions. We observe a correlation of high gas-porosity (low-strength) with increased spectral slope. The relationship between the parametric equations and the geologic and containment conditions will assist in our physical understanding of the nuclear explosion source.

Fractures and fracture networks are the principal pathways for migration of water and contaminants in groundwater systems, fluids in enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), oil and gas in petroleum reservoirs, carbon dioxide leakage from geological carbon sequestration, and radioactive and toxic industrial wastes from underground storage repositories. When dealing with EGS fracture networks, there are several major issues to consider, e.g., the minimization of hydraulic short circuits and losses of injected geothermal fluid to the surrounding formation, which in turn maximize heat extraction and economic production. Gel deployments to direct and control fluid flow have been extensively and successfully used in the oil industry for enhanced oil recovery. However, to the best of our knowledge, gels have not been applied to EGS to enhance heat extraction. In-situ gelling systems can either be organic or inorganic. Organic polymer gels are generally not thermostable to the typical temperatures of EGS systems. Inorganic gels, such as colloidal silica gels, however, may be ideal blocking agents for EGS systems if suitable gelation times can be achieved. In the current study, we explore colloidal silica gelation times and rheology as a function of SiO{sub 2} concentration, pH, salt concentration, and temperature, with preliminary results in the …

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The Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) was authorized by Congress in 1978, partly in response to concerns in Congress and the concerns of some in academia and the scientific community about the geographic distribution of federal research and development (R&D) funds. Some have questioned the length of time states should receive EPSCoR support. It continues to be called an experimental program after 28 years, and observers have noted that no state has yet to graduate, or leave the program. This report discusses current policy involving EPSCoR, as well as budget requests.

The RHIC collimation system is used to reduce background levels in both STAR and PHENIX detectors. With a push for higher luminosity in the near future, it becomes critical to check if and how the level of performance of the collimators can be improved. The following reviews a proposal for additional collimators placed further downstream of the current system and designed to intercept the tertiary halo coming out of the IR8 insertion before it can reach the triplet quadrupoles in either STAR or PHENIX. Simulations have been peformed to quantify the efficiency of additional collimator jaws in RHIC. Each figure presented in this article clearly shows that the additional mask collimators provide the expected reduction in losses around the machine, and especially to the incoming triplet to the STAR experiment (IP6), for the Yellow beam as much as for the Blue beam. Looking at compiled statistics for all three working point cases studied, proton losses around the machine are reduced by roughly one order of magnitude: at most a factor 30 for magnet losses, and at most a factor 40 for losses in spaces between magnets.

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A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Workforce board officials and their partners in the 14 initiatives cited a range of factors that facilitated building innovative collaborations. Almost all of the collaborations grew out of efforts to address urgent workforce needs of multiple employers in a specific sector, such as health care, manufacturing, or agriculture, rather than focusing on individual employers. Additionally, the partners in these initiatives made extra effort to understand and work with employers so they could tailor services such as jobseeker assessment, screening, and training to address specific employer needs. For example, in Greensboro, North Carolina, board staff provided expedited services for an aircraft company that just moved to the area by designing a web-based recruitment tool and customized assessment process within 48 hours and screening over 2,400 initial applicants. In all the initiatives, partners remained engaged in these collaborative efforts because they continued to produce a wide range of reported results, such as an increased supply of skilled labor, job placements, reduced employer recruitment and turnover costs, and averted layoffs. For example, in Cincinnati, Ohio, employers who participated in the health care initiative realized almost $5,000 in estimated cost …

This document contains the calculation of the TPBAR tritium release from the Mark 9.2 design TPBARs irradiated in WBN cycle 10. The calculation utilizes the generalized cycle analysis methodology given in TTP-1-3045 Rev. 0.

This report describes the status of the advanced redox flow battery research being performed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Storage Systems Program. The Quarter 1 of FY2012 Milestone was completed on time. The milestone entails completion of evaluation and optimization of single cell components for the two advanced redox flow battery electrolyte chemistries recently developed at the lab, the all vanadium (V) mixed acid and V-Fe mixed acid solutions. All the single cell components to be used in future kW-scale stacks have been identified and optimized in this quarter, which include solution electrolyte, membrane or separator; carbon felt electrode and bi-polar plate. Varied electrochemical, chemical and physical evaluations were carried out to assist the component screening and optimization. The mechanisms of the battery capacity fading behavior for the all vanadium redox flow and the Fe/V battery were discovered, which allowed us to optimize the related cell operation parameters and continuously operate the system for more than three months without any capacity decay.

In this publication, uncertainties in and differences between the MC{at}NLO and POWHEG methods for matching next-to-leading order QCD calculations with parton showers are discussed. Implementations of both algorithms within the event generator SHERPA are employed to assess the impact on a representative selection of observables. In the MC{at}NLO approach a phase space restriction has been added to subtraction and parton shower, which allows to vary in a transparent way the amount of non-singular radiative corrections that are exponentiated. Effects on various observables are investigated, using the production of a Higgs boson in gluon fusion, with or without an associated jet, as a benchmark process. The case of H+jet production is presented for the first time in an NLO+PS matched simulation. Uncertainties due to scale choices and non-perturbative effects are explored in the production of W{sup {+-}} and Z bosons in association with a jet. Corresponding results are compared to data from the Tevatron and LHC experiments.

Laser wakefield acceleration of electrons holds great promise for producing ultra-compact stages of GeV scale, high quality electron beams for applications such as x-ray free electron lasers and high energy colliders. Ultra-high intensity laser pulses can be self-guided by relativistic plasma waves over tens of vacuum diffraction lengths, to give >1 GeV energy in cm-scale low density plasma using ionization-induced injection to inject charge into the wake at low densities. This thesis describes a series of experiments which investigates the physics of LWFA in the self-guided blowout regime. Beginning with high density gas jet experiments the scaling of the LWFA-produced electron beam energy with plasma electron density is found to be in excellent agreement with both phenomenological theory and with 3-D PIC simulations. It is also determined that self-trapping of background electrons into the wake exhibits a threshold as a function of the electron density, and at the densities required to produce electron beams with energies exceeding 1 GeV a different mechanism is required to trap charge into low density wakes. By introducing small concentrations of high-Z gas to the nominal He background the ionization-induced injection mechanism is enabled. Electron trapping is observed at densities as low as 1.3 x …

On February 13, 2012, the Obama Administration submitted its FY2013 budget request, including $54.7 billion for State Department, Foreign Operations, and Related Appropriations. Of the total request, $18.6 billion is for programs funded through the State operations and related agencies (a 4.6% increase over FY2012 estimates), and $36.1 billion is for foreign operations (a 0.1% increase over FY2012 estimates). This fact sheet provides a brief overview of the request.

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We have developed a high-throughput graphics processing units (GPU) code that can characterize a large database of crystalline porous materials. In our algorithm, the GPU is utilized to accelerate energy grid calculations where the grid values represent interactions (i.e., Lennard-Jones + Coulomb potentials) between gas molecules (i.e., CH$_{4}$ and CO$_{2}$) and material's framework atoms. Using a parallel flood fill CPU algorithm, inaccessible regions inside the framework structures are identified and blocked based on their energy profiles. Finally, we compute the Henry coefficients and heats of adsorption through statistical Widom insertion Monte Carlo moves in the domain restricted to the accessible space. The code offers significant speedup over a single core CPU code and allows us to characterize a set of porous materials at least an order of magnitude larger than ones considered in earlier studies. For structures selected from such a prescreening algorithm, full adsorption isotherms can be calculated by conducting multiple grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations concurrently within the GPU.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Several factors—including rising rents, declining household incomes, and decisions to expand the number of assisted households—were key drivers of the approximately 29 percent increase (before inflation) in housing agencies’ expenditures for the voucher program between 2003 and 2010. Congress and HUD have taken steps to limit cost increases while maintaining assistance for existing program participants. For example, Congress moved away from providing funding to housing agencies based on the number of voucher-assisted households they were authorized to subsidize and instead provided funding based on the generally lower number of voucher-assisted households housing agencies actually subsidized in the prior year. Further, HUD has proposed administrative relief and program flexibility for housing agencies, including streamlining program requirements and reducing subsidies paid."