Wildfires are getting more severe, with more acres and houses burned and more people at risk. This results from excess biomass in the forests, due to past logging and grazing and a century of fire suppression, combined with an expanding wild land-urban interface-more people and houses in and near the forests-and climate change, exacerbating drought and insect and disease problems. This report looks at the causes of wildfires, and the pros and cons of their treatment.

In response, in part, to overall growth in Medicare program expenditures and growth in expenditures per Medicare beneficiary, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act created the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB, or the Board) and charged the Board with developing proposals to "reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending." This report discusses the responsibilities and duties.

The Cyber Crime Protection Security Act (S. 2111) would enhance the criminal penalties for the cyber crimes outlawed in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Those offenses include espionage, hacking, fraud, destruction, password trafficking, and extortion committed against computers and computer networks. S. 2111 contains some of the enhancements approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee when it reported the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act (S. 1151), S.Rept. 112-91 (2011).

This report provides an overview of U.S. foreign assistance to Israel. It includes a review of past aid programs, data on annual assistance, and an analysis of current issues.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Energy (DOE) has made $15 billion in loan guarantees and conditionally committed to an additional $15 billion, but the program does not have the consolidated data on application status needed to facilitate efficient management and program oversight. For the 460 applications to the Loan Guarantee Program (LGP), DOE has made loan guarantees for 7 percent and committed to an additional 2 percent. The time the LGP took to review loan applications decreased over the course of the program, according to GAO’s analysis of LGP data. However, when GAO requested data from the LGP on the status of these applications, the LGP did not have consolidated data readily available and had to assemble these data over several months from various sources. Without consolidated data on applicants, LGP managers do not have readily accessible information that would facilitate more efficient program management, and LGP staff may not be able to identify weaknesses, if any, in the program’s application review process and approval procedures. Furthermore, because it took months to assemble the data required for GAO’s review, it is also clear that the data were not …

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One of the crucial questions of all actinide electronic structure determinations is the issue of 5f versus 6d character and the distribution of these components across the density of states. Here, a break-though experiment is discussed, which has allowed the direct determination of the U5f and U6d contributions to the unoccupied density of states (UDOS) in Uranium Dioxide. A novel Resonant Inverse Photoelectron (RIPES) and X-ray Emission Spectroscopy (XES) investigation of UO{sub 2} is presented. It is shown that the U5f and U6d components are isolated and identified unambiguously.

Dissolved CO{sub 2} in groundwater is frequently supersaturated relative to its equilibrium with atmospheric partial pressure and will degas when it is conveyed to the surface. Estimates of dissolved CO{sub 2} concentrations can vary widely between different hydrochemical facies because they have different sources of error (e.g., rapid degassing, low alkalinity, non-carbonate alkalinity). We sampled 60 natural spring and mine waters using a beverage industry carbonation meter, which measures dissolved CO{sub 2} based on temperature and pressure changes as the sample volume is expanded. Using a modified field protocol, the meter was found to be highly accurate in the range 0.2–35 mMCO{sub 2}. The meter provided rapid, accurate and precise measurements of dissolved CO{sub 2} in natural waters for a range of hydrochemical facies. Dissolved CO{sub 2} concentrations measured in the field with the carbonation meter were similar to CO{sub 2} determined using the pH-alkalinity approach, but provided immediate results and avoided errors from alkalinity and pH determination. The portability and ease of use of the carbonation meter in the field made it well-suited to sampling in difficult terrain. The carbonation meter has proven useful in the study of aquatic systems where CO{sub 2} degassing drives geochemical changes that result …

We present TECA, a parallel toolkit for detecting extreme events in large climate datasets. Modern climate datasets expose parallelism across a number of dimensions: spatial locations, timesteps and ensemble members. We design TECA to exploit these modes of parallelism and demonstrate a prototype implementation for detecting and tracking three classes of extreme events: tropical cyclones, extra-tropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers. We process a modern TB-sized CAM5 simulation dataset with TECA, and demonstrate good runtime performance for the three case studies.

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The exact treatment of nuclei starting from the constituent nucleons and the fundamental interactions among them has been a long-standing goal in nuclear physics. In addition to the complex nature of nuclear forces, one faces the quantum-mechanical many-nucleon problem governed by an interplay between bound and continuum states. In recent years, significant progress has been made in ab initio nuclear structure and reaction calculations based on input from QCD employing Hamiltonians constructed within chiral effective field theory. In this contribution, we present one of such promising techniques capable of describing simultaneously both bound and scattering states in light nuclei. By combining the resonating-group method (RGM) with the ab initio no-core shell model (NCSM), we complement a microscopic cluster approach with the use of realistic interactions and a microscopic and consistent description of the clusters. We discuss applications to light nuclei scattering, radiative capture and fusion reactions.

Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) prepared a nominal 150 gallon batch of Next Generation Solvent (NGS) for Parsons. This material was then analyzed and tested for cesium mass transfer efficiency. The bulk of the results indicate that the solvent is qualified as acceptable for use in the upcoming pilot-scale testing at Parsons Technology Center. This report describes the analysis and testing of a batch of Next Generation Solvent (NGS) prepared in support of pilot-scale testing in the Parsons Technology Center. A total of {approx}150 gallons of NGS solvent was prepared in late November of 2011. Details for the work are contained in a controlled laboratory notebook. Analysis of the Parsons NGS solvent indicates that the material is acceptable for use. SRNL is continuing to improve the analytical method for the guanidine.

Exascale class machines will exhibit a new level of complexity: they will feature an unprecedented number of cores and threads, will most likely be heterogeneous and deeply hierarchical, and offer a range of new hardware techniques (such as speculative threading, transactional memory, programmable prefetching, and programmable accelerators), which all have to be utilized for an application to realize the full potential of the machine. Additionally, users will be faced with less memory per core, fixed total power budgets, and sharply reduced MTBFs. At the same time, it is expected that the complexity of applications will rise sharply for exascale systems, both to implement new science possible at exascale and to exploit the new hardware features necessary to achieve exascale performance. This is particularly true for many of the NNSA codes, which are large and often highly complex integrated simulation codes that push the limits of everything in the system including language features. To overcome these limitations and to enable users to reach exascale performance, users will expect a new generation of tools that address the bottlenecks of exascale machines, that work seamlessly with the (set of) programming models on the target machines, that scale with the machine, that provide automatic …

Wind is a significant source of energy; however, the human capability to produce electrical energy still has many hurdles to overcome. One of these is the unpredictability of the winds in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). The ABL is highly turbulent in both stable and unstable conditions (based on the vertical temperature profile) and the resulting fluctuations can have a dramatic impact on wind turbine operation. Any method by which these fluctuations could be observed, estimated, or predicted could provide a benefit to the wind energy industry as a whole. Based on the fundamental coupling of velocity fluctuations to pressure fluctuations in the nearly incompressible flow in the ABL, This work hypothesizes that a ground-based array of infrasonic pressure transducers could be employed to estimate the vertical wind profile over a height relevant for wind turbines. To analyze this hypothesis, experiments and field deployments were conducted. Wind tunnel experiments were performed for a thick turbulent boundary layer over a neutral or heated surface. Surface pressure and velocity probe measurements were acquired simultaneously. Two field deployments yielded surface pressure data from a 49 element array. The second deployment at the Reese Technology Center in Lubbock, TX, also included data from a …

Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and its connection to the generation of hadron masses has historically been viewed as a vacuum phenomenon. We argue that confinement makes such a position untenable. If quark-hadron duality is a reality in QCD, then condensates, those quantities that have commonly been viewed as constant empirical mass-scales that fill all spacetime, are instead wholly contained within hadrons; i.e., they are a property of hadrons themselves and expressed, e.g., in their Bethe-Salpeter or light-front wave functions. We explain that this paradigm is consistent with empirical evidence, and incidentally expose misconceptions in a recent Comment.

Fuel cell stacks are typically hand-assembled and tested. As a result the manufacturing process is labor-intensive and time-consuming. The fluid leakage in fuel cell stacks may reduce fuel cell performance, damage fuel cell stack, or even cause fire and become a safety hazard. Leak check is a critical step in the fuel cell stack manufacturing. The fuel cell industry is in need of fuel cell leak-test processes and equipment that is automatic, robust, and high throughput. The equipment should reduce fuel cell manufacturing cost.

HB-Line will begin processing Pu solutions during FY2012 that will involve the recovery of Pu using oxalate precipitation and filtration. After the precipitation and filtration processes, the filtrate solution will be transferred from HB-Line to H-Canyon. The presence of excess oxalate and unfiltered Pu oxalate solids in these solutions create a criticality safety issue if they are sent to H-Canyon without controls in H-Canyon. One approach involves H-Canyon receiving the filtrate solution into a tank that is poisoned with soluble gadolinium (Gd). Decomposition of the oxalate will occur within a subsequent H-Canyon vessel. The receipt of excess oxalate into the H-Canyon receipt tanks has the potential to precipitate a portion of the Gd poison in the receipt tanks. Because the amount of Gd in solution determines the maximum amount of Pu solids that H-Canyon can receive, H-Canyon Engineering requested that SRNL determine the solubility of Gd in aqueous solutions of 4-10 M nitric acid (HNO{sub 3}), 4-12 g/L Gd, and 0.15-0.25 M oxalic acid (H{sub 2}C{sub 2}O{sub 4}) at 25 °C. The target soluble Gd concentration is 6 g/L. The data indicate that the target can be achieved above 6 M HNO{sub 3} and below 0.25 M H{sub 2}C{sub 2}O{sub …