Gov. Davis issued Executive Order D-5-99 in March 1999 calling for removal of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) from gasoline no later than December 31, 2002. The Executive Order required the California Air Board, State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) and Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) to prepare an analysis of potential impacts and health risks that may be associated with the use of ethanol as a fuel oxygenate. The SWRCB contracted with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to lead a team of researchers, including scientists from Clarkson University, University of Iowa, and University of California, Davis, in evaluating the potential ground and surface water impacts that may occur if ethanol is used to replace MTBE. These findings are reported in the document entitled Health and Environmental Assessment of the Use of Ethanol as a Fuel Oxygenate. This document has been peer reviewed and presented to the California Environmental Policy Council and may be viewed at: http://www-erd.llnl.gov/ethanol/. Ethanol used for fuels is made primarily from grains, but any feed stock containing sugar, starch, or cellulose can be fermented to ethanol. Ethanol contains 34.7% oxygen by weight. It is less dense than water, but infinitely soluble in water. …

The volumes and diversity of information in the discovery, development, and business processes within the chemical and life sciences industries require new approaches for analysis. Traditional list- or spreadsheet-based methods are easily overwhelmed by large amounts of data. Furthermore, generating strong hypotheses and, just as importantly, ruling out weak ones, requires integration across different experimental and informational sources. We have developed a framework for this integration, including common conceptual data models for multiple data types and linked visualizations that provide an overview of the entire data set, a measure of how each data record is related to every other record, and an assessment of the associations within the data set.

The United States' Department of Energy Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee recently completed a study ''Technological Opportunities To Increase The Proliferation Resistance Of Global Civilian Nuclear Power Systems (TOPS).'' That effort included the development of a set of both intrinsic and extrinsic barriers to proliferation that technologies can directly impact. In this paper we will review these barriers as and framework for assisting in the evaluation of the relative proliferation resistance of various nuclear fuel cycles, technologies and alternatives.