A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Defense Reform Initiative (DRI), focusing on: (1) the types of performance measures used to track progress toward achieving DRI program goals; (2) opportunities to add or improve on existing performance measures; and (3) performance measurement limitations."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program, focusing on: (1) the distribution of awards by company and geographic area, with special emphasis on the share of awards received by the 25 most frequent winners; (2) the extent to which federal agencies are considering commercial potential and the program's other goals in making their awards; and (3) previous evaluations of the SBIR program to identify opportunities to improve measurements of the program's outcomes."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO surveyed inspectors general (IG) to obtain: (1) information on their organizational structure, staffing, and workload; and (2) their views on current policy issues affecting them."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed and updated its previous work on airfares and service and reexamined the effect that certain barriers have had on these measures, focusing on: (1) how airfares have changed since 1990 for travel to and from 171 airports serving various U.S. communities; (2) how the quality of air service has changed since 1978 for travel to and from these airports; and (3) the extent to which certain barriers to entry--restrictive gate-leasing arrangements, controls on the number of allowable takeoffs and landings at some airports, and the limits on the distance that flights from some airports can be--influence competition at affected airports."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed how the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in conjunction with the states, ensures the cost-effectiveness of projects funded under the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, focusing on: (1) the approaches FEMA and the states use to ensure that program grants are targeted to cost-effective mitigation projects; and (2) whether the approaches ensure that the mitigation measures are cost-effective."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Administration for Children and Families' (ACF) new rule on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. GAO noted that: (1) the rule contains key provisions of the new welfare block grant program enacted in 1996 by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and the TANF program; (2) this program replaces the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and the related programs known as the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training Program and the Emergency Assistance program; and (3) ACF complied with the applicable requirements in promulgating the rule."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the potential differences in treatment patterns for health maintenance organizations (HMO) patients treated by specialists and those treated by generalist physicians, focusing on: (1) the proportion of Medicare heart attack survivors enrolled in HMOs who take cholesterol-lowering drugs, beta-blockers, and aspirin; and (2) whether Medicare heart attack survivors in HMOs regularly treated by a cardiologist are more likely to take cholesterol-lowering drugs, beta-blockers, and aspirin than those who do not have regular cardiology appointments."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA) efforts to safeguard Medicare payments, focusing on: (1) how Medicare program safeguard activities have changed from fiscal years (FY) 1995 to 1999 and what changes are planned for FY 2000; (2) HCFA's actions to better manage its program safeguard activities, which respond to key findings from GAO's previous audit reports and those of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG); and (3) the initial effects of the Medicare Integrity Program (MIP) on controlling Medicare fraud and abuse, including the adequacy of HCFA's data for measuring the effectiveness of its program safeguard activities."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the status of financial management at the Department of Defense (DOD), focusing on: (1) DOD's most serious financial management weaknesses; (2) the resulting impact on DOD's ability to effectively carry out its programs and operations; and (3) DOD's efforts to address these deficiencies."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Automated Land and Mineral Record System project, also known as the ALMRS/Modernization, focusing on: (1) the history of the project; (2) the results of GAO's reviews, including the key reasons for problems; and (3) where GAO believes BLM should go from here."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the year 2000 technology problem, focusing on: (1) the federal government's progress and challenges that remain in correcting its systems; (2) state and local government year 2000 issues; and (3) the readiness of key public infrastructure and economic sectors."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the actions the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has taken to move from its traditional regulatory approach to an approach that considers risk in conjunction with engineering analyses and operating experience-termed risk-informed regulation, focusing on the: (1) issues that NRC needs to resolve to implement a risk-informed regulatory approach; (2) status of NRC's efforts to make two of its oversight programs--overall plant safety assessments and enforcement-risk-informed; and (3) major management challenges that NRC faces."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed its preliminary findings and observations pertaining to pilot shortages, focusing on: (1) the validity of pilot requirements; (2) the extent of the reported shortages and where they exist; (3) the key factors contributing to pilot shortages; (4) the services' plans for correcting such shortfalls; and (5) other steps that could be taken to address the problem."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the need to revamp the federal food safety system, focusing on: (1) an overview of GAO's work on the problems resulting from the fragmented food safety system; and (2) where in the federal government food safety inspection responsibilities should reside."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed its study of the Health Care Financing Administration's (HFCA) implementation of two of its nursing home initiatives."

This document describes some of the more significant accomplishments in the reactor restart program and details the magnitude and extent of the work completed to bring K-Reactor to a state of restart readiness. The discussion of restart achievements is organized into the three major categories of personnel, programs, and plant. Also presented is information on the scope and extent of internal and external oversight of the efforts, as well as some details on the startup plan.

A kind of microwave power source, called a free-electron laser afterburner (FEL afterburner) which consists of a free-electron laser buncher and a slow-wave output structure sharing a magnetic wiggler field with the buncher, is proposed. The buncher and the slow-wave structure can operate in either a travelling-wave state or a standing-wave state. In the buncher, the wiggler field together with the radiation field makes an electron beam bunched, and in the slow-wave structure the wiggler field keeps the beam bunched while the bunched beam interacts strongly with the slow-wave structure and so produces rf power. The bunching process comes from the free-electron laser mechanism and the generating process of rf power is in a slow-wave structure. A three-dimensional, time-dependent code is used to simulate a particular standing-wave FEL afterburner and it is shown that rf power of up to 1.57 GW can be obtained, at 17.12 GHz, from a l-kA, 5-MeV electron beam.

This analysis is prepared by the Mined Geologic Disposal System (MGDS) Waste Package Development (WPD) department with the objective of providing a comprehensive, conservative estimate of the consequences of the criticality which could possibly occur as the result of commercial spent nuclear fuel emplaced in the underground repository at Yucca Mountain. The consequences of criticality are measured principally in terms of the resulting changes in radionuclide inventory as a function of the power level and duration of the criticality. The purpose of this analysis is to extend the prior estimates of increased radionuclide inventory (Refs. 5.52 and 5.54), for both internal and external criticality. This analysis, and similar estimates and refinements to be completed before the end of fiscal year 1997, will be provided as input to Total System Performance Assessment-Viability Assessment (TSPA-VA) to demonstrate compliance with the repository performance objectives.

Research activity has included continued mechanistic investigations of the nucleophilic activation of carbon monoxide such as homogeneous catalysis of the water gas shift and key steps in the relevant catalytic cycles. Other investigations of related processes included the application of fast reaction techniques to prepare and to investigate quantitatively reactive organometallic intermediates relevant to the activation of hydrocarbons toward carbonylation and other functionalizations. 8 refs.

The traveler was given beam time at the ILL to continue neutron scattering work on high-temperature superconductivity. The unique facilities at the ILL for both high-energy and low-energy neutron instrumentation made the experiments possible. The measurements consisted of two basic types. The first of these is the study of the nature of spin fluctuations in high-{Tc} materials. This work is fundamental to the mechanism that is responsible for the high-transition temperatures. The second consisted of experiments on the flux lattice in high-temperature superconductors. The flux lattice has interesting physics in its own right and is important in understanding the current-carrying capability of superconductors.

The Table of Tables' application system captures in a set of SYBASE tables the basic design specification for a database schema. Specification of tables, columns (including the related defaults and rules for the stored values) and keys is provided. The feature which makes this application specifically useful for SYBASE is the ability to automatically generate SYBASE triggers. A description field is provided for each database object. Based on the data stored, SQL scripts for creating complete schema including the tables, their defaults and rules, their indexes, and their SYBASE triggers, are written by TOT. Insert, update and delete triggers are generated from TOT to guarantee integrity of data relations when tables are connected by single column foreign keys. The application is written in SYBASE's APT-SQL and includes a forms based data entry system. Using the features of TOT we can create a complete database schema for which the data integrity specified by our design is guaranteed by the SYBASE triggers generated by TOT. 3 refs.

The travelers attended meetings in Dubna and in Zelenograd. Discussions in Dubna centered on (1) obtaining information on USSR capabilities in silicon detector manufacture and testing and on (2) strategy regarding the development of an industrial process and the manufacture of a large quantity of silicon detectors for the SSC L* collaboration. The ELMA plant in Zelenograd was inspected, and discussions were held on production process development and on a possible detector supply time line. In addition, J. Walter participated in technical and cost estimate forecast discussions with representatives of Wacker-Chemitronic Factory (Germany) about silicon crystals for possible use in the SSC.

In the design of superconducting magnet elements, such as may be required to guide and focus ions in a particle accelerator, one frequently premises some particular current distribution and then proceeds to compute the consequent magnetic field through use of the laws of Biot and Savart or of Ampere. When working in this manner one of course may need to revise frequently the postulated current distribution before arriving at a resulting magnetic field of acceptable field quality. It therefore is of interest to consider an alternative ( inverse'') procedure in which one specifies a desired character for the field required in the region interior to the winding and undertakes then to evaluate the current distribution on the specified winding surface that would provide this desired field. We may note that in undertaking such an inverse procedure we would wish, on practical grounds, to avoid the use of any double-layer'' distributions of current on the winding surface or interface but would not demand that no fields be generated in the exterior region, so that in this respect the goal would differ in detail from that discussed by other authors, in analogy to the distribution sought in electrostatics by the so-caged Green's …

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Metal Recovery Industries, Inc. (MRII), in cost-sharing collaboration, have developed an electrolytic process to separate and recover steel and zinc from galvanized steel scrap. This work has been supported by the US DOE. An assessment of available dezinc technology was begun in 1987 which (1) screened process concepts for separating and recovering zinc and steel from galvanized ferrous scrap, (2) selected electrochemical stripping in hot caustic as the most promising process, (3) evaluated the technical and economic feasibility of the selected process on the basis of fundamental electrochemical studies, (4) experimentally verified the technical and economic feasibility of the process in a phased evaluation from bench-scale controlled experiments through batch tests of actual scrap up to six ton lots, and (5) concluded that the process has technical and economic merit and requires larger- scale evaluation in a continuous mode as the final phase of process development. This work has attracted worldwide interest. Preliminary economic analysis indicates that the cost of the recovered ferrous scrap would be about $150/ton (at a base cost of $110/ton for galvanized scrap), including credit for the co-product zinc. Concentrations of zinc, lead, cadmium and other coating constituents on loose scrap …