Appropriations are one part of a complex federal budget process that includes budget resolutions, appropriations (regular, supplemental, and continuing) bills, rescissions, and budget reconciliation bills. This report is a guide to one of the 13 regular appropriations bills that Congress passes each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Subcommittees on VA, HUD and Independent Agencies Appropriations.

This report discusses the Appalachian Development Highway Program (ADHP). After a brief description of the ADHP system, the report describes the ADHP's operation, organization, spending history and status. It then describes changes in its funding mechanism resultant from TEA 21 and issues of interest to Congress related to the ADHP.

After several years of relative peace in Central Asia and southern Russia, Islamic extremist movements have become more active in Russia and in Central and South Asia, threatening stability in the region. Although numerous factors might account for the upsurge in activity, several of these movements appear to have connections to the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These linkages raise questions about whether the United States, as part of a broader effort to promote peace and stability in the region, should continue to engage the Taliban regime, or strongly confront it. This report will be updated as events warrant.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a municipality may establish a program for economic development pursuant to section 380.001 of the Local Governement Code, and related questions (RQ-464)

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Jim Mattox, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Can a municipality require a bond, either a performance and/or payment bond, from a developer if it also requires surety from the same developer that the project will be completed? What determines 'sufficient surety'? Does the statute permit a municipality to accept forms of guarantee, such a letter of credit, in lieu of a performance and/or payment bond?

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether the district clerk may file an abstract of judgement for nonpayment of costs (ID# 26152)

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Application of section 365.012, Health and Safety Code, which prohibits the dumping of litter or other solid waste (ID# 26966)

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether newly added subsections (e) and (f) of section 52.021 of the Government Code conflict and related questions (ID# 22365)

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether interpreters for the deaf hired by councils that contract with the Texas Commission for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired are employees or independent contractos (ID# 22176)

A statement of record issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Air Force's F-22 aircraft development and procurement program."

Hanford Seismic Monitoring provides an uninterrupted collection of high-quality raw and processed seismic data from the Hanford Seismic Network (HSN) for the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractors. Hanford Seismic Monitoring also locates and identifies sources of seismic activity and monitors changes in the historical pattern of seismic activity at the Hanford Site. The data are compiled, archived, and published for use by the Hanford Site for waste management, Natural Phenomena Hazards assessments, and engineering design and construction. In addition, the seismic monitoring organization works with the Hanford Site Emergency Services Organization to provide assistance in the event of a significant earthquake on the Hanford Site. The HSN and the Eastern Washington Regional Network. (EWRN) consist of 40 individual sensor sites and 15 radio relay sites maintained by the Hanford Seismic Monitoring staff. A major reconfiguration of the HSN was initiated at the end of this quarter and the results will be reported in the first quarter report for next fiscal year (FY2000). For the HSN, there were 390 triggers during the fourth quarter of fiscal year(FY) 1999 on the primary recording system. With the implementation of dual backup systems during the second quarter of the fiscal year and …

Electron and negative ion densities have been measured in inductively coupled discharges containing C{sub 2}F{sub 6} and CHF{sub 3}. Line integrated electron density was determined using a microwave interferometer, negative ion densities were inferred using laser photodetachment spectroscopy, and electron temperature was determined using a Langmuir probe. For the range of induction powers, pressures and bias power investigated, the electron density peaked at 9 x 10{sup 12} cm{sup -2} (line-integrated) or approximately 9 x 10{sup 11} cm{sup -3}. The negative ion density peaked at approximately 1.3 x 10{sup 11} cm{sup -3}. A maximum in the negative ion density as a function of induction coil power was observed. The maximum is attributed to a power dependent change in the density of one or more of the potential negative ion precursor species since the electron temperature did not depend strongly on power. The variation of photodetachment with laser wavelength indicated that the dominant negative ion was F{sup -}. Measurement of the decay of the negative ion density in the afterglow of a pulse modulated discharge was used to determine the ion-ion recombination rate for CF{sub 4}, C{sub 2}F{sub 6} and CHF{sub 3} discharges.

Laser induced fluorescence has been used to measure the spatial distribution of the two lowest energy argon excited states, 1s{sub 5} and 1s{sub 4}, in inductively driven plasmas containing argon, chlorine and boron trichloride. The behavior of the two energy levels with plasma conditions was significantly different, probably because the 1s{sub 5} level is metastable and the 1s{sub 4} level is radiatively coupled to the ground state but is radiation trapped. The argon data is compared with a global model to identify the relative importance of processes such as electron collisional mixing and radiation trapping. The trends in the data suggest that both processes play a major role in determining the excited state density. At lower rfpower and pressure, excited state spatial distributions in pure argon were peaked in the center of the discharge, with an approximately Gaussian profile. However, for the highest rfpowers and pressures investigated, the spatial distributions tended to flatten in the center of the discharge while the density at the edge of the discharge was unaffected. The spatially resolved excited state density measurements were combined with previous line integrated measurements in the same discharge geometry to derive spatially resolved, absolute densities of the 1s{sub 5} and …

Though they were discovered in the 18th century, practical applications of individual lanthanides were not possible until the development of first ion exchange and later solvent extraction techniques. Today, solvent extraction using lipophilic organophosphorus complexants is the principal separation technique applied for lanthanide production by hydrometallurgy. Separations chemistry (coprecipitation, ion exchange, and solvent extraction) also was central to both the discovery of the individual actinides and to the preparation of samples of sufficient purity to allow elucidation of their chemical/physical properties. Solvent extraction, in the form of the PUREX process, has become the single most important separations process in actinide technology. In this report, the basic thermodynamics of extraction of actinide and lanthanide metal ions is discussed.

The Winter Fuels Report is intended to provide concise, timely information to the industry, the press, policymakers, consumers, analysts, and State and local governments on the following topics: distillate fuel oil net production, imports and stocks on a US level and for all Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts (PADD) and product supplied on a US level; propane net production, imports and stocks on a US level and for PADD`s I, II, and III; natural gas supply and disposition and underground storage for the US and consumption for all PADD`s; as well as selected National average prices. Residential and wholesale pricing data for heating oil and propane for those States participating in the joint Energy Information Administration (EIA)/State Heating Oil and Propane Program; crude oil and petroleum price comparisons for the US and selected cities; and a 6--10 Day and 30-Day outlook for temperature and precipitation and US total heating degree-days by city.

We describe a general strategy we have found effective for parallelizing solid mechanics simula- tions. Such simulations often have several computationally intensive parts, including finite element integration, detection of material contacts, and particle interaction if smoothed particle hydrody- namics is used to model highly deforming materials. The need to balance all of these computations simultaneously is a difficult challenge that has kept many commercial and government codes from being used effectively on parallel supercomputers with hundreds or thousands of processors. Our strategy is to load-balance each of the significant computations independently with whatever bal- ancing technique is most appropriate. The chief benefit is that each computation can be scalably paraIlelized. The drawback is the data exchange between processors and extra coding that must be written to maintain multiple decompositions in a single code. We discuss these trade-offs and give performance results showing this strategy has led to a parallel implementation of a widely-used solid mechanics code that can now be run efficiently on thousands of processors of the Pentium-based Sandia/Intel TFLOPS machine. We illustrate with several examples the kinds of high-resolution, million-element models that can now be simulated routinely. We also look to the future and dis- cuss what possibilities …

The generation of surface defects on electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma derived aluminum oxide films has been studied. We find that Cl active O vacancies can be generated using electron and ion irradiation yielding surface concentrations of 3 xl 013 to 1X1014 sites"cm-2. These values correspond to surface defect concentrations of 3 to 10% when compared to ordered, crystalline u-alumina. The vacancies appear to be responsible for increased surface O concentrations when immersed in water. Anodic polarization of irradiated films yields a decrease in the stable pitting potential which correlates with electron dose.

Spectrophotometry of elliptical galaxies spanning a large rang in luminosity is analyzed for cosmic variations in color and line strength. The results are used to construct a base sequence spectral energy distribution as a function line strength, color, and velocity dispersion, representing old, red, uniform elliptical galaxy stellar populations. The sequence can be used as the starting point for investigating and modeling the stellar populations of other systems such as dwarf ellipticals, merger remnants, and, eventually, high redshift ellipticals.

We propose a multi length scale approach to modeling recrystallization which links a dislocation model, a cell growth model and a macroscopic model. Although this methodology and linking framework will be applied to recrystallization, it is also applicable to other types of phase transformations in bulk and layered materials. Critical processes such as the dislocation structure evolution, nucleation, the evolution of crystal orientations into a preferred texture, and grain size evolution all operate at different length scales. In this paper we focus on incorporating experimental measurements of dislocation substructures, rnisorientation measurements of dislocation boundaries, and dislocation simulations into a mesoscopic model of cell growth. In particular, we show how feeding information from the dislocation model into the cell growth model can create realistic initial microstructure.

For nearly fifty years the US held a dominant position in research and development in the free world. The situation has changed dramatically in the last decade. Countries around the world realize that to foster sustainable economic growth, they must build and maintain a foundation in science and technology. The time in which a country could base its gross national product solely on extraction of raw materials or on people-intensive manufacturing is drawing to a close. The funding for research and development has been growing in the rest of the world, while US expenditures have not kept pace. In 1961, the United States funded 71 `?40 of the world's R&D. It is estimated that the US contribution to research and development fimding today has reached the 3 3o/0 level, and will drop to 26o/0 of the world's total by 2003.1 In 1981 US government spending per capita on non-defense research and development was nearly fifty percent above our major competitors; by 2002 it is projected to be f@ percent below them.2 This trend has a profound impact on how research and development institutions in the United States plan for their future technical growth. Sandia National Laboratories, as one of the …

This document is the tenth quarterly technical progress report under Contract No. DE-AC22-92PC92110 {open_quotes}Development of Vanadium-Phosphate Catalysts for Methanol Production by Selective Oxidation of Methane{close_quotes}. Activities focused on testing of additional modified and promoted catalysts and characterization of these materials. Attempts at improving the sensitivity of our GC based analytical systems were also made with some success. Methanol oxidation studies were initiated. These results are reported. Specific accomplishments include: (1) Methane oxidation testing of a suite of catalysts promoted with most of the first row transition metals was completed. Several of these materials produced low, difficult to quantify yields of formaldehyde. (2) Characterization of these materials by XRD and FTIR was performed with the goal of correlating activity and selectivity with catalyst properties. (3) We began to characterize catalysts prepared via modified synthesis methods designed to enhance acidity using TGA measurements of acetonitrile chemisorption and methanol dehydration to dimethyl ether as a test reaction. (4) A catalyst prepared in the presence of naphthalene methanol as a structural disrupter was tested for activity in methane oxidation. It was found that this material produced low yields of formaldehyde which were difficult to quantify. (5) Preparation of catalysts with no Bronsted acid sites. …

Development of remediation technologies for the characterization, retrieval, treatment, concentration, and final disposal of radioactive and chemical tank waste stored within the Department of Energy (DOE) complex represents an enormous scientific and technological challenge. A combined total of over 90 million gallons of high-level waste (HLW) and low-level waste (LLW) are stored in 335 underground storage tanks at four different DOE sites. Roughly 98% of this waste is highly alkaline in nature and contains high concentrations of nitrate and nitrite salts along with lesser concentrations of other salts. The primary waste forms are sludge, saltcake, and liquid supernatant with the bulk of the radioactivity contained in the sludge, making it the largest source of HLW. The saltcake (liquid waste with most of the water removed) and liquid supernatant consist mainly of sodium nitrate and sodium hydroxide salts. The main radioactive constituent in the alkaline supernatant is cesium-137, but strontium-90, technetium-99, and transuranic nuclides are also present in varying concentrations. Reduction of the radioactivity below Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) limits would allow the bulk of the waste to be disposed of as LLW. Because of the long half-life of technetium-99 (2.1 x 10 5 y) and the mobility of the pertechnetate …