This report provides an overview of some of the more common legal, procedural, and practical issues, questions and problems that committees have faced in the courts of an oversight investigation.

This report describes the history and background of the offset and the legislative history of recent attempts to eliminate or reduce the offset. It delineates and analyzes the arguments for and against eliminating or reducing the offset and allowing concurrent receipt, and addresses the issues of costs, precedents in other Federal programs, purposes of the two programs, and equity issues. Finally, options other than full concurrent receipt are mentioned.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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.

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 article III, section 19 of the Texas Constitution prevents a city council member from running for the state legislature after resigning his city council post (ID# 36821)

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 witness fees under section 22.001, Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, must be paid to a person who is subpoenaed to appear and give testimony at a location other than the courthouse (RQ-667)

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 legislation changing two of thirty-one senatorial districts constitutes an "apportionment" under article III, section 3 of the Texas Constitution.

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 an employee of a state university may be compensated for service on the board of directors of the Brazos River Authority (ID# 27010)

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; Propriety of Ellis County Treasurer's making payments from the county treasury without prior approval from the county treasury without prior approval by the commissioners court and related questions (ID# 26895)

This engineering note documents a communication link between the D0 cryo/gas control system and the D0 physics data acquisition computer system. This note is being written well after the work has been completed, in order to document this communications link, and to satisfy needs of planned upgrades. These upgrades are the D0 Super Conducting Solenoid, VLPC system, and Silicon Detector System. The D0 cryo/gas control system is a Programmable Logic Controller based process control system. It is responsible for controlling many of the physical parameters of the D0 experiment, such as Calorimeter cooling, vacuum, Instrument air, TRD gas pressures and flows, W AMUS pressures and flows, SAMUS pressure and flows, etc. It works independent of the Physics DAQ system. There is a need for the Physics DAQ system to record some of these process values with the D0 physics data. This process data will later be used to calibrate certain features of the Physics data during reconstruction. The process data is also used to interlock (via the Physics DAQ system) some of the other D0 systems such as the TRD high voltage system. Some of the Process data values will be continuously monitored and will stop the Physics data taking …

A dynamic and reciprocal flow of information between cells and the extracellular matrix contributes significantly to the regulation of form and function in developing systems. Signals generated by the extracellular matrix do not act in isolation. Instead, they are processed within the context of global signalling hierarchies whose constituent inputs and outputs are constantly modulated by all the factors present in the cell's surrounding microenvironment. This is particularly evident in the mammary gland, where the construction and subsequent destruction of such a hierarchy regulates changes in tissue-specific gene expression, morphogenesis and apoptosis during each developmental cycle of pregnancy, lactation and involution.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission`s (Commission) mission is to oversee America`s natural gas and oil pipeline transportation, electric utility, and hydroelectric power industries to ensure that consumers receive adequate energy supplies at just and reasonable rates. To carry out this mission, the Commission issues regulations covering the accounting, reporting, and rate-making requirements of the regulated utility companies. The Commission`s Office of Chief Accountant performs financial related audits at companies to ensure compliance with these regulations. The purpose of this audit was to evaluate the office of Chief Accountant`s audit performance. Specifically, the objectives were to determine if the most appropriate audit approach was used and if a quality assurance process was in place to ensure reports were accurate and supported by the working papers.

The statements of work for each activity and task of the Hanford Low-Level Tank Waste Performance Assessment project are given for the fiscal years 1996 through 2001. The end product of this program is approval of a final performance assessment by the Department of Energy in the year 2000.

During the development of the feed processing flowsheet for the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) at the Savannah River Site (SRS), research had shown that use of formic acid (HCOOH) could accomplish several processing objectives with one chemical addition. These objectives included the decomposition of tetraphenylborate, chemical reduction of mercury, production of acceptable rheological properties in the feed slurry, and controlling the oxidation state of the glass melt pool. However, the DEPF research had not shown that some vitrification slurry feeds had a tendency to evolve hydrogen (H{sub 2}) and ammonia (NH{sub 3}) as the result of catalytic decomposition of CHOOH with noble metals (rhodium, ruthenium, palladium) in the feed. Testing conducted at Pacific Northwest Laboratory and later at the Savannah River Technical Center showed that the H{sub 2} and NH{sub 3} could evolve at appreciable rates and quantities. The explosive nature of H{sub 2} and NH{sub 3} (as ammonium nitrate) warranted significant mitigation control and redesign of both facilities. At the time the explosive gas evolution was discovered, the DWPF was already under construction and an immediate hardware fix in tandem with flowsheet changes was necessary. However, the Hanford Waste Vitrification Plant (HWVP) was in the design phase and …

A procedure and the equipment necessary for single-point diamond flycutting (loosely referred to as diamond turning) potassium di-hydrogen phosphate (KDP) crystals are described. It is based on current KDP diamond turning activities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), drawing upon knowledge from the Nova crystal finishing development during the 1980`s and incorporating refinements from our efforts during 1995. In addition to describing a step-by-step process for diamond turning KDP, specific discussions are included on the necessary diamond tool geometry and edge sharpness, cutting fluid, and crystal preparation, handling, cleaning, and inspection. The authors presuppose that the reader is already familiar with diamond turning practices.

This paper develops and characterizes mixed direct-iterative methods for boundary integral formulations of continuum dielectric solvation models. We give an example, the Ca{sup ++}{hor_ellipsis}Cl{sup {minus}} pair potential of mean force in aqueous solution, for which a direct solution at thermal accuracy is difficult and, thus for which mixed direct-iterative methods seem necessary to obtain the required high resolution. For the simplest such formulations, Gauss-Seidel iteration diverges in rare cases. This difficulty is analyzed by obtaining the eigenvalues and the spectral radius of the non-symmetric iteration matrix. This establishes that those divergences are due to inaccuracies of the asymptotic approximations used in evaluation of the matrix elements corresponding to accidental close encounters of boundary elements on different atomic spheres. The spectral radii are then greater than one for those diverging cases. This problem is cured by checking for boundary element pairs closer than the typical spatial extent of the boundary elements and for those cases performing an ``in-line`` Monte Carlo integration to evaluate the required matrix elements. These difficulties are not expected and have not been observed for the thoroughly coarsened equations obtained when only a direct solution is sought. Finally, we give an example application of hybrid quantum-classical methods to …

Optical damage that results in large scale fracture has been observed in the large, high-fluence, fused-silica, spatial filter lenses on the Nova and Beamlet lasers. In nearly all cases damage occurs on the vacuum side of the lenses and because the vacuum side of the lens is under tensile stress this damage can lead to catastrophic crack growth if the flaw (damage) size exceeds the critical flaw size for SiO{sub 2}. The damaged 52 cm Nova lenses fracture into two and sometimes three large pieces. Although under full vacuum load at the time they fracture, the Nova lenses do not implode. Rather the authors have observed that the pieces lock together and air slowly leaks into the vacuum spatial filter housing through the lens cracks. The Beamlet lenses have a larger aspect ratio and peak tensile stress than Nova. The peak tensile stress at the center of the output surface of the Beamlet lens is 1,490 psi versus 810 psi for Nova. During a recent Beamlet high energy shot, a damage spot on the lens grew to the critical flaw size and the lens imploded. Post shot data indicate the lens probably fractured into 5 to 7 pieces, however, unlike …

Reflections from lens surfaces create parasitic beams that can damage optics in high-powered laser systems. These parasitic beams are low in energy initially, because of the low reflectivity of antireflection (AR) coated lens surfaces and because they are clipped by spatial filter pinholes, but subsequent amplification can raise them to damage fluence levels. Also, some of the pencil beams in multipass laser systems become pre-pulses at the output by by-pass one of more of the passes, arriving at the output ahead of the main pulse in time. They are insidious because pencil beams that are not initially a problem can become so due to a slow degradation of the AR coatings. Both the Nova and Beamlet laser systems at LLNL have had optics damaged by pencil beams. The best solution for pencil beams is to tip the lenses far enough to eliminate them altogether. This will be the approach taken for the National Ignition Facility (NIF).

We have developed two in-situ HVEM techniques which allow us to begin fundamental investigations into the mechanisms of deformation and fracture in nonstructured materials. A procedure for the observation of tensile deformation and failure in multilayers materials in cross-section is given and also the development of an in-situ HVEM nanoindentor of surfaces and films on surfaces in cross-section.

A number of discriminants have been developed for seismic monitoring. These include the Ms-mb discriminant which measures differences in surface and body wave magnitudes (e.g., Marshall and Basham, 1972), short period P to S wave amplitude ratio discriminants (e.g., Blandford, 1981) and spectral ratios discriminants (e.g., Murphy and Bennett, 1982). Unfortunately, existing discrimination capabilities are insufficient to meet the needs that will be required by a comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT). Of particular concern are limitations of current capabilities for discriminating small magnitude (mb<4) seismic events such as earthquakes, mining explosions, and mining related seismicity (rockbursts and collapse events) from small magnitude nuclear explosions (both coupled and decoupled). In this report, we summarize our work on the development of new methods for discriminating such small magnitude events.

The proposed National Ignition Facility is a 192 beam Nd:glass laser system capable of driving targets to fusion ignition by the year 2005. A key factor in the flexibility and performance of the laser is a front-end system which provides a precisely formatted beam to each beamline. Each of the injected beams has individually controlled energy, temporal pulseshape, and spatial shape to accommodate beamline-to-beamline variations in gain and saturation. This flexibility also gives target designers the options for precisely controlling the drive to different areas of the target. The design of the Front-End laser is described, and initial results are discussed.

Thermal embrittlement of static-cast CF-8 stainless steel components from the decommissioned Shippingport reactor has been characterized. Cast stainless steel materials were obtained from four cold-leg check valves, three hot-leg main shutoff valves, and two pump volutes. The actual time-at-temperature for the materials was {approx}13 y at {approx}281 C (538 F) for the hot-leg components and {approx}264 C (507 F) for the cold-leg components. Baseline mechanical properties for as-cast material were determined from tests on either recovery-annealed material, i.e., annealed for 1 h at 550 C and then water quenched, or material from the cooler region of the component. The Shippingport materials show modest decreases in fracture toughness and Charpy-impact properties and a small increase in tensile strength because of relatively low service temperatures and ferrite content of the steel. The procedure and correlations developed at Argonne National Laboratory for estimating mechanical properties of cast stainless steels predict accurate or slightly lower values for Charpy-impact energy, tensile flow stress, fracture toughness J-R curve, and JIC of the materials. The kinetics of thermal embrittlement and degree of embrittlement at saturation, i.e., the minimum impact energy achieved after long-term aging, were established from materials that were aged further in the laboratory. The results …