After global warming became a concern in the mid-1950s, researchers proposed measuring deep ocean temperatures to reveal any significant trends in core ocean warming. Acoustic thermometry can detect changes in ocean temperature by receiving low-frequency sounds transmitted across an ocean basin because the speed of sound is proportional to water temperature. Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate, or ATOC, is an international program involving 11 institutions in seven nations. It is designed as a 30-month "proof-of-concept" project to provide data on possible global climate change, with funding provided by the U.S. Department of Defense. A debate has arisen over ATOC's impact on marine mammals versus the benefits of better global warming information derived from ATOC. This report dicusses the ATOC program and related concerns.

Over the past 30 years, U.S. trade negotiators have pressured Japan to open its market to foreign goods and services. These outside pressures, known as gaiatsu in Japan, have been based partly on economically coercive bargaining and partly on invitation. The coercive element, which has entailed threats of retaliatory market constriction should a satisfactory resolution of the market opening dispute not be forthcoming, generally has been a necessary ingredient in obtaining concessions from Japan. The invitational component, which has included requests for U.S. pressures from Japanese interests who favor reforms, generally has facilitated Japanese concessions and made the gaiatsu process unique.

The Bureau of the Census estimated the U.S. resident population at nearly 262.0 million as of March 1, 1995, up 5.3% from 248.7 million in 1990, 15.6% from 226.5 million in 1980, and 73.1% from 151.3 million in 1950. The population has grown, on average, by slightly under 1.1% a year since 1990—faster than the world's developed countries overall (0.6%), but slower than the developing countries (1.9%,). Current projections indicate a possible U.S. population of 392.0 million by 2050—over 250% growth in a century and nearly a 50% increase from 1995.

This report focuses on the exchange-rate system set up at Bretton Woods, its breakdown in the 1970s, the current system of managed floating and, finally, proposals to return part or all the way to a more fixed-rate system.

The Rural Abandoned Mine Program (RAMP) was designed to restore agricultural land that has been disturbed by strip mining. The program is carried out by the Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service at a current cost of about $10 million per year--a modest share of total Federal abandoned surface mining reclamation efforts that currently exceed $110 million per year, and that has been higher in the past. Critics contend that the RAMP program is inefficient and duplicates other Federal and State reclamation activities. Proponents contend that the effort has been underfunded and thus unable to fulfill its goals and to realize potential efficiencies. With the efforts of the 104th Congress to cut Federal expenditures and programs, the RAMP program appears highly vulnerable to being cut or eliminated.

Legislation to designate wilderness areas on Federal lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management has been introduced in several recent Congresses. Bills in the 104th Congress include H.R. 1500, America's Red Rock Wilderness Act of 1995, and H.R. 1745 and S. 884, Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995 (identical as introduced). H.R. 1500 would designate 5.7 million acres of wilderness, and reserve Federal water rights. H.R. 1745/S. 884 would designate 1.8 million acres of wilderness, release areas not designated as wilderness, deny Federal reserved water rights, and provide management directions, some of which are exceptions to the standards established in the Wilderness Act.

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 Attorney General Opinion JM-74 (1983) regarding section 6.06(e) of the Tax Code continues to be valid, and related question (ID# 31221)

At this stage of the reservoir characterization research, the main emphasis is on the geostatistics and reservoir simulation. Progress is reported on geological analysis, reservoir simulation, and reservoir management.

A sodium carbonate salt transport system is required to support the Molten Salt Oxidation system being constructed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We are embarking on a project to create a national test bed for evaluating mixed waste destruction technologies. This project is called the Mixed Waste Management Facility. It is currently in the second phase of design and will be operational in 1998. One of the first technologies demonstrated in this facility is Molten Salt Oxidation. Molten Salt Oxidation is a thermal process that destroys the organic constituents of mixed and hazardous wastes. Sodium carbonate salt is heated in a reactor vessel to approximately 950{degrees}C. Organic wastes, along with oxidant air, are injected under the pool of molten salt. A catalytic reaction occurs converting the organics into CO{sub 2} and water. Inorganic constituents in the salt such as metals, silica, alumina, and radionuclides remain captured in the salt. Chlorides in the waste feed are converted in the salt to sodium chloride. As these impurities build up in the salt, the salt must be recycled to remove them or else the reaction rate is reduced. Spent salt is periodically taken from the reactor and transported to a salt recycle system. …

This machine cuts coal along a longwall face extending up to 500 feet by a rotating auger with bits. The machine also transports the coal that is cut acting as screw conveyor. By virtue of an integral shroud comprising part of the conveyor the machine is also amenable to a separation of the zones where men work from air being contaminated by dust and methane gas by the cutting action. Beginning as single intake air courses, the air separates at the working section where one split provides fresh air to the Occupied Zone (OZ) for human needs and the other split purges and carries away dust and methane from face fragmentation in the Cutting Zone (CZ). The attractiveness of the Variable Wall Mining Machine is that it addresses the limitations of current longwall mining equipment: it can consistently out-produce continuous mining machines and most longwall shearing machines. It also is amenable to configuring an environment, the dual-duct system, where the air for human breathing is separated from dust-laden ventilating air with methane mixtures. The objective of the research was to perform a mathematical and experimental study of the interrelationships of the components of the system so that a computer model …

The objective of this talk is to compare the CDF W+ {ge} 3 Jets data with Monte Carlo predictions using the standard model with the top quark. The data is seen to be consistent with these predictions using the t{bar t} production rate indicated by the SVX b-tagging and the previously reported top mass.

The mesoscale sea breeze has important consequences for many densely populated coastal environments, including convection initiation, aviation safety, and air quality. The sea breeze characteristics before and after sunset are markedly different (Sha et al 1993). A gravity current will form during the early afternoon due to the relatively large density difference between the land and sea air. During the afternoon, as the lighter land air is forced upward by the cooler dense sea air, Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) billows often form along the interface, as well as thin regions of turbulent rising air, playing a crucial role in the mixing process (Simpson 1994). After sunset, the frontal zone expands as longwave radiation cools the surface which reduces vertical mixing. With further inland penetration, the sea breeze encounters increasingly stable air near the ground, resulting in the formation of an undular bore or cutoff vortex (Sha et al. 1993). It has been demonstrated that large-scale winds have profound effects on both the strength and inland penetration of sea breezes (Arritt 1993, among others). In general, offshore flow results in a sharper frontal discontinuity and less inland penetration, while onshore flow produces weaker fronts which may penetrate further inland. Most sea breeze studies …

In the second half of the 1990`s, LLNL and others anticipate designing and beginning construction of the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The NIF will be capable of producing the worlds first laboratory scale fusion ignition and bum reaction by imploding a small target. The NIF will utilize approximately 192 simultaneous laser beams for this purpose. The laser will be capable of producing a shaped energy pulse of at least 1.8 million joules (MJ) with peak power of at least 500 trillion watts (TV). In total, the facility will require more than 7,000 large optical components. The performance of a high power laser of this kind can be seriously degraded by the presence of low amplitude, periodic modulations in the surface and transmitted wavefronts of the optics used. At high peak power, these phase modulations can convert into large intensity modulations by non-linear optical processes. This in turn can lead to loss in energy on target via many well known mechanisms. In some cases laser damage to the optics downstream of the source of the phase modulation can occur. The database described here contains wavefront phase maps of early prototype optical components for the NIF. It has only recently become possible …

Optical components of large-aperture, high irradiance and high fluence lasers can experience significant levels of stimulated scattering along their transverse dimensions. The authors have observed transverse stimulated Raman scattering in large aperture KDP crystals, and have measured the stimulated gain coefficient. With sufficiently high gain, transverse stimulated scattering can lead to energy loss from the main beam and, more importantly, optical damage in the components in which this scattering occurs. Thus transverse stimulated,scattering is of concern in large aperture fusion lasers such as Nova and Beamlet, which is a single-aperture, full-scale scientific prototype of the laser driver for the proposed National Ignition Facility.

This document provides guidelines for implementing Engineering`s responsibility relating to evaluating the adequacy of existing project design outputs. At this time, there exists design documents that were prepared and approved for modifications to operating facilities, that may or may not have been constructed, but have never been turned over to the Operating Facility Management. The process described herein describes the methodology to perform an evaluation of these existing designs and document the findings. The key elements in this process are (1) to evaluate the existing design for general adequacy of the design, (2) to evaluate the existing design due to changes subsequent to the issuance of the documents (i.e. lessons learned, codes or standards change, changes to input documents, ect.), and (3) to verify the existence of critical supporting documentation in the areas of personnel safety, facility safety or environmental compliance.

The authors describe several experiments on Nova that use laser-produced plasmas to generate x-rays capable of backlighting dense, cold plasmas (p {approximately} 1--3 gm/cm{sup 3}, kT {approximately} 5--10 eV, and areal density {rho}{ell}{approximately} 0.01--0.05 g/cm{sup 2}). The x-rays used vary over a wide range of h{nu}, from 80 eV (X-ray laser) to 9 keV. This allows probing of plasmas relevant to many hydrodynamic experiments. Typical diagnostics are 100 ps pinhole framing cameras for a long pulse backlighter and a time-integrated CCD camera for a short pulse backlighter.

Much of our knowledge of the properties of matter at high pressures, from the static ruby pressure scale to shock compression at Gbar pressures, rests ultimately on the use of shock waves. Simple conservation relations define the initial and final states, leading to absolute measurements. I will describe some methods for measuring the equation of state of materials under shock loading for a variety of methods of shock production, and also describe the basis for other optical methods used widely in shock physics.

The Beamlet laser is a full-scale, single-aperture scientific prototype of the frequency-tripled Nd:glass laser for the proposed National Ignition Facility. At aperture sizes of 30 cm x 30 cm and 34 cm x 34 cm using potassium dihydrogen phosphate crystals of 32 cm x 32 cm and 37 cm x 37 cm, respectively, the authors have obtained up to 8.3 kJ of third harmonic energy at 70%--80% whole beam conversion efficiency.

Contaminated soil resulting from the excavation, repair, and decommissioning of facilities located at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is currently being disposed of by shallow land burial or is being stored when considered only hazardous. Vitrification of this waste is being investigated, since it will bind the hazardous and radioactive species in a stable and durable glass matrix, which will reduce the risk of ground water contamination. However, the composition limits for producing durable glass have to be determined before the technology can be applied. Glass compositions, consisting of SRS soil and glass forming additives, were tested on a crucible-scale in three ternary phase systems. Nine different glass compositions were produced, with waste loadings ranging from 43 to 58 weight percent. These were characterized using varoius chemical methods and tested for durability in both alkaline and acidic environments. All nine performed well in alkaline environments, but only three met the strictest criteria for the acidic environment tests. Although the glasses did not meet all of the limits for the acidic tests, the test was performed on very conservative size samples, so the results were also conservative. Therefore, enough evidence was found to provide proof that SRS soil can be vitrified …

A conceptual process for producing a gasifiable slurry from raw municipal solid waste (MSW) using direct steam heating is outlined. The process is based on the hydrothermal decomposition of the organic matter in the MSW, which requires the MSW to be heated to 300-350{degrees}C in the presence of water. A process model is developed and it is shown, based on preliminary estimates of the hydrothermal reaction stoichiometry, that a process using multiple pressure vessels, which allows recovery of waste heat, results in a process capable of producing a product slurry having a 40 wt % solids content with no waste water emissions. Results for a variety of process options and process parameters are presented. It is shown that the addition of auxiliary feedstock to the gasifier, along with the MSW derived slurry, results in more efficient gasification. It is estimated that 2.6 kmol/s of hydrogen can be produced from 30 kg/s (2600 tonne/day) of MSW and 16 kg/s of heavy oil. Without the additional feedstock, heavy oil in this case, only 0.49 kmol/s of hydrogen would be produced.