This issue brief describes the FY1996 request for DOE's major programs, its implications, and congressional action on the DOE budget. Table 1 at the end of the issue brief highlights the FY1996 DOE budget request.

This report is on Legislative Research in Congressional Offices: A Primer.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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for clarification; Whether, pursuant to the Water Code, a petition for the dissolution of a drainage district may be withdrawn after being presented to a commissioners court, but before the commissioners have ordered an election on the issue (ID# 38663)

Fifty nanosecond pulses of visible light have been used to produce hard, hydrogen-free diamond-like-carbon (DLC) films at irradiances between 5 x 10{sup 8} and 5 x 10{sup 10} W/cm{sup 2} The films were characterized by a number of techniques including: Raman spectroscopy, Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (EELS), atomic force microscopy, and spectroscopic ellipsometry. The cost for manufacturing DLC with high average power, high-pulse repetition frequency, visible light is low enough to compete with other diamond thin film production methods.

The Tank Waste Remediation System (TWRS) includes many activities required to remediate the radioactive waste stored in underground waste storage tanks. These activities include routine monitoring of the waste, facilities maintenance, upgrades to existing equipment, and installation of new equipment necessary to manage, retrieve, process, and dispose of the waste. In order to ensure that these multiple activities are integrated, cost effective, and necessary, a sound technical baseline is required from which all activities can be traced and measured. The process by which this technical baseline is developed will consist of the identification of functions, requirements, architecture, and test (FRAT) methodology. This process must be completed for TWRS to a level that provides the technical basis for all facility/system/component maintenance, upgrades, or new equipment installation.

The objective of this 24 month project is to determine the degree of sulfur retention in slag in a full scale cyclone coal combustor. This effort will consist of a series of up to 20 parametric tests in a 20 MMBtu/hr slagging, air cooled, cyclone combustor. During the present reporting period, this combustor was tested for a total of 9 days in February and at the end of March. The tests at the end of March were the first ones in which excellent slagging combustor operation was achieved. This is the key requirement for implementing the test effort in the present project. Therefore, the combustor is now ready for testing under the current project, and initial tests are planned during the next quarterly reporting period, as per the project schedule.

Caterpillar has been developing advanced low-heat-rejection (LHR) engine designs because by insulating the combustion chamber components for reduced heat rejection, improved fuel economy and emission reduction can be achieved. The insulation eliminates heat loss during the closed portion of the cycle and increases the combustion temperature. Increased combustion temperatures improve emissions by reducing the amount of particulate or smoke. The higher combustion temperatures also provide additional energy to drive a turbocharger that, in turn, improves the overall efficiency of the engine system and results in increased fuel economy.

Thomson scattering measurements of the electron temperature in laser- produced gold plasmas are presented. We irradiated a flat gold disk target with one laser beam of the Nova laser facility. A second laser beam probed the plasma at a distance of 500{mu}m with temporally resolved Thomson scattering. The electron temperature measurements are compared with hydrodynamic simulations using the code LASNEX for experiments applying smoothed and unsmoothed heater beams. In case of an unsmoothed heater beam the simulations predict temperatures which are about 40% higher than our measured data. Although the agreement is improved for a smoothed heater beam, discrepancies exist in the decay phase of the plasma. We discuss possible explanations for these observations.

Amorphous carbon films approximately 20 nm thick are used throughout the computer industry as protective coatings on magnetic storage disks. As storage densities increase, the role of the overcoat becomes increasingly important because of smaller spacings between the recording head and the spinning disk. Furthermore, future-generation disks call for an overcoat thickness of 5 nm or less. These small length scales and the high speed of the spinning disk (10-30 m/s) suggest that a molecular dynamics (MD) model might provide useful insight into friction and wear mechanisms when the head and disk make contact. One of the necessary inputs required to carry out such an MD model is a specification of the position of all the atoms in the simulation, i.e. a detailed model of the material microstructure. Such a detailed understanding of the microstructure of amorphous carbon overcoats does not presently exist. Neutron and electron diffraction studies demonstrate that the material is amorphous. Previous classical MD simulations yield pair distribution functions in qualitative agreement with the diffraction studies, but they all differ in detail. More recent, quantum-mechanical tight-binding MD (TBMD) studies give a better description of the interatomic interactions and the chemical hybridization (sp{sup 2}-graphite-like versus sp{sup 3}-diamond-like). However, …

{open_quotes}Gist{close_quotes} is a scientific graphics library written by David H. Munro of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). It features support for three common graphics output devices: X Windows, (Color) PostScript, and ANSI/ISO Standard Computer Graphics Metafiles (CGM). The library is small (written directly to Xlib), portable, efficient, and full-featured. It produces X versus Y plots with {open_quotes}good{close_quotes} tick marks and tick labels, 2-dimensional quadrilateral mesh plots with contours, vector fields, or pseudo color maps on such meshes, with 3-dimensional plots on the way. The Python Gist module utilizes the new {open_quotes}Numeric{close_quotes} module due to J. Hugunin and others. It is therefore fast and able to handle large datasets. The Gist module includes an X Windows event dispatcher which can be dynamically added (e.g., via importing a dynamically loaded module) to the Python interpreter after a simple two-line modification to the Python core. This makes fast mouse-controlled zoom, pan, and other graphic operations available to the researcher while maintaining the usual Python command-line interface. Munro`s Gist library is already freely available. The Python Gist module is currently under review and is also expected to qualify for unlimited release.

Older single-story facilities (Pre-1985 vintage) are commonly constructed of structural steel framing with concrete masonry unit (CMU) walls connected to columns and roof girders of the steel framing system. The CMU walls are designed for lateral wind and seismic loads (perpendicular to the wall) and transmit shear loads from the roof diaphragm to the foundation footings. The lateral loads normally govern their design. The structural framing system and the roof diaphragm system are straight forward when analyzing or upgrading the structure for NPH loads. Because of a buildings design vintage, probable use of empirical methodology, and poor design basis documentation (and record retention); it is difficult to qualify or upgrade CMU walls for lateral Natural Phenomena Hazards (NPH) loads in accordance with References 1, 2 and 3. This paper discusses three analytical approaches and/or techniques (empirical, working stress and yield line) to determine the collapse capacity of a laterally loaded CMU wall, and compares their results

This report presents the results of a program to provide technical assistance to Meharry Medical College. The purpose of the program is to facilitate Meharry`s effort to finance a campus-wide facility retrofit. The US Department of Energy (USDOE) funded the program through a grant to the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TECD). The University of Memphis-Technology and Energy Services (UM-TES), under contract to TECD, performed program services. The report has three sections: (1) introduction; (2) project definition, financing, and participants; and (3) opportunities for federal participation.

This report documents progress made for the time period of January to April, 1996 in developing and testing a slurry carbonization plant at the Energy and Environment Research Center (EERC) in North Dakota. Various combinations of paper and plastics were carbonized` Performance parameters were assessed and the resulting refuse derived fuel pellets were analyzed for chemical composition and caloric values. Difficulties with performance and reliability of the equipment are discussed.

This thesis comprises three parts: Electrocatalysis of anodic oxygen-transfer reactions: aliphatic amines at mixed Ag-Pb oxide thin-film electrodes; oxidation of ammonia at anodized Ag-Pb eutectic alloy electrodes; and temperature effects on oxidation of ethylamine, alanine, and aquated ammonia.

With the end of the Cold War, the world faces for the first time the need to dismantle vast numbers of ``excess`` nuclear weapons and dispose of the fissile materials they contain, together with fissile residues in the weapons production complex left over from the production of these weapons. If recently agreed US and Russian reductions are fully implemented, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, containing a hundred tons or more of plutonium and hundreds of tonnes* of highly enriched uranium (HEU), will no longer be needed worldwide for military purposes. These two materials are the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons, and limits on access to them are the primary technical barrier to prospective proliferants who might desire to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. Theoretically, several kilograms of plutonium, or several times that amount of HEU, is sufficient to make a nuclear explosive device. Therefore, these materials will continue to be a potential threat to humanity for as long as they exist.

The National Storage Laboratory (NSL) is currently implementing a prototype storage system that utilizes network attached high performance storage devices to transfer data directly between storage devices and client processors using HIPPI IPI-3. The client processors in use at the NSL include Cray YMP-C90 supercomputers, IBM RISC System 6000 workstations, Silicon Graphics workstations, SUN workstations, and a PsiTech frame buffer. This paper describes the HIPPI IPI-3 interface between the client processors and the storage devices. It is intended to serve as a guide for vendors who desire to connect their products to the NSL. Clients direct their requests to a distributed storage system. A typical storage system will contain multiple storage devices. The storage system map client`s files onto regions on the storage devices. At the NSL, the data transfers are performed directly between the client processors and the storage devices, bypassing any processors in the storage system. The protocol used between the client processors and the storage devices is HIPPI IPI-3 third party copy. When a client processor wants to read or write data to or from the storage system, the client processor sends a request to the storage system across a control connection. The control path to the …

The purpose of this DOE guide is to facilitate the use of consistent procedures to document cost and performance information for projects involving the remediation of media contaminated with hazardous and radioactive wastes. It provides remedial action project managers with a standardized set of data to document completed remediation projects. Standardized reporting of data will broaden the utility of the information, increase confidence in the effectiveness of future remedial technologies, and enhance the organization, storage and retrieval of relevant information for future cleanup projects. The foundation for this guide was laid down by the Federal Remediation Technologies Roundtable (FRTR) in their publication, Guide to Documenting Cost and Performance for Remediation Projects, EPA-542-B- 95-002. Member agencies of the FRTR include the US EPA, the US DOD, the US DOE, and the US DOI. All the member agencies are involved in site remediation projects and anticipate following the guidance provided in the above reference. Therefore, there is much to be gained for DOE to be consistent with the other member agencies as it will be easier to compare projects across different agencies and also to learn from the experiences of a wider spectrum of prior completed projects.

This monthly reports describes progress in three projects, namely (1) Thermochemical Production of Hydrogen from Wet Biomass, (2) Photoelectrochemical Production, and (3) Photobiological Production.

These lectures are an attempt to a pedagogical introduction into the elementary concepts of chiral symmetry in nuclear physics. Effective chiral models such as the linear and nonlinear sigma model will be discussed as well as the essential ideas of chiral perturbation theory. Some applications to the physics of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions will be presented.

Adaptive optics on the Keck 10 meter telescope will provide an unprecedented level of capability in high resolution ground based astronomical imaging. The system is designed to provide near diffraction limited imaging performance with Strehl {gt} 0.3 n median Keck seeing of r0 = 25 cm, T =10 msec at 500 nm wavelength. The system will be equipped with a 20 watt sodium laser guide star to provide nearly full sky coverage. The wavefront control subsystem is responsible for wavefront sensing and the control of the tip-tilt and deformable mirrors which actively correct atmospheric turbulence. The spatial sampling interval for the wavefront sensor and deformable mirror is de=0.56 m which gives us 349 actuators and 244 subapertures. This paper summarizes the wavefront control system and discusses particular issues in designing a wavefront controller for the Keck telescope.

In the conceptual design of the APT cooling water system, several options exist for the design of the system(s) which serve as the ultimate heat sink. This study will evaluate alternative methods of providing an ultimate heat sink to the APT.

The Petroleum Marketing Monthly (PMM) provides information and statistical data on a variety of crude oils and refined petroleum products. The publication presents statistics on crude oil costs and refined petroleum products sales for use by industry, government, private sector analysts, educational institutions, and consumers. Data on crude oil include the domestic first purchase price, the f.o.b. and landed cost of imported crude oil, and the refiners` acquisition cost of crude oil. Refined petroleum product sales data include motor gasoline, distillates, residuals, aviation fuels, kerosene, and propane.