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 the El Paso County Water Improvement District No. 1 may, pursuant to chapter 55, subchapter N of the Water Code, assess a tax on the benefit basis against land belonging to the Permanent University Fund (RQ-715)

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 a hospital district may charge retrieval and copying fees for health care information in accordance with the new section 241.154(b) of the Health and Safety Code when those fees exceed the charges established by the General Services Commission pursuant to section 552.262 of the Government Code (ID# 38086, formerly ID# 35941)

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, under the Open Records Act, Gov't Code ch. 522, a governmental body that recieved a request prior to September 1, 1995, may charge the requestor for access to information compromised of pages that are legal size or smaller and related question (ID# 29925)

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 Orange County Commissioners Court must order payment in accordance with a district court order adjusting salaries of court administration personnel within the amount approved and budgeted (ID# 33340)

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 XVI, section 40 of the Texas Constitution excepts a county commissioner from the common-law doctrine of incompatibility (request for reconsideration of Attorney General Opinion DM-311 (1994)) (ID# 31414)

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; Constitutionality, as applied to independent and major party candidates, of the provisions of Election Code section 141.063(2)(B), which requires that a peititon filed in connection with a candidate's application for a place on the ballot contain each peition signer's voter registration number (ID# 35318)

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 and if so ,under what procedures,the Aransas County Navigation District No1 may be dissolved(ID# 33955).

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 Jasper county may provide longevity pay to county employees(ID# 36648).

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 Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority may provide buses for use during the 1996 Olympic Games un Atlanta (ID# 38134)

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 Penal Code section 46.035 prohibits carrying a license handgun on the premises of a public school or university where a school- or university-sponsored sporting or interscholastic event is taking place (ID# 36491)

Report meant to guide people through negotiating an agreed order from the Texas natural Resource Conservation Commission, as well as describing cases in which litigation may be considered.

Progress has clearly been made on all of the goals set forth in the original proposal. Although the monoclonal antibodies raised against FNR turned out no to be useful for mapping the FNR/ferredoxin or FNR/NADP+ interaction domains, good progress has been made on mapping the FNR/ferredoxin interaction domains by an alternative technique, differential chemical modification. Furthermore, the techniques developed for differential chemical modifications of these two proteins - taurine modification of aspartate and glutamate residues and biotin modification of lysine residues - should be useful for mapping the interaction domains of many proteins that associate through electrostatic interactions. Finally, progress has also been made with respect to another ferredoxin-dependent enzyme involved in the earliest steps of plant nitrogen metabolism - nitrite reductase. Questions concerning the subunit composition and heme content of the enzyme have been resolved and evidence demonstrating the involvement of lysine and arginine residues in binding ferredoxin has been obtained for the first time.

This report describes the progress made during the first Quarter of a two year project to demonstrate that the air pollution from a traveling grate stoker being used to heat water at a central heating plant in Krakow Poland can be reduced significantly by replacing the unwashed, unsized coal now being used with a mechanically cleaned, double sized stoker fuel and by optimizing the operating parameters of the stoker. It is anticipated that these improvements will prove to be cost effective and hence be adopted in the other central heating plants in Krakow and indeed throughout Eastern European cities where coal is the primary source of heating fuel. EFH Coal Company has formed a partnership with two Polish institutions -- MPEC a central heating company in Krakow and Naftokrak-Naftobudowa, preparation plant designers and fabricators, for this effort. An evaluation of the washability characteristics of five samples of two coals (Piast and Janina) showed that {open_quotes}compliance-quality{close_quotes} stoker coals could be produced which contained less than 640 g of SO{sub 2}/KJ (1.5 lbs SO{sub 2}/MMBtu) at acceptable plant yields by washing in heavy media cyclones. A search for long-term sources of raw coal to feed the proposed new 300 tph stoker coal …

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.

Development of the computer models for slurry carbonization have begun and were based upon the collected data (mass balances, yield, temperatures, and pressures) from the previous pilot plant campaigns. All computer models are being developed with Aspen`s SpeedUp{trademark} software. The primary flow sheet with major alternatives has been developed and the majority of equipment descriptions and models, cost algorithms, and baseline parameters have been input to SpeedUp. The remaining modeling parameters will be input in the next reporting period and the initial flow sheet skeleton and model will be completed. The computer models will focus on optimizing capital and operating costs, and evaluating alternative waste water recycling technologies. The weaknesses of the previous pilot plant data and the data required for design of the commercial demonstration facility were identified. The identified weaknesses of the existing data included mass balance precision and accuracy, reactor residence time control (i.e. reactor level control), reactor temperature variations, and air entrainment in the feed RDF slurry. To improve mass balance precision and accuracy, an alternative carbonization gas flow meter will be designed and installed on the pilot plant. EnerTech`s carbonization gas flow meter design has been submitted to the EERC for final approval. In addition, …

Elemental sulfur recovery from SO{sub 2}-containing gas stream is highly attractive as it produces a salable product and no waste to dispose of. However, commercially available schemes are complex and involve multi-stage reactors, such as, most notably in the Resox (reduction of SO{sub 2} with coke) and Claus plant (reaction of SO{sub 2} with H{sub 2}S over catalyst). This project will investigate a cerium oxide catalyst for the single stage selective reduction of SO{sub 2} to elemental sulfur by a reductant, such as carbon monoxide. Cerium oxide has been identified in recent work at MIT as a superior catalyst for SO{sub 2} reduction by CO to elemental sulfur because its high activity and high selectivity to sulfur over COS over a wide temperature range(400-650 {degrees}C). The detailed kinetic and parametric studies of SO{sub 2} reduction planned in this work over various CeO{sub 2}-formulations will provide the necessary basis for development of a very simplified process, namely that of a single-stage elemental sulfur recovery scheme from variable concentration gas streams. The potential cost- and energy-efficiency benefits from this approach can not be overstated. A first apparent application is treatment of a regenerator off-gases in power plants using regenerative flue gas desulfurization. …

One method of determining the flux density is flux synthesis which approximates the flux in the core by linear combinations of precomputed shape functions. In traditional flux synthesis, the unknown mixing coefficients are determined using a weighted residual method of solving the diffusion equation. In the instrumented synthesis method, the mixing coefficients are determined using count rates from neutron detectors in the core. In this way the mixing coefficients are linked to conditions in the reactor. Using the synthesized flux, kinetics parameters, notably reactivity, can be calculated in real time. An experimental evaluation has been performed in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Reactor, MITR-II. Detector measurements have been collected using fission chambers placed at the periphery of the core. The reactor was put into a number of various conditions, both static and transient, and data were collected using a digital acquisition system for later combination with shape functions. Transients included increasing power, decreasing power, and a reactor scram. The shape functions were generated using Version 3.0 of the QUARTZ code, a quadratic nodal diffusion theory code in triangular-Z geometry. Supernodal analysis algorithms have been added to the original program, along with subroutines to guarantee diagonal dominance of the leakage matrix …

In this paper we discuss an on-line turbulent load characterization system that has been designed to acquire loading spectra from turbines of the same design operating in several different environments and from different turbine designs operating in the same environment. This System simultaneously measures the rainflow-counted alternating and mean loading spectra and the hub-height turbulent mean shearing stress and atmospheric stability associated with the turbulent inflow. We discuss the theory behind the measurement configuration and the results of proof-of-concept testing recently performed at the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) using a Bergey EXCEL-S 10-kW wind turbine. The on-line approach to characterizing the load spectra and the inflow turbulent scaling parameter produces results that are consistent with other measurements. The on-line approximation of the turbulent shear stress or friction velocity u* also is considered adequate. The system can be used to characterize turbulence loads during turbine deployment in a wide variety of environments. Using the WISPER protocol, we found that a wide-range, variable-speed turbine will accumulate a larger number of stress cycles in the low-cycle, high-amplitude (LCHA) region when compared with a constant speed rotor under similar inflow conditions.

Comprehensive experimentation has been conducted to determine whether circulating fluidized bed (CFB) pressure fluctuations can be used to verify that similitude conditions in circulating fluidized beds have been achieved. Using two geometrically similar CFB models, pressure fluctuations were recorded while the full set of similitude parameters were matched under a broad range of operating conditions. The method of data acquisition and analysis is shown to be very important in order to observe the significant frequency phenomena. Under relatively dilute conditions similar power spectral density and Bode plot profiles are observed in the two geometrically similar beds. The dominant frequency under these dilute conditions is inversely proportional to the characteristic CFB dimension. Under conditions of higher solids loading, an additional lower bed frequency phenomena is observed in the spectrum which may be a function of the depth of the lower dense bed in the CFB. It is evident from the results that under some operating conditions, a single dimensionless frequency is not sufficient to validate the achievement of similitude using pressure fluctuations. The results also suggest that the use of similitude parameters as they are currently defined is limited to dilute operating conditions, prior to the formation of a lower dense …

The April, 1990 SPEAR synchrotron radiation run was one of the two or three best in SSRL`s history. High currents were accumulated, ramping went easily, lifetimes were long, beam dumps were infrequent and the average current was 42.9 milliamps. In the one month of operation, 63 different experiments involving 208 scientists from 50 institutions received beam. The end-of-run summary forms completed by the experimenters indicated high levels of user satisfaction with the beam quality and with the outstanding support received from the SSRL technical and scientific staffs. These fine experimental conditions result largely from the SPEAR repairs and improvements performed during the past year and described in Section I. Also quite significant was Max Cornacchia`s leadership of the SLAG staff. SPEAR`s performance this past April stands in marked contrast to that of the January-March, 1989 run which is also described in Section I. It is, we hope, a harbinger of the operation which will be provided in FY `91, when the SPEAR injector project is completed and SPEAR is fully dedicated to synchrotron radiation research. Over the coming years, SSRL intends to give highest priority to increasing the effectiveness of SPEAR and its various beam lines. The beam line and …

This report describes the progress made during this reporting period of a two year project to demonstrate that the air pollution from a traveling-grate stoker being used to heat water at a central heating plant in Krakow, Poland can be reduced significantly by (1) substituting the unwashed, unsized coal currently being used with a mechanically cleaned, double-sized stoker fuel and by (2) optimizing the operating parameters of the stoker. It is anticipated that these improvements will prove to be cost-effective and hence will be adopted by the other central heating plants in Krakow and ideally, throughout Eastern European cities where coal continues to be the primary source of fuel. EFH Coal Company has formed a partnership with two Polish institutions -- MPEC, a central heating company in Krakow, and Naftokrak-Naftobudowa, preparation plant designers and fabricators-for the execution of this effort. Five potential candidate sources have been located and contracts for coal deliveries should be executed early next quarter. TInitial delays in formalizing the EFH/Polish Partners agreement delayed finalizing the coal supply contracts and hence, precluded collecting the Polish coal samples for characterization and combustion performance studies. Work on this Task will be initialed next quarter after the raw coal supply …

This report describes the progress made during this reporting period of a two year project to demonstrate that the air pollution from a traveling grate stoker being used to heat water at a central heating plant in Krakow, Poland can be reduced significantly by (1) substituting the unwashed, unsized coal currently being used with a mechanically cleaned, double-sized stoker fuel and by (2) optimizing the operating parameters of the stoker. It is anticipated that these improvements will prove to be cost effective and hence be adopted by the other central heating plants in Krakow and indeed, throughout Eastern European cities where coal continues to be the primary source of fuel. EFH Coal Company has formed a partnership with two Polish institutions -- MPEC, a central heating company in Krakow, and Naftokrak-Naftobudowa, preparation plant designers and fabricators, for the execution of this effort. The washability data from a 20mm x 0.5mm size fraction of raw coal from the Nikwa Modrejow Mine were evaluated. The data show that the ash content of this coal can be reduced from 34.0 percent to 9.0 percent by washing in a heavy-media cyclone at 1.725 sp.gr.; the actual yield of clean coal would be 63.1 percent. …

As discussed in last year`s Activity Report, a fairly complete analysis of SPEAR problems was performed in concert with SLAC, and a major maintenance/improvement process was initiated in the spring of 1989. This run made it apparent that SPEAR will remain a very useful and impressive synchrotron radiation storage ring for at least a decade, given a steady maintenance and improvement program. More details about SPEAR functioning during the run, as well as SPEAR improvements, are contained in Chapter I. The formal SPEAR injector construction project was completed in November, 1990, on-time and on-budget. Although DOE was not able to provide anticipated FY90 commissioning funds, preliminary commissioning was performed and 2.3 GeV injection to SPEAR was demonstrated. A discussion of the Injector project is contained in Chapter II. Commissioning of the injector and the injector/SPEAR complex is continuing in 1991 with Users participating during the May-September period. This user participation allowed normal experimentation, so that systems could be tested critically, but with the commissioning process having higher priority than data acquisition. Another major event in 1990 was the full dedication of SPEAR to the synchrotron radiation program. Previously SPEAR was considered a high energy physics machine that was partially dedicated …

This report describes the progress made during the second Quarter of a two year project to demonstrate that the air pollution, from a traveling grate stoker being used to heat water at a central heating plant in Krakow Poland, can be reduced significantly by replacing the unwashed, unsized coal now being used with a mechanically cleaned, double sized stoker fuel and by optimizing the operating parameters of the stoker. It is anticipated that these improvements will prove to be cost effective and hence be adopted in the other central heating plants in Krakow and indeed throughout Eastern European cities where coal is the primary source of heating fuel. EFH Coal Company has formed a partnership with two Polish institutions -- MPEC a central heating company in Krakow and Naftokrak-Naftobudowa, preparation plant designers and fabricators for this effort. The washability data from a 20mm x 0.5mm size fraction of raw coal from the Staszic Mine were evaluated. The data show that the ash content of this coal can be reduced from 24.4 percent to 6.24 percent by washing in a heavy media cyclone at 1.825 sp.gr.; the actual yield of clean coal would be 76.1 percent. The quest for long-term sources …