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This report provides a description of initiatives within the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, and Defense to protect the physical electrical utility infrastructure from outages caused by a range of activities including system operator errors, weather-related damage, and terrorist attacks. While the electric utility industry has primary responsibility, federal and state government agencies also have been addressing physical security concerns.

Most distributed applications today manage to utilize only a small percentage of the needed and available network bandwidth. Often application developers are not aware of the potential bandwidth of the network, and therefore do not know what to expect. Even when application developers are aware of the specifications of the machines and network links, they have few resources that can help determine why the expected performance was not achieved. What is needed is a ubiquitous and easy-to-use service that provides reliable, accurate, secure, and timely estimates of dynamic network properties. This service will help advise applications on how to make use of the network's increasing bandwidth and capabilities for traffic shaping and engineering. When fully implemented, this service will make building currently unrealizable levels of network awareness into distributed applications a relatively mundane task. For example, a remote data visualization application could choose between sending a wireframe, a pre-rendered image, or a 3-D representation, based on forecasts of CPU availability and power, compression options, and available bandwidth. The same service will provide on-demand performance information so that applications can compare predicted with actual results, and allow detailed queries about the end-to-end path for application and network tuning and debugging.

The authors summarize results of analyses of D meson mixing parameters performed by the BABAR collaboration.

We have used sub-picosecond laser pulses to launch ultra-high strain rate ({approx} 10{sup 9} s{sup -1}) nonlinear acoustic waves into a 4:1 methanol-ethanol pressure medium which has been precompressed in a standard diamond anvil cell. Using ultrafast interferometry, we have characterized acoustic wave propagation into the pressure medium at static compression up to 24 GPa. We find that the velocity is dependent on the incident laser fluence, demonstrating a nonlinear acoustic response which may result in shock wave behavior. We compare our results with low strain, low strain-rate acoustic data. This technique provides controlled access to regions of thermodynamic phase space that are otherwise difficult to obtain.

This report provides Emergency an Overview and Options for Congress on Emergency Management Preparedness Standards which includes major recommendations like adoption and use of emergency response standards, mutual aid provisions, private sector preparedness.

This report discusses the European Union (EU) refusal to accept U.S. imports of poultry treated with antimicrobial rinses. Prior to 1997, when the prohibition took effect, U.S. exports of broiler and turkey meat to the 15 countries that then constituted the EU were reported to total nearly 32,000 MT with a value of $44.4 million.

This report reviews the major legislative initiatives to deal with the gasoline price issue.

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This report provides background on Holocaust-Era compensation and restitution issues and an overview of ICHEIC, including criticism and support of its claims and administration policy on ICHEIC.It also provides an overview of litigation on Holocaust-Era Insurance claims and proposed legislation.

We have built and successfully tested a novel particle identification detector concept, the Fast Focusing DIRC (fDIRC). The prototype's concept is based on the BaBar DIRC with several important improvements: (a) much faster pixelated photon detectors based on Burle MCP-PMTs and Hamamatsu MaPMTs, (b) a focusing mirror allowing a smaller photon detector, reducing the sensitivity to backgrounds in future applications, (c) electronics capable of measuring the single photon resolution to better than {sigma} {approx} 100-200ps. The fDIRC is the first RICH detector to successfully correct the chromatic error by timing.

The hadroproduction of lepton pairs with mass Q and finite transverse momentum Q{sub T} is described in perturbative QCD by the same partonic subprocesses as prompt photon production. The authors demonstrate that, like prompt photon production, lepton pair production is dominated by quark-gluon scattering in the region Q{sub T} > Q/2. This feature leads to sensitivity to the gluon density in kinematical regimes accessible in collider and fixed target experiments, and it provides a new independent method for constraining the gluon density.

In this summary of the considerations of the QCD working group at Snowmass 2001, the roles of quantum chromodynamics in the Standard Model and in the search for new physics are reviewed, with emphasis on frontier areas in the field. The authors discuss the importance of, and prospects for, precision QCD in perturbative and lattice calculations. They describe new ideas in the analysis of parton distribution functions and jet structure, and review progress in small-x and in polarization experiments.

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This report explores what future world economic growth and development means for proposals to constrain total annual global greenhouse gas emissions.

The objective of this project is to demonstrate the use of alkaline reagents injected into the furnace of coal-fired boilers as a means of controlling sulfuric acid emissions. Sulfuric acid controls are becoming of increasing interest to utilities with coal-fired units for a number of reasons. Sulfuric acid is a Toxic Release Inventory species, a precursor to acid aerosol/condensable emissions, and can cause a variety of plant operation problems such as air heater plugging and fouling, back-end corrosion, and plume opacity. These issues will likely be exacerbated with the retrofit of SCR for NO{sub x} control on some coal-fired plants, as SCR catalysts are known to further oxidize a portion of the flue gas SO{sub 2} to SO{sub 3}. The project is testing the effectiveness of furnace injection of four different calcium- and/or magnesium-based alkaline sorbents on full-scale utility boilers. These reagents have been tested during four one- to two-week tests conducted on two First Energy Bruce Mansfield Plant units. One of the sorbents tested was a magnesium hydroxide slurry produced from a wet flue gas desulfurization system waste stream, from a system that employs a Thiosorbic{reg_sign} Lime scrubbing process. The other three sorbents are available commercially and include dolomite, …

Although it has been a high priority Army program, a number of factors have complicated the RAH-66 Comanche program. Since its inception, the program has been restructured several times–postponing the initial operational capability (IOC) and increasing overall program costs. Presently, there is debate within the Army regarding whether the program should be reduced significantly to make funds available to pursue other modernization priorities.

The QCD color transparency of higher-twist contributions to the inclusive hadroproduction cross section, where the trigger proton is produced directly in a short-distance subprocess, can explain several remarkable features of high-p{sub T} proton production in heavy ion collisions which have recently been observed at RHIC: (a) the anomalous increase of the p {yields} {pi} ratio with centrality (b): the more rapid power-law fall-off at fixed x{sub T} = 2p{sub T}/{radical}s of the charged particle production cross section in high centrality nuclear collisions, and (c): the anomalous decrease of the number of same-side hadrons produced in association with a proton trigger as the centrality increases. These phenomena illustrate how heavy ion collisions can provide sensitive tools for interpreting and testing fundamental properties of QCD.

The AdS/CFT correspondence between string theory in AdS space and conformal field theories in physical space-time leads to an analytic, semi-classical model for strongly-coupled QCD which has scale invariance and dimensional counting at short distances and color confinement at large distances. The AdS/CFT correspondence also provides insights into the inherently nonperturbative aspects of QCD such as the orbital and radial spectra of hadrons and the form of hadronic wavefunctions. In particular, we show that there is an exact correspondence between the fifth-dimensional coordinate of AdS space z and a specific impact variable {zeta} which measures the separation of the quark and gluonic constituents within the hadron in ordinary space-time. This connection leads to AdS/CFT predictions for the analytic form of the frame-independent light-front wavefunctions (LFWFs) of mesons and baryons, the fundamental entities which encode hadron properties. The LFWFs in turn predict decay constants and spin correlations, as well as dynamical quantities such as form factors, structure functions, generalized parton distributions, and exclusive scattering amplitudes. Relativistic light-front equations in ordinary space-time are found which reproduce the results obtained using the fifth-dimensional theory and have remarkable algebraic structures and integrability properties. As specific examples we describe the behavior of the pion form …

Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) is a known issue for short-pulse laser facilities, and will also be an issue for experiments using the advanced radiographic capability (ARC) at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The ARC diagnostic uses four NIF beams that are compressed to picosecond durations for backlighting ignition capsules and other applications. Consequently, we are working to understand the EMP due to high-energy (MeV) electrons escaping from targets heated by short-pulse lasers. Our approach is to measure EMP in the Titan short-pulse laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and to employ that data to establish analysis and simulation capabilities. We have installed a wide variety of probes inside and outside the Titan laser chamber. We have high-frequency B-dot and D-dot probes, a photodiode, and fast current-viewing and integrating current transformers. The probe outputs are digitized by 10 and 20 Gsample/s oscilloscopes. The cables and oscilloscopes are well shielded to reduce noise. Our initial measurement campaign has yielded data useful mainly from several hundreds of MHz to several GHz. We currently are supplementing our high-frequency probes with lower-frequency ones to obtain better low-frequency data. In order to establish analysis and simulation capabilities we are modeling the Titan facility using various commercial …

Standard design certification has been used over the past 20 years to develop NRC approval of Advanced Light Water Reactor (ALWR) designs. The standard design approval approach is intended to remove much of the uncertainty in the regulatory schedule prior to commitment of major funds to construction. The value of the approach has not been tested in the US but it has supported construction of ABWRs in Japan and Taiwan. Application of the approach to other types of advanced reactors may be possible but is not clear how this might be accomplished in the case of reactors with little or no operating experience. This paper discusses an approach that was proposed by General Electric over 15 years ago and its possible application to GEN-IV reactors.

This report summarizes the reasons for Endangered Species Act (ESA) listings and outlines efforts to protect ESA - listed species.

This report discusses issues debated in the 107th Congress while is considering various proposals to amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). Major issues in recent years have included changing the role of science in decision-making, changing the role of critical habitat, reducing conflicts with Department of Defense activities, incorporating further protection for property owners, and increasing protection of listed species, among others. In addition, many have advocated including significant changes to ESA regulations made during the Clinton Administration in the law itself.

A statistical comparison of observations and forecasts using the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) for operations at the Savannah River Site (SRS) is discussed. Simulated and observed values of wind direction, wind speed, and temperature, collected twice daily for a two-year period from April 1998 through March 2000, are compared in a variety of ways for 5 different locations in the southeast United States. Turbulence quantities are also compared for a one-year period beginning in February 1999 for the SRS. Results are presented in the form of scatter plots and histograms, as well as time-based line plots for the different locations within the modeling domain. Both surface and upper-level model predictions are compared with observations taken from both the National Weather Service and local SRS tower locations (surface measures only). Variability based on the time of year, the forecast hour, the location of the observations, and the height above ground for each of these variables is discussed. Statistics of accuracy used for comparison include absolute mean bias, relative bias, root-mean-square error, standard deviation, and the index of agreement. The most severe degradation in results occurs during the transition periods of early evening (approximately 19 to 20 LST) and late morning …