The electric utility industry is inherently capital intensive. At the same time, the industry must operate under a changing and sometimes unpredictable regulatory system at both the federal and state level. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 has set in place government activities intended to relieve congestion on the transmission system. Several factors have contributed to the lack of new transmission capacity; these are outlined within this report. This report also discusses earlier pieces of energy legislation.

The electric utility industry is inherently capital intensive. At the same time, the industry must operate under a changing and sometimes unpredictable regulatory system at both the federal and state level. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 has set in place government activities intended to relieve congestion on the transmission system. Several factors have contributed to the lack of new transmission capacity; these are outlined within this report. This report also discusses earlier pieces of energy legislation.

The electric utility industry is inherently capital intensive. At the same time, the industry must operate under a changing and sometimes unpredictable regulatory system at both the federal and state level. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 has set in place government activities intended to relieve congestion on the transmission system. Several factors have contributed to the lack of new transmission capacity; these are outlined within this report. This report also discusses earlier pieces of energy legislation.

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 transmission infrastructure.

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 transmission infrastructure.

To compensate the large tune shift and tune spread generated by the head-on beam-beam interactions in polarized proton operation in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a low energy electron beam with proper Gaussian transverse profiles was proposed to collide head-on with the proton beam. In this article, using a modified version of SixTrack [1], we investigate stability of the single particle in the presence of head-on beam-beam compensation. The Lyapunov exponent and action diffusion are calculated and compared between the cases without and with beam-beam compensation for two different working points and various bunch intensities. Using the action diffusion results the emittance growth rate and lifetime of the proton beam is also estimated for the different scenarios.

This report details the constitutional standards that currently apply to indirect school aid programs and summarizes all of the pertinent Supreme Court decisions, with particular attention to Zelman. It also summarizes the pending case of Davey v. Locke and other recent and ongoing state and lower federal court cases concerning vouchers.

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The authors report on a search for B{sub s}{sup 0} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -} and B{sub d}{sup 0} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -} decays in p{bar p} collisions at {radical}s = 1.96 TeV using 171 pb{sup -1} of data collected by the CDF II experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. The decay rates of these rare processes are sensitive to contributions from physics beyond the Standard Model. One event survives all the selection requirements, consistent with the background expectation. They derive branching ratio limits of {Beta}(B{sub s}{sup 0} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -}) < 5.8 x 10{sup -7} and {Beta}(B{sub d}{sup 0} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -}) < 1.5 x 10{sup -7} at 90% confidence level.

During the period of October 2 and 3, 2007, the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) performed confirmatory radiological survey activities which included gamma surface scans within Area B1S/B2S and the collection of soil samples from these areas.

This report discusses the variety of current U.S. security assistance programs to Lebanon including objectives, vetting processes, end-use monitoring, and issues for Congress. The last section of this report discusses the upcoming elections and the future of U.S. security assistance to Lebanon.

China has been, is, and will continue to be a coal-powered economy. The rapid growth of coal demand since 2001 has created deepening strains and bottlenecks that raise questions about supply security. Although China's coal is 'plentiful,' published academic and policy analyses indicate that peak production will likely occur between 2016 and 2029. Given the current economic growth trajectory, domestic production constraints will lead to a coal gap that is not likely to be filled with imports. Urbanization, heavy industry growth, and increasing per-capita consumption are the primary drivers of rising coal usage. In 2006, the power sector, iron and steel, and cement accounted for 71% of coal consumption. Power generation is becoming more efficient, but even extensive roll-out of the highest efficiency units could save only 14% of projected 2025 coal demand. If China follows Japan, steel production would peak by 2015; cement is likely to follow a similar trajectory. A fourth wedge of future coal consumption is likely to come from the burgeoning coal-liquefaction and chemicals industries. New demand from coal-to-liquids and coal-to-chemicals may add 450 million tonnes of coal demand by 2025. Efficient growth among these drivers indicates that China's annual coal demand will reach 4.2 to …

Advances in Electron Microscopy and single-particle reconstruction have led to results at increasingly high resolutions. This has opened up the possibility of complete automation of single particle reconstruction. Main bottleneck in automation of single particle reconstruction is manual selection of particles in the micrograph. This paper describes a simple but efficient approach for segmentation of particle projections in the micrographs obtained using cryo-electron microscope. Changing the shape of objects to facilitate segmentation from the cluster and reconstructing its actual shape after isolation is successfully attempted. Both low-level and high-level processing techniques are used and the whole process is made automatic. Over 90 percent success in automatic particle picking is achieved. Several areas for improvement and future research directions are discussed.

The standard cosmological model posits a spatially flat universe of infinite extent. However, no observation, even in principle, could verify that the matter extends to infinity. In this work we model the universe as a finite spherical ball of dust and dark energy, and obtain a lower limit estimate of its mass and present size: the mass is at least 5 x 10{sup 23}M{sub {circle_dot}} and the present radius is at least 50 Gly. If we are not too far from the dust-ball edge we might expect to see a cold spot in the cosmic microwave background, and there might be suppression of the low multipoles in the angular power spectrum. Thus the model may be testable, at least in principle. We also obtain and discuss the geometry exterior to the dust ball; it is Schwarzschild-de Sitter with a naked singularity, and provides an interesting picture of cosmogenesis. Finally we briefly sketch how radiation and inflation eras may be incorporated into the model.

The design and operation of a recirculating flow reactor designed to convert isotopically enriched silane to polycrystalline Si with high efficiency and chemical purity is described. The starting material is SiF{sub 4}, which is enriched in the desired isotope by a centrifuge method and subsequently converted to silane. In the reactor, the silane is decomposed to silicon on the surface of a graphite starter rod (3 mm diameter) heated to 700-750 C. Flow and gas composition (0.3-0.5% silane in hydrogen) are chosen to minimize the generation of particles by homogeneous nucleation of silane and to attain uniform deposition along the length of the rod. Growth rates are 5 {micro}m/min, and the conversion efficiency is greater than 95%. A typical run produces 35 gm of polycrystalline Si deposited along a 150 mm length of the rod. After removal of the starter rod, dislocation-free single crystals are formed by the floating zone method. Crystals enriched in all 3 stable isotopes of Si have been made: {sup 28}Si (99.92%), {sup 29}Si (91.37%), and {sup 30}Si (88.25%). Concentrations of electrically active impurities (P and B) are as low as mid-10{sup 13} cm{sup -3}. Concentrations of C and O lie below 10{sup 16} and 10{sup …

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This report examines the economic partnership between the United States and the European Union. Not only is the U.S.-EU trade and investment relationship the largest in the world, but it is also arguably the most important. Agreement between the two partners in the past has been critical to making the world trading system more open and efficient.

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Report on the trade agreements between the United States and Thailand, including commercial relations, intellectual property rights, and more.

The Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) is a proposed accelerator for the low energy nuclear physics community. Its goal is to understand the natural abundances of the elements heavier than iron, explore the nuclear force in systems far from stability, and study symmetry violation and fundamental physics in nuclei. To achieve these scientific goals, RIA promises to produce isotopes far from stability in sufficient quantities to allow experiments. It would also produce near stability isotopes at never before seen production rates, as much as 10{sup 12} pps. Included in these isotopes are many that are important to stockpile stewardship, such as {sup 87}Y, {sup 146-50}Eu, and {sup 231}Th. Given the expected production rates at RIA and a reasonably intense neutron source, one can expect to make {approx} 10 {micro}g targets of nuclei with a half-life of {approx}1 day. Thus, it will be possible at RIA to obtain experimental information on the neutron cross section for isotopes that have to date only been determined by theory. There are two methods to perform neutron cross-section measurements, prompt and delayed. The prompt method tries to measure each reaction as it happens. The exact technique employed will depend on the reaction of interest, (n,2n), (n,{gamma}), …

One of the tasks of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission-sponsored project titled "Reliability of Nondestructive Examination (NDE) for Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) Inservice Examination (ISI)" is to provide collaborative assistance to Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA) in France through theoretical predictions of ultrasonic scattering by grains of cast stainless steels (CASS) components. More specifically, a mathematical treatment of ultrasonic scattering in media having duplex micro¬structure is sought because cast stainless steel components often contains larger-scale macrograins that are composed of sub-grains/colonies. In this report, we present formal mathematical theories for ultrasonic wave propagation in polycrystalline aggregates having both simple (composed of grains only) and complex microstructures (having macrograins and sub-grains/colonies). Computations based on these theories are then carried out for ultrasonic backscatter power, attenuation due to scattering, and phase velocity dispersions. Specifically, numerical results are presented for backscatter coefficient for plane longitudinal wave propagating in duplex steel containing macrograins and colonies. Furthermore, the expected propagation characteristics (attenuation coefficient and phase velocity) are computed and described in this report for plane longitudinal waves propagating in (1) steels composed of randomly oriented grains, (2) [001] aligned grains encountered in austenitic stainless steel welds and casts, and (3) duplex steels.

CQ Inc. and its team members (ALSTOM Power Inc., Bliss Industries, McFadden Machine Company, and industry advisors from coal-burning utilities, equipment manufacturers, and the pellet fuels industry) addressed the objectives of the Department of Energy and industry to produce economical, new solid fuels from coal, biomass, and waste materials that reduce emissions from coal-fired boilers. This project builds on the team's commercial experience in composite fuels for energy production. The electric utility industry is interested in the use of biomass and wastes as fuel to reduce both emissions and fuel costs. In addition to these benefits, utilities also recognize the business advantage of consuming the waste byproducts of customers both to retain customers and to improve the public image of the industry. Unfortunately, biomass and waste byproducts can be troublesome fuels because of low bulk density, high moisture content, variable composition, handling and feeding problems, and inadequate information about combustion and emissions characteristics. Current methods of co-firing biomass and wastes either use a separate fuel receiving, storage, and boiler feed system, or mass burn the biomass by simply mixing it with coal on the storage pile. For biomass or biomass-containing composite fuels to be extensively used in the U.S., especially …

Established by Congress in 1991, the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program provides the Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) laboratories, like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL or the Laboratory), with the flexibility to invest up to 6% of their budget in long-term, high-risk, and potentially high payoff research and development (R&D) activities to support the DOE/NNSA's national security missions. By funding innovative R&D, the LDRD Program at LLNL develops and extends the Laboratory's intellectual foundations and maintains its vitality as a premier research institution. As proof of the Program's success, many of the research thrusts that started many years ago under LDRD sponsorship are at the core of today's programs. The LDRD Program, which serves as a proving ground for innovative ideas, is the Laboratory's most important single resource for fostering excellent science and technology for today's needs and tomorrow's challenges. Basic and applied research activities funded by LDRD enhance the Laboratory's core strengths, driving its technical vitality to create new capabilities that enable LLNL to meet DOE/NNSA's national security missions. The Program also plays a key role in building a world-class multidisciplinary workforce by engaging the Laboratory's best researchers, recruiting its future scientists and engineers, …