From Summary: "This report addresses one of several approaches to the issue of rising gasoline prices put forward in the 109th Congress."

The objectives of the Annual Report are to: 1) describe changes in the volume of liquid seen in each lysimeter, 2) describe concentrations and changes or trends in the concentrations of leachate-indicator constituents in any liquids accumulated in each lysimeter, 3) summarize the finding in regard to the presence or absence of leachate in each lysimeter, 4) make recommendations, if any, limited to vadose-zone study-related variables. The data and analyses contained in this report reflect the initial characterization of construction and consolidation water in Cells 5 and 6 lysimeters.

We calculate X-ray line polarization degrees for cases with axial symmetry using a collisional-radiative magnetic-sublevel atomic kinetics model and the properties of multipole radiation fields. This approach is well-suited for problems where the alignment is determined by the competition between many atomic processes. We benchmark this method against polarization measurements performed at the Livermore electron beam ion trap, and we study the 3-to-2 cascade effects on the polarization of 2-to-1 lines in He-like Fe.

This report provides information about the Cloture Effect on Senate Proceedings.The senate in most circumstances allows its members to debate issues for as long as they want.

This report provides information about Considering Measures in the House Under the One-Hour Rule which means occupying more than one hour in a debate on a question in the house.

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Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "On September 7, 2006, GAO testified before the Subcommittee on Defense, Committee on Appropriations, on recent trends in Department of Defense (DOD) contracting. Specifically, GAO testified about practices that undermine DOD's ability to establish sound business arrangements, particularly those involving the selection and oversight of DOD's contractors and their performance. This correspondence responds to a number of post-hearing questions relating to various issues, including measures that DOD can employ to ensure better contracting outcomes."

We report the results of a first-principles study of dissociative electron attachment (DEA) to H{sub 2}O. The cross sections were obtained from nuclear dynamics calculations carried out in full dimensionality within the local complex potential model by using the multi-configuration time-dependent Hartree method. The calculations employ our previously obtained global, complex-valued, potential energy surfaces for the three ({sup 2}B{sub 1}, {sup 2}A{sub 1}, and {sup 2}B{sub 2}) electronic Feshbach resonances involved in this process. These three metastable states of H{sub 2}O{sup -} undergo several degeneracies, and we incorporate both the Renner-Teller coupling between the {sup 2}B{sub 1} and {sup 2}A{sub 1} states, as well as the conical intersection between the {sup 2}A{sub 1} and {sup 2}B{sub 2} states, into our treatment. The nuclear dynamics are inherently multi-dimensional and involve branching between different final product arrangements as well as extensive excitation of the diatomic fragment. Our results successfully mirror the qualitative features of the major fragment channels observed, but are less successful in reproducing the available results for some of the minor channels. We comment on the applicability of the local complex potential model to such a complicated resonant system.

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Virtualization has become increasingly popular for enabling full system isolation, load balancing, and hardware multiplexing for high-end server systems. Virtualizing software has the potential to benefit HPC systems similarly by facilitating efficient cluster management, application isolation, full-system customization, and process migration. However, virtualizing software is not currently employed in HPC environments due to its perceived overhead. In this work, we investigate the overhead imposed by the popular, open-source, Xen virtualization system, on performance-critical HPC kernels and applications. We empirically evaluate the impact of Xen on both communication and computation and compare its use to that of a customized kernel using HPC cluster resources at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL). We also employ statistically sound methods to compare the performance of a paravirtualized kernel against three popular Linux operating systems: RedHat Enterprise 4 (RHEL4) for build versions 2.6.9 and 2.6.12 and the LLNL CHAOS kernel, a specialized version of RHEL4. Our results indicate that Xen is very efficient and practical for HPC systems.

High corrosion resistance under very aggressive conditions is a distinguishing property of Ni-Cr-Mo-W alloys. One such alloy, Alloy 22, is a candidate material for fabrication of the outer layer of high-level nuclear waste (HLNW) packages for the proposed HLNW repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, USA. We are using Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS), ex-situ X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) and Time of Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectroscopy (ToF SIMS) to characterize the electrochemical properties and composition of the protective oxide formed on Alloy 22 surfaces. These studies have been conducted at temperatures up to 90 C at potentials from -0.8 V to 0.8 V (vs. Ag/AgCl (sat'd KCl)) in deaerated 5 mol L{sup -1} NaCl solution. Using this combination of techniques, we can correlate the electrical (from EIS) and compositional properties (from XPS, ToF SIMS) of the oxide. At more negative potentials (-0.8 V to -0.4 V) the film exhibits a low charge transfer resistance and high capacitance, indicating the presence of a very defective film with a high concentration of electronic defects. The presence of additional elements in the equivalent circuit, corresponding to water reduction, supports this suggestion. At these potentials, surface analysis techniques show a thin oxide layer with a …

The Hanford site has 149 underground single-shell tanks (SST) storing mostly soluble, multi-salt, mixed wastes resulting from Cold War era weapons material production. These wastes must be retrieved and the salts immobilized before the tanks can be closed to comply with an overall site closure consent order entered into by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the Environmental Protection Agency, and Washington State. Water will be used to retrieve the wastes and the resulting solution will be pumped to the proposed treatment process where a high curie (primarily {sup 137}Cs) waste fraction will be separated from the other waste constituents. The separated waste streams will then be vitrified to allow for safe storage as an immobilized high level waste, or low level waste, borosilicate glass. Fractional crystallization, a common unit operation for production of industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals, was proposed as the method to separate the salt wastes; it works by evaporating excess water until the solubilities of various species in the solution are exceeded (the solubility of a particular species depends on its concentration, temperature of the solution, and the presence of other ionic species in the solution). By establishing the proper conditions, selected pure salts can be crystallized …

QCD was developed in the 1970's as a theory of the strong interaction describing the confinement of quarks in hadrons. An early consequence of this picture was the realization that at sufficiently high temperature, or energy density, the confining forces are overcome by color screening effects, resulting in a transition from hadronic matter to a new state--later named the Quark Gluon Plasma--whose bulk dynamical properties are determined by the quark and gluon degrees of freedom, rather than those of confined hadrons. The suggestion that this phase transition in a fundamental theory of nature might occur in the hot, dense nuclear matter created in heavy ion collisions triggered a series of experimental searches during the past two decades at CERN and at BNL, with successively higher-energy nuclear collisions. This has culminated in the present RHIC program. In their first five years of operation, the RHIC experiments have identified a new form of thermalized matter formed in Au+Au collisions at energy densities more than 100 times that of a cold atomic nucleus. Measurements and comparison with relativistic hydrodynamic models indicate that the matter thermalizes in an unexpectedly short time ( < 1 fm/c) , has an energy density at least 15 times …

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To date, angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy has been successful in identifying energy scales of the many-body interactions in correlated materials, focused on binding energies of up to a few hundred meV below the Fermi energy. Here, at higher energy scale, we present improved experimental data from four families of high-T{sub c} superconductors over a wide doping range that reveal a hierarchy of many-body interaction scales focused on: the low energy anomaly ('kink') of 0.03-0.09eV, a high energy anomaly of 0.3-0.5eV, and an anomalous enhancement of the width of the LDA-based CuO{sub 2} band extending to energies of {approx} 2 eV. Besides their universal behavior over the families, we find that all of these three dispersion anomalies also show clear doping dependence over the doping range presented.

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Explanation and depiction of the House Amendment Tree, which illustrates the relationship of one amendment to another, as well as the proper voting sequence.

This report mainly discusses about the Forms and Requirements of House Voting Procedures. There are four ways for lawmakers to obtain a vote in the house. there are voice votes,division votes ,yea and nay votes and recorded votes.

Four programs, administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), were created to provide temporary and permanent housing to the homeless, along with supportive services.This report describes how HUD distributes the four homeless assistance grants.

Fan filter units (FFU) are widely used to deliver re-circulated air while providing filtration control of particle concentration in controlled environments such as cleanrooms, minienvironments, and operating rooms in hospitals. The objective of this paper is to document an innovative method for characterizing operation and control of an individual fan filter unit within its operable conditions. Built upon the draft laboratory method previously published [1] , this paper presents an updated method including a testing procedure to characterize dynamic operation of fan filter units, i.e., steady-state operation conditions determined by varied control schemes, airflow rates, and pressure differential across the units. The parameters for dynamic characterization include total electric power demand, total pressure efficiency, airflow rate, pressure differential across fan filter units, and airflow uniformity.

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This report provides an overview of U.S. relations with Latin American and the Caribbean, focusing on the role of Congress and congressional concerns in the 109th Congress.

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Crevice corrosion may initiate in confined regions due to transport limitations, followed by an accumulation of a highly corrosive chemistry, capable of dissolving the metal. The metal and the crevice former surface roughness, the presence of particulates under the crevice former and the accumulation of solid corrosion products at the corroding site would significantly affect the current and potential distribution at the anode by increasing the ohmic potential drop. Most crevice corrosion models focus on a smooth walled crevice of uniform gap and do not account for the changing profile after crevice corrosion has been initiated. In this work we analyze the crevice (anodic) region and apply current and potential distribution models to examine the effects of the perturbed surface topography. The analysis focuses on three related issues: (1) the effects of surface roughness of the metal and the crevice former, (2) the effects of particulates under the crevice former, and (3) the evolution of the crevice profile with corrosion product accumulation at the active, anodic region.