This report has the following chapters: (1) Synopsis of 2000-2008 Stream Temperature Monitoring with Implications for Bull Trout Recovery in the Upper Malheur Logan Valley Wildlife Mitigation Property, 2008; (2) Bull Trout Spawning Survey Report, 2008; (3) 2008 Efforts to Trap and Haul Entrained Bull Trout Salvelinus confluentus over Agency Valley Dam on the North Fork Malheur River, Oregon; (4) Distribution and Abundance of Redband Trout Oncorhynchus mykiss in the Malheur River Basin, 2008; and (5) Spatial Patterns of Hybridization between Bull Trout, Salvelinus confluentus, and Brook Trout, Salvelinus fontinalis in an Oregon Stream Network.

The Advanced Technology Development (ATD) Program is a multilaboratory effort to assist industrial developers of high-power lithium-ion batteries overcome the barriers of cost, calendar life, abuse tolerance, and low-temperature performance so that this technology may be rendered practical for use in hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). Included in the ATD Program is a comprehensive diagnostics effort conducted by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The goals of this effort are to identify and characterize processes that limit lithium-ion battery performance and calendar life, and ultimately to describe the specific mechanisms that cause performance degradation. This report is a compilation of the diagnostics effort conducted since spring 2001 to characterize Generation 2 ATD cells and cell components. The report is divided into a main body and appendices. Information on the diagnostic approach, details from individual diagnostic techniques, and details on the phenomenological model used to link the diagnostic data to the loss of 18650-cell electrochemical performance are included in the appendices. The main body of the report includes an overview of the 18650-cell test data, summarizes diagnostic data and modeling information contained in the appendices, and provides an assessment of the various …

Ultraconserved elements have been suggested to retainextended perfect sequence identity between the human, mouse, and ratgenomes due to essential functional properties. To investigate thenecessities of these elements in vivo, we removed four non-codingultraconserved elements (ranging in length from 222 to 731 base pairs)from the mouse genome. To maximize the likelihood of observing aphenotype, we chose to delete elements that function as enhancers in amouse transgenic assay and that are near genes that exhibit markedphenotypes both when completely inactivated in the mouse as well as whentheir expression is altered due to other genomic modifications.Remarkably, all four resulting lines of mice lacking these ultraconservedelements were viable and fertile, and failed to reveal any criticalabnormalities when assayed for a variety of phenotypes including growth,longevity, pathology and metabolism. In addition more targeted screens,informed by the abnormalities observed in mice where genes in proximityto the investigated elements had been altered, also failed to revealnotable abnormalities. These results, while not inclusive of all thepossible phenotypic impact of the deleted sequences, indicate thatextreme sequence constraint does not necessarily reflect crucialfunctions required for viability.

The United States (U.S.) has identified 61.5 metric tons (MT) of plutonium that is permanently excess to use in nuclear weapons programs, including 47.2 MT of weapons-grade plutonium. Except for materials that remain in use for programs outside of national defense, including programs for nuclear-energy development, the surplus inventories will be stored safely by the Department of Energy (DOE) and then transferred to facilities that will prepare the plutonium for permanent disposition. Some items will be disposed as transuranic waste, low-level waste, or spent fuel. The remaining surplus plutonium will be managed through: (1) the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility (FFF), to be constructed at the Savannah River Site (SRS), where the plutonium will be converted to fuel that will be irradiated in civilian power reactors and later disposed to a high-level waste (HLW) repository as spent fuel; (2) the SRS H-Area facilities, by dissolving and transfer to HLW systems, also for disposal to the repository; or (3) alternative immobilization techniques that would provide durable and secure disposal. From the beginning of the U.S. program for surplus plutonium disposition, DOE has sponsored research to characterize the surplus materials and to judge their suitability for planned disposition options. Because many …

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has recently recovered from an economic downturn and the SARS virus outbreak of 2002-2003 which crippled trade and tourism. There has also been a major change in the top government personnel, with the former Chief Executive, Tung Chee-Hwa, being replaced by Donald Tsang as the new Chief Executive of Hong Kong. The next major the issue to be addressed in Hong Kong is the pace of further democratization and the the extent to which the next elections for the Legislative Counsel will be based on direct elections of all seats or a larger portion thereof.

None

This commercial demonstration project demonstrated the technical feasibility of converting low-value, underutilized and waste stream solid wood fiber material into higher valued products. With a growing need to increase product/production yield and reduce waste in most sawmills, few recovery operations and practically no data existed to support the viability of recovery operations. Prior to our efforts, most all in the forest products industry believed that recovery was difficult, extremely labor intensive, not cost effective, and that recovered products had low value and were difficult to sell. This project provided an opportunity for many within the industry to see through demonstration that converting waste stream material into higher valued products does in fact offer a solution. Our work, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, throughout the project aimed to demonstrate a reasonable approach to reducing the millions of recoverable solid wood fiber tons that are annually treated as and converted into low value chips, mulch and fuel. Consequently sawmills continue to suffer from reduced availability of forest resources, higher raw material costs, growing waste disposal problems, increased global competition, and more pressure to operate in an Environmentally Friendly manner. It is our belief (based upon the experience of this project) …

We develop a piecewise linear (PWL) Galerkin finite element spatial discretization for the multi-dimensional radiation diffusion equation. It uses piecewise linear weight and basis functions in the finite element approximation, and it can be applied on arbitrary polygonal (2D) or polyhedral (3D) grids. We show that this new PWL method gives solutions comparable to those from Palmer's finite-volume method. However, since the PWL method produces a symmetric positive definite coefficient matrix, it should be substantially more computationally efficient than Palmer's method, which produces an asymmetric matrix. We conclude that the Galerkin PWL method is an attractive option for solving diffusion equations on unstructured grids.

Growth in renewable energy in the U.S. over the past decade has been propelled by a number of forces, including rising fossil fuel prices, environmental concerns, and policy support at the state and federal levels. In this article, we review and discuss what are arguably the two most important types of state policies for supporting electricity generation from geothermal and other forms of renewable energy: renewables portfolio standards and utility integrated resource planning requirements. Within the Western U.S., where the vast majority of the nation's readily-accessible geothermal resource potential resides, these two types of state policies have been critical to the growth of renewable energy, and both promise to continue to play a fundamental role for the foreseeable future. In its essence, a renewables portfolio standard (RPS) requires utilities and other retail electricity suppliers to produce or purchase a minimum quantity or percentage of their generation supply from renewable resources. RPS purchase obligations generally increase over time, and retail suppliers typically must demonstrate compliance on an annual basis. Mandatory RPS policies are backed by various types of compliance enforcement mechanisms, although most states have incorporated some type of cost-containment provision, such as a cost cap or a cap on retail …

The Department of Defense operates six environmental programs: cleanup of past contamination at military facilities, acceleration of cleanup at military bases designated for closure, compliance with environmental laws and regulations that apply to ongoing military operations, pollution prevention, natural resource conservation, and environmental technology. In addition to these activities, the Department of Energy is responsible for managing defense nuclear waste and remediating contaminated sites. This report discusses the federal laws that established these programs, describes their scope and purpose, provides a history of appropriations, indicates the President’s budget request for FY2001, examines authorization and appropriations legislation for FY2001, and discusses other relevant legislation considered in the 106th Congress.

None

Proposed development of domestic energy resources, including wind energy, is expected to impact the sagebrush steppe ecosystem in the western United States. The greater sage-grouse relies on habitats within this ecosystem for survival, yet very little is known about how wind energy development may affect sage-grouse. The purpose of this report is to inform organizations of the impacts wind energy development could have on greater sage-grouse populations and identify information needed to fill gaps in knowledge.

Starting from the results of a recent measurement of the 2s{sub 1/2}-2p{sub 1/2} transition in U{sup 89+} has been made on the SuperEBIT electron beam ion trap, which provided a determination of the 2s two-loop QED contribution, we estimate 1.27 {+-} 0.45 eV for the two-loop contribution to the 1s level in U{sup 91+}. This estimate could be improved by a factor of two or more, if the uncertainties associated with the three-photon exchange in the theoretical calculations were eliminated in the future.

The dispersion properties of ion acoustic waves (IAW) are sensitive to the strength of ion-ion collisions in multi-species plasma in which the different species usually have differing charge-to-mass ratios. The modification of the frequency and damping of the fast and slow acoustic modes in a plasma composed of light (low Z) and heavy (high Z) ions is considered. In the fluid limit where the light ion scattering mean free path, {lambda}{sub th} is smaller than the acoustic wavelength, {lambda} = 2{pi}/k, the interspecies friction and heat flow carried by the light ions scattering from the heavy ions causes the damping. In the collisionless limit, k{lambda}{sub lh} >> 1, Landau damping by the light ions provides the dissipation. In the intermediate regime when k{lambda}{sub lh} {approx} 1, the damping is at least as large as the sum of the collisional and Landau damping.

We simulate quenched QCD with the overlap Dirac operator. We work with the Wilson gauge action at {beta} = 6 on an 18{sup 3} x 64 lattice. We calculate quark propagators for a single source point and quark mass ranging from am{sub 4} = 0.03 to 0.75. We present here preliminary results based on the propagators for 60 gauge field configurations.

While commodity computing and graphics hardware has increased in capacity and dropped in cost, it is still quite difficult to make effective use of such systems for general-purpose parallel visualization and graphics. We describe the results of a recent project that provides a software infrastructure suitable for general-purpose use by parallel visualization and graphics applications. Our work combines and extends two technologies: Chromium, a stream-oriented framework that implements the OpenGL programming interface; and OpenRM Scene Graph, a pipelined-parallel scene graph interface for graphics data management. Using this combination, we implement a sort-first, distributed memory, parallel volume rendering application. We describe the performance characteristics in terms of bandwidth requirements and highlight key algorithmic considerations needed to implement the sort-first system. We characterize system performance using a distributed memory parallel volume rendering application, a nd present performance gains realized by using scene specific knowledge to accelerate rendering through reduced network bandwidth. The contribution of this work is an exploration of general-purpose, sort-first architecture performance characteristics as applied to distributed memory, commodity hardware, along with a description of the algorithmic support needed to realize parallel, sort-first implementations.

Analysis of sequence variation among members of a single species offers a potential approach to identify functional DNA elements responsible for biological features unique to that species. Due to its high rate of allelic polymorphism and ease of genetic manipulability, we chose the sea squirt, Ciona intestinalis, to explore intra-species sequence comparisons for genome annotation. A large number of C. intestinalis specimens were collected from four continents and a set of genomic intervals amplified, resequenced and analyzed to determine the mutation rates at each nucleotide in the sequence. We found that regions with low mutation rates efficiently demarcated functionally constrained sequences: these include a set of noncoding elements, which we showed in C intestinalis transgenic assays to act as tissue-specific enhancers, as well as the location of coding sequences. This illustrates that comparisons of multiple members of a species can be used for genome annotation, suggesting a path for the annotation of the sequenced genomes of organisms occupying uncharacterized phylogenetic branches of the animal kingdom and raises the possibility that the resequencing of a large number of Homo sapiens individuals might be used to annotate the human genome and identify sequences defining traits unique to our species. The sequence data …

For the fourth year in a row, the United States led the world in adding new wind power capacity in 2008, and also surpassed Germany to take the lead in terms of cumulative installed wind capacity. The rapid growth of wind power in the U.S. over the past decade (Figure 1) has been driven by a combination of increasingly supportive policies (including the Federal production tax credit (PTC) and a growing number of state renewables portfolio standards), uncertainty over the future fuel costs and environmental liabilities of natural gas and coal-fired power plants, and wind's competitive position among generation resources. This article focuses on just the last of these drivers - i.e., trends in U.S. wind power prices - over the period of strong capacity growth since 1998.

The wind power industry in the U.S. has been on a growth binge in recent years, and the rapid pace of development has made it difficult to keep up with trends in the marketplace. Yet the need for timely, objective information on the wind industry and its progress has never been greater. This article, excerpted from a longer report from the U.S. Department of Energy, attempts to fill this need by providing a comprehensive, yet detailed, overview of key developments in the U.S. wind power market, with a particular focus on 2007. This summary includes information on wind project installation trends, industry developments, and, perhaps most interestingly, project-level installed cost and pricing information that has not otherwise been widely reported. The article concentrates on larger-scale wind applications, defined here as projects utilizing turbines that exceed 50 kW in size. In many cases, the data reported here represent only a sample of all wind projects installed in the United States; furthermore, the data vary in quality. As such, emphasis should be placed on overall trends in the data, rather than on individual data points.

None

None

A unique set of high-quality downhole shallow subsurface well log data combined with industry standard 3D seismic data from the Alaminos Canyon area has enabled the first detailed description of a concentrated gas hydrate accumulation within sand in the Gulf of Mexico. The gas hydrate occurs within very fine grained, immature volcaniclastic sands of the Oligocene Frio sand. Analysis of well data acquired from the Alaminos Canyon Block 818 No.1 ('Tigershark') well shows a total gas hydrate occurrence 13 m thick, with inferred gas hydrate saturation as high as 80% of sediment pore space. Average porosity in the reservoir is estimated from log data at approximately 42%. Permeability in the absence of gas hydrates, as revealed from the analysis of core samples retrieved from the well, ranges from 600 to 1500 millidarcies. The 3-D seismic data reveals a strong reflector consistent with significant increase in acoustic velocities that correlates with the top of the gas-hydrate-bearing sand. This reflector extends across an area of approximately 0.8 km{sup 2} and delineates the minimal probable extent of the gas hydrate accumulation. The base of the inferred gas-hydrate zone also correlates well with a very strong seismic reflector that indicates transition into units of …

None

In response to the rising number of home mortgage foreclosures, several bills have been introduced during the 110th Congress that would provide additional federal assistance to state and local governments with high concentrations of foreclosed homes, subprime mortgage loans, and delinquent home mortgages. At least one of these proposals, H.R. 3221, as passed by the Senate, includes provisions that would use the framework of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program to channel an additional $4 billion in assistance to state and local governments. This provision faces an uncertain future; objections to it have been raised by the Bush Administration and others, contending that the assistance will result in the rescue of lenders and speculators.