The Accelerator Transmutation of Waste (ATW) concept has been proposed as a transuranics (TRU) (and long-lived fission product) incinerator for processing the 87,000 metric tonnes of Light Water Reactor used fuel which will have been generated by the time the currently deployed fleet of commercial reactors in the US reach the end of their licensed lifetime. The ATW is proposed to separate the uranium from the transuranics and fission products in the LWR used fuel, to fission the transuranics, to send the LWR and ATW generated fission products to the geologic repository and to send the uranium to either a low level waste disposal site or to save it for future use. The heat liberated in fissioning the transuranics would be converted to electricity and sold to partially offset the cost of ATW construction and operations. Options for incineration of long-lived fission products are under evaluation. A six-year science-based program of ATW trade and system studies was initiated in the US FY 2000 to achieve two main purposes: (1) ''to evaluate ATW within the framework of nonproliferation, waste management, and economic considerations,'' and (2) ''to evaluate the efficacy of the numerous technical options for ATW system configuration.'' This paper summarizes …

In this study, 10-Ah cylindrical and flat-wound cells were designed and studied for use in batteries for the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV). A low-cost current collection system was devised that results in a low resistance. Heat rejection from flat cells is much better than that from cylindrical cells and is an important safety factor. Very compact, powerful batteries of about 1.5 kW/L can be designed with wound lithium-ion cells.

Java is quickly becoming the preferred language for writing distributed applications because of its inherent support for programming on distributed platforms. In particular, Java provides compile-time and run-time security, automatic garbage collection, inherent support for multithreading, support for persistent objects and object migration, and portability. Given these significant advantages of Java, there is a growing interest in using Java for high-performance computing applications. To be successful in the high-performance computing domain, however, Java must have the capability to efficiently handle the significant I/O requirements commonly found in high-performance computing applications. While there has been significant research in high-performance I/O using languages such as C, C++, and Fortran, there has been relatively little research into the I/O capabilities of Java. In this paper, we evaluate the I/O capabilities of Java for high-performance computing. We examine several approaches that attempt to provide high-performance I/O--many of which are not obvious at first glance--and investigate their performance in both parallel and multithreaded environments. We also provide suggestions for expanding the I/O capabilities of Java to better support the needs of high-performance computing applications.

To achieve high performance, a parallel algorithm needs to effectively utilize the memory subsystem and minimize the communication volume and the number of network transactions. These issues gain further importance on modern architectures, where the peak CPU performance is increasing much more rapidly than the memory or network performance. In this paper, we present some performance enhancing techniques that were employed on an unstructured mesh implicit solver. Our experimental results show that this solver adapts reasonably well to the high memory and network latencies.

Advanced exotic beam facilities that are currently being developed will use powerful driver accelerator for the production of short-lived rare isotopes. Multi-beam-drivers capable of producing high power beams from very light to very heavy ions are now technically feasible. A challenge for such facilities is the development of production targets to be used for a variety of reaction mechanisms with beam powers of about 100 kilowatts. This paper presents engineering concepts that have been developed recently for using liquid lithium coolant for two types of targets, one for use with light-ion beams on high atomic number (Z) targets and the other for heavy-ion beams on low-Z targets.

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We explore how nuclear modifications to the nucleon structure functions, shadowing, affect massive gauge boson production in heavy ion collisions at different impact parameters. We calculate the dependence of Z{sup 0}, W{sup +} and W{sup -} production on rapidity and impact parameter to next-to-leading order in Pb+Pb collisions at 5.5 TeV/nucleon to study quark shadowing at high Q{sup 2}. We also compare our Pb+Pb results to the pp rapidity distributions at 14 TeV.

Low Power EM radar-like sensors have made it possible to measure properties of the human speech production system in real-time, without acoustic interference. This greatly enhances the quality and quantity of information for many speech related applications. See Holzrichter, Burnett, Ng, and Lea, J. Acoustic. SOC. Am . 103 ( 1) 622 (1998). By combining the Glottal-EM-Sensor (GEMS) with the Acoustic-signals, we've demonstrated an almost 10 fold reduction in error rates from a speaker verification system experiment under a moderate noisy environment (-10dB).

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the Texas Board of Medical Examiners may certify a foreign nonprofit corporation, organized under the laws of a jurisdiction other than Texas, as a nonprofit health organization under section 162.001(b) of the Occupations Code (RQ-0250-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the Comptroller must continue to pay monthly installment payments to a county that has stopped, midyear, collecting the fee authorized by section 51.702 of the Government Code, and related question (RQ-0251-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the phrase "judicial officer who collected fees" used in section 51.921(d) of the Government Code refers to the court clerk who collects time-payment fees (RQ-0254-JC)

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

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This paper addresses the need to support a very precise optical instrument while causing essentially no influence to its natural shape. Such influences could come from a number of sources, such as manufacturing tolerances, temperature changes, over-constrained structural members, or ground motion. Kinematic couplings have long been used for purposes of repeatable location and minimal influence to the supported object, however these couplings typically offer very little damping. This paper presents a kinematic coupling that utilizes constrained-layer damping techniques to damp out the first three modes of vibration of a precision optical instrument. Finite element analysis was used to aid in the design and tuning of the dampers for the kinematic coupling. Experimental tests were conducted and confirmed the effectiveness of the dampers. The quality factor (Q), which measure the amplification at resonance, dropped from 33.3 to 5.9 on the first mode, from 156.3 to 7.1 on the second mode, and from 147.1 to 18.5 on the third mode. These dampers help to ensure that the stringent vibration requirements necessary to produce high quality optical images are met.

A generalized version of the Lindemann melting criterion has recently been used to develop a unified thermodynamic description of disorder-induced amorphization and heat-induced melting. This concept of amorphization as a melting process is based on the fact that the melting temperature of a defective crystal driven far from equilibrium will decrease relative to that of its defect-free equilibrium state. The broader view of melting provides a new perspective of damage-accumulation processes such as radiation damage, ion implantation, ion beam mixing, plastic deformation, and fracture. For example, within this conceptual framework, disorder-induced amorphization is simply polymorphous melting of a critically disordered crystal at temperatures below the glass transition temperature. In the present communication, we discuss the application of the concept to two specific cases: amorphous phase formation during ion implantation and solute segregation-induced intergranular fracture.

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A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report focuses on school and community collaborations for improving student outcomes for at-risk youth. To better provide the support needed for these students to succeed in school and beyond, some schools and school districts have intensified their collaboration with businesses, community agencies, and other neighborhood organizations. These efforts, which go substantially beyond the usual links between schools and other agencies or organizations, go by such names as "extended-service schools," "full- service schools," "community schools," or, more generally, "school-community initiatives." The federal government plays a role in these initiatives because of the funding and support it provides through various programs serving youths who are disadvantaged or at risk of school failure. Schools with a large number of disadvantaged students often struggle to both educate their students and prepare them for further education or a career. The goals of the school-community initiatives GAO reviewed center on helping students achieve in school and readying them for life after graduation. Several officials GAO spoke with said that it is difficult to measure the success of these programs for at-risk youth. Officials cited the lack of funds and the complex …

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From 1992 to 1995 the CDF experiment has taken 110 pb{sup {minus}1} of p{anti p} collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.8 TeV. These data gave rise to a variety of important B physics measurements. Most importantly B mass, lifetime and mixing measurements, the observation of the last missing meson, the B{sub c}, and a measurement of the CP violation parameter sin 2{beta}. The highlights of those results are described and a perspective for the upcoming Run II period is given.

Real time pattern recognition is becoming a key issue in many position sensitive detector applications. The CDF collaboration is building SVT: a specialized electronic device designed to perform real time track reconstruction using the silicon vertex detector (SVX II). This will strongly improve the CDF capability of triggering on events containing b quarks, usually characterized by the presence of a secondary vertex. SVT is designed to reconstruct in real time charged particles trajectories using data coming from the Silicon Vertex detector and the Central Outer Tracker drift chamber. The SVT architecture and algorithm have been specially tuned to minimize processing time without degrading parameter resolution.

In this paper the authors present results on Charm and Beauty production as well as on production and polarization of Quarkonia at {radical}s = 1.8 TeV. These results were obtained from data taken with the CDF detector at Fermilab. They cover recently completed analyses of the 1992--96 collider run.

The total costs and impacts of expanding energy use in China will depend, in part, on a number of important factors, an understanding of which is vital for China's policy-makers. These issues include the additional environmental and public health impacts associated with energy use, the economic costs of infrastructure expansion to meet growing energy needs, and the potential role that renewable energy technologies could play if pushed hard in China's energy future. This short report summarizes major trends and issues in each of these three areas.

This report examines the major, foreign conventional weapon systems that China has acquired or has committed to acquire since 1990, with particular attention to implications for U.S. security concerns. It is not the assumption of this report that China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), will engage in conflict with other forces in Asia. Nonetheless, since the mid-1990s, there has been increasing concern about China’s assertiveness in Asia and greater threats against Taiwan.

Diffractive, exclusive di-jet events produced by 500 GeV/c {pi}{sup {minus}} scattered off nuclei were used to measure their A-dependence, and to make the first direct measurement of the valence-quark momentum distribution in pions. Data on the latter are compared to two limiting predictions for the pion light-cone wave-function. The results show that the asymptotic wave-function of perturbative QCD describes the data well for Q{sup 2} of 10 GeV{sup 2} and above. The measured A-dependence is consistent with observation of point-like configurations in the pion and color-transparency calculations.