This report provides historical context, discusses political and economic developments in Cambodia, and raises policy issues regarding U.S.-Cambodian relations.

This report mainly focuses on China-U.S. Trade Issues. China-U.S. ties have expanded substantially over the past several years. China overtook Japan to become the third-largest U.S .Export market and overtook Canada to become the Largest source of U.S imports.

This report discusses constitutional considerations facing both individual states and Congress in enacting hate crime legislation.

This report provides an overview of the statutory framework, key players, infrastructure, resources, tools, and operations associated with enforcement and compliance of the major pollution control laws and regulations administered by EPA.

The scope of the Fluor Hanford, Inc. Groundwater and Technical Integration Support (Master Project) is to provide technical and integration support to Fluor Hanford, Inc., including operable unit investigations at 300-FF-5 and other groundwater operable units, strategic integration, technical integration and assessments, remediation decision support, and science and technology. This Quality Assurance Management Plan provides the quality assurance requirements and processes that will be followed by the Fluor Hanford, Inc. Groundwater and Technical Integration Support (Master Project).

Miniature spherical retroreflectors, less than 8 millimeters in diameter, are currently being developed to enhance remote optical detection of nuclear proliferation activities. These retroreflecting spheres resemble small, sand-colored marbles that have the unique optical property of providing a strong reflection directly back to the source (i.e., retroreflecting) when illuminated with a laser. The addition of specific coatings, sensitive to specific chemicals or radioactive decay in the environment, can be applied to the surface of these retroreflectors to provide remote detection of nuclear proliferation activities. The presence of radioactive decay (e.g., alpha, gamma, neutron) or specific chemicals in the environment (e.g., TBP, acids) will change the optical properties of the spheres in a predictable fashion, thus indicating the presence or absence of the target materials. One possible scenario might employ an airborne infrared laser system (e.g., quantum-cascade lasers) to illuminate a section of ground littered with these retroreflective spheres. Depending on the coating and the presence of a specific chemical or radioisotope in the environment, the return signal would be modified in some predictable fashion because of fluorescence, frequency shifting, intensity attenuation/enhancement, or change in polarization. Research conducted in FY 2007 focused on developing novel optical fabrication processes and exploiting the …

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This report identifies and provides website addresses of official government sources for information on the legislative process and the rules and procedure of the House and Senate.

The objective of this task was to demonstrate that metal hydrides could be produced by mechanical alloying in the quantities needed to support production-scale hydrogen isotope separations. Three starting compositions (ratios of elemental Zr and Fe powders) were selected and attritor milled under argon for times of 8 to 60 hours. In general, milling times of at least 24 hours were required to form the desired Zr{sub 2}Fe and Zr{sub 3}Fe phases, although a considerable amount of unalloyed Zr and Fe remained. Milling in liquid nitrogen does not appear to provide any advantages over milling in hexane, particularly due to the formation of ZrN after longer milling times. Carbides of Zr formed during some of the milling experiments in hexane. Elemental Zr was present in the as-milled material but not detected after annealing for milling times of 48 and 60 hours. It may be that after intimate mixing of the powders in the attritor mill the annealing temperature was sufficient to allow for the formation of a Zr-Fe alloy. Further investigation of this conversion is necessary, and could provide an opportunity for reducing the amount of unreacted metal powder after milling.

Experiments involving the interaction of a high-power laser beam with metal targets demonstrate that combustion plays an important role. This process depends on reactions within an oxide layer, together with oxygenation and removal of this layer by the wind. We present an analytical model of laser-induced combustion. The model predicts the threshold for initiation of combustion, the growth of the combustion layer with time, and the threshold for self-supported combustion. Solutions are compared with detailed numerical modeling as benchmarked by laboratory experiments.

The Nevada Test Site-Directed Research and Development (SDRD) program completed a very successful year of research and development activities in FY 2007. Twenty-nine new projects were selected for funding this year, and eight projects started in FY 2006 were brought to conclusion. The total funds expended by the SDRD program were $5.67 million, for an average per-project cost of $153 thousand. An external audit conducted in September 2007 verified that appropriate accounting practices were applied to the SDRD program. Highlights for the year included: programmatic adoption of 8 SDRD-developed technologies; the filing of 9 invention disclosures for innovation evolving from SDRD projects; participation in the tri-Lab Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) and SDRD Symposium that was broadly attended by Nevada Test Site (NTS), National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), LDRD, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) representatives; peer reviews of all FY 2007 projects; and the successful completion of 37 R&D projects, as presented in this report. In response to a company-wide call, authors throughout the NTS complex submitted 182 proposals for FY 2007 SDRD projects. The SDRD program has seen a dramatic increase in the yearly total of submitted proposals--from 69 in FY …

This report focuses on the current threat and trends in nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and missiles.

This report focuses on the current threat and trends in nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and missiles.

Bulk chemical and oxygen, magnesium and silicon isotopic compositions were measured for each of 17 Types A and B refractory inclusions from CV3 chondrites. After bulk chemical compositions were corrected for non-representative sampling in the laboratory, the Mg and Si isotopic compositions of each inclusion were used to calculate its original chemical composition assuming that the heavy-isotope enrichments of these elements are due to Rayleigh fractionation that accompanied their evaporation from CMAS liquids. The resulting pre-evaporation chemical compositions are consistent with those predicted by equilibrium thermodynamic calculations for high-temperature nebular condensates but only if different inclusions condensed from nebular regions that ranged in total pressure from 10{sup -6} to 10{sup -1} bar, regardless of whether they formed in a system of solar composition or in one enriched in OC dust relative to gas by a factor of ten relative to solar composition. This is similar to the range of total pressures predicted by dynamic models of the solar nebula for regions whose temperatures are in the range of silicate condensation temperatures. Alternatively, if departure from equilibrium condensation and/or non-representative sampling of condensates in the nebula occurred, the inferred range of total pressure could be smaller. Simple kinetic modeling of evaporation …

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The purpose of this document is to describe research, monitoring, and evaluation (RME) for the Federal Columbia River Estuary Program, hereafter called 'the Estuary Program'. The intent of this RME effort is to provide data and information to evaluate progress toward meeting program goals and objectives and support decision making in the Estuary Program. The goal of the Estuary Program is to understand, conserve, and restore the estuary ecosystem to improve the performance of listed salmonid populations. The Estuary Program has five general objectives, designed to fulfill the program goal, as follows: (1) Understand the primary stressors affecting ecosystem controlling factors, such as ocean conditions and invasive species. (2) Conserve and restore factors controlling ecosystem structures and processes, such as hydrodynamics and water quality. (3) Increase the quantity and quality of ecosystem structures, i.e., habitats, juvenile salmonids use during migration through the estuary. (4) Maintain the food web to benefit salmonid performance. (5) Improve salmonid performance in terms of life history diversity, foraging success, growth, and survival. The goal of estuary RME is to provide pertinent and timely research and monitoring information to planners, implementers, and managers of the Estuary Program. The goal leads to three primary management questions pertaining …

We welcome the Comment by Lerche et al on our recent paper titled "A new derivation of the plasma susceptibility tensor for a hot magnetized plasma without infinite sums of products of Bessel functions." The Comment brings up additional historical facts about previous research on the infinite sums of products of Bessel functions appearing in the plasma susceptibility.

The computational challenge of predicting shock-turbulence interactions stems from the fundamentally different physics at play. Shock waves are microscopically thin regions wherein flow properties change rapidly over a distance roughly equal to the molecular mean free path; hence, they are essentially strong discontinuities in the flow field. Turbulence, on the other hand, is a chaotic phenomenon with broadband spatial and temporal scales of motion. Most shock-capturing methods rely on strong numerical dissipation to artificially smooth the discontinuity, such that it can be resolved on the computational grid. Unfortunately, the artificial dissipation necessary for capturing shocks has a deleterious effect on turbulence. An additional problem is the fact that shock-capturing schemes are typically based on one-dimensional Riemann solutions that are not strictly valid in multiple dimensions. This can lead to anisotropy errors and grid-seeded perturbations. Other complications arising from upwinding, flux limiting, operator splitting etc., can seriously degrade performance and generate significant errors, especially in multiple dimensions. The purpose of this work is to design improved algorithms, capable of capturing both shocks and turbulence, which also scale to tens of thousands of processors. We have evaluated two new hydrodynamic algorithms, in relation to the widely used WENO method, on a suite …

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Report of the Texas Lottery Commission regarding the level of minority business participation in its lottery and bingo regulatory contracting activity and in the licensing of lottery sales agents, as well as recommendations for the improvement of lottery-related minority business opportunities.

This report provides background on Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) and ATAA, summarizes key issues related to reauthorization, and briefly describes bills in the 110th Congress that affect the TAA and ATAA programs.

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A series of octadentate ligands featuring the 2-hydroxyisophthalamide (IAM) antenna chromophore (to sensitize Tb(III) and Eu(III) luminescence) has been prepared and characterized. The length of the alkyl amine scaffold that links the four IAM moieties has been varied in order to investigate the effect of the ligand backbone on the stability and photophysical properties of the Ln(III) complexes. The amine backbones utilized in this study are N,N,N{prime},N{prime}-tetrakis-(2-aminoethyl)-ethane-1,2-diamine [H(2,2)-], N,N,N{prime},N{prime}-tetrakis-(2-aminoethyl)-propane-1,3-diamine [H(3,2)-] and N,N,N{prime},N{prime}-tetrakis-(2-aminoethyl)-butane-1,4-diamine [H(4,2)-]. These ligands also incorporate methoxyethylene [MOE] groups on each of the IAM chromophores to increase their water solubility. The aqueous ligand protonation constants and Tb(III) and Eu(III) formation constants were determined from solution thermodynamic studies. The resulting values indicate that at physiological pH, the Eu(III) and Tb(III) complexes of H(2,2)-IAM-MOE and H(4,2)-IAM-MOE are sufficiently stable to prevent dissociation at nanomolar concentrations. The photophysical measurements for the Tb(III) complexes gave overall quantum yield values of 0.56, 0.39, and 0.52 respectively for the complexes with H(2,2)-IAM-MOE, H(3,2)-IAM-MOE and H(4,2)-IAM-MOE, while the corresponding Eu(III) complexes displayed significantly weaker luminescence, with quantum yield values of 0.0014, 0.0015, and 0.0058, respectively. Analysis of the steady state Eu(III) emission spectra provides insight into the solution symmetries of the complexes. The combined solubility, stability …