This report discusses the new emergency preparedness rules for organizations which participate in the Medicaid and Medicare programs that will be required to be in place by November 16, 2017.

This report highlights four particularly notable cases the Court heard and ruled on during the October 2016 term: Matal v. Tam, which examines the interplay between the First Amendment and trademark law; Sessions v. Morales-Santana, a case exploring the relationship between immigration law and the Court's Equal Protection jurisprudence; Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, the latest chapter in the Court's Free Exercise jurisprudence; and Ziglar v. Abbasi, a case limiting the types of damages claims that can be asserted against federal officers for alleged constitutional violations under the Bivens doctrine. Each case is addressed in a separate section below, which provides background information on the case; summarizes the arguments that were presented to the Court; explains the Court's ultimate ruling; and examines the implications that the Court's ruling could have for Congress, including broader ramifications for jurisprudence in a given area of law.

This report provides background information regarding oil spills and identifies the legal authorities and processes for oil spill prevention, response, liability, and compensation. The first section highlights background issues, including oil spill statistics and potential environmental impacts. The second section discusses the legal and regulatory framework that governs oil spill prevention and response.

This report discusses the Iran nuclear agreement that was made on July 14, 2015 and the lifting of sanctions related to their nuclear weapons programs which occurred on January 16, 2016. Iran's obligations under the agreement and Congressional discussion of adjustments to the agreement or withdrawal are outlined.

This report provides background information and issues for Congress on maritime territorial and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) disputes in the East China (ECS) and South China Sea (SCS) involving China, with a focus on how these disputes may affect U.S. strategic and policy interests.

This report provides background on the use of special envoys, representatives, and coordinators (primarily within the foreign affairs arena; for the most part, interagency positions are not included). It identifies various temporary positions, their purpose, and existing authorities. The report presents commonly articulated arguments for and against the use of these positions and issues for Congress going forward. The scope of this report is limited to the special envoy and related positions identified by the Department of State in a 2017 report to Congress and additional selected positions identified by CRS. This report may be updated to reflect congressional action.

This report introduces the various regulatory exclusivities that protect certain medicines from marketplace competition for a set period of time and then describes pertinent legislation in the 115th Congress addressing them.

This report provides background on China's economic rise; describes its current economic structure; identifies the challenges China faces to maintain economic growth; and discusses the challenges, opportunities, and implications of China's economic rise for the United States.

This report outlines the role of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in hurricane disaster relief and recovery. This role encompasses emergency response to floods and general disaster recovery, maintaining or repairing flood control structures such as dams that they operate as well as assisting in the repair of non-federally owned flood control structures. Recent activities of the Corps during and after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are discussed.

This report discuses a shift to a new international security environment and implications of that new environment on defense-related issues. It does not discuss potential implications of a shift in the international security environment for other policy areas, such as foreign policy and diplomacy, trade and finance, energy, and foreign assistance.

This report analyzes U.S. and international sanctions against Iran and provides some examples, based on open sources, of companies and countries that conduct business with Iran. CRS has no way to independently corroborate any of the reporting on which these examples are based and no mandate to assess whether any firm or other entity is complying with U.S. or international sanctions against Iran. The sections are grouped by function, in the chronological order in which the themes have emerged

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 research adds to the understanding of the areas of residual starch and biomass conversion to alcohol, by providing data from pilot plant equipment of larger scale than the minimum required to give commercially scalable data. Instrumentation and control is in place to capture the information produced, for economic and technical evaluation. The impact of rheology, recycle streams, and residence time distributions on the technical and economic performance can be assessed. Various processes can be compared technically and economically because the pilot plants are readily modifiable. Several technologies for residual starch yield improvement have been identified, implemented, and patent applications filed. Various biomass-to-ethanol processes have been compared and one selected for technical optimization and commercialization. The technical and economic feasibility of the current simplified biomass conversion process is being confirmed by intensive pilot plant efforts as of this writing. Optimization of the feedstock handling and pretreatment is occurring to increase the alcohol yield above the minimum commercially viable level already demonstrated. Samples of biomass residue and reactor blowdown condensate are being collected to determine the technical and economic performance of the high-water-recycle waste treatment system being considered for the process. The project is of benefit to the public because it …

At the Advanced Light Source (ALS), we are developing broadly applicable, high-accuracy, in-situ, at-wavelength wavefront slope measurement techniques for Kirkpatrick-Baez (KB) mirror nano-focusing. In this paper, we report an initial cross-check of ex-situ and in-situ metrology of a bendable temperature stabilized KB mirror. This cross-check provides a validation of the in-situ shearing interferometry currently under development at the ALS.

The West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (WESTCARB), in collaboration with Shell Oil Co. performed site characterization for a potential small-scale pilot test of geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide (CO2). The site area, know as Montezuma Hills, is near the town of Rio Vista in northern California. During the process of injection at a CO2 storage site, there is a potential for seismic events due to slippage upon pre-existing discontinuities or due to creation of new fractures. Observations from many injection projects have shown that the energy from these events can be used for monitoring of processes in the reservoir. Typically, the events are of relatively high frequency and very low amplitude. However, there are also well documented (non-CO2-related) cases in which subsurface injection operations have resulted in ground motion felt by near-by communities. Because of the active tectonics in California (in particular the San Andreas Fault system), and the potential for public concern, WESTCARB developed and followed an induced seismicity protocol (Myer and Daley, 2010). This protocol called for assessing the natural seismicity in the area and deploying a monitoring array if necessary. In this report, we present the results of the natural seismicity assessment and the results of …

Modeling of laser-plasma wakefield accelerators in an optimal frame of reference [1] is shown to produce orders of magnitude speed-up of calculations from first principles. Obtaining these speedups requires mitigation of a high frequency instability that otherwise limits effectiveness in addition to solutions for handling data input and output in a relativistically boosted frame of reference. The observed high-frequency instability is mitigated using methods including an electromagnetic solver with tunable coefficients, its extension to accomodate Perfectly Matched Layers and Friedman's damping algorithms, as well as an efficient large bandwidth digital filter. It is shown that choosing theframe of the wake as the frame of reference allows for higher levels of filtering and damping than is possible in other frames for the same accuracy. Detailed testing also revealed serendipitously the existence of a singular time step at which the instability level is minimized, independently of numerical dispersion, thus indicating that the observed instability may not be due primarily to Numerical Cerenkov as has been conjectured. The techniques developed for Cerenkov mitigation prove nonetheless to be very efficient at controlling the instability. Using these techniques, agreement at the percentage level is demonstrated between simulations using different frames of reference, with speedups reaching …

Buildings are at the locus of three trends driving China's increased energy use and emissions: urbanization, growing personal consumption, and surging heavy industrial production. Migration to cities and urban growth create demand for new building construction. Higher levels of per-capita income and consumption drive building operational energy use with demand for higher intensity lighting, thermal comfort, and plug-load power. Demand for new buildings, infrastructure, and electricity requires heavy industrial production. In order to quantify the implications of China's ongoing urbanization, rising personal consumption, and booming heavy industrial sector, this study presents a lifecycle assessment (LCA) of the energy use and carbon emissions related to residential and commercial buildings. The purpose of the LCA model is to quantify the impact of a given building and identify policy linkages to mitigate energy demand and emissions growth related to China's new building construction. As efficiency has become a higher priority with growing energy demand, policy and academic attention to buildings has focused primarily on operational energy use. Existing studies estimate that building operational energy consumption accounts for approximately 25% of total primary energy use in China. However, buildings also require energy for mining, extracting, processing, manufacturing, and transporting materials, as well as energy …

The 3M Company has developed a high-temperature low-sag conductor referred to as Aluminum- Conductor Composite-Reinforced or ACCR. The conductor uses an aluminum metal matrix material to replace the steel in conventional conductors so the core has a lower density and higher conductivity. The objective of this work is to accelerate the commercial acceptance by electric utilities of these new conductor designs by testing four representative conductor classes in controlled conditions. Overhead transmission lines use bare aluminum conductor strands wrapped around a steel core strands to transmit electricity. The typical cable is referred to as aluminum-conductor steel-reinforced (ACSR). The outer strands are aluminum, chosen for its conductivity, low weight, and low cost. The center strand is of steel for the strength required to support the weight without stretching the aluminum due to its ductility. The power density of a transmission corridor has been directly increased by increasing the voltage level. Transmission voltages have increased from 115-kV to 765- kV over the past 80 years. In the United States, further increasing the voltage level is not feasible at this point in time, so in order to further increase the power density of a transmission corridor, conductor designs that increase the current carrying …

This report is prepared in the context of a larger program whose mission is to advance understanding of ventilation and indoor air quality in U.S. homes. A specific objective of this program is to develop the scientific basis ? through controlled experiments, monitoring and analysis ? for health risk-based ventilation standards. Appropriate and adequate ventilation is a basic element of a healthy home. Ventilation provides outdoor air and in the process removes indoor odors and contaminants including potentially unhealthful chemicals emitted by indoor materials, products and activities. Ventilation traditionally was assured to occur via infiltration of outdoor air through cracks and other leakage pathways in the residential building envelope. As building air tightness is improved for energy efficiency, infiltration can be reduced to inadequate levels. This has lead to the development of standards requiring mechanical ventilation. Though nominally intended to ensure acceptable indoor air quality, the standards are not explicitly tied to health risk or pollutant exposure targets. LBNL is currently designing analyses to assess the impact of varying ventilation standards on pollutant concentrations, health risks and energy use. These analyses require information on sources of chemical pollutant emissions, ideally including emission rates and the impact of ventilation on emissions. …

Methane hydrate was formed in two moist sands and a sand/silt mixture under a confining stress in an X-ray-transparent pressure vessel. Three initial water saturations were used to form three different methane-hydrate saturations in each medium. X-ray computed tomography (CT) was used to observe location-specific density changes caused by hydrate formation and flowing water. Gas-permeability measurements in each test for the dry, moist, frozen, and hydrate-bearing states are presented. As expected, the effective permeabilities (intrinsic permeability of the medium multiplied by the relative permeability) of the moist sands decreased with increasing moisture content. In a series of tests on a single sample, the effective permeability typically decreased as the pore space became more filled, in the order of dry, moist, frozen, and hydrate-bearing. In each test, water was flowed through the hydrate-bearing medium and we observed the location-specific changes in water saturation using CT scanning. We compared our data to a number of models, and our relative permeability data compare most favorably with models in which hydrate occupies the pore bodies rather than the pore throats. Inverse modeling (using the data collected from the tests) will be performed to extend the relative permeability measurements.

Optimality principles have been used for investigating physical processes in different areas. This work attempts to apply an optimal principle (that water flow resistance is minimized on global scale) to steady-state unsaturated flow processes. Based on the calculus of variations, we show that under optimal conditions, hydraulic conductivity for steady-state unsaturated flow is proportional to a power function of the magnitude of water flux. This relationship is consistent with an intuitive expectation that for an optimal water flow system, locations where relatively large water fluxes occur should correspond to relatively small resistance (or large conductance). Similar results were also obtained for hydraulic structures in river basins and tree leaves, as reported in other studies. Consistence of this theoretical result with observed fingering-flow behavior in unsaturated soils and an existing model is also demonstrated.

This document is the Close-Out Report for design and partial fabrication of the Pressurized Button Cell Test Facility at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL). This facility was planned to help develop the sulfur dioxide depolarized electrolyzer (SDE) that is a key component of the Hybrid Sulfur Cycle for generating hydrogen. The purpose of this report is to provide as much information as possible in case the decision is made to resume research. This report satisfies DOE Milestone M3GSR10VH030107.0. The HyS Cycle is a hybrid thermochemical cycle that may be used in conjunction with advanced nuclear reactors or centralized solar receivers to produce hydrogen by watersplitting. The HyS Cycle utilizes the high temperature (>800 C) thermal decomposition of sulfuric acid to produce oxygen and regenerate sulfur dioxide. The unique aspect of HyS is the generation of hydrogen in a water electrolyzer that is operated under conditions where dissolved sulfur dioxide depolarizes the anodic reaction, resulting in substantial voltage reduction. Low cell voltage is essential for both high thermodynamic efficiency and low hydrogen cost. Sulfur dioxide is oxidized at the anode, producing sulfuric acid that is sent to the high temperature acid decomposition portion of the cycle. Sulfur dioxide from the decomposer …

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Capstone Turbine Corporation (CTC) participated in an in-kind cost share cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) effort under the auspices of the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Technology Maturation Program to explore the feasibility for use of developmental ORNL alumina-forming austenitic (AFA) stainless steels as a material of construction for microturbine recuperator components. ORNL delivered test coupons of three different AFA compositions to CTC. The coupons were exposed in steady-state elevated turbine exit temperature (TET) engine testing, with coupons removed for analysis after accumulating ~1,500, 3,000, 4,500, and 6,000 hours of operation. Companion test coupons were also exposed in oxidation testing at ORNL at 700-800°C in air with 10% H2O. Post test assessment of the coupons was performed at ORNL by light microscopy and electron probe microanalysis. The higher Al and Nb containing AFA alloys exhibited excellent resistance to oxidation/corrosion, and thus show good promise for recuperator applications.