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An initiative led by Iran, Israel, and Jordan could give new life to the stalled Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) facility under construction in Allaan, Jordan. In the works for a dozen years, the project is intended as a driver for both topnotch science and peace in the region.

At a late-May meeting, the three SESAME member countries each promised $1 million a year for five years if another of the nine members matches their pledges this year, and at least one more later. Turkey and Egypt have set in motion the process to join the initiative. The project's other members are Bahrain, Cyprus, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Authority.

If the initiative succeeds, it would cover much of the $35 million still needed in capital costs. The total tab for construction is $110 million, including the building and land, which Jordan has contributed, and the first three beamlines.

The idea for SESAME was hatched in the late 1990s when a synchrotron light source in Berlin was being retired. Herman Winick of Stanford University and Gus Voss of the Electron Synchrotron laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, thought it could be retooled. The finished SESAME is to be a third-generation 2.5-GeV light source.

When ground was broken for SESAME in 2003, the hope was that it would be open for science by 2010. But insufficient funds have delayed the project. Christopher Llewellyn Smith, an Oxford University professor and president of the SESAME council, said he is "now confident that SESAME is on track technically, and will soon also be positioned financially, for experiments to begin in 2015."

Toni Feder

Presidential science adviser John Holdren vowed to defend the Obama administration's science and technology budget request for fiscal 2012 against anticipated congressional efforts to make further sweeping reductions in federal spending. Speaking to the annual S&T policy forum of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on 5 May, Holdren predicted that certain federal R&D programs—including basic research at the Department of Defense, carbon capture and storage and fusion research at the Department of Energy, and the multiagency US Global Change Research Program—will likely be especially targeted for reductions by lawmakers looking to cut the budget.

"The president remains committed to robust growth in key dimensions of S&T," Holdren said, pointing to President Obama's commitment to double the basic research programs at DOE, NSF, and NIST over 10 years and his goal of raising the total amount of spending by government and industry on R&D to 3% of US GDP. Holdren said that Obama had reiterated the need for "a coherent energy and climate policy that entails large investments in both mitigation and adaptation" during a 3 May conversation with Holdren.

"Virtually all international cooperation comes under scrutiny when budgets are tight, because many members of Congress do not believe that international cooperation in science and technology benefits the United States," Holdren said. "We believe that our very strategically focused investments in these domains are of great benefit to the US and to the world. We plan to defend those investments, but you can expect some arguments."

Holdren said he also expects budget cutters to go after the social sciences programs at NSF, the peer-reviewed research programs at the US Department of Agriculture, and the basic research programs of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.

On another topic, Holdren praised the performance of Japanese authorities in sharing with US counterparts information concerning the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in the aftermath of the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. "I would say that the level of transparency has been extraordinarily good, really," he said, responding to a questioner. "We have had representatives from the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] in place with the Japanese team, managing the situation from very early in the game. We have gotten extraordinarily detailed reports multiple times daily from the Japanese authorities, and we've been in continuous contact by phone and conference call with the leaders of the Japanese operation."

Holdren said that he and Energy Secretary Steven Chu had convened "an informal group" of experts in nuclear accident prevention and mitigation immediately following the accident. Consulting daily during the initial weeks of the crisis, those advisers continue to hold twice weekly teleconferences, and have been "interacting intensively with the Japanese authorities," he said.

"I think basically we know everything they know," Holdren said of the Japanese nuclear authorities. "One of the problems in this kind of situation is that nobody knows everything we need to know because it's extremely difficult to operate and observe in a high radiation environment."

Holdren said that the administration intends to comply for the most part with a 2011 funding law provision that prohibits NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from cooperating with China on S&T matters. But Holdren, who is also director of OSTP, said the administration will ignore the congressional restriction in cases where it might "infringe on the president's constitutional prerogatives to conduct foreign diplomacy." Without elaborating, Holdren noted that "some of the things that we are doing with China we believe that if we curtailed them, would infringe on those constitutional prerogatives."

David Kramer

• Continued discussion of the developing world's interest in open access
• Contrasting views on courts and carbon dioxide, as seen in a pair of commentaries
• A case study of alarmism in the news: a Washington Post front-page story
• Reactor cancellations raising doubts about new nuclear plants, as seen in three national newspapers
• Continued discussion of the potential role of science and science-mindedness in Egypt's future

SciDev.net, Thomas Jefferson, and open access to new knowledge

Please indulge some long-view historical context for a report that builds on last week's posting "Open access, citation statistics, and the spread of knowledge."

It's the spread-of-knowledge dimension that calls to mind how, in 1809, the scientist who presided over the physicist Benjamin Franklin's American Philosophical Society wrote a letter that historians remember under the name "the republic of science." The letter's author was just completing his second term in his other office, the US presidency. In that capacity, Thomas Jefferson was writing to lament a disruptive intrusion by politics into the work of the international science enterprise—the republic of science.

Jefferson cited "the nature of the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them." He continued:

These societies are always in peace, however their nations may be at war. Like the republic of letters, they form a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth, and their correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation. Vaccination has been a late and remarkable instance of the liberal diffusion of a blessing newly discovered. It is really painful, it is mortifying, to be obliged to note these things, which are known to every one who knows any thing, and felt with approbation by every one who has any feeling.

David Dickson serves as director of the developing world's SciDev.net, an organization instituted, as Jefferson might have put it, for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered by scientists anywhere. In a 15 April commentary headlined "Open access: not just about citations," Dickson has engaged the recurring debate—reported on last week—about the relationship between open access and citation statistics. He has discerned in that debate a potential for interruption to the international spread of new knowledge—calling to mind Jefferson's letter, even if Dickson probably doesn't find it "mortifying to be obliged to note" the problem, and even though the impediment is economics, not politics.

Dickson's commentary's thumbnail encapsulation says, "Focusing on the 'citation advantage' of open access misses its value in getting science information in the hands of those who need it."

He begins by declaring that, thanks to the economics of scientific publishing, "support in the scientific community for the principle OA [open access] represents—that all scientific publications should be made freely available, at least in electronic form—has outstripped individual scientists' willingness to put that principle into practice." He calls authors' fees "a particular obstacle for scientists in developing countries."

This economic disincentive for OA works with the one discussed last week. As Dickson now puts it, "most scientists still prefer, where possible, to publish in established journals with high citation rates—a proxy for quality of scientific publications." He worries that the "study published last month by Philip Davis of Cornell University ... has been widely interpreted as throwing OA into further doubt, by questioning what is generally perceived as a major benefit of OA publishing—the 'OA citation advantage.'" He worries that "even by 2020, only about one quarter of scientific articles will be freely accessible."

Dickson worries too about the effect of the press release for the Davis study. The headline proclaimed, "Paid access to journal articles not a significant barrier for scientists." The thumbnail summary said, "New research paper ... shows that scientists have adequate access to paid journal content since free access to journal articles does not increase their citations."

And there's the problem. There's the potential, as Dickson sees it, for harm to "the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them." The debate that these results have triggered, writes Dickson, "sidesteps consideration of the full value of OA journals" to the spread of new knowledge. He continues:

This lies not merely in how they benefit science specialists, but also in making scientific research widely available to those who can neither afford high subscription rates for specialist journals, nor get access to scientific libraries—but whose work or personal interest depend on having access to the global pool of scientific knowledge....

Those who benefit from OA include many scientists in the developing world, where most university and research institution libraries remain heavily underfunded.

Then there are students, who are equally keen to follow new scientific developments. And finally there are all those who put scientific research to practical use—including members of the public, as well as professional groups such as healthcare workers.

As Davis has said, "there are many benefits to the free access of scientific information"—a point long argued by OA advocates, even if a citation advantage may not prove to be one of them.

To bolster his argument, Dickson cites the recent PLoS Medicine article "Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development." It argues that "the sharing of knowledge discovery across borders and the building of a global knowledge commons is increasingly important for solving problems that we all face." He agrees with it that "standards for assessing journal quality and relevance are generally based on 'Northern' values that often ignore development needs" and marginalize local science.

Dickson declares in conclusion that putting the "social value of science into measurable terms is much more difficult than the relatively simple calculations of citation rates."

WSJ v. NYT on American Electric Power v. Connecticut

Though it's not news that opinion in the Wall Street Journal often mismatches opinion in the New York Times, sharply diverging views might merit reporting from the two papers concerning this week's US Supreme Court case American Electric Power v. Connecticut.

Plaintiffs including several states and New York City are suing corporations responsible for a quarter of the electric power industry's carbon dioxide emissions. They seek abatement of what they believe are contributions to global warming.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, two former Justice Department officials from the George H. W. Bush administration disapprove of the suit. David B. Rivkin Jr and Lee A. Casey assert that the "rank absurdity of plaintiffs' claims should be obvious to the justices, who should rule decisively that the federal courts do not possess constitutional jurisdiction over climate change cases."

The two call the suit political—and have filed an amicus brief. They disbelieve the plaintiffs' fundamental motivation. Pressing often-heard claims of scientific authority, they write:

It is difficult to imagine a subject less susceptible to judicial resolution. Climate change is a well-established and natural phenomenon. The Earth's climate has changed dramatically over time. In the 19th century, for example, the northern hemisphere began to emerge from a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. The extent to which man-made emissions like carbon dioxide may contribute to this process of periodic change, and to more recent warming trends, remains unclear.

What is clear is that the entire human population produces carbon emissions, and industrialized economies have done so on a significant scale since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution more than two centuries ago. It is impossible to determine whether emissions by any particular power plant—or US electricity production as a whole—have affected warming trends and, if so, how. Nor can we surmise what party is responsible in whole or in part for the particular plaintiffs' alleged injuries. The law requires more than a guess.

Rivkin and Casey cite a "fundamental reason why these lawsuits must be dismissed: Federal courts can only decide cases where the complaining parties have actually been injured by the defendants' own actions and an effective remedy can be framed in a judicial order."

But a New York Times editorial agrees with a lower court:

As the Second Circuit writes, [the plaintiffs] "may seek their remedies under the federal common law," including made by justices. The Supreme Court has upheld a lawsuit preventing the discharge of sewage that made the Mississippi River unfit. It has upheld limits of noxious emissions of sulfur from copper foundries in Tennessee that were destroying Georgia forests. There are other clear-cut precedents.

The appellate court's opinion closes by paraphrasing a Supreme Court opinion from almost 40 years ago. New federal regulation may pre-empt the federal common law of nuisance, but, until then, federal courts are empowered to address the public nuisance caused by major, undisputed and destructive sources of greenhouse gases.

Rivkin and Casey also disbelieve, by the way, in the applicability of those interstate sewage and sulfur examples:

Federal common law nuisance actions have been generally limited to cases where activities in one state, such as creating air or water pollution, have a direct and identifiable harmful impact in another state. The federal courts have stepped into such cases because the states have no other mechanism to resolve disputes that may be too limited in scope to warrant congressional action.

The Times editors say that because "there is no federal regulation of this problem in force, it is fortunate that there is a line of Supreme Court precedents back to 1901 on which the plaintiffs can build their challenge." They continue:

When this lawsuit began seven years ago, one of the defendants' main defenses was that, because the Clean Air Act and other laws "address" carbon dioxide emissions, Congress has "legislated on the subject" and pre-empted the suit. The pre-emption claim was spurious when they made it and remains spurious now.

A Wall Street Journal news report about the case doesn't say when to expect a decision. Neither does a New York Times article posted online just after the Supreme Court heard the case, though its headline obviously means to telegraph a surmise: "States' Emissions 'Nuisance' Argument Seems to Fall on Deaf Ears in Supreme Court."

Alarmism in the news, cont.

This report has nothing whatsoever to do with science, but everything to do with alarmism in the news—a problem and challenge having lots to do with science. (Some examples: radiation, space weather, asteroids, cell phones' alleged health effects and—I'm not making this up—whether last month's "super moon," when the full moon appeared abnormally large, could cause natural disasters.)

Above the fold on the Washington Post's 20 April front page appeared what's probably a bit of a case study in news-reporting alarmism: the story of Mrs. Obama's airplane's landing incident.

As a non-aviator, my own amateur surmise when I first heard of the incident via broadcast media was that the danger was being way overblown. So even without the prompting of James Fallows's blog posting at the Atlantic—"Michelle Obama's Plane Was Not in 'Danger'"—I'd have been skeptical of the headline appearing on at least one paper edition of the Post: "Jet with first lady escapes close call: Presidential plane had to abort landing after error by controller, officials say." (The story's online version may be evolving.)

But Fallows, as it happens, is a reasonably experienced aviator, not to mention a veteran critic of some of his colleagues in the national media—for example, in his book Breaking the News. He calls out this line from the Post story: "A White House plane carrying Michelle Obama came dangerously close to a 200-ton military cargo jet and had to abort its landing at Andrews Air Force Base on Monday as the result of an air traffic controller's mistake, according to federal officials familiar with the incident." Fallows observes that two paragraphs later, the article reports that the Federal Aviation Administration has already said that there was never any danger.

He continues:

As FAA spokesmen said, and as the NYT made clear in a much calmer-toned story (the WSJ calm too), the maneuvers required of Mrs. Obama's plane—doing "S-turns" to slow down as it neared the airport, and then "going around" for another approach when it became clear that the first plane wouldn't get off the runway in time—are routine and the farthest things from emergency procedures. A mistake, yes. A near-miss, no.

Last month, the Post had a similar alarmist story about National Airport's sleeping controller forcing planes to "land on their own." (The online version of the story has been changed from the one I talked about in that post, to a calmer lead.) It was obviously bad then to have no one on duty in the tower, and it was bad this time that the planes got closer than they should have. But there was nothing in this new situation to justify the assertion that the planes got "dangerously close." I hope that by the time you see the online version this story will have been changed too.

Newspaper reporters and editors work fast on short deadlines. Among their duties, obviously, are two that conflict:

• To avoid deciding too much for the public, which can mean allowing stories to convey more alarm than might later seem to have been wise.
• To exercise judiciousness, which can mean preventing stories from conveying the degree of alarm that might later seem to have been wise.

No doubt it's easier to calibrate alarm when the story—as in many science-related cases—lacks real-time immediacy. But in my view the calibration of alarm is nevertheless an important issue for everyone who cares about science and the media.

Reactor cancellations said to affect nuclear power prospects generally

Leaving aside the question's mixed-metaphor problem, can the wheels really fall off of a renaissance?

All three of the big East Coast national newspapers reported this week that, thanks to Fukushima and changes in the economics of electricity production, NRG Energy is abandoning plans to add two new reactors to its two-reactor South Texas Project nuclear station, 90 miles southwest of Houston.

The Washington Post's wire-service article reported that support "for new nuclear projects in the US has eroded in the aftermath of the nuclear crisis in Japan, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll conducted earlier this month" and that of "dozens of proposals for new nuclear reactors ... submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission" only "a handful of projects remain active."

A Wall Street Journal business article called NRG's announcement "the most tangible evidence, to date, of fallout in the US from the nuclear accident in Japan." (Might be another ill-fitting metaphor in that one, actually.) Besides noting that NRG was planning on reactors designed by Toshiba, the WSJ article reported that the company was also "depending on financial assistance from Tokyo Electric Power Co., owner of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex."

Matthew Wald's New York Times article concluded with this passage, which sums up all three papers' view of the implications of the NRG-Texas news:

The public's appetite for nuclear power projects resembles the situation right after the Three Mile Island accident of 1979, said Charles A. Zielinski, a lawyer in Washington who is a former chairman of the New York State Public Service Commission. Companies now factor in the prospect of higher construction costs, mixed with a slack demand.

The South Texas Project "may have been on the fence already, and Fukushima pushed it over," Mr. Zielinski said.

Tom Smith, an organizer in Austin with Public Citizen and a longtime campaigner against the project, cited higher construction costs and uncertainty after the Fukushima accident.

"The wheels are starting to fall off the nuclear renaissance," he said.

Science, Tahrir Square, Bruce Alberts

David Ignatius's 21 April Washington Post column asserted that America should "spend more to support the democratic revolution in Egypt and less to seek a military solution in Afghanistan." Ignatius advocates "helping the Tahrir Square revolutionaries build a strong new country that can lead the rest of the Arab and Islamic world toward a better, saner future."

Does science have a role?

The April Physics Today article "Freedom, fairness, and funds give hope to Egypt's scientists" reported optimism about science in Egypt's future. In February, the "Science and the Media" posting "Scientist president for Egypt?" reported on a Nature Middle East commentary about the the Nobel chemist Ahmed Zewail's prospects to become Egypt's president.

That discussion appeared in the "House of Wisdom" blog of Mohammed Yahia, NME's editor, who this week posted "Bruce Alberts on the future of science." That new posting begins:

Celebrated American biochemist Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science and author of the Molecular Biology of the Cell, which is pretty much the standard cell biology textbook in most universities, visited the American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt, where he gave a talk to students, media and members of the public about the role of science in the future.

The over-packed room listened intently as Alberts spoke of how no democracy can function properly without what Indian prime minister Nehru once called "the scientific temper."

"Science and technology can make a major difference for national development," said Alberts. He stressed that scientists must have a more prominent role as the young people go out to rebuild Egypt after 30 years of authoritarian rule.

Alberts is following through with actions to back up his own past words.

"I consider science education to be critically important to both science and the world," he wrote in a 21 March 2008 editorial at the beginning of his tenure as editor-in-chief of Science, "and I shall frequently address this topic on this page." That editorial asked, "Might it be possible to encourage, across the world, scientific habits of mind, so as to create more rational societies everywhere?" Alberts urged that rather "than only conveying what science has discovered about the natural world, as is done now in most countries, a top priority should be to empower all students with the knowledge and practice of how to think like a scientist." He added, "Scientists share a common way of reaching conclusions that is based not only on evidence and logic, but also requires honesty, creativity, and openness to new ideas."

A few weeks later in another editorial, he continued his ambitious expansiveness concerning the potential of science and scientists to change the world. "[E]veryone can benefit when scientists take on practical problems," he wrote, asserting that in fact the "future success of humanity may depend on learning to use the tools of science—including the collection of objective evidence on what works and why—at all levels of decision-making." He advised that "scientists will need to develop much deeper connections with the rest of society." He reported that he had "repeatedly witnessed the innovation that arises from recruiting scientists and outstanding practitioners to work together, using scientific approaches to tackle important problems."

In late 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed what an article in Science called "three prominent scientists as special envoys to assess the potential for scientific partnerships with Muslim-majority countries," which the article said was "the first concrete step in a broader US effort to expand the role of science in diplomacy." The three new envoys were

• Egyptian-born Ahmed H. Zewail, the Caltech Nobel laureate chemist,
• Algerian-born Elias Zerhouni, the radiologist and former NIH director, and
• Alberts, the former National Academy of Sciences president.

The appointments were said to build upon President Obama's earlier speech at Cairo University that had called for a new beginning in relations with the Muslim world.

So it's plain that Bruce Alberts, anyway, believes there's a role for science in the post-Tahrir democratic transformation that Ignatius hopes to see take place in Egypt with constructive American involvement.

Here's the rest of that Nature Middle East "House of Wisdom" blog posting about Alberts's visit:

[Alberts said] "Scientists can't stay in their universities anymore. They must go out all across Egypt. Often, only local scientists will have the credibility required to rescue a nation from misguided local policies and beliefs."

Alberts is an example of a scientist who has gone out to change the world. He has been very active in using science and technology to bring development on southeastern Asia. He is also one of the most prominent science diplomats, becoming one of the first three science envoys from Obama in his reach-out efforts to the Muslim world.

Alberts talked of the importance of an overhaul to science education as Egyptians rebuild their state. "Science education is not just about learning words of science—but about participating as scientists do, even from as early as when they are five years old."

He also stressed the need to "support the statuses of teachers" since they are primarily responsible to produce a new successful generation. "No democracy can work when people don't understand. They must be educated to analyze the choices being made for them by politicians." Modern technology can be used to educate people with the increasing popularity of social networks.

During the talk, Alberts drew several parallels between the future and opportunities of Egypt and those of India, who is quickly emerging as one of the important science centres of the world.

"As in India, science and technology can be harnessed to improve the livelihoods of people, even among the rural poor."

While talking to the young audience after the talk, Alberts stressed the important role of young people and said he went down to Tahrir Square, the epicentre of Egypt's 25 January Revolution, and met with some of the young people who participated in the events that led to the overthrow of Egypt's authoritarian government. "I'm a big believer in empowering young people to address their problems. The culture of science, such as honesty, tolerance and respect for logic will be critical for Egypt's future."

Anyone who knows me would expect to see this report tied together with some reference or other to a scientist who long ago occupied the White House, Thomas Jefferson. Here it is:

Some people, no doubt with good reason, express deep skepticism about American intrusiveness overseas, and maybe they're right when they assert that Jefferson would have counseled isolationism. But it is also true that Jefferson found the fundamental principles underlying good government nearly congruent with those underlying science. Maybe Alberts can't help. I don't know. But those principles can.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• Science in the political controversy emanating from Wisconsin, as seen on the New York Times opinion page
  
• Two new articles from the Pakistani polymath physicist and social commentator Pervez Hoodbhoy
  
• The argument that public nuclear fears should be taken more seriously, as
  presented in a Nature commentary
  
• Recent egregiousness, most notably at CNN, in the realm of nuclear hysteria
  
• The advent of the periodical Nature Climate Change
  

New York Times, Krugman draw science into Wisconsin contentiousness

In a newly developing dimension of Wisconsin's turbulent political contentiousness about government employment, Republicans are seeking access to a prominent scholar's e-mail messages. A New York Times editorial and Times columnist Paul Krugman have not only harshly criticized the tactic, but have highlighted analogies to recent political contentiousness about climate science.

William Cronon serves as a professor of history, geography, and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and as president of the American Historical Association. In recent blog postings and in a 22 March Times op-ed, he has criticized Wisconsin Republicans for "seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well."

Cronon charges that Wisconsin's Republican governor, Scott Walker, "has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War," and compares Walker to the late Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Even before Cronon's op-ed appeared, Wisconsin Republicans had filed a freedom-of-information request demanding access to any of his university e-mail messages that might contain certain words or phrases, including Republican, Scott Walker, union and rally.

The 28 March Times opinion pages engaged all of this with:

• A mixed set of letters to the editor, one of which condemned the McCarthy comparison as "shameful" and a "disgrace."
  
• The editorial "A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin," for which the Times's online teaser said, "State Republicans target a distinguished historian for criticizing the union-busting law."
  
• The Krugman column "American Thought Police," for which the teaser alleged a "chilling effect of right-wing attacks on scholars."
  

It's probably noteworthy that by implication, the editorial's opening classifies climate scientists as "liberal academics":

The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian  . . These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.

The editorial closes by asserting that professors "are not just ordinary state employees" and by citing the conservative federal judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who has noted that state university faculty members are "employed professionally to test ideas and propose solutions, to deepen knowledge and refresh perspectives." The editors declare that a "political fishing expedition through a professor's files would make it substantially harder to conduct research and communicate openly with colleagues" and that the effort "makes the Republican Party appear both vengeful and ridiculous."

The Krugman column makes similar arguments, but replaces the Cuccinelli example with that of the controversy over e-mail correspondence among scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK—"Climategate," to use a connotatively freighted name. Krugman calls the Cronon affair "one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become."

Krugman stipulates that technically, "Republicans may be within their rights," but concludes by asserting that what's at stake "is whether we're going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding." He asserts that "Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down," and declares that it's "up to the rest of us to see that they don't succeed."

Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, cont.

Readers of Physics Today may remember Pervez Hoodbhoy, the polymath Pakistani physicist and social commentator, for his August 2007 article "Science and the Islamic world: The quest for rapprochement." Recently Hoodbhoy published a pair of physics-related political articles in prominent online English-language periodicals:

"Pakistan can't handle Fukushima" summarizes the Japanese disaster, criticizes Pakistan's lack of a proper nuclear-safety culture, and argues that until "nuclear fusion power becomes available after some decades, Pakistan, like other countries, must rely on a mix of oil, gas, hydro, coal, solar, wind, and other renewables."

Hoodbhoy predicts that in a disaster, the "rich and the fortunate would succeed; the rest would not. Unlike the orderly and disciplined evacuation of post-tsunami Fukushima, all hell would break loose as millions would try to flee. Looters would strip everything bare, roads would be clogged, and vital services would collapse." He warns, "Japan's nuclear disaster should open our eyes." And he declares, "It is time to down-size Pakistan's nuclear fission power production."

The lengthy "Pakistan's nuclear bayonet" reviews Pakistan's nuclear-weapons history, of course with substantial attention to relations with India. The article explains that Pakistan's "nukes generate income" because proliferation-worried "international financial donors are compelled to keep pumping in funds."

Hoodbhoy asks, "But can our nukes lose their magic? Be stolen, rendered impotent or lose the charm through which they bring in precious revenue? More fundamentally, how and when could they fail to deter?" He continues: "A turning point could possibly come with Mumbai-II. This is no idle speculation. The military establishment's reluctance to clamp down on anti-India jihadi groups, or to punish those who carried out Mumbai-I, makes a second Pakistan-based attack simply a matter of time."

Hoodbhoy's concluding paragraph requires quoting:

An extremist takeover of Pakistan is probably no further than five to 10 years away. Even today, some radical Islamists are advocating war against America. But such a war would end Pakistan as a nation state even if no nukes are ever used. Saving Pakistan from religious extremism will require the army, which alone has power over critical decisions, to stop using its old bag of tricks. It must stop pretending that the threat lies across our borders when in fact the threat lies within. . . . Pakistan needs peace, economic justice, rule of law, tax reform, a social contract, education and a new federation agreement.

Colin Macilwain in Nature: Concerns over nuclear energy are legitimate

With important exceptions, charges Colin Macilwain in a Nature column, nuclear experts commenting on Fukushima have been "defensive, selective, condescending towards public fears and . . . ultimately counterproductive." He believes that "legitimate" technical analysis has been "largely drowned out by the flood of technical reassurance offered by nuclear scientists and engineers in the wake of the disaster."

Macilwain cites three problem areas requiring, in his view, better attention: multiple reactors at the same site and insufficient seriousness about moving to safer reactor designs and about replacing on-site water storage of spent fuel rods.

Macilwain also offers a physics-history theory about what he believes he's seeing:

[T]he scientific establishment and those whose careers are invested in nuclear power have sought to convince the public that 'science' supports nuclear power. Too many specialists have assured us of the general safety of nuclear power without adequately addressing specific concerns.

Some of this loyalty is deep rooted, I fear, in the development of the atomic bomb, which greatly embellished the standing of the scientific establishment with governments. Not long afterwards, many senior physicists embraced 'atoms for peace'. Having interrogated nature, and established the means to harness some of its terrible powers, they wanted to prove themselves 'useful'. Such a culture influences those who follow—and can take generations to wear off.

In closing, he declares that the "real risk of nuclear power is that active human intervention has to be maintained, come rain, shine, war or political upheaval. That, and the threat of a downside too terrible to contemplate."

CNN anchor adamant: Fukushima radiation threatens US

With due respect to Colin Macilwain's caution (please see the earlier accompanying report) against condescension towards public nuclear fears, a certain level of nuclear hysteria has inevitably persisted since the tsunami, with highlights—probably the wrong word—that may merit at least brief attention.

Earlier in March, the columnist Amy Goodman not only brandished Hiroshima in the nuclear-power discussion, but falsely conflated Fukushima and the tsunami that actually caused the devastation. The run on both radiation detectors and potassium iodide pills that had begun even then in the US now seems particularly noteworthy in the nuclear-hysteria realm.

According to a recent New York Times article, post-Fukushima demand "quickly outstripped supplies and the limited capacity to produce more." One company's orders for Geiger counters grew by more than an order of magnitude.

But something now circulating on the web may beat that story when it comes to irrationality about the more than 5000 miles of ocean separating Japan from the US west coast—and this story involves not misinformed citizens, but Nancy Grace, a CNN journalist with two advanced degrees in law. Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth blog posting "Radiation + Cable Anchor + Science = ?" at the New York Times site begins:

If you are brave enough to want to see a horrifying example of how science fares in the infotainment arena, watch the following excerpt from CNN's HLN network last Monday. The network claims to be about both "news and views." I think the word news should be dropped for now.

Revkin links to the brief clip, which shows anchorwoman Grace hectoring a meteorologist concerning what she sees as an imminent radiation threat crossing the Pacific to harm Americans. The meteorologist strives mightily to keep this bizarre, impromptu debate grounded in factual reality. Revkin calls the exchange "astonishing." For my own part, I'll just add that in decades of paying close attention to science in the news, I've never seen anything remotely like this clip.

New periodical: Nature Climate Change

Here's the first line of an e-mail message from the organization that publishes Nature and many other science periodicals: "Dedicated to publishing the most significant and cutting-edge research on the impacts of global climate change and its implications, the first issue of Nature Climate Change is now published and available free to view online."

And here are a few indicators of what prospective readers can expect:

Volume 1 Issue 1 features most prominently the research paper "Global radiative forcing from contrail cirrus," which Nature Publishing Group blurbs this way:

Aviation is responsible for 2 to 14 percent of human-induced climate change, making it a subject of considerable public and political interest. A global modeling study quantifies the climate effect of aircraft condensation trails and the clouds that form from them, and shows that they may be causing more warming today than all of the aircraft-emitted carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the start of aviation.

A commentary in the first issue argues that "public understanding of climate science deserves the strongest possible communications science to convey the practical implications of large, complex, uncertain physical, biological and social processes." The article promises to "identify the communications science that is needed to meet this challenge and the ambitious, interdisciplinary initiative that its effective application to climate science requires."

The research paper "Perceptions of climate change and willingness to save energy related to flood experience" examines the hypothesis that "individuals who have direct experience of phenomena that may be linked to climate change would be more likely to be concerned by the issue and thus more inclined to undertake sustainable behaviours."

The first issue of this ambitious new periodical also offers what it calls a special feature on "opening the future":

How will our choices shape the future? That's a question researchers are keen to answer, and with a new approach to how the climate community develops scenarios, they are coming that bit closer to answering it. Mason Inman reports on the new scenario development taking place in the climate research community, which is akin to switching from Windows, a closed-source operating system, to an open-source system such as Linux, and will make it much easier for researchers to figure out how to create the kind of future we want—and how to avoid the futures we fear.

Nature Climate Change invites registrations for table-of-contents e-mail alerts.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

• MIT's pioneering gender-equity measures, as seen in a new report and a New York Times article
• Geophysical sensor technology for natural disasters, as advocated in a scientist's Wall Street Journal op-ed
• Ernest Rutherford's founding of nuclear physics, as remembered in a New York Times editorial
• Prospects for safer nuclear power, as seen in a scientist's New York Times op-ed
• Obstacles to government scientists' service in scientific societies, as reported in Nature

New York Times reviews renewal of MIT's gender-equity efforts, whose precedent, prestige suggests national implications

"When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology acknowledged 12 years ago that it had discriminated against female professors in 'subtle but pervasive' ways," begins a 21 March New York Times article, MIT "became a national model for addressing gender inequity." The Times emphasizes that MIT's "unusual" admission of problems 12 years ago has "echoed far beyond campus."

Now MIT has revisited the question in a report, finding "that there has been remarkable progress for women faculty . . . in terms of equity, status and numbers," but that old issues remain, that "new issues have emerged," and that gender-equity efforts "need to be continued for the foreseeable future."

The Times article quotes Hazel L. Sive, associate dean of MIT's School of Science: "It's almost as though the baseline has changed, because things are so much better now"—and, precisely "because things are so much better now, we can see an entirely new set of issues."

The article captures some of the issues, whether old or new, in this passage:

As Professor Sive said, "Men are not expected to discuss how much sleep they get or what they give their kids for breakfast."

Administrators say some men use family leave to do outside work, instead of to be their children's primary care giver—creating more professional inequity.

And stereotypes remain: women must navigate a narrow "acceptable personality range," as one female professor said, that is "neither too aggressive nor too soft." Said another woman: "I am not patient and understanding. I'm busy and ambitious."

The part of the report representing MIT's School of Science notes a pervasive belief among women faculty that "MIT offers outstanding opportunities and resources, and that the Institute is a much friendlier and supportive environment than perceived from the outside." Similarly, the part representing MIT's School of Engineering declares: "There is a strong sense of excitement among the women faculty about the intellectual atmosphere at MIT."

Nevertheless, besides family, childcare, and personality-expectations issues, the report discusses problems with standards for hiring and with perceptions of those standards, with committee service burdens, with exclusion from decision making, and with lack of respect.

The MIT website offers information about a symposium that will ensue later in March: "Leaders in Science and Engineering: The Women of MIT."

Geophysicist in Wall Street Journal: High-tech disaster-warning systems

"Nobody wants another Hurricane Katrina experience," declares Caltech geophysicist Mark Simons in closing his 23 March Wall Street Journal op-ed "Budget Cuts and the Next Earthquake: Will Washington save money by nixing high-tech disaster-warning systems?"

Here's the heart of his argument:

Mitigating against future disasters depends on monitoring hazardous regions (earthquake faults, volcanoes, landslides and so on) and preparing to survive and recover once catastrophe strikes. Japan's recent experience demonstrated the success of early-warning systems, as sensors close to the earthquake's epicenter alerted locations farther away, such as Tokyo. These systems saved lives by alerting people to take cover before the shaking began, to slow down and even stop high-speed trains, and to seek higher ground because of the tsunami threat.

In the same vein, U.S. scientists at universities and government agencies are developing applications that exploit sensors in your cell phone or computer, treating them as a huge earth-monitoring system—a wonderful example of crowd sourcing. Combined with conventional seismographic and permanent GPS networks, such new technologies can provide robust early-warning, assessment and response systems for earthquakes and tsunamis.

Simons leads up to that with a litany of reminders about past disasters, and follows it with this: "But here's the reality check: Under the White House's proposed budget for fiscal year 2012, the US Geological Service would experience a 9% cut in its earthquake programs budget."

He also reports that NASA's satellites can monitor movement of Earth's surface with "exquisite fidelity" and, if properly equipped, "could identify elastic strain in tectonic plates . . . and moving magma in the Earth's crust." Such satellites could provide "highly detailed maps of post-disaster devastation spanning hundreds or even thousands of miles." Unfortunately, Simons writes, the US lacks a radar satellite with the imaging characteristics needed for such applications.

At the end, he laments in particular the defunding of the DESDynI (Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice) mission, which the National Research Council had endorsed. A Jet Propulsion Laboratory webpage lists DESDynI's purposes as follows:

• Determine the likelihood of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and landslides.
• Predict the response of ice sheets to climate change and impact on the sea level.
• Characterize the effects of changing climate and land use on species habitats and carbon budget.
• Monitor the migration of fluids associated with hydrocarbon production and groundwater resources.

Simons expresses disbelief that the state of national finances justifies the cutbacks that he criticizes.

New York Times editorial celebrates Rutherford centennial

An illustration—an oddity in the editorial column on the left-hand side of any editorial page—draws the eye to a short editorial in the 23 March New York Times: "A Nucleated Century." In celebrating this month's centennial of the physics of Ernest Rutherford, the editors supply an old-fashioned sketch of the atom seen as, in their words, "something like a cockeyed solar system."

And in summarizing Rutherford's gold foil scattering experiment, which led to the first stage of modern understanding of atomic structure, they also make sure to create pictures in the nonscientist's mind's eye. For example: "A few [alpha particles] even bounced straight back at the observer, which Rutherford said was as unexpected as firing a cannon shell at tissue paper and having it come back and hit you." And: "Compared to the whole atom, Rutherford said, the nucleus was like 'a fly in a cathedral.'"

In summing up, they explain that "finding the nucleus was the start of nuclear physics, which has transformed our picture of the atom." Nowadays, they conclude, the atom has come to look "something like a composite of quarks surrounded by clouds of uncertainty. More accurate. Much harder to draw."

Conjectural addendum: Maybe the editors thought of mentioning current events—Fukushima—especially since that would offer them the chance to mention Rutherford's intriguing and entertaining "moonshine" comment:

We might in these processes obtain very much more energy than the proton supplied, but on the average we could not expect to obtain energy in this way. It was a very poor and inefficient way of producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine.

But the editors don't mention current events, maybe out of respect for physics in the longer view.

New York Times features prominent physicist's nuclear views

Of the 24 March New York Times op-ed page's total acreage, the editors gave more than half to the nuclear physicist Frank N. von Hippel for a long essay assessing America's nuclear-energy status and prospects. The Times identifies von Hippel as a Princeton professor of public and international affairs and cochairman of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, who from 1993 to 1994 was responsible for national security issues in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The essay's closing paragraph presents a useful summary:

While new plants are unlikely to be built in the United States over the next 25 years, nuclear power provides 20 percent of our electrical power and is climate friendly. We therefore must make existing reactors safer, develop a new generation of safer designs and prevent nuclear power from facilitating nuclear proliferation. As tragic as the Fukushima disaster has been, it has provided a rare opportunity to advance those goals.

To illustrate present nuclear plants' relative safety, von Hippel uses one version of the coal comparison: Chernobyl will eventually have killed about 10 000, he observes, but "much deadlier" coal plants accomplish the same annually in the US alone.

Nevertheless, he writes, "the nuclear-power industry needs constant and aggressive regulation," but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission "has often been too timid in ensuring that America's 104 commercial reactors are operated safely." He charges that thanks to public and congressional inattention, the nuclear industry has committed "regulatory capture" and now controls its own regulators.

His examples include the failure to require the filtering vents that nuclear engineers recommended for containment buildings even before Three Mile Island, mishandling of spent fuel, and failure to distribute potassium iodide pills beyond the 10-mile emergency zones around reactors. He spurns the suggestion that established plants, with their construction costs paid off, can't afford these expenses. He declares that "perhaps the most important thing to do in light of the Fukushima disaster is to change the industry-regulator relationship."

Next von Hippel calls for development of reactors that are more inherently safe, such as the high-temperature gas-cooled graphite reactor. (Some in the accelerator community will notice that he omits the possibility of accelerator-driven subcritical reactors, or ADSRs, as advocated by the Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia and others.)

Finally he calls for making nuclear technology harder to misuse for developing nuclear weapons, and charges that an unintended effect of government R&D has been to make proliferation easier. To make this case he focuses first on the effort to commercialize plutonium breeder reactors, and then on General Electric's application to build a plant that would use lasers for uranium enrichment, which could constitute another way to produce weapons-grade material.

The American Physical Society, he reports, is leading a coalition petitioning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to study the nonproliferation implications carefully before issuing the GE license. The commission has been "predictably . . . reluctant to do so," he laments. He calls for all enrichment plants to be placed under multinational control to "make it more difficult for countries like Iran to justify building national enrichment plants that could be used to produce nuclear weapons materials."

Nature on government scientists, scientific societies, and conflicts of interest; AGU president's situation highlighted

A 24 March Nature news article reports on recent developments concerning the difficulties facing government scientists who seek to serve scientific societies.

In contrast to the UK and other countries, the article says, the US has applied strict conflict-of-interest rules, and sometimes these rules have been interpreted as preventing government employees from lobbying. Now a memorandum on scientific integrity issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) "explicitly encourages government scientists to get involved with societies" even though "previously, the government [had] tended to view such associations ambivalently or negatively."

Nevertheless, the article reports, "many government scientists affected by the policy change say that serious legal and ethical pitfalls remain." The article surveys the situations in a few specific cases, beginning with that of the new AGU president in the months just before the OSTP memorandum appeared:

When Mike McPhaden was elected president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) last year, he was delighted—but he wasn't sure he would be able to take up the position. McPhaden is an oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, which is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Lawyers at the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, were concerned that leading a scientific organization that lobbies the government on funding and policy matters would create a conflict of interest for McPhaden. "There was resistance," he says.

In the end, McPhaden convinced the agency that taking up the position would bring prestige to his government role and enhance the credibility of NOAA science. Today, a memorandum of understanding between the AGU and NOAA even allows him to spend some of his government-paid time working for the scientific society, although he has to recuse himself from both fund-raising and lobbying.

The article engages the situation of William Talman, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and a physician at a Veterans Affairs hospital, who takes unpaid leave when lobbying for funding for the National Institutes of Health or testifying in Congress for the National Science Foundation.

The article also tells about Gabriela Chavarria, science adviser to the director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who turned down an invitation earlier this month to serve on the board of the Society for Conservation Biology. Annually the Fish and Wildlife Service gives the society a few thousand dollars for scientific meetings; she worried about a possible perception of conflict of interest.

The article reports that the new policy at the Department of the Interior "follows the OSTP guidance and explicitly encourages all researchers within the DOI's jurisdiction to participate in scientific societies, although they need to fill out forms before going ahead"—and it predicts that various other agencies will follow.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Like the broader population in Egypt, scientists there are brimming with optimism following the popular uprising that resulted in the February toppling of Hosni Mubarak's decades-long stronghold.

"We were all part of the protests," says Yasser Kadah, a professor of biomedical engineering at Cairo University. "There is a general sense of relief. We feel that in the times to come things will be much better." Maged Al-Sherbiny, vice minister of science and technology since 2007, is especially pleased about the relative peacefulness of the revolution in his country. "In Libya they are killing demonstrators by air fighters. That is totally crazy," he says. Egypt is going to be "a very good model for the region of how things can change."

Al-Sherbiny notes that many demands are already being met: "Corrupt parts of government have been removed and are in jail or under trial. Money taken will be recovered. There will be a new constitution. Future presidents will be limited to two terms—there will be no running the country for 30, 40 years."

Transforming the country

People can talk freely now, says Kadah. "Basically, the focus at the universities was to maintain security and stability. We had leaders who did not care about the quality of education. They were making sure no one demonstrated or talked about things that were not good for the regime." Previously, he says, the feeling was that knowing the right people, not making an effort, is what would get you a job. "Now students feel they have opportunity. They don't have to know the right people. There is a sense of fairness. I think this will transform the whole country."

Kadah and others note that professors at public universities earn about $400 to $1000 a month. But at several new campuses in which the government had sometimes been playing a much stronger role, including handpicking faculty, the salaries could be higher by an order of magnitude or more. Kadah adds, "I have to support my research—I buy equipment out of my personal money. We do not have funds at the university to do that." Until now, says Hassan Talaat, a physicist at Ain Shams University in Cairo, "to make a decent income, you either go to the Gulf area or leave to work at a private university. You can barely get by with a faculty income as it is now [at Egyptian public universities]."

Elections are planned for September. And everyone—scientists, politicians, Egyptian expatriates, intellectuals from different political parties—is discussing how to move forward. The discussions have "no formal structure," says Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian American geologist who is director of Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing. El-Baz went to Egypt to "congratulate these kids that made the revolution." In the US, he says, "we had a technological revolution with the Apollo program"—for which El-Baz trained astronauts and worked with NASA to select lunar landing sites. "In Egypt, they have had an information revolution. They know everything, instantly." Broadly, according to El-Baz, the first priorities are to help the poor in Egypt, to initiate a program to eradicate illiteracy, and to invigorate innovation. The people "don't really know about science, but they want science and technology institutions to have the respect and the funds they deserve," he says.

Science priorities

"A lot of people came [together] to talk about their perspectives," says Yasser Khalil, a professor of nuclear engineering at Alexandria University and the administrative director of SESAME, the international synchrotron light source being built in Jordan. "One common theme was that we have to put stress on education. The more we spend on education, the more we gain later."

Within public universities, demands are likely to include the selection of administrators by faculty vote instead of by government appointment, higher salaries, and a new policy for running the education system. Another question, says Talaat, will be how to finance research. "These will be the four items of major concern to universities."

Al-Sherbiny, who in addition to his ministerial post is an immunology researcher, a member of the SESAME council, and president of Egypt's Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, is optimistic that research and universities will fare well in the future. The science and technology ministry set priorities four years ago, he says. "We know what needs to be done. These plans faced funding problems but now, with science and technology"—as the recognized engine for the economy—"becoming part of the major priorities we can push ahead."

The national science and technology plan Al-Sherbiny refers to has four thrusts, each with the potential for local impact: energy and renewable energy; water desalination; agriculture, including development of wheat, rice, and cotton crops and aquaculture; and treatment of common diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and certain cancers.

In 2007 Egypt launched a "science decade," through which it collaborates with a different country each year. "We look at strengths and identify areas of common interest for people to work together," says Al-Sherbiny. Egypt has begun sending more students to Germany, the inaugural partner. And with its 2008 partner, Japan, it founded a new joint university in Egypt. Italy and France were the partners in 2009 and 2010, respectively. The US is supposed to be this year's partner, but Al-Sherbiny says that with the political upheaval, joint activities are in limbo.

Now, with Amr Salama, an engineer, former university president, and previous science minister named interim science minister in a March cabinet reshuffle, Al-Sherbiny says the country's science and technology strategy will be updated. "We want to make the transformation with as little pain as possible, and to create the best future for our youth," he says. "It all comes to money at the end of the day. It will be very important to increase resources." In recent years, he says, Egypt has put from 0.2% to 0.4% of its gross domestic product into research. "We would hope for at least 1%."

"Don't blink an eye"

Not surprisingly, hand in hand with optimism about the future come worries about heading down the right path. For Khalil, one worry is the possibility that the military may not keep its promise to hand back authority to civilians. Talaat notes that things have moved very swiftly, and "it would have been easier to negotiate with a weakened government than with the armed forces." For his part, Al-Sherbiny is not worried about the temporary military control of the country. "They are on our side," he says. Rather, he worries about a derailing of the new process due to war erupting somewhere in the region or to "people pointing fingers at each other instead of moving forward."

"There is still a lot of dust in the air," says Talaat. "It's like having someone who has been imprisoned for a long time, and now he is free. But he is not prepared. He cannot answer right away what he wants to do."

El-Baz says he did not see "even a hint of pessimism. My advice is, keep forging ahead, don't blink an eye. Egypt has been like a snail. If they sit on things, corruption will creep back in." He notes that when asked to be on an advisory board, his answer was "Forget it. Don't go back to the generation that made a mess. Ask us questions, but do not depend on us." In 2006 El-Baz, then 68 years old, wrote an article on the Arab world's "generation of failure." He says he is "delighted that this young generation is a different beast. If they do see roadblocks, they do not see why they can't remove them."

Toni Feder

• The Wall Street Journal's early post-Fukushima call for calm concerning nuclear power's future
• Two Washington Post columnists' early post-Fukushima condemnation of nuclear power
• A Wall Street Journal columnist's prediction that environmentalists will revert to opposing nuclear power
• Conflation of Hiroshima devastation and Fukushima harm in an Amy Goodman commentary
• Congressional Republicans' hardening climate-consensus disbelief as assessed in a Nature editorial

Nuclear misgivings proliferate following Japan's disaster; Wall Street Journal calls for calm and perspective

"The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America's energy and global warming challenges may have dissolved in the crippled cores of Japan's nuclear reactors." So began the 14 March, above-the-fold, front-page New York Times article "US Nuclear Push May Be Impeded."

Also on 14 March, the Chicago Tribune published "Japan's Crisis May Have Already Derailed 'Nuclear Renaissance,'" a story line picked up by at least one of the Tribune's network of other newspapers. And Cokie Roberts, in her regular Monday morning Q&A on NPR's Morning Edition, predicted renewed nuclear misgivings in America. Though she didn't mention engineers or scientists, she dwelled in particular on popular mistrust of authorities, including utilities and government regulators, when it comes to nuclear power.

The Times reports that "even staunch supporters of nuclear power are now advocating a pause in licensing and building new reactors in the United States to make sure that proper safety and evacuation measures are in place," and that "environmental groups are reassessing their willingness to see nuclear power as a linchpin of any future climate change legislation." The Times piece states that although President Obama "still sees nuclear power as a major element of future American energy policy . . . he is injecting a new tone of caution into his endorsement."

The views of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in the matter are being reported widely. The Times notes his caution that "the United States should not overreact to the Japanese nuclear crisis by clamping down on the domestic industry indefinitely" and says as well that "Republicans have loudly complained that the Obama administration did just that after the BP oil spill last spring."

The Times piece also quotes Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA), whom it identifies as "a skeptic of nuclear power who nonetheless supported expansion of nuclear power" in recent legislation. Markey reportedly said, "The unfolding disaster in Japan must produce a seismic shift in how we address nuclear safety here in America."

The 14 March Wall Street Journal opinion page focuses on this question of renewed nuclear misgivings, and calls for calm and perspective.

The lead editorial carries the headline "Nuclear Overreactions," with a call-out declaring, "Modern life requires learning from disasters, not fleeing all risk." The editorial begins as follows:

After a once-in-300-years earthquake, the Japanese have been keeping cool amid the chaos, organizing an enormous relief and rescue operation, and generally earning the world's admiration. We wish we could say the same for the reaction in the US, where the troubles at Japan's nuclear reactors have produced an overreaction about the risks of modern life and technology.

Part of the problem is the lack of media proportion about the disaster itself. The quake and tsunami have killed hundreds, and probably thousands, with tens of billions of dollars in damage. The energy released by the quake . . . is equivalent to about 336 megatons of TNT, or 100 more megatons than last year's quake in Chile and thousands of times the yield of the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima. The scale of the tragedy is epic.

Yet the bulk of US media coverage has focused on a nuclear accident whose damage has so far been limited and contained to the plant sites. In simple human terms, the natural destruction of Earth and sea have far surpassed any errors committed by man.

The editorial laments that "more than other energy sources, nuclear plants have had their costs increased by artificial political obstacles and delay. The US hasn't built a new nuclear plant since 1979, after the Three Mile Island meltdown, even as older nuclear plants continue to provide 20% of the nation's electricity." It reports that the "Tennessee Valley Authority is a couple of years away from completing a reactor at Watts Bar after years of effort" and that "proposals for 20 new reactors to be built over the next 15 to 20 years are in various stages of review in the multiyear approval process at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission." America's "much-ballyhooed 'nuclear renaissance,'" the editorial predicts, is "a long way off, and it will be longer after events in Japan."

The piece ends with a few paragraphs about technological risk. "Modern civilization is in the daily business of measuring and mitigating risk, but its advance requires that we continue to take risk. It would compound Japan's tragedy if the lesson America learns is that we should pursue the illusory and counterproductive goal of eliminating all risk."

The editorial also points to an op-ed by William Tucker atop the facing page, "Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl," where the call-out says that the "containment structures appear to be working" and that "the latest reactor designs aren't vulnerable to the coolant problem at issue here." Tucker emphasizes that the "crisis seems to have been triggered by the failure of diesel generators that provided electricity to cool the reactors once they were shut down," and that the op-ed "explains that this weakness has been corrected in new nuclear plant designs."

Tucker, author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey (Bartley, 2008), offers in his op-ed, a technical explanation of "exactly what is happening in Japan and what we have to fear from it." Here's the ending:

If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact. Researchers have spent 30 years trying to find health effects from the steam releases at Three Mile Island and have come up with nothing. With all the death, devastation and disease now threatening tens of thousands in Japan, it is trivializing and almost obscene to spend so much time worrying about damage to a nuclear reactor.

What the Japanese earthquake has proved is that even the oldest containment structures can withstand the impact of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. The problem has been with the electrical pumps required to operate the cooling system. It would be tragic if the result of the Japanese accident were to prevent development of Generation III reactors, which eliminate this design flaw.

Washington Post columnists reject nuclear power

Beneath the grossly understated headline "Slow The Nuclear Rush," a large box on on the Washington Post op-ed page for 15 March pairs the columns of Anne Applebaum and Eugene Robinson. Apparently the editor who wrote that overall headline only skimmed the two columns, for the accurate verb isn't "slow."

Applebaum calls not for slowing the nuclear rush, but for killing it. "If the competent and technologically brilliant Japanese can't build a completely safe reactor," she asks, "who can?" Nuclear power, she declares, is safe, "except, of course, when it is not." She seems unimpressed that nuclear-power science and technology are evolving and that future nuclear plants would incorporate new features and approaches. At the end, she declares her "hope that a near-miss prompts people around the world to think twice about the true 'price' of nuclear energy, and that it stops the nuclear renaissance dead in its tracks."

Robinson calls for neither slowing nor stopping the nuclear rush; he simply declares that nuclear power can't be made safe. The headline on the paper version of his column captures this view: "No fail-safe option." Nuclear power, he asserts, looks "like a bargain with the devil," and nuclear fission "is an inherently and uniquely toxic technology." He does stipulate that it's possible to engineer nuclear plants that would never suffer breakdowns like those being seen in Japan, but he asserts that it "is also true that there is no such thing as a fail-safe system. Stuff happens." Robinson continues:

The problem with nuclear fission is that the stakes are unimaginably high. We can engineer nuclear power plants so that the chance of a Chernobyl-style disaster is almost nil. But we can't eliminate it completely—nor can we envision every other kind of potential disaster. And where fission reactors are concerned, the worst-case scenario is so dreadful as to be unthinkable.

In a curious comment, Robinson allows that it "seems unlikely that the Fukushima crisis will turn into another Chernobyl, if only because there is a good chance that prevailing winds would blow any radioactive cloud out to sea." Questions: Is wind direction really a criterion for deciding whether or not to liken the crisis to Chernobyl? Or should that judgment address what the plant does or doesn't put into the wind in the first place?

Robinson ends his column this way:

As President Obama and Congress move forward with a new generation of nuclear plants, designs will be vetted and perhaps altered. We will be confident that we have taken the lessons of Fukushima into account.

And we will be fooling ourselves, because the one inescapable lesson of Fukushima is that improbable does not mean impossible. Unlikely failures can combine to bring any nuclear fission reactor to the brink of disaster. It can happen here.

Wall Street Journal columnist predicts environmentalist reversal on nuclear power

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr has a long record of deep skepticism about human effects on climate. His 16 March column predicts that the disaster in Japan will—and the following isn't how he puts it—kill the nuclear renaissance because environmentalists will stupidly reverse their recent advocacy of nuclear power.

Jenkins's column might merit summarizing. He may disbelieve the global warming consensus, but he shares some views with many who advocate nuclear power.

He expresses respect and appreciation for the on-scene nuclear responders in Japan, but declares that for "the things that matter most—life and safety—the nuclear battle has been a sideshow." To prove that point, he offers a series of contrasts.

He contrasts the loss of thousands in the tsunami with the human costs, so far, of the nuclear crisis: "[O]ne worker at one nuclear plant is known to have died in a hydrogen explosion and several others have exhibited symptoms of radiation poisoning."

He offers an environmental degradation contrast:

An infinity of contaminants—sewage, fuels, lubricants, cleaning solvents—have been scattered across the Earth and into aquifers. Radiation releases, meanwhile, haven't been a serious threat to anyone but the plant's brave workers.

Then he contrasts Chernobyl with the current crisis. He calls Chernobyl "a uniquely bad nuclear accident" that killed 59 firemen and workers and that, thanks to "the failure to evacuate or take other precautionary steps," caused "1,800 thyroid cancer cases among children, though fewer than a dozen deaths." He continues:

Now think about Japan. It suffered its worst earthquake in perhaps 1,100 years, followed by a direct-hit tsunami on two nuclear plants. Plenty of other industrial systems on which the Japanese rely—transportation, energy, water, food, medical, public safety—were overwhelmed and failed. A mostly contained meltdown of one or more reactors would not be the worst event of the month.

Jenkins closes with a question about environmentalists who "haven't opted for [the] escapism [of] insisting wind and solar" can suffice in the future, and who "have quietly recognized that the only alternative to fossil energy is nuclear." He asks, "If they believe their climate rhetoric, will environmentalists speak up in favor of nuclear realism or will they succumb to the fund-raising and media lure of antinuclear panic?"

He closes with his own answer: "In the unlikely event the world was ever going to make a concerted dent in CO₂ output, nuclear was the key. Let's just guess this possibility is now gone, for better or worse."

Nuclear "worst piece I have seen so far"

This past Thursday in a regional daily, I found what I cherish as the most irresponsible piece of nuclear-power hysteria I've seen so far: "Calling time on the nuclear age" by Amy Goodman of the radio show Democracy Now.

In this of all weeks, please consider the difficulty of exceeding all others in spreading that hysteria. After all, we live in a country many thousands of miles across the sea from Japan, yet druggists suddenly can't keep potassium iodide on the shelves in California.

This piece was crying out for a good rebuttal, but Mark Lynas, a UK science writer, ruined part of my fun by beating me to it.

When I googled for the Goodman piece, I bumped immediately into Lynas's blog posting entitled "Rebuttal of Amy Goodman scaremongering op-ed on Japanese nuclear crisis." Concerning the worst piece I have seen so far, Lynas had already written, It's "the worst piece I have seen so far."

As Lynas explains, Goodman offers questionable technical comments and worse. But as he also explains, those aren't the reason she wins the prize.

Goodman wins the prize right in her opening, where she quotes an August 1945 news report on Hiroshima's devastation, asserts that it "could well describe the scenes of annihilation in northeastern Japan today," and declares that given "the worsening catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, [the 1945] grave warning to the world remains all too relevant."

You read that correctly. It's a compounded offense. Not only does Goodman brandish Hiroshima in a nuclear-power debate, she falsely conflates Fukushima and the tsunami that actually caused the 2011 devastation.

At the end of her column, Goodman reverts to this conflation. "The nuclear age dawned not far from Fukushima," she writes, "when the United States became the sole nation in human history to drop nuclear bombs on another country, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians." To Goodman, this constitutes a "warning" for all of us about nuclear power. As Lynas asks, "Does she understand that it is physically impossible for a nuclear power station to explode like a nuclear weapon?"

It's often said that participants in political debates must condemn, immediately and on principle, attempts of one side to liken the other to Hitler or the Nazis. Probably nuclear-power advocates have long since learned a similar principle: If the opponents drag in Hiroshima, blow the whistle.

Nature editorial rebukes Republicans

In a Washington Post op-ed last fall, Sherwood Boehlert, former chairman of the House Science Committee, called on his "fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become [their] party's line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities."

Apparently that plea has been spurned. A recent Talking Points Memo posting, for example, pointed out that all 31 Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have declined "to vote in support of the very idea that climate change exists."

Now the editors of Nature are energetically rebuking the Republican party. Under the headline "Into ignorance," they lament Congress's handling of the issue of the Environmental Protection Agency and greenhouse-gas emissions. Their editorial charges that at a 14 March subcommittee hearing, "anger and distrust were directed at scientists and respected scientific societies. Misinformation was presented as fact, truth was twisted and nobody showed any inclination to listen to scientists, let alone learn from them."

The editors call this "an embarrassing display, not just for the Republican Party but also for Congress and the US citizens it represents." At one point the editors catalog some more criticisms:

One lawmaker last week described scientists as "elitist" and "arrogant" creatures who hide behind "discredited" institutions. Another propagated the myth that in the 1970s the scientific community warned of an imminent ice age. Melting ice caps on Mars served to counter evidence of anthropogenic warming on Earth, and Antarctica was falsely said to be gaining ice. Several scientists were on hand—at the behest of Democrats on the subcommittee—to answer questions and clear things up, but many lawmakers weren't interested in answers, only in prejudice.

Near the end, the editors assert that it "is hard to escape the conclusion that the US Congress has entered the intellectual wilderness."

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• Research funding for 2011 as seen in some Sunday Washington Post opinions
  
• Emphatic alarm in a Post commentary about anthropogenic global warming
  
• The latest installment in the New York Times's Radiation Boom series
  
• The proposal to give the present geological epoch an anthropomorphic name
  
• A New York Times front-page report about disrespect for the teaching profession
  
• Raymond Orbach's trenchant Science magazine defense of 2011 research funding
  

Research funding defended in Washington Post

"On the Sunday Opinions page today," begins a 27 February Washington Post editorial, "we publish alarms from a number of advocates for federal programs endangered by Republican budget cutting. We sympathize with many of the appeals. But we also recognize that the United States is facing a fiscal challenge that, if unaddressed, threatens US prosperity and global leadership."

The editors ask, "So how should priorities be set?" Among their answers:

Third, government should promote economic growth. That means maintaining ports, roads, rails, subways and airports; educating the next generation; and supporting science. But grandiose projects such as trips to Mars or high-speed rail to Las Vegas will have to wait.

The Sunday Opinions page offers seven opinions, each in a blurb a bit less than half the length of a standard op-ed. Two will particularly interest scientists.

General James L. Jones, now a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and formerly national security adviser to President Obama, focuses on "America's severe economic and national security vulnerability to dependence on foreign oil." Citing "the Defense Department's successful record developing transformative technologies through its DARPA program," and advocating "ARPA-E to advance high-risk, high-reward technologies that enhance our national security," Jones writes:

While new energy production technologies must ultimately be driven by the private sector and competitive markets, only the federal government has the rational incentive to make the early, up-front investments in the real technology breakthroughs—such as durable electricity storage, advanced modular nuclear reactors and the development of new transportation fuels.

ARPA-E enjoys several unusual but critical institutional attributes—independent hiring authority to bring in the best minds from academia and the private sector, autonomous decision-making ability, and the capacity to take risks. These attributes are vital to achieving success in our globalized, 21st-century economy and should become increasingly more commonplace throughout the rest of our government.

Another of the opinion blurbs comes from Thomas Mason and Persis Drell, directors of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, respectively. They write:

Fully half of U.S. economic growth since 1945 can be attributed to investments in science and technology. Our colleagues Paul Alivisatos, Eric Isaacs, Sam Aronson and Michael Kluse—the other directors of the Department of Energy's Multi-program National Laboratories—agree that the competitive advantage the United States retains in technological innovation would be seriously jeopardized by extensive cuts to research proposed in House Resolution 1 for fiscal 2011. These reductions ignore the fact that innovation—not trade policies or labor costs—is the most important factor in global economic competitiveness and continued American prosperity.

The dramatic proposed cuts came just weeks after Congress extended the America Competes Act (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science). This bipartisan legislation was a statement that even in difficult times a priority should be placed on federally funded research tied to innovations that spawn new products and companies.

The United States still has the ability to compete successfully, but only if we invest in the scientific talent and infrastructure critical to fueling the private sector's need for new technologies. Whether it's a smartphone, a new drug or a battery that powers an electric car from Washington to Indianapolis, publicly supported research is almost always an essential contribution in the discovery chain.

Science will not be exempted from the sacrifices that have to be made across the entire federal budget. The challenge is to prioritize these reductions in a more thoughtful way that does not result in lasting damage to America's capacity for innovation.

Just as we cannot fix an overweight plane by removing an engine, we should not attempt to fix a deficit problem by removing America's ability to compete.

Five-alarm climate change

If the question of degree of alarm in climate discussion matters, then an article prominently placed on the front of the 27 February Washington Post Sunday Outlook section merits attention. Here's the teaser atop the print version: "The world is running out of time to stop climate change, says activist Mike Tidwell. So he's preparing for a future of food riots, freakish weather—and fending for himself."

Tidwell is executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, which calls itself "the first grassroots, non-profit organization dedicated exclusively to fighting global warming in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C." He begins by reporting that he has partly supplemented and partly replaced his personal environmentalism with deadbolt locks on his doors, a generator in his garage, and a "starter kit to raise tomatoes and lettuce behind barred basement windows." He's "not a survivalist or an 'end times' enthusiast," he stipulates, but "just a realist" when it comes to climate change, because "we're running out of time."

He vividly cites recent examples of extreme weather—and attributes every one of them to climate change. He borrows Winston Churchill's words from just before World War II: "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

Tidwell explains that those "consequences explain the generator in my garage and why I'm reinforcing my basement windows to protect emergency supplies," and adds: "This may seem like a stunt, or a sign that this frustrated environmentalist has finally lost it. But I'm not crazy. Just wait. The mega-storms and social disruptions on the horizon will be the best proof of that."

Here's a typical passage:

On the security side, it was the global food riots of 2008 and 2010 that led me to replace the 50-year-old locks on all my doors last fall. I'm not normally the paranoid type, but when extreme weather alternately baked and flooded wheat fields in Australia and Russia, helping to jack up grain prices more than 40 percent worldwide and leading hungry people to protest from Mexico to Mozambique to Serbia, I took notice. After all, the many climate effects we're already seeing—massive wildfires, bigger hurricanes, astonishing Arctic ice melt—all result from just 1.2 degrees of planetary warming since 1900. Now scientists at the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say the planet could warm another five degrees by the end of this century.

If that happens, Iowa is done for. Corn and wheat will wither and die on a scale never before seen. That's because heat-triggered mega-droughts will intensify across much of America's "continental interior" regions, scientists say, as flooding increases elsewhere. Iowa and much of the Heartland will resemble a scrub desert.

How will we feed ourselves adequately if our breadbasket is a desert? Answer: We won't, and there will be social unrest as a result.

Tidwell also reports that he "even took [his] first-ever lesson in firearms use last December" and that he's "not planning to join the Earth Liberation Front or some such militia." However, he asks, "wouldn't even a level-headed person want to be ready to defend his family if climate chaos goes to the max?"

If you consider his actions alarmist, he says, he "can't really blame you," for he'd "be confused about climate change, too, if [he] got most of [his] information from the half-asleep news media, much less the committed disinformers at Fox News and the Heritage Foundation." He offers a question for skeptics: "Why would private insurance companies lie about climate change? Already, Allstate has stopped selling new homeowners' policies in coastal Virginia and Maryland because the warming Atlantic Ocean is bringing larger hurricanes to the region."

Tidwell predicts:

Our trees are going to keep falling in ways we've never seen before. Our streets are going to flood. Our neighborhood bridges will wash out. Our roofs will sag from freak snowstorms and bake from unimaginable heat. And our power will keep going out, no matter how many "service improvements" Pepco makes. We've waited too long to avoid all this.

He ends by noting that ten years ago, he put solar panels on his roof "as an act of love for the planet." Now he's "making new changes, focused on [his] immediate loved ones. The era of consequences, at every conceivable level, has entered our world. Ready or not."

Medical physics returns to New York Times front page

The 28 February New York Times front page offers another very long article in the Times's Radiation Boom series examining "issues arising from the increasing use of medical radiation and the new technologies that deliver it." The online headline this time: "X-Rays and Unshielded Infants."

"Radiation Boom" articles begin with horror stories. This time it's about "the discovery that the tiniest, most vulnerable of all patients—premature babies—had been over-radiated" at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

The articles also advocate increased regulation. Today's lengthy piece moves from the opening horror story to what it calls "broader questions about the competence, training and oversight of technologists who operate radiological equipment that is becoming increasingly complex and powerful." The Times asks, "If technologists could not properly take a simple chest X-ray, how can they be expected to safely operate CT scanners or linear accelerators?"

The article continues:

With technologists in many states lightly regulated, or not at all, their own professional group is calling for greater oversight and standards. For 12 years, the American Society of Radiologic Technologists has lobbied Congress to pass a bill that would establish minimum educational and certification requirements, not only for technologists, but also for medical physicists and people in 10 other occupations in medical imaging and radiation therapy.

Yet even with broad bipartisan support, the association said, and the backing of 26 organizations representing more than 500,000 health professionals, Congress has yet to pass what has become known as the CARE bill because, supporters say, it lacks a powerful legislator to champion its cause.

In December 2006, the Senate passed the bill, but Congress adjourned before the House could vote. At the time, the House bill had 135 co-sponsors.

"I would think the public would be outraged that Congress was sitting on what could reduce their radiation exposure," said Dr. Fred Mettler, a radiologist who has investigated and written extensively about radiation accidents.

Individual states decide what standards, if any, radiological workers must meet. Radiation therapists are unregulated in 15 states, imaging technologists in 11 states and medical physicists in 18 states, according to the technologists association. "There are individuals," said Dr. Jerry Reid, executive director of a group that certifies technologists, "who are performing medical imaging and radiation therapy who are not qualified. It is happening right now."

Under the subheading "Children Are Most at Risk," the article explains that because "their cells divide quickly, children are more vulnerable to radiation's effects" and that "as new ways are found to use radiation in diagnosing and treating injuries and disease, children face an ever-increasing number of radiological procedures." The Times cites a recent finding "that by the age of 18, the average child will have already received more than seven radiological exams." Moreover, it says, in "premature infants, minimizing radiation exposure is especially important because they may require multiple radiological exams for problems like underdeveloped respiratory systems."

The article eventually notes that "[f]ull-body X-rays of babies are rarely done" and that "Dr. Donald Frush, chief of pediatric radiology at the Duke University School of Medicine, said that failing to properly cone, or collimate, the radiation was rare."

Under the subheading "Push for Continuing Education," the article reports that supporters of the proposed CARE legislation emphasize its continuing-education requirement. The Times adds that a "continuing-education provision might have prevented the over-radiation of 76 patients at a hospital in Missouri—a state that does not regulate its radiological workers. The medical physicist there had selected the wrong calibration tool to set up a highly sophisticated linear accelerator."

The article ends by quoting Dr. Steve Goetsch, a medical physicist in California who runs training programs: "In my profession, there is very little room for error and no room for unqualified personnel."

The Anthropocene

A 28 February New York Times editorial intrigues readers concerning a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: "The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time?"

The special issue offers 13 articles. Here's the abstract of the introductory piece:

Anthropogenic changes to the Earth's climate, land, oceans and biosphere are now so great and so rapid that the concept of a new geological epoch defined by the action of humans, the Anthropocene, is widely and seriously debated. Questions of the scale, magnitude and significance of this environmental change, particularly in the context of the Earth's geological history, provide the basis for this Theme Issue. The Anthropocene, on current evidence, seems to show global change consistent with the suggestion that an epoch-scale boundary has been crossed within the last two centuries.

The Times editorial begins by setting context, first mentioning human-history eras like the Renaissance, then contrasting them with geological time scales. "Humans existed when the Pleistocene ended and the Holocene began, 11 500 years ago," the editors observe. "Among scientists, there is now serious talk that the Holocene has ended and a new era has begun." They note that it was Paul Crutzen, who shared a Nobel Prize for work on the chemical mechanisms that affect the ozone layer, who first used the term Anthropocene, in 2000.

The editors argue that there's "a strong case that the Anthropocene begins with the Industrial Revolution, around 1800, when we began to exert our most profound impact on the world, especially by altering the carbon content of the atmosphere." Their ending may merit quoting:

Other species are embedded in the fossil record of the epochs they belong to. Some species, like ammonites and brachiopods, even serve as guides—or index fossils—to the age of the rocks they're embedded in. But we are the only species to have defined a geological period by our activity—something usually performed by major glaciations, mass extinction and the colossal impact of objects from outer space, like the one that defines the upper boundary of the Cretaceous.

Humans were inevitably going to be part of the fossil record. But the true meaning of the Anthropocene is that we have affected nearly every aspect of our environment—from a warming atmosphere to the bottom of an acidifying ocean.

New York Times front page: scorning teachers

Whatever may or may not need saying about teachers' unions, surely teachers' perceptions of their profession merit attention, possibly including the anecdotal kind that the question received in the 3 March New York Times.

"One of the astounding things about the rhetoric sweeping through statehouses across the United States," says a letter to the editor, "is the notion that teachers, of all people, are overpaid and selfish. Teachers continue to be just as underpaid and committed as they were before this insidious discourse was introduced." The letter echoes some of what's in the front-page article "Teachers Wonder, Why the Heapings of Scorn?"

The article begins by focusing on Erin Parker, a second-year high school science teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. She feels "punched in the stomach" when she encounters this comment: "Oh you pathetic teachers. . . . You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage."

She earns $36 000. She owes $26 000 on student loans. She owns no car and can't begin to think of buying a house. She's going to head for Colorado, where she'll live with her parents so she can afford to keep teaching.

Then the article states its main point:

Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.

Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers—Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy—education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.

The article reports extensively on the politics of education reform, but also reports the views of a math teacher and a science teacher. It quotes Lindsay Vlachakis, 25, a high school math teacher in Madison: "I put my heart and soul into teaching. When people attack teachers, they're attacking me."

And finally it quotes Anthony Cody, who "taught middle-school science for 18 years and now mentors new teachers in the Oakland, California, school district":

"What we need in these schools is stability," said Mr. Cody, 52, who writes a blog about teaching. "We need to convince people that if they invest their career in working with these challenging students, then we will reward them and appreciate them. We will not subject them to arbitrary humiliation in the newspaper. We will not require they be evaluated and paid based on test scores that often fluctuate greatly beyond the teacher's control."

Orbach in Science: Bill would "end America's legendary status" as world science leader

Raymond L. Orbach, who served as undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy for President George W. Bush, asserts in a 4 March Science magazine commentary that a funding bill for the present fiscal year passed on 19 February in the House of Representatives "would effectively end America's legendary status as the leader of the worldwide scientific community, putting the United States at a distinct disadvantage when competing with other nations in the global marketplace."

The signed opinion piece, called an editorial in Science's lexicon, first appeared online on 24 February. In it, Orbach asks legislators instead to sustain "the bipartisan commitment to double the science research budgets of the National Science Foundation, the DOE Office of Science, and the National Institute for Science and Technology over 10 years"—as "supported by both Presidents Bush and Obama" and as "affirmed as recently as last December in the America COMPETES Act."

The bill's spending cuts, Orbach writes, "would have a devastating effect on an array of critical scientific research." He cites the Office of Science generally, as well as cuts at its Office of Biology and Environmental Research "that would all but eliminate . . . the hope for developing transportation fuels derived from plant cellulose." He also condemns cuts for Energy Frontier Research Centers that "support activities based at 28 universities and 16 national laboratories." He emphasizes, and elaborates on, the threats to the national laboratories generally.

Orbach closes by granting that the "budget deficit is serious" but stipulates that "escaping from its clutches requires economic growth as well as budget reductions." He offers the reminder that well "over half of US economic growth in the past century can be traced to investments in science and technology."

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• A Wall Street Journal discussion of research on individual versus group achievement in science.
  
• An initiative to revolutionize peer review and advance open-access scientific publishing, as discussed in a Colin Macilwain commentary.
  
• A science perspective on events in Egypt, as seen in a Wall Street Journal article.
  
• Another such science perspective, as seen in a scientist's commentary and in a New York Times article.
  
• A national discussion of science fairs and STEM education in the Times and Washington Post
  

Quantifying trends: scientists' lateness in blooming & increases in collaboration

Even though it's not news that science, technology, and innovation rely increasingly on teamwork, Jonah Lehrer's recent Wall Street Journal column "Sunset of the Solo Scientist" might merit attention—and so might the column's academic source.

Lehrer bases the piece largely on research that seeks to quantify the trends. He seems to be referring to more than one of the papers cited on the research page of Benjamin Jones at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Lehrer begins with the old news. He asks, rhetorically, if the reader can name "a current scientist as influential as Einstein or an inventor as famous as Edison." He joins others who have declared that the "age of the great scientific thinker is over."

Reporting on Jones's work, Lehrer declares that the ideal creative age "for most scientists" has risen from the 20s and "is now closer to 40." Mean ages have risen for Nobel laureates and inventors. "The reason is straightforward," Lehrer writes. "Before we can transform a field, we need to master it, to learn the details of the domain. And there's more to learn than ever before."

Here's the main quantification:

By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed papers and 2.1 million patents, Mr. Jones and his colleagues at Northwestern were able to show that teamwork is a defining trend of modern research. Over the last 50 years, more than 99% of scientific subfields, from computer science to biochemistry, have experienced increased levels of teamwork, with the size of the average team increasing by about 20% per decade.

This shift is even more pronounced among influential papers. While the most cited studies in a field used to be the product of lone geniuses, Mr. Jones has shown that the best research now emerges from groups. It doesn't matter if the scientists are studying particle physics or human genetics. Papers by multiple authors receive more than twice as many citations as those with one author. This trend is even more apparent when it comes to "home run papers"—those publications with at least 1,000 citations—which are more than six times as likely to come from a team.

Lehrer ends by commenting on the "death of the Renaissance man," a phrase from the title of a 2009 paper by Jones.

Evolving peer review and open access, cont.

A recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education offered the Colin Macilwain article "'Facebook of Science' Seeks to Reshape Peer Review." The thumbnail summary at the top said:

With his latest Internet experiment, a large network of scientists called the Faculty of 1000, Vitek Tracz hopes to transform papers from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among researchers, authors, and readers.

A paywall sequesters this long piece. Here's some information about the Faculty of 1000, followed by a summary of the article.

A web page at the Faculty of 1000 site describes the organization's mission: "post-publication peer review" of "the most important articles in biology and medical research," using "a peer-nominated global 'Faculty' of the world's leading scientists and clinicians who rate the best of the articles they read and explain their importance."

F1000 says that it has actually come to involve "more than 10 000 experts whose evaluations form a fully searchable resource identifying the best research available" and that "Faculty Members and their evaluations are organized into over 40 Faculties (subjects), which are further subdivided into over 300 Sections." F1000 claims that on average, "1500 new evaluations are published each month," corresponding "to approximately the top 2% of all published articles in the biological and medical sciences."

Macilwain describes Tracz, the F1000 founder, as "a risk-taker" and a "publishing pioneer" with long and varied experience, who "put his money into open-access publishing when free Internet journals seemed like a long shot," and who profited enormously from this risk-taking.

"Now," writes Macilwain, Tracz "wants to reinvent the basics of scholarly communication" by turning the Faculty of 1000 "into what some call 'the Facebook of science' and a force that will change the nature of peer review." Tracz pursues a vision not only of transforming papers "from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among those researchers, authors, and readers," but of ending the need for costly journal prescriptions.

One passage in particular illustrates Tracz's background:

Sensing that the Internet would revolutionize publishing, and feeling hostile toward larger publishing rivals such as Elsevier, Mr. Tracz was the only commercial publisher to support [open-access publishing]. He offered all of the content of his own online journal, BioMed Central, for inclusion in PubMed Central, the digital archive set up by the National Institutes of Health in 2000.

In doing this, Mr. Tracz was backing a development that most other publishers regarded as about as welcome as the arrival of the bubonic plague. "He was incredible," recalls David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health, who set up PubMed Central. "He put his own skin in—he just thought it was a good thing, and he risked a lot."

Macilwain reports that Tracz believes "that the open-access battle has been won, with open journals now ensconced at Springer and the PLOS firmly established"—and that Tracz "takes issue with a suggestion that, with most of the up-to-date literature still lurking behind subscription walls for at least six months, the war is not over." Macilwain quotes Tracz:

In a few years, all new papers are going to be open access and available for free. . . . Today it is six months—yesterday it was a year. I promise you, within a year or two, it will be zero, because it is not worth it. It is better for the publishers to make it immediate. They keep on trying to defend the subscription model, but it is collapsing around their ears.

So Tracz has a record and a vision. Will his Faculty of 1000 amount to anything big?

Macilwain reports some criticism: F1000 doesn't have enough activity. Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science magazine, "argues that it is prone to dominance by particular individuals within subfields, limiting its usefulness as an arbiter of quality." Alberts also worries that the project needs "a code of ethics . . . that would say, for example, if you're asked by someone to review their paper, then you cannot review it."

And Macilwain reports confidence in "those who know Mr. Tracz." They "expect that his focus on transparency will help deal with" the problems, and they observe that Tracz is focusing his full attention on the project. Tracz has taken full control of The Scientist and has "rebranded it as the 'magazine of F1000.'"

Macilwain emphasizes that Tracz's ultimate objective is to upend the existing publishing system. Tracz sees "two big issues, for science and for publishing"—peer review and the publishing of data. Tracz says, "Except for a tiny little part at the top, where it is done seriously, peer review has become a joke. It is not done properly, it delays publication unnecessarily, it is open to abuse, and is being abused. It is seriously sick, and it has been for a while."

Tracz's remedy: F1000. His remedy for the "mountains of data," much of which is "never published": separate publication. Macilwain continues:

Mr. Tracz says the way forward here is for "data" and "discussion" to be published separately, so that the former get due credit.

"At the moment, people dump data," he says. So reams of DNA sequences end up in databases such as GenBank, where some are used heavily but many more are forgotten. "We want to change that and say, publish the data, put it in front of others, put it in some format that is visible, and people can use it." When the author of an article refers to that data, he says, the data-producer would get credit "as a special type of co-author, a data co-author."

Macilwain closes by quoting Lipman, who sums up Tracz this way: "He's got artistic sensibilities—he wanted to be a writer, and he was a filmmaker. When you put together that sense of aesthetics with resourcefulness and business management skills, it's a pretty powerful combination."

Egypt and science I

Under the old, broad meaning of the word science as all of organized knowledge, please consider the science dimension of what's happening in Egypt. Following is the first of two reports constituting a shamelessly anecdotal partial media tour, with stops at the Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune and Nature (next report).

Carl Sagan, a scientist and polymath, once eloquently ranked the ancient, lost library at Alexandria, Egypt, with the best from human history.

Thomas Jefferson, a science-minded polymath, omitted political offices from his own self-composed epitaph, citing instead three achievements from the realm of ideas: the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and his founding of the University of Virginia.

Maybe politicians are right who say that realpolitik allows only partial respect for the spirit animating what's happening in Egypt. But even if so, it seems important to link remembrance of the polymaths Sagan and Jefferson with the 8 February Wall Street Journal article "A Symbol for the New Egypt."

The story's single illustration shows the interior of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which opened in 2002 as the ancient, destroyed library's replacement. Along with the headline, that illustration's caption conveys the point: "The library was saved from damage last week during the violent unrest in Egypt after youths formed a human cordon around the building."

Maybe those youths remember that incident in Afghanistan when barbarians, claiming religious justification, destroyed ancient mountainside statues.

Maybe the youths remember little or nothing about Sagan or Jefferson. Maybe they wouldn't esteem those Americans anyway.

But plainly they remember the preciousness of ideas, and rationality, and learning, and the spirit of science itself.

The article begins by reporting that "the hypermodern successor to the ancient library of Alexandria stands out as a beacon of hope, efficiency and enlightenment among the crumbling buildings of Egypt's second-largest city," and later notes that it "has become a gathering place for scientists, literary figures and other thinkers from around the world." The library contains "four museums, a planetarium, a children's science center, a library for the blind and eight research institutes."

Ismail Serageldin, a Harvard-educated former World Bank vice president, directs it. He asserts its centrality in "a battle for the hearts and minds" of Egyptians in that it spreads "the values of democracy, freedom of expression, tolerance, diversity and pluralism" that Serageldin hopes "are taking root in the young generation."

The article reports that the "reincarnated library . . . holds some 1.6 million volumes," with "access to 50 000 electronic journals," and with "one of the few archives in the world of every web page on the Internet." It quotes the chief librarian: "We taught a lot of these kids who are demonstrating how to use computers, how to use social media, and I'm glad to see it's put to good use."

Jefferson rose above established practice by deliberately founding the University of Virginia on scientific, not religious, principles. The article reports that Serageldin "has fought to keep the library a secular institution, rejecting calls from staff members to open a mosque on the premises." It quotes Vartan Gregorian, a trustee of the library and president of the Carnegie Corporation, who formerly headed the New York Public Library: "Serageldin has been a marvelous defender of freedom and scientific thought."

The article continues:

Debate at library events has been described by human-rights activists and Western diplomats as open and free-wheeling. Its Arab Reform Forum has held an annual conference to promote human rights and civil society, and runs a website to facilitate communication among Arab nongovernmental organizations. The library has also hosted meetings spotlighting corruption in the Egyptian government.

It's easy, the article reports, to find Hitler's Mein Kampf for sale in Alexandria. Yet the library has hosted screenings of movies that "vividly portray Jewish suffering during the Holocaust," and Serageldin once "personally removed" a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from a library museum display, then "went on Egyptian television to denounce the notorious book as anti-Semitic hate literature and a fabrication."

The article closes by quoting Serageldin:

Last week, about 50 of the library's 2,000 staff members helped safeguard the interior along with another 50 volunteers forming "a moral force to remind people 'This is the library, don't touch it.'" On Sunday, all staff returned to work and gathered in the auditorium where Mr. Serageldin thanked them for protecting the institution. "I'm hoping to resume our functioning in society," he said, "stronger than ever."

Maybe many of those Egyptians who treasure science and freedom of mind don't treasure Thomas Jefferson. And maybe Jefferson himself overcredited the American revolution's importance in world history. Nevertheless it seems worth noting that in 1812, Jefferson wrote, ''I hope and firmly believe that the whole world will, sooner or later, feel benefit from the issue of our assertion of the rights of man.''

Egypt and science II

Last week the chemistry Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail, President Obama's special science envoy to the Middle East, published the commentary "Egypt's Next Steps" in the International Herald Tribune.

He offered four desiderata for Egypt: "a council of wise men and women" to "draft a new constitution based on liberty, human rights and the orderly transfer of power," an independent judiciary, free and fair elections, and a "new transitional government of national unity."

But Zewail also offered thoughts about education and science as fundamental to Egypt's future:

Finally, the education system, which is central to every Egyptian household's hopes of progress, has deteriorated into a sad state that is far below Egypt's standing in the world. The system failed in a big way, especially when I compare it with the one I personally experienced as a student in Alexandria in the 1960s. Moreover, scientific research in Egypt, which was ahead of South Korea, has now fallen to the tail of global rankings over the 30 years of the regime's governance.

Now that theme has found further visibility in an article in Nature: "Egypt's youth 'key to revival': Country's future depends on democracy, education and research reform, say scientists." The sidebar box "Scientists speak out" contains brief interview comments, with a link to longer versions.

The main article emphasizes that with the Mubarak regime "still in place . . . the most urgent priorities are to halt the regime's crackdowns on protesters, and to ensure that the pro-democracy movement prevails," but that "in the long term . . . Egypt's education and science systems must be completely overhauled to help address the root causes of its social and economic woes."

The article quotes Hassan Azzazy, a chemist at the American University in Cairo: "The current outdated government simply lacks the mindset and vision to strategically support scientific research and lead an innovation-based economy that can compete globally." It goes on to mention Zewail's commentary and to report that he has "returned to his home country . . . to join a group of prominent Egyptian intellectuals who are drawing up plans, including constitutional reforms, to try to engineer a peaceful transition to democracy." It laments that in Egyptian universities, "budgets have remained flat, salaries have stagnated, and training of teachers and lecturers has been neglected," such that the universities "do not foster productivity or innovation," but, according to one scientist, are instead "simply assembly lines that produce thousands of unskilled graduates every year."

The article also calls troublesome the fact that the "suppression of human rights, and the poor conditions for science, have also led to a brain drain to the West, and more recently to Gulf states that are investing in research." Nature cites the Science Citation Index in reporting that "Egypt produced 5,140 scientific papers in 2010," and that Harvard alone "published twice that number." Moreover, "the unrest has . . . led to uncertainty about Egypt's role in the SESAME synchrotron project in Jordan."

Near the end, the article quotes Ismail Serageldin, director of the Library of Alexandria: "Building science is not just a question of money and projects, it is also about a whole climate of research, of freedom of enquiry, freedom of expression, education, the ability to question." Then it adds this: "That the country's youth is now standing up for these values gives reason for hope, [Serageldin] says."

Holdren joins science fair discussion, advertises Obama STEM efforts

President Obama's state-of-the-union mention of science fairs has led to a public discussion that now involves John Holdren, the president's science advisor.

In a front-page article, the New York Times reported that although the president "said that America should celebrate its science fair winners like . . . Super Bowl champions, or risk losing the nation's competitive edge," it appears that participation among high school students is declining. The article leveled a charge:

[M]any science teachers say the problem is not a lack of celebration, but the Obama administration's own education policy, which holds schools accountable for math and reading scores at the expense of the kind of creative, independent exploration that science fair projects require.

The article frankly admitted that it lacked comprehensive quantitative data, but it did present anecdotal evidence that included numbers. For example:

"To say that we need engineers and 'this is our Sputnik moment' is meaningless if we have no time to teach students how to do science," said Dean Gilbert, the president of the Los Angeles County Science Fair, referring to a line in President Obama's State of the Union address last week. The Los Angeles fair, though still one of the nation's largest, now has 185 schools participating, down from 244 a decade ago.

Another example:

In Indiana, high school participation in the state's science fairs dropped 15 percent in the last three years. One fair organizer in Washington described last year's fair there as "heartbreaking," with few projects and not enough judges. The fair in St. Louis was in danger of folding this year when its major sponsor, Pfizer, moved its operations and dropped its sponsorship.

A few days after the Times article appeared, a journalist argued in a Washington Post op-ed that even though "denied the celebrity of the athlete, the true scholar learns to take the longer view," that "most science-fair winners will never be as instantly celebrated as the winners of the Super Bowl," and that "that's probably as it should be."

Then the Times devoted most of its 10 February letters page to six responses under the headline "The Decline of the Science Fair." A high school student described his own "science fair career." A science teacher called for considering a science fair an "exhibition, not a competition." A researcher lamented the lack of funding for students to participate as interns in actual research. A professor decried the misplacing of priorities on sports instead of academics and science. Another writer said, "Your article reveals the essential weakness of an educational system based on standardized tests: standardized tests teach how to answer questions; a true education teaches the questions to ask."

Finally, Holdren's letter began by alluding to "deep budget challenges that many school districts are facing and problems with the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law," and then noted that the article didn't "mention much of the Obama administration's extraordinary agenda for improving science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education in this country." Holdren offered as examples "the commitment to prepare 100 000 new math and science teachers over the next 10 years, the $4 billion Race to the Top program's support for innovation in teaching these important subjects, and the administration's blueprint for updating the Elementary and Secondary Education Act this year."

He continued:

Recognizing that government alone cannot be the answer, moreover, the president has also called upon the business community, foundations, professional societies and others to do more. Already, the president's "Educate to Innovate" campaign has attracted more than $700 million in nongovernmental financial and in-kind support for science and math programs.

And more than 100 chief executives have responded to the president's "all hands on deck" call to action by launching "Change the Equation," an unprecedented program to scale up effective models for improving STEM education.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

A bill to create a domestic supply base for molybdenum-99, a short-lived radioactive isotope widely used for medical imaging, was reintroduced in the Senate in late January. Virtually identical to a measure that passed the House by a 400–17 vote last year, the bill (S-99) would codify and authorize funds for an interagency effort already under way to help establish a US supply of ⁹⁹Mo that would be produced without the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU).

The introduction of S-99 restarts a legislative push that stalled last year due to opposition from a single lawmaker, Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO). Bond, who retired in December, used a Senate procedure known as a hold to prevent the measure from coming to a vote. The measure aims to establish a reliable source of ⁹⁹Mo in the US and to prevent a recurrence of a shortage like the one that occurred last year, when two of the five research reactors that account for nearly all the world's supply of the radioisotope were shut down for the better part of 2010.

The US, which consumes about half the world's ⁹⁹Mo output, imports material from a Canadian company and from two European suppliers. A fourth producer, located in South Africa, serves mostly customers located outside North America. Because of its 66-hour half-life, ⁹⁹Mo can't be stockpiled. It is the parent of the even shorter-lived technetium-99m, which is used as a tracer in about 18 million US medical diagnostic procedures each year.

At a 1 February hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources—Parrish Staples, director of the office of European and African threat reduction, at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration—welcomed the bill's provisions to phase out use of HEU in ⁹⁹Mo production. The American Medical Isotopes Production Act would prohibit US exports of HEU in seven years, a deadline that could be extended by as much as six years if the administration determines that there is insufficient ⁹⁹Mo produced without HEU.

To reduce the threat the material poses to nuclear proliferation, the Obama administration is pressuring other nations to end all civilian uses of HEU, including for medical isotopes. The US, however, continues to export HEU to Canada for ⁹⁹Mo production there. Since 2005, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has licensed seven shipments of HEU to Canada and Belgium for use in medical isotope production, according to Margaret Doane, director of NRC's international programs. Two more license applications, from Canada and France, are pending before the commission.

NNSA is offering financial and technical assistance for ⁹⁹Mo producers to convert their HEU-based production processes to low-enriched uranium. Last year, with NNSA's help, the South African Nuclear Energy Corp (Necsa) became the first of the major producers to ship a commercial quantity of the isotope that was made without HEU.

The Senate bill would authorize $143 million over three years for the development of HEU-free domestic production sources. NNSA has cooperative agreements in place with four US industry teams, each of which is developing a different novel approach to manufacturing ⁹⁹Mo. The cost-shared grants allow for up to $25 million in federal funds for each of the teams: GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, Babcock & Wilcox, NorthStar Nuclear Medicine and Morgridge Institute for Research.

Three of the processes would not require uranium of any type. But Staples warned that long-term subsidies provided to the current HEU-based ⁹⁹Mo producers undercut US efforts to establish a domestic supply. "We must achieve full cost recovery across the entire global commercial industry," he testified. "Any foreign government subsidy of HEU-based production puts the objectives of this legislation at risk."

David Kramer