Recently in Energy policy Category

The House has approved $6 billion in cuts to the Department of Energy for 2012, but the Senate may restore much of that.

On 15 June the House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that would slash Department of Energy spending nearly $6 billion below President Obama's request for fiscal year 2012. The measure would bring to a sudden halt a bipartisan drive to double the budget of DOE's Office of Science over a 10-year period, and would carve $1.9 billion out of Obama's request for the agency's energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. The $1.3 billion provided in the bill for those programs is nearly $500 million less than current-year spending.

The $7.1 billion the committee's bill would provide for DOE's nuclear weapons program is $195 million above its current level, but nearly $500 million below the Obama request. Despite applauding the new Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, which provides grants for high-risk clean-energy R&D projects in the private sector, appropriators provided only $100 million of the $550 million the administration requested for ARPA–E. The bill approved just $160 million of the more than $1 billion that was requested to back up loan guarantees for the construction of nuclear and, to a lesser extent, renewable-energy power plants. In the report accompanying the bill, the committee stated that the department has sufficient existing loan guarantee authority to cover the low demand for new nuclear plants.

The $406 million provided in the bill for the civilian fusion program is a $31 million increase from the current year, and also $6 million more than the administration request. The chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development, Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), chairs the appropriations subcommittee that wrote the bill. His district is adjacent to the one that includes the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, DOE's flagship fusion research facility.

The bill report praised DOE's high-energy physics program for its emphasis on the "intensity frontier," saying it was an area where the US could lead the world. The appropriators were equivocal on the role that the agency should play at the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory in South Dakota, the project that NSF abandoned early this year. While cautioning DOE against taking on construction and operation of the proposed multidisciplinary laboratory at the former gold mine, the committee supported an ongoing caretaker role for the agency at DUSEL, "in order to preserve it as an option while [DOE] weighs the alternatives."

The $1.7 billion provided for DOE's Basic Energy Sciences program is $297 million below the administration's request. The report instructs BES to terminate $25 million worth of its multiyear research projects, based upon the results of a "performance ranking" of all BES-sponsored research at universities, the national laboratories, the 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers, or the three Energy Innovation Hubs. Appropriators described the ranking exercise as a "first step towards increasing the accountability and effectiveness" of the BES program. They said the bulk of BES's research portfolio "lacks transparency to the public and to the Congress," and that sponsored projects are not held accountable for results. The bill provides $20 million for a new hub that will be focused on batteries and energy storage.

The energy and water development bill was the fifth of the 12 annual appropriations bills to be approved by the full House committee. Senate appropriators have yet to move any of their spending bills. Given that Republicans control the House, and Democrats the Senate, the amounts established in the House bills are likely to represent the funding floor for the House–Senate conference committees that will reconcile the two versions of each spending measure later this year.

David Kramer

The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration awarded a five-year, $25 million grant to a consortium of academic organizations headed by the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) that will train graduate and undergraduate students to work in the fields of nuclear security and nonproliferation. The National Science and Security Consortium will also involve Michigan State University, UC Davis, UC Irvine, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Washington University in St. Louis.

The students will participate in the nuclear security R&D projects at the NNSA-owned weapons laboratories, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories. Anne Harrington, NNSA deputy administrator for defense nonproliferation, said the UCB collaboration topped a number of bids submitted by other university teams in response to NNSA's request for proposals. The consortium will train students in nuclear physics, nuclear and radiation chemistry, nuclear engineering, nuclear instrumentation and public policy.

Although NNSA annually funds about $15 million worth of research at US universities, those interactions involve directed R&D projects, with the academic partner performing research for one of the three NNSA weapons laboratories. The new collaboration will be "exploratory and we hope, very innovative," she said. "If we don't keep the vital pipeline of talent coming into our laboratories, and more importantly, if we don't excite a new generation about the importance of working on nuclear security and nonproliferation issues, it doesn't matter how beautiful our facilities are; we will not be able to do the work that must be done."

Referring to the collaboration, Per Peterson, chair of UCB's nuclear engineering department, said that "coordinating efforts at the partnering universities and creating linkages with national laboratories will give students the opportunity to gain a much broader interdisciplinary perspective on why their research matters and what it's going to be able to do." Interest in that field has "grown enormously over the past several years," he said, and his students tell him they think they have an opportunity to change the world's future. The consortium goes well beyond typical small grants to principal investigators, which provide a "stovepiped environment."

Through the consortium, participating faculty from engineering, chemistry, physics and public policy departments plan to collaborate in a fashion that mirrors the interdisciplinary model found at national laboratories. If a public policy-related question were to come up, a teleconference could be arranged with officials at NNSA, the Department of State, or other relevant agencies.

Nuclear resonance fluorescence

One topic of investigation for the consortium is nuclear resonance fluorescence for the detection of nuclear materials. The technology, in which gamma-ray photons with the appropriate energy can generate fission in uranium, could provide a new method for detecting nuclear materials in locations that are very difficult to monitor by other means and would also be capable of identifying the specific isotope that is present. "A whole host of applications" could further ensue from developing NRF, Peterson said, such as in verifying arms control agreements, where inspectors have to ascertain the presence of a warhead without disclosing classified design information.

Another topic the consortium could explore is the growing risk that uranium ore concentrates are diverted to terrorists or rogue nations, Harrington noted. The risk is heightened by the fact that many uranium mines are in developing countries having high levels of corruption. "That gives us a natural opportunity to engage a broad set of countries in very low-level, fundamental nuclear forensics materials analysis and characterization using uranium as the base, but in a form that is completely non-sensitive," she said. "So we can explore things like geological watermarking. We can explore different ways of developing and controlling databases on things like uranium ore concentrates." Scientific advances from that work might be transferred into the highly sensitive field of post-detonation nuclear forensics, she added.

Over the program's five years, a total of 230 students are expected to be trained by the program over the five years, Harrington said. Six graduate students are to be enrolled at UCB initially, with that number doubling in later years, Peterson said.

David Kramer

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• Wind and solar land-use requirements as calculated and discussed in a New York Times commentary
  
• Rush Limbaugh's and other conservatives' climate-politics backlash against Mitt Romney, as reported on the Washington Post's front page
  
• Recent Yucca Mountain geologic nuclear-waste repository technopolitics
  
• Starkly conflicting views on the imminent US switch to new-tech light bulbs
  

New York Times op-ed: enormous land use for solar or wind power

An 8 June New York Times op-ed highlights for the public an informal technocivic phenomenon often seen among physicists, engineers and others who muse about large-scale energy production: rough calculations of the enormous amounts of land that would be required for solar or wind.

For example, Chris Uhlik, Google's engineering director, told in a recent unpublished talk about calculations showing that to scale up wind power for generating U.S. primary energy would require a footprint roughly the area of Nevada plus Arizona, and that to scale up solar would require an area equivalent to California.

In the Times op-ed, Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute begins by citing California's self-imposed new "ambitious mandate" to obtain one-third of its electricity from renewables like sunlight and wind by 2020. "Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia now have renewable electricity mandates," Bryce adds—and there's talk in Washington of a federal mandate.

Bryce continues:

But there's the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources—most notably, land. Even a cursory look at these costs exposes the deep contradictions in the renewable energy movement.

Bryce offers a few paragraphs of back-of-an-envelope calculations for solar and wind under California's mandate, notes that the Nature Conservancy has coined the term energy sprawl to describe such land requirements, and tosses in a few numbers illustrating "the massive quantities of steel required for wind projects." No matter how "you crunch the numbers," Bryce writes, "the takeaway is the same: the amount of steel needed to generate a given amount of electricity from a wind turbine is greater by several orders of magnitude" than for natural gas.

Bryce ends by citing environmentalists' "small is beautiful" dictum. If we are to take that principle to heart "while also reducing the rate of growth of greenhouse gas emissions," he declares, "we must exploit the low-carbon energy sources—natural gas and, yes, nuclear—that have smaller footprints."

Washington Post front: Romney vs. fellow Republicans on climate science

Above the fold on the 9 June Washington Post front page appears the headline "Romney in hot seat on warming—Views on climate change put presidential candidate at odds with GOP base."

The article elaborates on implications from something reported online by CBS News and others: "Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney broke with many in his party on Friday when he said he believes humans have contributed to global warming." In New Hampshire, Romney reportedly said, "I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed."

The Post piece emphasizes polling numbers that highlight the left-right divide on human-caused climate disruption. It observes that the "putative Republican presidential front-runner, eager to prove his conservative bona fides, could easily have said what he knew many in his party's base wanted to hear," but instead "stuck to the position he has held for many years."

A "conservative backlash" has ensued, the article reports, citing the Club for Growth, the blog Conservatives4Palin.com, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Rush Limbaugh. From a transcript at rushlimbaugh.com, here's some of what Limbaugh told his national radio audience:

Bye-bye, nomination. Bye-bye nomination. Another one down. We're in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of manmade global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates who want to buy into it! Why? 'Cause in New Hampshire they obviously care about it. . . . People in New Hampshire for some cockamamie reason want to believe in global warming. There was snow on the summit of Hawaii's biggest mountain, Mauna Kea, after a thunderstorm dropped inches of ice this morning. In Hawaii!

CBS's online report charges that Republican candidates Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty have "shift[ed] on climate change issues."

Yucca Mountain science and politics, cont.

As of the morning of 9 June, the Yucca Mountain geologic repository for nuclear waste was back in the news at the Washington Post, though not at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.

The 8 June Post carried an editorial with the headline (in the paper version) "Radioactive politics: What happened to an administration that was going to be guided by science?"

Guided by science? Is Yucca Mountain about science as clearly as, say, evolution is about science? Robert Alvarez, a former Clinton administration energy official, doesn't think so. The 9 June Post, at the foot of the editorial column on the left-hand side of the opinion spread, carried a "Taking Exception" box containing Alvarez's letter with the headline "Politics has always outranked science at Yucca Mountain."

Richard M. Jones of the American Institute of Physics explained the recent background in some detail in the 7 June issue of "FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News." It carried the headline "New Developments in Yucca Mountain Controversy." Jones reported on Capitol Hill discussions and a 76-page report from the Government Accountability Office.

That GAO report begins, "DOE decided to terminate the Yucca Mountain repository program because, according to DOE officials, it is not a workable option and there are better solutions that can achieve a broader national consensus. DOE did not cite technical or safety issues." It's that second sentence that caused the Post to headline its editorial with an assertion that Yucca Mountain is about science.

There are "reasonable things to do if Yucca is permanently dead," wrote the Post's editors, after offering a brief recap of past developments leading to the Obama administration's effort to kill the project. The editors continued:

But it's not even clear that's the case. House Republicans want to restore funding for the project and forbid money from going to shut it down—though Mr. Reid will no doubt fight back in the Senate. The government's 2008 license application is still pending at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The only thing that seems certain is that toxic politics have resulted in a lot of wasted time and money.

Alvarez's "Taking Exception" letter declares, "Fierce opposition to disposal sites in the states where most of the nation's 104 reactors are located resulted in a choice that had more to do with political convenience than scientific merit." The letter concludes:

Even if Yucca Mountain were to open today, by the time it accommodated all the spent nuclear fuel now housed in unsafe conditions at reactors across the country, a comparable amount of highly radioactive waste would be stockpiled at crowded and vulnerable spent fuel pools at 51 sites. The safe and secure storage of nuclear spent fuel in dry, hardened casks should have a higher priority than pursuing the quest, now in its 55th year, to find a dump for the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet.

Jones at AIP concluded, "The controversy will continue, playing out at the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission], in the courts, and in Congress."

The light-bulb wars

"When it comes to making light," wrote Andrew Rice in the 5 June Sunday magazine of the New York Times, "libertarians and aesthetes are joined in an unlikely alliance." That alliance opposes environmentalists and the federal law that will soon ban the sale of energy-wasting, Thomas Edison-style, incandescent light bulbs, which emit light of a quality that many people prefer. Rice's article and recent Wall Street Journal articles, taken together, offer an anecdotal snapshot of the current state of the light-bulb wars.

The Times piece summarized the entrepreneurially motivated applied physics that has been underway thanks to what many conservatives condemn as deplorable federal intrusion into the market. "Over the past few years," Rice began, "in conditions of strict secrecy, a multinational team of scientists has been making a mighty effort to change the light bulb." He described how "some of the industry's most brilliant minds are plumbing the mysteries of light on an atomic level, working to devise the bulb of the future." They're developing LED technology to overcome objections to the compact fluorescent and other bulbs that meet the new federal requirements. To fill America's billions of light sockets in this new way, Rice wrote, "represents not just a technological challenge but also an opportunity the industry hasn't encountered since Edison first flipped a switch."

Rice retold the story of Edisonian light-bulb technology and explained a bit of the engineering, and the perceptual esthetics, of bulb radiation. He cited the view of a scientist named Roland Haitz "that just as computer chips were becoming exponentially more powerful," LEDs are "getting brighter and cheaper at a predictable rate"—a proposition that, according to Rice, is now known as Haitz's Law. Rice analyzed the marketing challenges that will arise if that law holds true. He cited the federal government's $10 million L Prize, designed to encourage bulb innovation. The phaseout will initially send people toward toward hybrid halogen bulbs, which he called "a transitional product that only barely meets the new regulations," and toward compact fluorescents. But the industry is well aware that people dislike these alternatives—which is why, he wrote, there's so much R&D, and why there's an L Prize.

Meanwhile a Wall Street Journal article covered some of the same ground, complete with an illustration comparing and differentiating traditional incandescent bulbs, halogen-incandescents, compact fluorescents and LEDs. The article focused in large part on the industry's coming marketing challenges, and closed this way:

"Right now people don't think about light bulbs," says Ellen Sizemore, product marketing manager for LED retrofit lamps at Osram Sylvania. "And the industry is going to force them to do that."

That closing led to one of the two letters that the WSJ published in response. "It would have been more accurate," the letter said, if the reporter had used the word government instead of the word industry, given that "the government is the driving force behind the 'us versus them' battles: low-flow toilets that don't work well, shower heads you have to 'fix' and, soon, a smart grid that won't let you have electricity when you want it." The letter continued: "As every day goes by there is more 'force' and less 'freedom.' It just goes on and on. Don't laugh at the hoarders of light bulbs. In the face of the enemy, it's the only choice."

Battles? Enemy? Well, these are the light-bulb wars—as the second letter showed too. It offered bitter terseness in recycling a gun-rights bumper-sticker slogan. In its entirety, the WSJ's second letter said: "To adapt Charlton Heston: They can pry the last incandescent light bulb out of my cold, dead hands."

A few days later, the editors who selected and printed that pair of letters offered a fusillade of their own: the editorial "The Light Bulb Police: Americans deserve their choice of illumination." The editorial showed no awareness of the LED developments, maybe because the WSJ's usual sharp awareness of the power of entrepreneurial innovation lessens when the government has intruded. It lamented, without full accuracy, that "we will all be required to buy compact fluorescent lights." Then came sarcasm:

The ban passed at the height of the global warming fad-scare when all proper thinkers were supposed to sacrifice to the anticarbon gods. . . . Mr. Obama's Energy Department told Congress recently that to repeal the ban would "detrimentally affect the nation's economy, energy security, and environmental imperatives." Yes, and cause the seas to rise to swamp Miami and New York too.

The editorial closed by criticizing Republicans for insufficient opposition: "If Republicans can't understand the appeal of sparing Americans from the light bulb police, what are they good for?"

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:

• Science magazine and New York Times coverage of a study of "deliberate practice" in teaching college physics
  
• New York Times front-page coverage of major findings about exoplanets
  
• Nature editors' advocacy of naming the present geological epoch anthropomorphically
  
• Science magazine's post-Fukushima review of the state of low-dose radiation biophysics
  
• A mysterious silence in the climate wars
  

College physics: two-way engagement vs. one-way lectures

"As a psychologist, I'm ashamed that it is physicists who are leading this effort, and not learning scientists," admitted James W. Stigler, a UCLA psychology professor, to the New York Times. Here's the Science magazine abstract for the study in question, "Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class":

We compared the amounts of learning achieved using two different instructional approaches under controlled conditions. We measured the learning of a specific set of topics and objectives when taught by 3 hours of traditional lecture given by an experienced highly rated instructor and 3 hours of instruction given by a trained but inexperienced instructor using instruction based on research in cognitive psychology and physics education. The comparison was made between two large sections (N = 267 and N = 271) of an introductory undergraduate physics course. We found increased student attendance, higher engagement, and more than twice the learning in the section taught using research-based instruction.

The study has been reported and assessed in both the online Science magazine news article "A Better Way to Teach?" and in the New York Times piece "Less Talk, More Action: Improving Science Learning."

The Science piece summarizes:

Any physics professor who thinks that lecturing to first-year students is the best way to teach them about electromagnetic waves can stop reading this item. For everybody else, however, listen up: A new study shows that students learn much better through an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor.

The research, appearing online . . . in Science, was conducted by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman. First at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now at an eponymous science education initiative at UBC, Wieman has devoted the past decade to improving undergraduate science instruction, using methods that draw upon the latest research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and learning theory.

In this study, Wieman trained a postdoc, Louis Deslauriers, and a graduate student, Ellen Schelew, in an educational approach, called "deliberate practice," that asks students to think like scientists and puzzle out problems during class. For 1 week, Deslauriers and Schelew took over one section of an introductory physics course for engineering majors, which met three times for 1 hour. A tenured physics professor continued to teach another large section using the standard lecture format.

The results were dramatic: After the intervention, the students in the deliberate practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as did those in the control section. They were also more engaged—attendance rose by 20% in the experimental section, according to one measure of interest—and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.

The Times piece, after offering an equivalent summary, goes on to report criticisms. It quotes Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia: "The whole issue of how to draw on basic science and apply it in classrooms is a whole lot more complicated than they're letting on." The Times adds that he "said that, among other concerns, the study was not controlled enough to tell which of the changes in teaching might have accounted for the difference in students' scores."

The Times also quotes Stigler concerning the possible biasing effect of having the "deliberate practice" teachers serve also as the study authors: "This is not a good idea, since they know exactly what the hypotheses are that guide the study, and, more importantly, exactly what the measures are that will be used to evaluate the effects. They might, therefore, be tailoring their instruction to the assessment—that is, teaching to the test."

But the Times also quotes Stigler's opinion that "the authors are pioneers in exploring and testing ways we can improve undergraduate teaching and learning"—which is why he's "ashamed" that his own colleagues didn't lead the effort.

The news obviously calls to mind two buzz phrases from the science-outreach realm: the deficit model, in which scientists seek to defray citizens' knowledge deficit with one-way lecturing to captive audiences, and the engagement model, involving two-way interactions. Nowhere in either news article do those terms appear, but it's clear that the pedagogical researchers' "deliberate practice" overlaps substantially with the engagement model and contrasts sharply with the deficit model.

New York Times front page reports unbound or distant Jupiter-mass objects

As highlighted on the New York Times front page, as mentioned only in a single sentence in the Wall Street Journal's daily "What's News" roundup, and as ignored altogether in the Washington Post, this week's Nature carries the report "Unbound or distant planetary mass population detected by gravitational microlensing" plus the companion commentary "Astronomy: Bound and unbound planets abound."

The Nature report's authors are the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics Collaboration, from New Zealand and Japan, and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment Collaboration, from Poland and Chile. They announce "the discovery of a population of unbound or distant Jupiter-mass objects."

As the Times's Dennis Overbye explains it, the discovery is "that space [is] littered with hundreds of billions of planets that [have] been ejected from the planetary systems that gave them birth and either [are] going their own lonely ways or [are] only distantly bound to stars at least 10 times as far away as the Sun is from the Earth."

Overbye reports that astronomers "said the results would allow them to tap into a whole new unsuspected realm of exoplanets . . . causing scientists to re-evaluate how many there are, where they are and how they are created, even as astronomers immediately began to ponder whether the new planets in question are in fact floating free or are just far from their stars." He explains the gravitational microlensing method as relying "on the ability of the gravitational field of a massive object . . . to bend light and act as a magnifying lens, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity."

Nature editors: Recognize the Anthropocene to "focus minds"

Nature's editors this week are seeking to intensify the technopolitics of the word Anthropocene—the anthropomorphizing name that, on behalf of all of science, the International Commission on Stratigraphy is considering for the present geological epoch. The most obvious political implications involve climate, but that's far from the whole story.

As reported here last winter, the abstract for the introductory piece in a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: "The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time?" summarized the question:

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.

A 28 February New York Times editorial argued that a "strong case" exists for the proposed name. Now a Nature editorial argues, "Official recognition for the Anthropocene would focus minds on the challenges to come." It asserts: "Humans may yet ensure that these early years of the Anthropocene are a geological glitch and not just a prelude to a far more severe disruption. But the first step is to recognize, as the term Anthropocene invites us to do, that we are in the driver's seat."

Building on a Nature news article from a week earlier, the editors offer this summary of the science:

Human activity is set to leave an indelible mark on the geological record. Deforestation, mining and road building have unleashed tides of sediment down rivers and onto the ocean floor. Fossil-fuel use and land clearance have already emitted perhaps a quarter as much carbon into the atmosphere as was released during one of the greatest planetary crises of the past, the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago. Now, as then, corals and other organisms are recording a global carbon-isotope shift. The increasing acidification of the oceans as they absorb carbon dioxide will dissolve carbonate from deep sediments, and what is likely to be the sixth great mass extinction in Earth's history will gather speed, adding vivid new markers to the record.

It's the technopolitical dimension, however, that characterizes the editorial. The editors want more than an apt scientific name; they want an apt scientific name that will generate action by reframing environmental issues.

They ask, is "it wise for stratigraphers to endorse a term that comes gift-wrapped as a weapon for those on both sides of the political battle over the fate of the planet?" Their answer is yes. "Official recognition of the concept would invite cross-disciplinary science." That's the scientific dimension. To that dimension they add an explicit technopolitical dimension: "And it would encourage a mindset that will be important not only to fully understand the transformation now occurring but to take action to control it."

Science magazine: "Fukushima Revives The Low-Dose Debate"

Front-page articles this week showed that Fukushima continues to command attention. On Wednesday, the New York Times offered "In Japan Reactor Failings, Danger Signs for the U.S." The Wall Street Journal offered "Fresh Tales of Chaos Emerge From Early in Nuclear Crisis." Now Science magazine has published a lengthy post-Fukushima analysis of the vexing challenges in developing scientific understanding of low-level radiation exposure.

"Radiation spiked 4 days after the first explosion," the article explains, but since then, "radiation levels have ebbed as short-lived radionuclides, such as iodine-131 with a half-life of 8 days, decay into stable isotopes." On the ground lie "small amounts of cesium-134 and cesium-137, isotopes with half-lives of 2 and 30 years respectively." Now "several thousand of Fukushima's 2 million residents have been thrust into the middle of a vigorous scientific debate about the health effects of long-term exposure to low levels of radiation."

Science summarizes some of that perennial debate's central questions:

Some researchers believe even unavoidable background radiation can be a factor in causing cancer. Others argue that tiny doses of radiation are not harmful. Some scientists even claim that low doses, by stimulating DNA repair, make you healthier—an effect known as hormesis.

There's hope, the article says, that despite difficulties like sample size and insufficient controls for various influences, studies in Fukushima "could help clarify the picture." The article summarizes the biophysics of radiation harm, mentions studies that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, laments inadequacies in studies of Chernobyl's effects, and cites animal experiments that seem to find low doses benign. It describes nascent post-Fukushima study efforts, and reports scientists' "hope [that] a respected entity will organize a high-quality research plan involving all levels of government."

But within an ending that recalls the perennial vexations of radiation-exposure studies, the article adds:

Some researchers doubt that any study in Fukushima, no matter how well devised, will reveal much. The radiation exposure of the general population "is too small to give a statistically significant increase in stochastic effects such as cancer," argues Ohtsura Niwa, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Kyoto University.

National Research Council re-emphasizes climate; Wall Street Journal editors silent

Late last week, the National Research Council published a report that warns, as the NRC's summary announcement puts it, that "the risk of dangerous climate change impacts is growing with every ton of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere." The NRC reiterated that a "pressing need" remains "for substantial action to limit the magnitude of climate change and to prepare to adapt to its impacts."

Early this week, the Washington Post published the editorial "Climate change denial becomes harder to justify." It appealed for the NRC report to be heeded—and it harshly criticized Republicans and others for not heeding.

About a century ago, Arthur Conan Doyle published the story "Silver Blaze," in which Sherlock Holmes identified "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." From a dog's silence during the disappearance of a race horse, Holmes inferred much.

But I'm no Sherlock Holmes, so all I can do—in recycling the old "dog that didn't bark" cliché—is report the dog that didn't bark: the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I have no idea why the WSJ's editors and opinion writers have remained silent about the NRC report, given that its tone and content constitute a direct challenge targeted precisely at them. (Nor, by the way, am I Holmes enough to explain why the WSJ's guide to climate change, as I think it was called, has disappeared from the online editorial page.)

The Post's editorial adds to the challenge to the WSJ. Here are three examples of its harshness:

• "[T]he Republican Party, and therefore the US government, have moved . . . far from reality and responsibility in their approach to climate change."
  
• "Seizing on inevitable points of uncertainty in something as complex as climate science, and on misreported pseudo-scandals among a few scientists, Republican members of Congress, presidential candidates and other leaders pretend that the dangers of climate change are hypothetical and unproven and the causes uncertain."
  
• "Climate-change deniers . . . are willfully ignorant, lost in wishful thinking, cynical or some combination of the three. And their recalcitrance is dangerous, the report makes clear, because the longer the nation waits to respond to climate change, the more catastrophic the planetary damage is likely to be—and the more drastic the needed response."
  

The Post's editorial concludes this way:

Every candidate for political office in the next cycle, including for president, should be asked whether they disagree with the scientific consensus of America's premier scientific advisory group, as reflected in this report; and if so, on what basis they disagree; and if not, what they propose to do about the rising seas, spreading deserts and intensifying storms that, absent a change in policy, loom on America's horizon.

If the Wall Street Journal editorial page should decide after all to accept a new battle in the technopolitical climate wars, I'll play the role of Dr Watson and report it.

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 recommendation has been made by the commission formed to advise the Obama administration on what to do with the spent nuclear fuel from the nation's commercial reactors: The material should be consolidated at an above-ground storage facility while a new search is carried out to find a permanent geological repository.

In a draft of its interim findings made public on 13 May, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future called for the US to establish one or more interim storage facilities for the consolidation of spent fuel that is now stored on-site at each of the nation's 104 operating reactors and at commercial reactors that have been decommissioned. Although it found no unmanageable safety or security risks with current spent-fuel storage practices at reactor sites, it cautioned that "rigorous efforts will be needed to ensure this continues to be the case." Spent fuel that is stored at decommissioned reactor sites should be the first in line for transport to consolidated storage, it said.

Chartered by Energy Secretary Steven Chu in January 2010 after President Obama terminated construction of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, the commission also urged creation of a new government agency with the sole purpose of selecting the locations of the proposed interim storage and repository facilities. The proposed agency should be given the necessary financial and institutional resources, as well as sufficient authority, to make its policies stick.

The panel said that the new agency must be allowed to tap the Nuclear Waste Fund, the reserve financed by a levy on the electric bills of nuclear utility ratepayers. The fund has been accumulating monies since it was established under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 to pay for the construction of a repository. Including interest, the fund currently stands at $35 billion, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.

The commission called for a transparent science- and consent-based process to be used in the selection of new storage and disposal sites. That would contrast with the political process that resulted in the 1987 selection by Congress of the Yucca Mountain site. Over the years, the Department of Energy spent more than $10 billion performing scientific and environmental studies of the Nevada site as it fought off repeated legal and legislative challenges from the state. Nuclear utilities also have sued DOE, which was supposed to begin accepting waste into the repository in 1998.

The panel looked into reprocessing, advanced reactors, and other fuel-cycle technologies as potential alternatives to storage, but it concluded that no reasonably foreseeable technologies could change the waste management problem for several decades. It did recommend that the government continue to fund R&D and demonstration of advanced reactors and fuel-cycle technologies, with a goal of improving their economics, safety, and nonproliferation characteristics.

David Kramer

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

To make sure that the best practices are followed by the industry, Energy Secretary Steven Chu has appointed a committee to recommend environmental and safety improvements for fracking. The seven-member panel consists of environmental, industry and state regulatory experts and is chaired by MIT chemist and former CIA director John Deutch. Within 90 days the committee will submit its recommendations on any immediate steps that could be taken, Chu set a six-month deadline for delivery of separate advice for federal regulatory agencies.

Other members of the committee include former Clinton administration officials Kathleen McGinty, who chaired the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and Susan Tierney, former assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Energy. Others are global energy analyst and Pulitzer-prize winning author Daniel Yergin, Stanford University geophysicist Mark Zoback, Texas A&M University petroleum engineer Stephen Holditch, and Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp. The panel was established as a subcommittee of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, although only Deutch, Tierney, and Yergin are members of the full SEAB.

Announcement of the panel's formation drew criticism from some lawmakers who believe the gas exploration business is already sufficiently regulated. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, accused the Department of Energy of "piling on" in getting involved with an issue that is already overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. Noting that fracking has been used in gas extraction for more than 60 years, Upton complained in a statement that "adding another study to the mix will do little to prove anything and only serve to waste more government resources."

David Kramer

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• The growing public discussion about the reportClimate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate
  
• Newt Gingrich's conservative support for science funding
  
• A prominent biodiversity scientist's perspective on environmentalism, climate and energy
  
• The nuclear industry's future prompts discouraging views in the New York Times
  
• Disagreement between Wall Street Journal opinion writers and a teachers' union leader on education reform
  

Matthew Nisbet's controversial climate report

As many in the physics community know, Matthew C. Nisbet holds faculty positions in both communication and environmental science at American University in Washington, DC. Here's a collage of excerpts from the already voluminous public discussion, mainly online so far, of his new report, Climate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate.

"So now greens are in the post-mortem stage, and, not shockingly, it's a sensitive subject," wrote Bradford Plumer, an associate editor at the New Republic, in the 21 April article "Blame Game: Has the green movement been a miserable flop?" Plumer continued:

Matthew Nisbet ... [has] released a hefty 84-page report trying to figure out why climate activism flopped so miserably in the past few years. Nisbet's report is already causing controversy: Among other things, he argues that, contrary to popular belief, greens weren't badly outspent by industry groups and that media coverage of climate science wasn't really a problem.

Ezra Klein's Washington Post blog quoted Plumer, and then said of Nisbet's report, "Reading through it, I started to wonder if there was another option worth considering. Maybe none of the theories about what went wrong are correct. It's quite possible that climate activists basically did a competent job: After all, they did get a big, complicated bill to the 20-yard-line in a legislative body that rarely passes big, complicated bills—and they just got unlucky."

Nature's 21 April editorial "Home truths: A new report offers useful insight into the continuing stalemate over global warming" declared that the Nisbet report "shines light on some uncomfortable truths" and "should be essential reading for anyone with a passing interest in the climate-change debate." The editors emphasize that it "effectively dismantles three of the most common reasons given by those who have tried, and failed, to garner widespread support for policies to restrict greenhouse gases." The editors continued:

First—the failure of the US Senate to pass a cap-and-trade bill in 2010 cannot be blamed directly on the financial lobbying muscle of the conservative movement and its allies in industry. In 2009, the report says, although a network of prominent opponents of cap and trade, including ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, spent a total of US$272 million lobbying policy-makers, environmental groups in favour of cap and trade mobilized $229 million from companies such as General Electric and other supporters to lobby for environmental issues. Indeed, the effort to pass cap and trade, Nisbet notes, "may have been the best-financed political cause in American history".

Second—most of the mainstream media coverage of climate change gets it right. During 2009 and 2010, Nisbet writes, around nine out of ten news and opinion articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN's online site reflected the consensus scientific position. The Wall Street Journal regularly presented the opposite view in its opinion pages, but eight out of ten news items still backed the science.

Third—conservative media outlets such as Fox News and controversies such as the coverage of e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom have a minimal impact on public attitudes to climate change, because such influences tend to only reinforce the views of those who already hold doubts.

The failure of cap and trade in the United States, Nisbet concludes, was not down to poor communication, but was due to framing the issue of greenhouse-gas emissions as a problem that could be solved by a specific policy. More useful, he says, would be to present climate change as an issue that needs to be addressed at many levels, similar to public health or poverty. Those, of course, are far from ideal models—but we live in far from ideal times.

At the New York Times's Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin has now offered two postings about the report and the discussion surrounding it.

He begins the first posting, "Beyond the Climate Blame Game," by reporting that on "the tiny patch of American public discourse reserved for the global warming debate ... a week of blogitation over a sprawling report examining failed efforts to pass a climate bill has started to give way to constructive discussion." Revkin explains that Nisbet's report "explores who had the biggest advantage—in money and media spin—in the fight over a cap-and-trade climate bill, along with cultural issues, like the deep liberal tilt among scientists, that flavor how such battles are waged." He links to several other blog discussions, quotes the views of several formal reviewers, mainly from academe, and offers what he calls "a few overarching observations about the report, the fate of the climate bill, American attitudes on energy and the influence of environmental and anti-regulatory forces in Washington."

Revkin says that his second posting, "Two Views of Climate Cause and Effect," is "for anyone wishing to dig in deeper on missteps and next steps on the climate challenge." He offers replies received from Nisbet and from Joe Romm of the Climate Progress blog, whom Revkin calls "one of Nisbet's staunchest critics." The replies address questions from Revkin "related to the overall question of influence, effort and outcomes after nearly a decade aimed at producing a comprehensive climate bill centered on carbon trading."

Conservatives for science funding, cont.

As reported in January, the conservative columnist George F. Will, addressing kindred spirits concerning the federal budget, cited the National Academies' Gathering Storm reports and declared that federally funded research has become "what canals and roads once were—a prerequisite for long-term economic vitality." Shortly later he wrote in support of STEM education. Now a Wall Street Journal columnist, David Wessel, has likened the conservative Newt Gingrich to President Obama when it comes to support for science.

Wessel's 28 April column, headlined "Republicans Split Over Research Spending," reports that Gingrich is accusing Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), "chairman of the House Budget Committee and leader of the quest to shrink government . . . of a big mistake: Spending too little on medical and scientific research." He quotes Gingrich on the lack of wisdom in scanting science: "It's essentially like saying I want to save money on your car [so] we're not going to change the oil. And for about a year I can get away with it, then the engine will freeze, and we have to change the engine." Wessel emphasizes: "In making the case for more government investment in research, [Gingrich] sounds like Barack Obama."

Wessel joins in with his own support as well when he asks readers to "ponder these facts":

Federal spending on payments for individuals (everything from housing subsidies to health care) has doubled over the past 30 years, as a share of the economy. Defense spending fell when the Cold War ended, but has been climbing for a decade.

Yet everything else—including all spending intended to pay off in the future—has been flat, setting aside the temporary Obama fiscal stimulus. Of the $3.5 trillion the federal government spent in 2010, only 1.6% went to non-defense physical capital, R&D, education and training, the White House budget office says. That's half the size of the share for this spending in the early 1970s.

Wessel also invokes business leaders' support of federal science funding:

Many corporate executives side with Messrs. Gingrich and Obama. Along with calling for lower taxes and less regulation, they've been arguing—to quote a recent statement signed by the Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs—for "federal investment to prepare our children with world-class educations and to support the scientific and technology research and innovation infrastructure that enable the private sector to create jobs."

The columnist sums things up this way: "It's a reminder that in the debate over government-spending priorities, the differences aren't exclusively between the two parties, but sometimes within them."

Jesse Ausubel's environmental outlook

Please consider the environmental reconnaissance projects that Jesse H. Ausubel has contributed or helped contribute to biodiversity science, and then please consider his outlook on environmentalism—including energy and climate—overall. The four projects:

1. The Census of Marine Life has completed a ten-year investigation of diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life.
2. The International Barcode of Life project has collected more than a million specimens and has defined the DNA bar codes for more than 95 732 species.
3. Edward O. Wilson's Encyclopedia of Life calls itself a "global partnership between the scientific community and the general public" with the goal of making "freely available to anyone knowledge about all the world's organisms."
4. The Deep Carbon Observatory is a "multidisciplinary, international initiative dedicated to achieving a transformational understanding of Earth's deep carbon cycle"; it "deploys ships to drill deep holes, runs a fleet of helicopters to install instruments on every volcano on earth, and develops new apparatus to test the deep physics and chemistry of carbon."

Ausubel, of Rockefeller University, serves as vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New York, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nicholas Wade profiled him on the front page of this week's Science Times section in the New York Times.

Ausubel, Wade reports, believes that technology will, in general, protect rather than harm the environment. Wade continues:

Over the long run, [Ausubel] notes, the economy requires more efficient forms of energy, and these are inherently sparing of the environment. Cities used to use wood for heat and hay for transport fuel. But the required volumes of wood and horse feed soon led to more compact fuels like coal and oil.

Coal in turn is giving way to natural gas in a process that Mr. Ausubel calls decarbonization, the replacement of carbon-rich fuels with hydrogen-rich ones. The ultimate fuel source, in his view, is nuclear power, with reactors set to produce electricity by day and hydrogen, the fuel for battery-powered cars, by night. He sees little that might thwart the mighty process of decarbonization, even given setbacks like Japan's nuclear crisis. "The energy system absorbs shocks even as big as Fukushima," he says.

As a program officer with the National Academy of Sciences, Mr. Ausubel worked with senior scientists who had broad experience in running international environmental programs. He was involved in planning the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting but has viewed the panel's subsequent reports with reserve. Climate change went from being a small to a major issue. "And then the expected happened," he said. "Opportunists flowed in. By 1992 I stopped wanting to go to climate meetings."

Because of decarbonization, Mr. Ausubel believes that the growth of carbon dioxide emissions will be limited. "The computer models of the climate system aren't good enough and never will be. I tend not to be frightened because I think the natural evolution of the energy system is away from carbon," he said.

Wade explains that it was Ausubel's "belief that technology is generally relieving the pressure on the terrestrial environment that led to his interest in marine life" and the oceans—because they seemed to be being left under pressure. When Ausubel started the Deep Carbon Observatory in 2009, Wade writes, he had long been interested in the idea "that oil and gas are produced by deep-earth microbes feeding on natural sources of methane," which led to the idea "that oil wells might be naturally replenished from vast sources of carbon deep in the planet." This line of thinking originated with the Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold.

Wade continues:

Whether Dr. Gold's ideas are correct, the behavior of carbon in the deep earth is an issue of considerable scientific moment. The deep earth is full of microbes that lead a largely independent existence from those on the surface. This dark world, flourishing but largely unknown, could have been the origin of life on earth and may influence it in many other ways. There is reason to think the deep earth contains hidden reservoirs of carbon—meteorites of the type that formed the primitive earth are 3 percent carbon, but the detectable abundance of carbon is only 0.1 percent. Discovery of a hidden carbon reservoir in the deep earth, especially if it is connected with the origins of oil and gas, could change estimates of energy supplies.

At the end of the profile, Wade sums up by noting that Ausubel "does not belong to the Jeremiah school of environmentalists who prophesy imminent doom unless their words are heeded." He quotes Ausubel: "The credibility of the environmental movement as a whole is less than its members wish it to be, and a lot of that has come from overdoing it on various issues."

New York Times sees nuclear slowdown

Under the headline "Despite Bipartisan Support, Nuclear Reactor Projects Falter," the New York Times reports that six years after Congress authorized
$17.5 billion in loan guarantees for new reactors, market conditions and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster have stalled the nuclear industry, and nearly half of the fund remains unclaimed.

"Even supporters of the technology," writes Matthew Wald, "doubt that new projects will surface any time soon to replace those that have been all but abandoned." He cites Neil Wilmshurst, a vice president of the Electric Power Research Institute, who "said the continued depressed price of natural gas had clouded the economics of new reactors" and "predicted that construction activity would 'go quiet' for two to five years." Wald reports that of "the four nuclear reactor construction projects that the Energy Department identified in 2009 as the most deserving for the loans, two have lost major partners and seem unlikely to recover soon."

The situation also involves the politics of carbon dioxide emissions, Wald says:

The initial $17.5 billion was approved during the Bush administration, but President Obama has also embraced the idea of marrying nuclear power to solar, wind and "clean coal" to reach his administration's goal of generating 80 percent of American electricity from those sources by 2035. Mr. Obama's call for new loan guarantees came when the administration was seeking Republican votes in the Senate for a limit on carbon dioxide emissions, but he has stuck with the loan guarantees even after prospects for such legislation died after last fall's midterm elections.

Wald does report some optimism in the federal government:

Officials at the Energy Department, which administers the loans, said they were confident that other developers would come forward and apply for the guarantees. Jonathan M. Silver, the executive director of the loan programs office, said, "There is a significant queue of nuclear power plants in house that we will and are working on."

"They may just go forward under a different time frame," he said, but he declined to estimate how many years it would be before the government could reach its goal of providing loan guarantees to six to eight reactor projects.

Mr. Silver said that by the time a reactor could be finished and brought on line, market factors might be more in the industry's favor. "There are so many variables in this equation, taking a snapshot may be less relevant than watching the whole movie," he said.

And near the end, Wald paraphrases Michael J. Wallace, a former nuclear industry executive: "With a carbon tax no longer appearing likely, he said a new kind of help, like a federal 'clean energy' standard that would set a quota for nuclear and renewable electricity, might be needed."

But overall, Wald conveys doubt about nuclear industry prospects.

Randi Weingarten's hard month at the Wall Street Journal

Followers of—and participants in—the education wars might want to know that Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers since 2008, has been having a hard time on the Wall Street Journal opinion page.

In a 26 March "Weekend Interview" article under the headline "Weingarten for the Union Defense," a member of the WSJ's editorial board presented her as a hard-core opponent of good sense. He noted that recent documentaries have "highlighted how teachers unions block or stifle education reforms to the detriment of the low-income minority kids who populate the nation's worst schools." He charged that donations from the unions "go overwhelmingly to Democrats, and the role that member dues play in the wider liberal movement can be seen in teachers union support for everything from abortion rights to single-payer health care to statehood for Washington, D.C." He wrote:

And so it goes. Ms. Weingarten insists that teachers unions are agents of change, not defenders of the status quo. But in the next breath she shoots down suggestions for changes—vouchers, charter schools, differential teacher pay and so on—that have become important parts of the reform conversation. She seems to conceive of her job as the one William F. Buckley Jr. ascribed to conservatives in the 1950s: To stand athwart history yelling "Stop!"

A few days later, two letters to the editor appeared. The shorter letter complimented "the vast majority of America's teachers [as] both highly competent and highly dedicated." The longer letter began, "Jason L. Riley's 'The Weekend Interview With Randi Weingarten' (March 26) is truly frightening. As long as Ms. Weingarten leads the teachers union and speaks for any sizeable cross-section of teachers, our public education system will get worse before it gets better."

Early this week Weingarten asserted her own voice directly, via an op-ed under the headline "Markets Aren't the Education Solution." Though "market-based reforms" have been "promoted by the so-called reformers in the United States," she wrote, they have little in common with policies in educationally successful nations. She charged that "the evidence clearly shows that a heavy reliance on charter schools, performance pay, overuse of standardized tests and ignoring poverty won't adequately prepare our children for college, career and life."

She added: "With supreme certainty and blind zeal, market-based reformers are doubling down on an agenda that has failed to produce the transforming gains they promised. They disparage and delegitimize any gains that traditional public schools as well as their teachers (and their unions) have delivered for kids." She cited a Stanford University study's discouraging findings on charter schools and a Vanderbilt University study's discouraging findings on merit pay. She endorsed "countries like Finland, Singapore and South Korea," which "emphasize teacher preparation, mentoring and collaboration" and "revere and respect their teachers" rather than "demonize them." In a comment sure to gather special notice from some of the WSJ's opinion-page readers, she expressed admiration for countries that "offset the effects of poverty through on-site wraparound services such as medical and dental care and counseling" in public schools.

A few days later, four letters appeared under the headline "Accountability Is the Crux of Serious School Reform." All four criticized Weingarten.

The first came from Joel Klein, who served as chancellor of New York City public schools from 2002 to 2010. He wrote, in part:

Top-performing countries revere teachers because they get great results (that's why they're top performing). Those countries recruit teachers from the top of their graduating classes, insist on excellence and don't protect underperformers. America does precisely the opposite, largely recruiting from the bottom half of our graduates and protecting even the worst of them. . . . As long as unions continue to protect low-performing teachers, the solution for America's families is to give them choices so they can escape dead-end schools staffed by poor teachers.

The other three complete Weingarten's hard month at the WSJ. Here is one excerpt apiece:

1. "Let's examine why U.S. spending on elementary and secondary schools is 50% more than in Finland and Korea—two countries which Ms. Weingarten claims have things to teach us—while our kids are learning less."
2. "The real demon is the union-backed tenure system which keeps bad teachers in the classroom."
3. "Instead of a one-scale-fits-all pay approach, teachers, at least the good ones, should benefit from a more competitive labor market in which school administrators could offer salaries commensurate with expected student performance rather than being determined by an arbitrary salary scale."

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.

• 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.

In early May, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will resume their quest to attain a major milestone on the path to controlled nuclear fusion. Using the 192-beam laser at the National Ignition Facility, the researchers aim to implode a bb-sized sphere of deuterium and tritium. If the powerful illumination is sufficiently uniform, the nuclei will fuse into helium and release many times more energy than it took to initiate the reaction.

The National Ignition Campaign, as the experimental program is formally known, got under way last fall, 18 months after construction of the $3.5-billion NIF was declared finished in March 2009. In the NIC experiments, pulses from the lasers are directed through ports into a 10-meter-diameter target chamber onto a dime-sized cylindrical target. The beams enter the cylinder, known as a hohlraum, through windows located at each end. For ignition to occur, the scientists must tune to within nanoseconds the timing of multiple shocks that are delivered within a single pulse of the laser. If the timing or the power applied by the shocks is slightly off, the sphere will implode unevenly into a pancake or sausage shape and fizzle.

The complexity of the NIC challenge became evident over the winter when scientists found that surrogate fuel pellets weren't behaving the way they had predicted when they hit them with laser pulses. They were flattening instead, says Edward Moses, LLNL's principal associate director for NIF and photon sciences. The scientists eventually traced the problem to an unanticipated formation of frost on the hohlraum windows. The targets must be cooled to 20 K to keep the fusion fuel frozen, Moses explains. But because of its large size, the degree of vacuum that the target chamber can maintain is limited. Some moisture was condensing on the glass and distorting the angles of the laser beams as they entered the hohlraum. The solution turned out to be installing a second layer of glass over the hohlraum windows with an air gap between the two—essentially creating a storm window.

The frost problem was officially declared fixed on 23 January, the day before Steven Koonin, DOE undersecretary for science, visited the lab for a scheduled review of the ignition campaign. Koonin has taken an intense interest in the ignition campaign; he convened a panel of experts, chaired by himself, to review its progress. Critics, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, have complained that the Koonin committee does not hold its meetings in public. Last fall, Koonin commissioned a separate study from the National Research Council to recommend whether DOE should initiate a research program on inertial fusion as a potential energy source. The NRC committee is scheduled to deliver its interim recommendations this summer.

In a 10 March memorandum summarizing his January visit to NIF, Koonin called ignition "a goal of overriding importance for the DOE." He expressed some disappointment that progress since his previous visit in mid-October "was not as rapid as I had hoped." In addition to the frost, other operational problems encountered during the period were dust in the targets and trouble with the layering of the deuterium, tritium, and hydrogen cryogenic fuel mixtures used for the targets. Koonin said that discrepancies had arisen between measurements obtained from experimental shots and predicted values. On the other hand, he lauded the "control and consistency" achieved by the laser and said the target diagnostics were "working extremely well." In sum, he said "The degree of experiment control that has been achieved is an outstanding accomplishment and is fundamental to ignition success."

Solving the frost problem

John Lindl, NIF's chief scientist, says the results that Koonin saw during his review were from experiments performed before the storm-windows were installed. Lindl welcomed the DOE official's comments on reproducibility. "One of the huge challenges for NIF was to achieve the level of shot-to-shot reproducibility that is required for ignition," he says. No other high-power laser facility has been able to reproduce results with such precision, he says, with shot-to-shot results varying only a few percent.

Repeatable results are crucial because producing meaningful amounts of energy will require firing targets every few seconds. "Eventually they will have to be able to do [ignition] at will," notes Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, an industry group that promotes fusion energy.

Ignition experiments were halted temporarily in mid-February to allow other scheduled weapons physics and science experiments to proceed at NIF. The NIC is scheduled to resume around 1 May, and run through July 1.

Lindl is confident that with the frost problem solved, "we will be able to go in and get a precision optimization of the early part of the pulse, which is necessary to get high density. Then we will apply that to the cryo-layer implosion to see whether we can get the improvement that we were anticipating."

Moses says the frost had also caused the fuel-layering problems Koonin mentioned. Before they came up with the storm window idea, experimenters took measures to limit the frost that inadvertently prevented them from producing the precisely layered fusion fuel crystals they needed, says Moses. With the storm windows installed, "the layering is looking much better," he says, but he cautions that further results are needed before declaring the issue resolved.

Although Koonin wrote in the March memo that "having targets with the desired attributes available on schedule has been limiting," Moses and Lindl praise General Atomics, which manufactures them. Moses says the targets are designed and delivered to tolerances within microns. Adds Lindl, "We have targets that will allow us to precisely adjust each piece of the [laser] pulse, from early time all the way up to peak power."

Although the laser is designed to produce 1.8 megajoules, the maximum achieved to date has been 1.5 MJ. "We've been running the machine where the users want it," Moses says, adding that he hopes to fire the laser at 1.8 MJ this fall for experiments not related to NIC. He points out that NIF is on or slightly ahead of a long-established schedule to reach 1.8-MJ operation during fiscal year 2012.

It isn't clear yet when ignition will be achieved, and some skeptics remained convinced that NIF won't meet the goal. One persistent critic of NIF, Stephen Bodner, who formerly directed a "direct-drive" laser-fusion research program at the Naval Research Laboratory, maintains that LLNL's failure to take into account unwanted physics phenomena such as dielectronic recombination and fast-electron generation will prevent NIC from achieving the required implosion symmetry. "Fundamentally, the indirect-drive target is a clumsy and inelegant solution to laser fusion," Bodner says. Whatever the case, it's clear that the project will be taking longer than the early success optimists were predicting when the campaign began.

David Kramer