Bilancio desolato di Masahiro Sugiyama et al. su Nature:
Next week will mark five years since 11 March 2011, the day of the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the accident that followed at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant of the Tokyo Electric Power Company. The quake and tsunamis killed nearly 16,000 people and injured more than 6,000; 2,600 are still missing.
Si occupano sopratutto delle decisioni politiche riguardanti l’energia e l’ambiente,
Decommissioning involves many disciplines, including nuclear engineering, meteorology and oceanic-risk assessments, ecology and remediation. By soliciting international research proposals, CLADS (Collaborative Laboratories for Advanced Decommissioning Science) should involve more researches from elsewhere in Asia, where many countries have nuclear ambitions, including China, South Korea, India and many southeast Asian countries. Working with overseas scientists, CLADS should publish some outcomes in English.
Ma il problema è più generale:
We strongly believe that the events and aftermath of 11 March highlighted a fundamental problem with research in Japan: weak connections between disciplines and between Japan’s scholars and those working in other countries. In a nation that performs world-class research in conventional disciplines, interdisciplinary scholarship lags, and Japanese researchers are keenly aware of this.
Accennano anche alla piattaforma della ricerca sulla sostenibilità Future Earth, che a loro avviso dovrebbe mirare a trovare soluzioni. Ne parla anche un editoriale che invece conclude:
Future Earth might also become a showcase for linking natural and social sciences — a real necessity given that human activity is altering the planet at worrying speed. But sustainability research must not become tied in the straitjacket of conceptualism and utilitarianism. Scientists are not merely service providers. As in any other field of science, sustainability research must remain at its core a curiosity-driven affair.
Altri tre bilanci su Science. Dennis Normile, in “Slow burn”
Now, the nuclear refugees face a dilemma: How much radiation in their former homes is safe? In a herculean effort, authorities have so far scooped up some 9 million cubic meters of contaminated soil and leaves and washed down buildings and roadways with the goal of reducing outdoor radiation exposure to 0.23 microsieverts per hour. Last September, the government began lifting evacuation orders for the seven municipalities wholly or partly within 20 kilometers of the plant. As the work progresses, authorities expect that 70% of the evacuees will be allowed to return home by spring 2017.
But evacuees are torn over safety and compensation issues. Many claim they are being compelled to go home, even though radiation exposure levels, they feel, are still too high. “There has been no education regarding radiation,” says Katsunobu Sakurai, the mayor of Minamisoma, where 14,000 people were evacuated after the accident. (…)
Cleanup is of to a slow start, hampered by sketchy knowledge of where the nuclear fuel is located. Last year managers agreed to a road map for decommissioning the site over the next 30 to 40 years that calls for removing melted nuclear fuel masses and demolishing the plant’s four reactor halls at a cost that could top $9 billion. TEPCO intends to start removing nuclear debris from the reactors in 2021.
Li rimuoveranno dei robot, dopo quattro anni di prove ed errori, prevede Timothy Hornyak, in “Trial by meltdown”
Five years after the accident, robots are finally ready to enter the ruined reactors en masse. They are now expected to play an essential part in the daunting task of decontaminating and dismantling the reactors. Roboticists are making halting progress in developing machines for specific tasks, such as decontaminating and removing melted nuclear fuel masses, but they know that their creations need to be adaptable.
Dennis Normile racconta anche dei liceali di Fukushima – la città fuori della zona evacuata – che nel 2014 insieme ad altri in Giappone, Polonia, Francia e Bielorussia, hanno tenuto un dosimetro addosso per 2 settimane e sono risultati poco più esposti alle radiazioni degli altri. In “Epidemic of fear“, riassume la controversia sul paper di Tsuda et al. pubblicato da Epidemiology, secondo il quale
the first round of screening indicated cancer incidence rates ranging from 0 to 605 cases per million kids, depending on location, but overall “an approximately 30-fold increase” over the normal childhood cancer rate.
Ma
Other Japanese studies reported thyroid cancer rates of 300, 350, and even 1300 per million. “The prevalence of thyroid cancer detected by advanced ultrasound techniques in other areas of Japan does not differ meaningfully from that in Fukushima Prefecture,” Takamura wrote in Epidemiology.
(altri commenti sull’ultimo numero della rivista). C’era stata una polemica analoga dopo Chernobyl.
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L’Outlook di Nature è sulla “salute cognitiva“, lo tengo per dopo. Nei paper paper ho letto solo Spitler et al.. Confermano che i lampi radio non sono emessi nella “catastrofe” finale della loro sorgente:
Here we report observations of ten additional bursts from the direction of the fast radio burst FRB 121102. These bursts have dispersion measures and sky positions consistent with the original burst.
Potrebbero provenire da “una stella di neutroni giovane, altamente magnetizzata ed extra-galattica”.
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Il paziente “zero” che avrebbe introdotto l’HIV in California e da lì nel resto degli Stati Uniti, non era il canadese Gaétan Dugas, scrive Jon Cohen, su Science:
the U.S. epidemic most likely began in New York City around 1970, when the real index case brought in a virus that closely matched the sequences of older HIVs isolated from people in Haiti and a few other Caribbean countries. Although his sample size is small – ha detto Michael Worobey alla Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, ndt– the probability that New York City was the origin of the U.S. epidemic “is very, very high indeed.” He estimates the virus reached San Francisco around 1975.
John Bohannon era a una riunione su “lies, damned lies and statistics”:
At a meeting on survey data fabrication in Washington, D.C., last week, Michael Robbins and Noble Kuriakose presented an update on a newly developed statistical test that has been roiling the survey research community for the past year. When they apply the test to more than 1000 public data sets from international surveys, about one in five of the surveys fail, indicating a high likelihood of fabricated data. At the meeting, they debuted an analysis focusing on 309 of Pew’s international studies that found a failure rate of 30%.
… “We found out about this study and were very alarmed,” says Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research for Pew. She and her colleagues used the same test on Pew’s surveys and found that a “certain share” failed by Robbins and Kuriakose’s standards, Kennedy says, but follow-up investigation left the organization convinced only a “handful” were suspicious.
Aveva chiesto a Robbins e Kuriakose di ritirare il paper, ma ci ha ripensato. Adesso tocca agli statistici trovare i motivi della differenza.
Nei paper di Science, ho letto solo quello di Colin Camerer et al. sulla riproducibilità di 18 esperimenti (fonti a p. 13) di micro-economia sperimentale, 16 usciti sull’American Economic Review e 2 sul Quarterly Journal of Economics: 11 (il 61%) sono stati confermati, ma con un effetto inferiore di un terzo rispetto a quello trovato nell’originale. Commento di John Bohannon, nessun dubbio in merito al campione, alla sua selezione e alla metrica sull‘Economist, e più di uno da Retraction Watch.