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DOE OSTI2018

An Alternative to the Continued Accumulation of Separated Plutonium in Japan: Dry Cask Storage of Spent Fuel

As of the end of 2017, Japan had a stockpile of 48 tons of separated plutonium. It will take more than a decade for Japan to convert most of that plutonium into “mixed-oxide” (MOX) fuel and load it into power reactors licensed to use such fuel. This is a very costly program. Including the cost of reprocessing, MOX fuel costs about ten times more than the low-enriched-uranium fuel that otherwise would be used by these reactors. Yet Japan has a policy to start separating more plutonium from spent reactor fuel as soon as the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant can be put into operation – currently projected for 2021 after 24 years of delay due to a variety of technical problems and upgrades in safety requirements. Japan’s government remains committed to this costly and troubled program primarily because, pending the availability of additional spent-fuel storage space on or off site, reprocessing is seen as the only way to get spent fuel out of reactor pools that are getting full. Because of concerns about the safety of dense-packed spent-fuel pools, however, the prefectures and towns hosting Japan’s power reactors are beginning to accept on-site storage of spent fuel in dry casks. This is the option the United States and many other countries chose after they cancelled their reprocessing programs and their powerplant pools filled up. Its increasing availability in Japan, if backed by a determined policy to accelerate its introduction, should make it possible to cancel reprocessing in Japan as well.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2020

Development of Dry Cask Risk Tools

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has repeatedly expressed a desire to increase the use of risk in its decision-making. The Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) Policy Statement published in 1995 formalized the Commission’s commitment to risk-informed regulation through the expanded use of PRA. While a great deal of work has been done to incorporate risk insights into the regulatory framework for at-power nuclear reactors. Far less progress has been made to risk inform the dry-casks and nuclear waste transportation areas of the nuclear fuel cycle. INL was tasked with incorporating the information from the two completed dry cask PRAs as well as any additional available information into a tool that helps the NRC use those insights to identify levels of risk at various stages in the nuclear waste cycle. The first task was to address the License Amendment Request (LAR) Process for Dry Cask storage, the second task is for the incorporate transportation into the tool, and the third and final task will be incorporate any additional regulatory applications for dry cask storage. This report covers the first task of the tool and will eventually incorporate the remaining two tasks may be completed in the future and built off the model described here. Task 1 specifically asked to incorporate the risk insights into the process for determining and prioritizing review of license amendment changes related to storage applications by outlining a resource allocation strategy and defining recommendations of for the depth and breadth of the LAR review. It was requested that the tool be similar in design to the SDP notebooks/worksheets and contain quantitative, qualitative, or semi-quantitative approaches to assessing the risk of the change. The final tool that was selected by INL to be developed was a flowchart and associated rationale document that allows the reviewer to quickly assess potential LAR changes and their associated risks as well as the rationale behind the risk categorization. This risk categorization will lead to specific actionable recommendations to expect from a change of that specific category. This allows for a more consistent review process as well as improving the overall efficiency of the review itself.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗

DOE OSTI2022

Knowing the unknown: The underestimation of monkeypox cases. Insights and implications from an integrative review of the literature

Monkeypox is an emerging zoonotic disease caused by the monkeypox virus, which is an infectious agent belonging to the genus Orthopoxvirus. Currently, commencing from the end of April 2022, an outbreak of monkeypox is ongoing, with more than 43,000 cases reported as of 23 August 2022, involving 99 countries and territories across all the six World Health Organization (WHO) regions. On 23 July 2022, the Director-General of the WHO declared monkeypox a global public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), since the outbreak represents an extraordinary, unusual, and unexpected event that poses a significant risk for international spread, requiring an immediate, coordinated international response. However, the real magnitude of the burden of disease could be masked by failures in ascertainment and under-detection. As such, underestimation affects the efficiency and reliability of surveillance and notification systems and compromises the possibility of making informed and evidence-based policy decisions in terms of the adoption and implementation of ad hoc adequate preventive measures. In this review, synthesizing 53 papers, we summarize the determinants of the underestimation of sexually transmitted diseases, in general, and, in particular, monkeypox, in terms of all their various components and dimensions (under-ascertainment, underreporting, under-detection, under-diagnosis, misdiagnosis/misclassification, and under-notification).

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2016

History v. Simulation: An Analysis of the Drivers of Alternative Energy Vehicle Sales

Simulations of the US light duty vehicle stock help policy makers, investors, and auto manufacturers make informed decisions to influence the future of the stock and its associated green house gas emissions. Such simulations require an underlying framework that captures the key elements of consumer purchasing decisions, which can be uncertain. This uncertainty in a simulation’s logic is usually convolved with uncertainty in the underlying assumptions about the futures of energy prices and technology innovation and availability. By comparing simulated alternative energy vehicle (AEV) sales to historical sales data, one can assess the simulation’s ability to capture the dynamics of consumer choice, independent of many of those underlying uncertainties, thereby determining the factors that most strongly impact sales. The market for diesel vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles, and to a lesser extent plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and all-electric vehicles, has now matured sufficiently to make such a study possible. In this work, we measure the results of the Sandia ParaChoice model under a variety of input assumptions against historical sales data. Here, we observe that (1) the underlying simulation logic is sound, capturing key drivers of consumer choice, (2) AEV model availability has a significant impact on sales, and (3) AEV consumers are very likely aware of purchasing incentives and factoring those incentives into their purchasing decisions.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

NASA NTRS1980

Management. A continuing bibliography with indexes

This bibliography cites 604 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in 1979 covering the management of research and development, contracts, production, logistics, personnel, safety, reliability and quality control. Program, project, and systems management; management policy, philosophy, tools, and techniques; decision making processes for managers; technology assessment; management of urban problems; and information for managers on Federal resources, expenditures, financing, and budgeting are also covered. Abstracts are provided as well as subject, personal author, and corporate source indexes.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS2010

Aircraft Trajectory Optimization and Contrails Avoidance in the Presence of Winds

There are indications that persistent contrails can lead to adverse climate change, although the complete effect on climate forcing is still uncertain. A flight trajectory optimization algorithm with fuel and contrails models, which develops alternative flight paths, provides policy makers the necessary data to make tradeoffs between persistent contrails mitigation and aircraft fuel consumption. This study develops an algorithm that calculates wind-optimal trajectories for cruising aircraft while avoiding the regions of airspace prone to persistent contrails formation. The optimal trajectories are developed by solving a non-linear optimal control problem with path constraints. The regions of airspace favorable to persistent contrails formation are modeled as penalty areas that aircraft should avoid and are adjustable. The tradeoff between persistent contrails formation and additional fuel consumption is investigated, with and without altitude optimization, for 12 city-pairs in the continental United States. Without altitude optimization, the reduction in contrail travel times is gradual with increase in total fuel consumption. When altitude is optimized, a two percent increase in total fuel consumption can reduce the total travel times through contrail regions by more than six times. Allowing further increase in fuel consumption does not seem to result in proportionate decrease in contrail travel times.

Ng, Hok K.↗

NASA NTRS2010

Concepts and Challenges for Environmentally Friendly En Route Operations

A flight trajectory optimization algorithm with fuel and contrails models, which develops alternative flight paths, provides policy makers the necessary data to make tradeoffs between persistent contrails mitigation and aircraft fuel consumption. This study develops an algorithm that calculates wind-optimal trajectories for cruising aircraft while avoiding the regions of airspace prone to persistent contrails formation. The optimal trajectory is derived using Singular Perturbation Method. The regions of airspace favorable to persistent contrails formation are modeled as high-risk areas that aircraft should avoid and are adjustable. The tradeoffs between persistent contrails formation and additional travel time are investigated for wind-optimal trajectories and various contrails-avoidance trajectories at 10 different cruising altitudes for flights departing from Chicago and San Diego to New York. The additional travel times required for avoiding 100% persistent contrails formation at various flight altitudes ranged from approximately 0% to 4.3% for flights from Chicago to New York. For flights between San Diego and New York, additional traveling times vary between 1.3% and 5% depending on the cruise altitude and the percentage of contrail avoidance. Talk will present the results of aircraft fuel consumptions that are proportional to the travel time for cruising aircraft.

Sridhar, Banavar↗

NASA NTRS2023

Cost and Benefit Analysis of Orbital Debris Remediation

This report describes a cost-benefit analysis of approaches for debris remediation, which is defined as any action taken to reduce the risks posed by orbital debris by moving, removing, or reusing it. A better understanding of the near-term costs and benefits of the different approaches to remediation can support decision-making about R&D investment and policy creation in this area.

Thomas J. Colvin↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Cost Benefit Analysis of Space Debris Remediation

These slides provide a high-level summary of a cost-benefit analysis of approaches for debris remediation, which is defined as any action taken to reduce the risks posed by orbital debris by moving, removing, or reusing it. A better understanding of the near-term costs and benefits of the different approaches to remediation can support decision-making about R&D investment and policy creation in this area.

Tom Colvin↗

NASA NTRS2023

Exploring Interactive Visuals for Orbital Debris Report

NASA often produces reports or memos that include complex data and these findings can often be most effectively communicated using dynamic or interactive visualizations. While newsrooms, such as the New York Times, and academic journals, such as Distill, have demonstrated the power of interactivity within a prose context (i.e., not dashboards), NASA is still lagging in this area. A shift towards more interactive NASA publications will require new technology and expertise. In this presentation, we begin to explore the avenues that the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy are using to make its reports interactive by using results from the “Cost and benefit Analysis of Orbital Debris Remediation” as initial examples. We share our current findings and aim to start a discussion with other members of the NASA analytics community interested in or currently adding interactivity to Agency products.

data visualization↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Informing Wildfire Needs: The Expanded User Interface of NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (Firms)

As the global community continues to experience, and respond to, living in a changing environment, access to tools, technologies, and timely data utilized by an increasingly diverse set of stakeholders is increasing. This year, 2023, has thus far seen an unprecedented number of extreme events, increasingly driven by changes in the climate and a strong 2023 ENSO pattern. In Canada, a record number of wildfires, and associated weather events, evacuations, and infrastructure and habitat destruction has taken place, and is ongoing. Large swaths of Greece have experienced similar wildfire destruction. Most recently, Maui has experienced destructive wildfires, and early 2023 saw massive wildfires in Chile. NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System, or FIRMS, has a fifteen-year history of providing timely and comprehensive data and information on wildfires to stakeholders. FIRMS was initially developed in 2007 by the University of Maryland, with funds from NASA's Applied Sciences Program and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO), to provide near real-time active fire Locations to natural resource managers that faced challenges obtaining timely satellite-derived fire information. FIRMS has consistently evolved to address the needs of stakeholders Living in a changing environment; in 2012 it transitioned to NASA LANCE and in 2021 through a partnership between NASA and the US Forest Service, an updated version of FIRMS was released for the US and Canada. As NASA and other federal agencies continue to accelerate Open Science through integrated efforts such as the Year of Open Science, the provision of readily discoverable, findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable data represents a major focus to facilitate equitable outcomes. FIRMS supports this acceleration in Open Science by continuing to provision data and information for its traditional user base, while addressing the novel user needs of an increasingly diverse set of stakeholders seeking robust, reliable, transparently generated data and information. Increasingly, FIRMS is utilized by citizen scientists and individuals directly affected by wildfires - through evacuations, risks to structures/homes, poor air quality. etc. FIRMS has also been Leveraged to detect and assess the impacts resulting from ongoing conflicts. This further highlights the multi-faceted impacts of wildfires and other events. In the Fall of 2023, FIRMS will release an expanded User Interface (UI). This interface captures and reflects the needs of, and input from, a multitude of users. These users range from federal agency representatives to non-government organizations to the private sector to citizen science entities. To respond to this expansive and diverse user need base, the updated FIRMS UI will capture a range of features to support those beginning to explore the range of data and tools available to inform wildfire awareness and knowledge. These users are supported through a Basic Mode interface, furnishing access to a light set of functionalities that provision straight-forward, readily usable information and data, and ingestible knowledge. The Advanced Mode interface supports those stakeholder groups already proficient in navigating FIRMS. These stakeholders, representing fire managers and others, perform active fire management and tactical wildfire response activities. For these stakeholders, additional datasets have been included which require in-depth knowledge of both the utility as well as the caveats of such datasets. Additional functionalities have also been embedded to aid specific user queries. The expanded UI will introduce a new Experimental Mode. The focus of this UI will be to support the provision of emerging and innovative datasets that are in development for review and comment by the user community Examples include post-fire products generated by NASA's Earth Information System (EIS) Fire. This presentation will provide an overview of the expanded FIRMS UI. We will discuss how this UI is designed to be scalable and support the unique needs of an expanding and diverse user base. We will highlight key features, elements, and datasets, and describe how user needs have informed and guided the design of the UI. We will also share recent use cases to convey, and increase awareness, among conference participants. As the global community faces more extreme wildfires, due to climate variability and change, there is an increased need for reliable data to inform, manage, and mitigate the impacts of these events. Through this work, NASA FIRMS is striving to level the playing field, by making information accessible to all; from policy makers to the private sector to historically marginalized communities. In doing so, NASA is promoting the all-hands-on-deck response needed to minimize the impacts of wildfires and harness the strengths of open science to address the greatest environmental challenge faced.

Jenny Hewson↗

DOE OSTI2015

Data Transfer Study HPSS Archiving

The movement of the large amounts of data produced by codes run in a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment can be a bottleneck for project workflows. To balance filesystem capacity and performance requirements, HPC centers enforce data management policies to purge old files to make room for new computation and analysis results. Users at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) and many other HPC user facilities must archive data to avoid data loss during purges, therefore the time associated with data movement for archiving is something that all users must consider. This study observed the difference in transfer speed from the originating location on the Lustre filesystem to the more permanent High Performance Storage System (HPSS). The tests were done with a number of different transfer methods for files that spanned a variety of sizes and compositions that reflect OLCF user data. This data will be used to help users of Titan and other Cray supercomputers plan their workflow and data transfers so that they are most efficient for their project. We will also discuss best practice for maintaining data at shared user facilities.

Big Data↗

DOE OSTI2016

Proceedings of Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution and Design (SEED) Conference 2015

Synthetic Biology is an emerging discipline that seeks to accelerate the process of engineering biology. As such, the tools are broadly applicable to application areas, including chemicals and biofuels, materials, medicine and agriculture. A characteristic of the field is to look holistically at cellular design, from sensing and genetic circuitry to the manipulation of cellular processes and actuators, to controlling metabolism, to programming multicellular behaviors. Further, the types of cells that are manipulated are broad, from in vitro systems to microbes and fungi to mammalian and plant cells and living animals. Many of the projects in synthetic biology seek to move biochemical functions across organisms. The field is highly interdisciplinary with faculty and students spread across departments that focus on engineering (biological, chemical, electrical, mechanical, civil, computer science) and basic science (biology and systems biology, chemistry, physics). While there have been many one-off workshops and meeting on synthetic biology, the 2014 Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution and Design (SEED) was the first of an annual conference series that serves as a reliable place to pull together the involved disciplines in order to organize and exchange advances in the science and technology in the field. Further, the SEED conferences have a strong focus on industry, with many companies represented and actively participating. A number of these companies have started major efforts in synthetic biology including large companies (e.g., Pfizer, Novartis, Dow, Dupont, BP, Total), smaller companies have recently gone public (e.g., Amyris, Gevo, Intrexon), and many start-ups (e.g., Teslagen, Refactored Materials, Pivot, Genomatica). There are a number of loosely affiliated Synthetic Biology Centers, including ones at MIT, Boston University, UCSD, UCSF, UC-Berkeley, Imperial College, Oxford, and ETH. SEED 2015 will serve as the primary meeting at which international synthetic biology centers and related infrastructure (synthesis/software/foundries) meet to discuss technology, standards, and education. SEED2015 will be the second in an annual series of meeting held to bring researchers from industry and academia in the area of Synthetic Biology. The first SEED conference was highly successful, attracting 285 attendees with varying backgrounds from academia, industry and government. The SEED series provides leadership in the development of the field of synthetic biology and serves to broaden the participants in the field by appealing to broad sectors in industry and providing a means for young investigators and those outside of the field to participate. Further, the series closely integrates with groups such as the SBCC to provide a means by which the synthetic biology community can communicate with policy makers. Further, we will pursue making the meeting the center for the exchange of educational materials as centers for synthetic biology emerge globally. Proceedings will be published each year in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology. After each SEED meeting, surveys are distributed to assess the success of the conference and to help guide changes year-to-year. The diverse application areas further extend the expertise needed from people in areas such as plant biology, agriculture and soil science, environmental science, medicine, and the chemical industry. These areas could have a widespread impact on society in a number of ways. For example, the CRISPR/Cas9 system that serves to immunize bacteria from phage has provided the fundamental chemistry that is used to edit the genomes of diverse organisms, including human stem cells, crop plants, and livestock animals.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

DOE OSTI2019

Subtask 1.4 - Techno-Economic Assessment of Regional Carbon Utilization Scenarios and Attendant Monitoring Technology

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Carbon Storage Program seeks to develop technologies to significantly improve the effectiveness of carbon capture and storage (CCS), reduce the cost of implementation, and support the readiness of widespread commercial deployment by 2035. To accomplish this goal, technical and economic barriers must be addressed and the results used to inform regulators and industry on the safety, permanence, and viability of carbon storage. To help overcome these barriers, the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) conducted three activities: 1) investigate the regional techno-economic life cycle of CO2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in North Dakota, 2) assist DOE in determining the prospective CO2 storage resource of residual oil zones (ROZs), and 3) develop a seismic technique for monitoring geologic storage of CO2. These three activities address two strategic goals enumerated in the DOE–EERC Cooperative Agreement, namely, 1) to advance foundational science and 2) to inform data-driven policies that enhance U.S. economic growth and job creation, energy security, and environmental quality. Activity 1 In North Dakota, there is synergistic incentive to develop and implement CO2 EOR technologies. Regional industry partners are actively seeking options that can cost-effectively improve the efficiency of power production, while also coproducing CO2 for use in EOR applications. A full-value-chain techno-economic assessment that links lignite resources, power generation, and EOR is needed to determine the implications for a state or region to continue to use these resources or look elsewhere for other energy sources and revenue streams. The integration of North Dakota’s lignite power industry with the state’s oil industry has the potential to revitalize legacy oil fields and produce up to 1 billion barrels of additional oil using CO2 EOR while providing a market for a CO2 commodity captured at coal-fired power plants. Revitalization of North Dakota’s legacy oil fields will bring new industry investment to the state, resulting in the growth of oil-related jobs and revenue through oil sales, severance tax, and associated oilfield development activities (drilling, pipelines, etc.). CO2 demand for EOR and incremental oil production were calculated for 201 conventional oil fields in North Dakota. Infrastructure development in the fields was estimated using 1) a traditional vertical well arrangement of CO2 injectors and oil producers and 2) an advanced case where horizontal wells were used exclusively. Pipeline, compression, and recycling infrastructure requirements were also estimated. When viewed from the CO2 capture and CO2 EOR sectors, the advanced case showed a positive investment scenario when including potential benefits of the 45Q tax credit policy. An economic evaluation of a full implementation of CO2 EOR showed an average $60 billion potential state economic impact estimated over the 37-year construction and production time frame could be realized with an assumed oil price of $65/bbl. Oil price ranges of $35–$90/bbl cause an estimated variation of ±$5 billion over the potential effort. The total net state government revenues were estimated over the 37-year construction and production time frame. With an assumed oil price of $65/bbl, total potential fiscal impact could average $7.4 billion. This result ranges about ±$2.5 billion for a potential EOR implementation effort for oil price ranges of $35–$90/bbl. This broad-brush assessment was focused on “magnitude-of-effect” perspectives of what CO2 capture and use for EOR could mean to the state. Whether CO2 EOR ever becomes widely adopted is not the issue at this stage of evaluation. The question being answered is, How valuable could CO2 capture and CO2 EOR be for the state and local jurisdictions in western North Dakota? The results of the current economic assessment remove any ambiguity to that question. Full implementation of CO2 EOR as modeled in this study provides substantial economic benefits to the state, even at low oil prices (i.e., $35/bbl). Job creation and government revenues could be substantial, depending on the scale of implementation. With a better understanding of what CO2 EOR might mean for the state’s economy, the focus can now shift to the policies and financial mechanisms needed to make private investment in CO2 capture and use as EOR competitive with other energy-related pursuits. Activity 2 ROZs contain remnants of oil not swept away by natural waterflooding. Although nearly all of the identified ROZs are found in West Texas, there is evidence that this category of oil reservoir can be found in other major oil-producing basins of the United States. Because the formation of these oil reservoirs is distinct from other conventional reservoirs, the method to estimate the prospective CO2 storage resource in ROZs may be equally distinct from the method used for conventional fields. As such, the EERC collaborated with DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) to investigate the feasibility of CO2 storage in ROZs and determine what specific modification (if any) needs to be made to the current DOE volumetric method to estimate prospective CO2 storage resource in oil reservoirs. This activity built on a previous EERC investigation to identify ROZs in the Williston and Powder River Basins and upon collaborations between the EERC and NETL to develop storage resource estimation methods for different types of geologic CO2 storage. Review of the volumetric approach raised questions about the applicability of such an approach to hydrocarbon-bearing zones without the inclusion of potential hydrocarbon production. A production-based approach was presented by the EERC to inform the working group of additional methods of increasing the CO2 storage resource potential. Because the production-based method focuses more heavily on oil recovery than CO2 storage, it was not included in the working group manuscript. Activity 3 The EERC has used sparse and irregular seismic arrays to detect CO2 injected into a reservoir. The variability of seismic noise recorded by the sensors directly impacts the seismic interpretation. However, designing noise attenuation workflows effectively can be a more challenging task using sparse and irregular arrays for data acquisition. Based on the hypothesis that noncoherent noise is stationary during weekly data acquisition, a new machine-learning algorithm was developed to automatically estimate noise conditions using passive records, noise from active records, and ancillary information. The new noise attenuation processing workflow can improve the time-lapse detection of CO2 from sparse and irregular array acquisitions. Results show spatial and temporal noise patterns can be related to the location of the sensors and the weather conditions during the data acquisition and that our attenuation processing workflow can improve the time-lapse detection of CO2 from sparse and irregular array acquisitions. This effort was funded in part through the EERC–DOE Joint Program on Research and Development for Fossil Energy-Related Resources Cooperative Agreement No. DE-FE0024233. Nonfederal funding was provided by the North Dakota Department of Commerce.

Peck, Wesly↗

DOE OSTI2021

Certified Green Building Materials: Policy Impact Assessment

Chinese building construction is rapidly expanding, making it critical to focus on energy efficiency to curb the increase of energy consumption and emissions over a building’s lifetime. A key mechanism to do so is through building material certification systems and programs. These establish how building materials will perform and can be used to promote energy and resource efficiency, which help create a more sustainable and healthy building industry. This report begins by identifying characteristics of a strong certification system and ways to improve existing systems. To curb building energy demand, the Chinese government began developing a building material certification program to encourage energy and resource efficiency in the building sector. A timeline is provided of their program’s development and provides analysis. China’s building material database is highlighted and analyzed for their significance and opportunities for improvement. The report then continues to analyze the importance of policies such as procurement programs, and the Chinese government is developing their procurement programs for certified green building materials. To understand the potential large-scale impacts of green building material certifications, we conducted an analysis of the environmental and market impact of a nationwide green building procurement policy for all new residential and commercial construction.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2016

A software-aided workflow for precinct-scale residential redevelopment

Growing urban populations, combined with environmental challenges, have placed significant pressure on urban planning to supply housing while addressing policy issues such as sustainability, affordability, and liveability. The interrelated nature of these issues, combined with the requirement of evidence-based planning, has made decision-making so complex that urban planners need to combine expertise on energy, water, carbon emissions, transport and economic development along with other bodies of knowledge necessary to make well-informed decisions. This paper presents two geospatial software systems that can assist in the mediation of complexity, by allowing users to assess a variety of planning metrics without expert knowledge in those disciplines. Using Envision and Envision Scenario Planner (ESP), both products of the Greening the Greyfields research project funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI) in Australia, we demonstrate a workflow for identifying potential redevelopment precincts and designing and assessing possible redevelopment scenarios to optimise planning outcomes.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

NASA NTRS2009

The Urban Environmental Monitoring/100 Cities Project: Legacy of the First Phase and Next Steps

The Urban Environmental Monitoring (UEM) project, now known as the 100 Cities Project, at Arizona State University (ASU) is a baseline effort to collect and analyze remotely sensed data for 100 urban centers worldwide. Our overarching goal is to use remote sensing technology to better understand the consequences of rapid urbanization through advanced biophysical measurements, classification methods, and modeling, which can then be used to inform public policy and planning. Urbanization represents one of the most significant alterations that humankind has made to the surface of the earth. In the early 20th century, there were less than 20 cities in the world with populations exceeding 1 million; today, there are more than 400. The consequences of urbanization include the transformation of land surfaces from undisturbed natural environments to land that supports different forms of human activity, including agriculture, residential, commercial, industrial, and infrastructure such as roads and other types of transportation. Each of these land transformations has impacted, to varying degrees, the local climatology, hydrology, geology, and biota that predate human settlement. It is essential that we document, to the best of our ability, the nature of land transformations and the consequences to the existing environment. The focus in the UEM project since its inception has been on rapid urbanization. Rapid urbanization is occurring in hundreds of cities worldwide as population increases and people migrate from rural communities to urban centers in search of employment and a better quality of life. The unintended consequences of rapid urbanization have the potential to cause serious harm to the environment, to human life, and to the resulting built environment because rapid development constrains and rushes decision making. Such rapid decision making can result in poor planning, ineffective policies, and decisions that harm the environment and the quality of human life. Slower, more thought-out, decision making could result in more favorable outcomes. The harm to the environment includes poor air quality, soil erosion, polluted rivers and aquifers, and loss of wildlife habitat. Human life is then threatened because of increased potential for disease spreading, human conflict, environmental hazards, and diminished quality of life. The built environment is potentially threatened when cities are built in areas that can be impacted by events such as hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, and landslides. Our goals include assessing the threat of such events on cities and the people living there.

Stefanov, William L.↗

DOE OSTI2014

Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future: Modeling Social Unrest in Karachi, Pakistan

Social unrest represents a major challenge for policy makers around the globe, as it can quickly escalate from small scale disturbances to highly public protests, riots and even civil war. This research was motivated by a need to understand social instability and to unpack the comments made during a spring 2013 conference hosted by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security and the U.S. Institute for Peace, where policymakers noted that models considering social instability are often not suitable for decision-making. This analysis shows that existing state level models of instability could be improved in spatial scale to the city level, even without significantly improved data access. Better data would make this analysis more complete and likely improve the quality of the model. Another challenge with incorporating modeling into decision-making is the need to understand uncertainty in a model. Policy makers are frequently tasked with making decisions without a clear outcome, so characterization of uncertainty is critical. This report describes the work and findings of the project. It took place in three phases: a literature review of social stability research, a “hindsight scan” that looked at historical data, and a “foresight scan” looking at future scenarios.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗