Results for “Citizen” — Page 8

DOE OSTI2025

S&TR Jan/Feb 2025 Partnerships Issue

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we focus on science and technology research to ensure our nation’s security. We also apply that expertise to solve other important national problems in energy, bioscience, and the environment. Science & Technology Review is published eight times a year to communicate, to a broad audience, the Laboratory’s scientific and technological accomplishments in fulfilling its primary missions. The publication’s goal is to help readers understand these accomplishments and appreciate their value to the individual citizen, the nation, and the world

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2025

S&TR April/May 2025 Power Grid

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we focus on science and technology research to ensure our nation’s security. We also apply that expertise to solve other important national problems in energy, bioscience, and the environment. Science & Technology Review is published eight times a year to communicate, to a broad audience, the Laboratory’s scientific and technological accomplishments in fulfilling its primary missions. The publication’s goal is to help readers understand these accomplishments and appreciate their value to the individual citizen, the nation, and the world.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2025

S&TR June 2025 R&D 100 Awards

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we focus on science and technology research to ensure our nation’s security. We also apply that expertise to solve other important national problems in energy, bioscience, and the environment. Science & Technology Review is published eight times a year to communicate, to a broad audience, the Laboratory’s scientific and technological accomplishments in fulfilling its primary missions. The publication’s goal is to help readers understand these accomplishments and appreciate their value to the individual citizen, the nation, and the world.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2025

FRMAC Laboratory Analysis Manual Volume 1, Revision 0

The Federal Radiological Monitoring and Assessment Center (FRMAC) is an operational center, available on request by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to respond to nuclear and radiological incidents as described in the National Response Framework (NRF). Under the Federal Interagency Operational Plan for Response and Recovery’s Nuclear/Radiological Annex, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has the responsibility to maintain the operational readiness of the FRMAC during the emergency phase of an event. FRMAC is initially established and managed by the Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) and serves as an interagency operations center with representatives from various federal, state, and local radiological response organizations. The purpose of the FRMAC is to assist state, local, tribal, and territorial governments (SLTT) in their mission to protect the health and well-being of their citizens with: • Verified radiation measurements. • Interpretations of radiation distributions based on Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), or local Protective Action Guidelines (PAGs). • Characterization of overall radiological conditions. Once a declaration to respond to a radiological emergency has been made, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Headquarters will coordinate the response in consultation with the cognizant NNSA Regional Coordinating Office (RCO). Each of the eight RCOs maintain a 24-hour response capability for radiological emergencies that may occur in states served by its region. When a FRMAC is established, it operates under the parameters of the Incident Command System (ICS), as defined in the National Incident Management Systems (NIMS) construct. The Consequence Management Home Team (CMHT) will be activated immediately during normal business hours (Pacific Time Zone), and within two hours otherwise. The Consequence Management Response Team (CMRT) is prepared for deployment within six hours after activation. Along with the assets, FRMAC provides an operational framework for coordinating of all federal off-site radiological monitoring and assessment activities during a response to a radiological emergency to support the coordinating agency and SLTT governments. Potential radiological emergencies that fall within FRMAC vary widely in terms of the area affected, the nature of the contamination, and the scope of the government’s response. Detonation of a nuclear device, accidental release of radiation from a nuclear power plant, and a terrorist threat are just a few of the many possible scenarios FRMAC must be prepared to address. Through all this, supporting the state, local, and tribal organizations in the protection of the public remains the primary goal of the federal response.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2025

Science & Technology Review December 2025 - Optimizing Future Design

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we focus on science and technology research to ensure our nation’s security. We also apply that expertise to solve other important national problems in energy, bioscience, and the environment. Science & Technology Review is published eight times a year to communicate, to a broad audience, the Laboratory’s scientific and technological accomplishments in fulfilling its primary missions. The publication’s goal is to help readers understand these accomplishments and appreciate their value to the individual citizen, the nation, and the world.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2026

The Next Stage for Smart Cities: Metrics to Spur an Evolution from Technology for Efficiency to Technology for People's Needs

The Smart Cities movement is about a decade old, energized by the USDOT Smart Cities grant that sparked cities to dream big. Now, 10 years later, and multitudes of conferences and papers later, the biggest question regarding Smart Cities is whether any progress has been made? Smart Cities forums are typically led by the technology sector, either telecommunications, internet access, or most recently artificial intelligence (AI) concerns. Each of these areas have grown and found new applications in the context of Smart Cities, however, these technology applications are just tools toward ends. Do digital communications and assistance enable or foster improved access to real, tactile, non-virtual goods and services such as transportation, food, housing, trash removal, health care, education, social interaction? These and other topics are not 'big tech', but are each critical to quality of life outcomes and are day-to-day necessities, comprising many of the touch points through which citizens interact with municipal agencies. Regarding Smart Cities, relationships have not been fully refined as to how best to merge the emerging generation of technology and related trends with more mundane but essential requirements of tactile services. How should municipal managers and operators bring the range of new technology tools (e.g. on-demand transit, automated vehicles, digital connectivity) to bear to improve functions serving real- physical- non-virtual needs? How do we make cities more efficient in providing access to services and opportunities for improved quality of life? This paper examines the current Smart City movement, emerging trends, and the need to put metrics with respect to the delivery, access, and provision of real-life needs. Using a few case studies of past, present, and projected future scenarios, this paper attempts to bring Smart Cities into the real cities domain, perhaps pushing the moniker away from 'Smart' to 'Efficient' - something that can be measured, counted, and assessed. Through the consideration of the next stage of the evolution of cities from 'Smart' to 'Efficient', the combined efforts and experience of multiple researchers at the NREL and their network of collaborators highlights the need for updates metrics that can be used to start guiding efforts toward productive initiatives to improve quality of life.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2026

Science & Technology Review: March 2026 - The Future of Lasers

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we focus on science and technology research to ensure our nation’s security. We also apply that expertise to solve other important national problems in energy, bioscience, and the environment. Science & Technology Review is published eight times a year to communicate, to a broad audience, the Laboratory’s scientific and technological accomplishments in fulfilling its primary missions. The publication’s goal is to help readers understand these accomplishments and appreciate their value to the individual citizen, the nation, and the world.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2026

Science & Technology Review: April/May 2026 R&D 100 Winners Issue

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we focus on science and technology research to ensure our nation’s security. We also apply that expertise to solve other important national problems in energy, bioscience, and the environment. Science & Technology Review is published eight times a year to communicate, to a broad audience, the Laboratory’s scientific and technological accomplishments in fulfilling its primary missions. The publication’s goal is to help readers understand these accomplishments and appreciate their value to the individual citizen, the nation, and the world. Each year, the R&D 100 Awards recognize the top 100 innovations from a pool of international entries. Technologies developed at Lawrence Livermore earned four 2025 R&D 100 Awards, raising the Laboratory’s total to 186. A series of articles beginning on p. 4 describes each winning innovation: monolithic telescopes, the flexible imaging diffraction diagnostic for laser experiments, the in-air drop encapsulation apparatus, and the metaoptics-enabled large-scale 3D nanolithography platform.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2026

Science & Technology Review June 2026: Predicting Tsunamis

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we focus on science and technology research to ensure our nation’s security. We also apply that expertise to solve other important national problems in energy, bioscience, and the environment. Science & Technology Review is published eight times a year to communicate, to a broad audience, the Laboratory’s scientific and technological accomplishments in fulfilling its primary missions. The publication’s goal is to help readers understand these accomplishments and appreciate their value to the individual citizen, the nation, and the world.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

DOE OSTI2025

Muckleshoot Indian Tribe-Energy Deployment (MITED) Project

The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe (MIT) collaborated with our Project Partner, GRID Alternatives (GRID), to install 132 kilowatts of direct current (kW-DC) of rooftop solar on three Tribal facilities. The three facilities are the Tribe’s Youth Drop-In Center, Canoe Shed, and Water Treatment Facility. The solar PV systems were originally anticipated to offset approximately 45% of the aggregate annual electricity usage of the three buildings. A major aspect of the MIT-ED project was providing hands-on paid training to five Muckleshoot Building Maintenance workers in solar PV installations, operations, and maintenance. The scope of work aligns with the Tribe’s goals of building local capacity and providing real world work experience and potential career opportunities in solar PV to its citizens. The Building Maintenance Department committed five of its current FTE employees to the project. GRID provided guidance for the MIT project team on identifying paid trainees as well as end goals of skill development through training, including a long-term Operations and Maintenance (O&M) plan tailored to the Tribe’s goals of local capacity building and stewardship of natural resources.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2026

From Reads to Function Workshop - Milano 2026

The Bicocca Sampling Days (BSDs) model offers a reproducible “citizen science” framework integrating research, education, and public engagement through large-scale microbiome sampling, followed by a workshop of data analysis on select samples. We identified 9 bacterial and archaeal metagenome-assembled genomes from six soil samples across three separate sampling days in two approaches with indidivual sample and replicate co-assembly spanning three unique classes, providing genomic insights into microbial nutrient cycling in these systems.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2025

What regulates decomposition in agroecosystems? Insights from reading the tea leaves

Litter decomposition is a critical Earth process, recycling nutrients and setting a portion of plant tissue on a path toward soil organic matter. Despite this importance, we still lack a good understanding of local factors that regulate decomposition, especially in agroecosystems where management plays an outsized role. Using a narrow range of climate and soils, we buried 1,308 pre-manufactured “litter bags” of differing residue quality (i.e., green and rooibos tea leaves) in 109 plots across several management practices to (1) explore the local controls on decomposition in agroecosystems and (2) test the robustness of the Tea Bag Index (TBI). We found that management practices intended to increase soil ecosystem services, that is, soil health, altered the decomposition of both teas. For example, adding nitrogen fertilizer and implementing perennial cropping decreased the extent of green tea decomposition (carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, or C:N = 12.8). No-tillage increased, but perennial cropping decreased, the rate of rooibos tea decomposition (C:N = 50.1). Cropped prairie accelerated green tea decomposition and increased the extent of red tea decomposition. A random forest regression model showed that soil temperature was the strongest predictor of green tea decomposition, but a soil health score also played a significant role in predicting the mass remaining. Soil texture and nutrient availability best predicted rooibos tea decomposition. Finer textured soils seemed to decelerate rooibos decomposition but increased the extent of decomposition. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the TBI metrics correlated somewhat well with empirically derived decomposition constants and were similarly sensitive to the effects of management. Still, the green tea stabilization factor had a substantial prediction bias. Our study increased our basic understanding of what regulates decomposition in agroecosystems. It also showed that the TBI can be a scientifically rigorous citizen science approach to monitoring changes in soil health.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2026

Discovering Strong Gravitational Lenses in the Dark Energy Survey with Interactive Machine Learning and Crowd-sourced Inspection with Space Warps

We conduct a search for strong gravitational lenses in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 6 imaging data. We implement a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) for our machine learning (ML) architecture and adopt interactive machine learning to construct a training sample with multiple classes to address common types of false positives. Our ML model reduces ∼236 million DES cutout images to 22,564 targets of interest, including ∼85% of previously reported galaxy–galaxy lens candidates discovered in DES. These targets were visually inspected by citizen scientists, who ruled out ∼90% as false positives. Of the remaining 2618 candidates, 149 were expert-classified as “definite” lenses and 516 as “probable” lenses, for a total of 665 systems, with 147 of these candidates being newly identified. Additionally, we trained a second ViT to find double-source plane lens systems, finding at least one double-source system. Our main ViT excels at identifying galaxy–galaxy lenses, consistently assigning high scores to candidates with high expert assessments. The top 800 ViT-scored images include ∼100 of our “definite” lens candidates. This selection is an order of magnitude higher in purity than previous convolutional neural-network-based lens searches and demonstrates the feasibility of applying our methodology for discovering large samples of lenses in future surveys.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2026

Meeting the Challenges of Modern Transit through the Integration of Traditional Transit, On-Demand Micro-Transit Services and Vehicle Automation - A Case Study in Chandler, Arizona

Current technology trends of vehicle automation, electrification and on-demand transit are providing new tools to develop effective public mobility services, yet need to be balanced with traditional modes to serve the spectrum of demand effectively and efficiently. Automated vehicle transportation network company (TNC) services, better known as 'Robotaxis' are beginning to proliferate and scale across the US, with Waymo as the lead commercial entity. Chandler, AZ was the first fully automated deployment of Waymo technology. Chandler was also one of the first municipalities in Arizona to roll out micro-transit service to its citizens in 2022. At present the Chandler Flex micro-transit program is beginning to partner with Waymo to augment micro-transit services during peak demands, another first in the nation. However, the mix of services in Chandler relies not only on new technology, but also on traditional modes including fixed route transit and para-transit services. These are blended and balanced such that both old and new modes are applied within the context in which each excel. This presentation will provide background on the Chandler, AZ public mobility services, and the performance metrics that govern their use and selection within the spectrum of development and population density as well as socio-demographics within Chandler. Additionally, the behavioral response of the use of unmanned, automated vehicles employed to augment micro-transit is novel, the first in the nation - and initial feedback from public transit constituents in Chandler will be shared.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

NASA NTRS1973

Public science policy and administration

Science, the overwhelming concern of our time, is no longer a matter of private research and development but one of public policy and administration, in which government, industry, foundations, and educational institutions must all work together as never before. Few other single tasks are of such decisive importance to the collective and individual welfare of American citizens as the formulation of public science policy and the administration of scientific programs. Eleven national authorities of varied background in science, education, and government administration contribute their experience and their judgment in an effort to deal with the major aspects of the subject. Their focus is on the meeting of actual problems; they consider the decision making process in both public and public-private organizations. Topics are grouped in three general categories: personnel needs and resources, organizational problems and techniques, and the administrative role in policy leadership.

Rosenthal, A. H.↗

NASA NTRS1973

Measuring and minimizing the social cost of environmental pollution

The various impacts to the environmental protection movement on the largest corporations in several industries which had the most serious pollution problem are discussed. The purpose was to examine the impacts from the point of view of top corporation managers so that a broader perspective could be provided for all concerned parties- citizens, environmentalists, legislators, governmental administrators and agency personnel, scientists, engineers, and other industrial managers.

Henry, H. W.↗

NASA NTRS1975

A state-of-the-art review of transportation systems evaluation techniques relevant to air transportation, volume 1

Mathematical and philosophical approaches are presented for evaluation and implementation of ground and air transportation systems. Basic decision processes are examined that are used for cost analyses and planning (i.e, statistical decision theory, linear and dynamic programming, optimization, game theory). The effects on the environment and the community that a transportation system may have are discussed and modelled. Algorithmic structures are examined and selected bibliographic annotations are included. Transportation dynamic models were developed. Citizen participation in transportation projects (i.e, in Maryland and Massachusetts) is discussed. The relevance of the modelling and evaluation approaches to air transportation (i.e, airport planning) is examined in a case study in St. Louis, Missouri.

Haefner, L. E.↗

NASA NTRS1976

Advanced space system concepts and their orbital support needs (1980 - 2000). Volume 2: Final report

The results are presented of a study which identifies over 100 new and highly capable space systems for the 1980-2000 time period: civilian systems which could bring benefits to large numbers of average citizens in everyday life, much enhance the kinds and levels of public services, increase the economic motivation for industrial investment in space, expand scientific horizons; and, in the military area, systems which could materially alter current concepts of tactical and strategic engagements. The requirements for space transportation, orbital support, and technology for these systems are derived, and those requirements likely to be shared between NASA and the DoD in the time period identified. The high leverage technologies for the time period are identified as very large microwave antennas and optics, high energy power subsystems, high precision and high power lasers, microelectronic circuit complexes and data processors, mosaic solid state sensing devices, and long-life cryogenic refrigerators.

Bekey, I.↗