1,720,993 research outputs found
Socioeconomic and environmental impacts of bringing the sun to earth: A sustainability analysis of a fusion power plant deployment
No full textProducing electricity by nuclear fusion on Earth in this century is pursued by the academia and governments. Apart from the environmental and energy security benefits, fusion energy deployment would stimulate economic growth and employment. This research provides novel results of the global socioeconomic (value added, employment) and environmental (CO2) effects of the investments in a fusion power plant of 1.45 GW hypothetically deployed in Europe. A multi-regional input-output approach is used. Results show a multiplier effect in the production of goods and services of 2.2 (3.6 considering induced effects). The most benefited are Europe (47%) and United States (20%), due to the investment phase. In O&M, China and Japan arise as important suppliers. Most of value added would be captured in Europe (48%) and the United States (28%), being mining, construction and business services the most benefited activities. Intensive in employment generation, it would create 183 thousand full-time equivalent jobs, mainly in Europe (46%) and China (21%). The carbon footprint would be 11.4 gCO(2)/kWh mostly originated in Europe, United States and Japan, with a similar share. When considered, induced effects have a relevant impact on results. Despite the limitations, ex-ante evaluations are essential in setting priorities for fusion technology development. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Analysis of the effects of electrification of the road transport sector on the possible penetration of nuclear fusion in the long-term european energy mix
Full text linkThe European Roadmap towards the production of electricity from nuclear fusion foresees the potential availability of nuclear fusion power plants (NFPPs) in the second half of this century. The possible penetration of that technology, typically addressed by using the global energy system EUROFusion TIMES Model (ETM), will depend, among other aspects, on its costs compared to those of the other available technologies for electricity production, and on the future electricity demand. This paper focuses on the ongoing electrification process of the transport sector, with special attention devoted to road transport. A survey on the present and forthcoming technologies, as foreseen by several manufacturers and other models, and an international vehicle database are taken into account to develop the new road transport module, then implemented and harmonized inside ETM. Following three different storylines, the computed results are presented in terms of the evolution of the road transport demand in the next decades, fleet composition and CO2emissions. The ETM results are in line with many other studies. On one hand, they highlight, for the European road transport energy consumption pattern, the need for dramatic changes in the transport market, if the most ambitious environmental goals are to be pursued. On the other hand, the results also show that NFPP adoption on a commercial scale could be justified within the current projection of the investment costs, if the deep penetration of electricity in the road transport sector also occurs
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Estimates of population exposure to atmospheric pollution and health-related externalities in a real city: The impact of spatial resolution on the accuracy of results
No full textHealth impacts of atmospheric pollution is an important issue in urban environments. Its magnitude depends on population exposure which have been frequently estimated by considering different approaches relating pollutant concentration and population exposed to it. However, the uncertainties due to the spatial resolution of the model used to estimate the pollutant concentration or due to the lack of representativeness of urban air quality monitoring station (AQMS) have not been evaluated in detail. In this context, NO2 annual average concentration at pedestrian level in the whole city of Pamplona (Spain) modelled at high spatial resolution (~1 m) by Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations is used to estimate the total population exposure and health-related externalities by using different approaches. Air pollutant concentration and population are aggregated at different spatial resolutions ranging from a horizontal grid cell size of 100 m × 100 m to a coarser resolution where the whole city is covered by only one cell (6 km × 5 km). In addition, concentrations at AQMS locations are also extracted to assess the representativeness of those AQMS. The case with a spatial resolution of 100 m × 100 m for both pollutant-concentration distribution and population data is used as a reference (Base case) and compared with those obtained with the other approaches. This study indicates that the spatial resolution of concentration and population distribution in the city should be 1 km × 1 km or finer to obtain appropriate estimates of total population exposure (underestimations <13%) and health-related externalities (underestimations <37%). For the cases with coarser resolutions, a strong underestimation of total population exposure (>31%) and health-related externalities (>76%) was found. On the other hand, the use of AQMS concentrations can induce important errors due to the limited spatial representativeness, in particular in terms of population exposure
Estimates of population exposure to airborne pollutants in a real city: Sensitivity analysis to the spatial resolution of the pollutant concentration and population data
No full textThe impact of urban air pollution on human health has become an important problem, and the estimation of the amount of pollutants to which people are exposed is a major challenge, due to the complex spatial distribution of pollutant concentration and the usual coarse spatial resolution data of the population distribution. This study aims to investigate the uncertainties of outdoor population exposure estimates associated to the approach used to assign concentration to population. To achieve this objective, the results of Rivas et al. (2019) are used: 1) the annual average NO2 concentration over the whole city of Pamplona (Spain)computed at high-resolution (~m) by CFD modeling and 2) distribution population from the municipal census, at a resolution of 100m x 100m. Using this detailed information, the population and concentration data were aggregated for different cell resolution, from 100 m x 100 m to 6 km x 5 km (the entire city). The total population exposure was estimated for the different cases and compared with the highest resolution case that was taken as the reference. In addition, the population exposure was estimated using the concentration at the location of different air quality monitoring stations (AQMS). Results suggest that only concentration distributions with equal or finer than 1 km x 1 km provide appropriate estimate of total population exposure. In addition, an in overall, total exposure estimates using concentration at AQMS can induce important errors
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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