The Imperative for Nuclear Responsibility: Facing the Weapons Legacy in School

Nuclear industry\u27s pro-uranium mining campaign in Saskatchewan public schools

Analysing I/O bottlenecks in LHC data analysis on grid storage resources

We describe recent I/O testing frameworks that we have developed and applied within the UK GridPP Collaboration, the ATLAS experiment and the DPM team, for a variety of distinct purposes. These include benchmarking vendor supplied storage products, discovering scaling limits of SRM solutions, tuning of storage systems for experiment data analysis, evaluating file access protocols, and exploring I/O read patterns of experiment software and their underlying event data models. With multiple grid sites now dealing with petabytes of data, such studies are becoming essential. We describe how the tests build, and improve, on previous work and contrast how the use-cases differ. We also detail the results obtained and the implications for storage hardware, middleware and experiment software

Causation’s Nuclear Future: Applying Proportional Liability to the Price-Anderson Act

For more than a quarter century, public discourse has pushed the nuclear-power industry in the direction of heavier regulation and greater scrutiny, effectively halting construction of new reactors. By focusing on contemporary fear of significant accidents, such discourse begs the question of what the nation\u27s court system would actually do should a major nuclear incident cause radiation-induced cancers. Congress\u27s attempt to answer that question is the Price-Anderson Act, a broad statute addressing claims by the victims of a major nuclear accident. Lower courts interpreting the Act have repeatedly encountered a major stumbling block: it declares that judges must apply the antediluvian preponderance-of-the-evidence logic of state tort law, even though radiation science insists that the causes of radiation-induced cancers are more complex. After a major nuclear accident, the Act\u27s paradoxically outdated rules for adjudicating causation would make post-incident compensation unworkable. This Note urges that nuclear-power-plant liability should not turn on eighteenth-century tort law. Drawing on modern scientific conclusions regarding the invariably statistical nature of cancer, this Note suggests a unitary federal standard for the Price-Anderson Act—that a defendant be deemed to have caused a plaintiff\u27s injury in direct proportion to the increased risk of harm the defendant has imposed. This proportional liability rule would not only fairly evaluate the costs borne by injured plaintiffs and protect a reawakening nuclear industry from the prospect of bank-breaking litigation, but would prove workable with only minor changes to the Price-Anderson Act\u27s standards of injury and fault

Big Data in Critical Infrastructures Security Monitoring: Challenges and Opportunities

Critical Infrastructures (CIs), such as smart power grids, transport systems, and financial infrastructures, are more and more vulnerable to cyber threats, due to the adoption of commodity computing facilities. Despite the use of several monitoring tools, recent attacks have proven that current defensive mechanisms for CIs are not effective enough against most advanced threats. In this paper we explore the idea of a framework leveraging multiple data sources to improve protection capabilities of CIs. Challenges and opportunities are discussed along three main research directions: i) use of distinct and heterogeneous data sources, ii) monitoring with adaptive granularity, and iii) attack modeling and runtime combination of multiple data analysis techniques.Comment: EDCC-2014, BIG4CIP-201

European underground laboratories: An overview

Underground laboratories are complementary to those where the research in fundamental physics is made using accelerators. This report focus on the logistic and on the background features of the most relevant laboratories in Europe, stressing also on the low background facilities available. In particular the report is focus on the laboratories involved in the new Europeean project ILIAS with the aim to support the European large infrastructures operating in the astroparticle physics area.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, Invited talk: Topical Workshop in Low Radioactivity Techniques (Sudbury, Canada) December 12-14, 2004. To be publish in AIP conference proceeding

Exploiting peer group concept for adaptive and highly available services

This paper presents a prototype for redundant, highly available and fault tolerant peer to peer framework for data management. Peer to peer computing is gaining importance due to its flexible organization, lack of central authority, distribution of functionality to participating nodes and ability to utilize unused computational resources. Emergence of GRID computing has provided much needed infrastructure and administrative domain for peer to peer computing. The components of this framework exploit peer group concept to scope service and information search, arrange services and information in a coherent manner, provide selective redundancy and ensure availability in face of failure and high load conditions. A prototype system has been implemented using JXTA peer to peer technology and XML is used for service description and interfaces, allowing peers to communicate with services implemented in various platforms including web services and JINI services. It utilizes code mobility to achieve role interchange among services and ensure dynamic group membership. Security is ensured by using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to implement group level security policies for membership and service access.Comment: The Paper Consists of 5 pages, 6 figures submitted in Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, 24-28 March 2003 La Jolla California. CHEP0

Environmental Risk Analysis: Problems and Perspectives in Different Countries

The authors discuss various industrial accidents, which have led to growing concerns about the potential hazards and risks involved in chemical process industries