Comparison between dispersed nuclear power plants and a nuclear energy center at a hypothetical site on Kentucky Lake, Tennessee

The thermal, ecological, and social impacts of a 40-reactor NEC are compared to impacts from four 10-reactor NECs and ten 4-reactor power plants. The comparison was made for surrogate sites in western Tennessee. The surrogate site for the 40-reactor NEC is located on Kentucky Lake. A layout is postulated for ten clusters of four reactors each with 2.5-mile spacing between clusters. The plants use natural-draft cooling towers. A transmission system is proposed for delivering the power (48,000 MW) to five load centers. Comparable transmission systems are proposed for the 10-reactor NECs and the 4-reactor dispersed sites delivering power to the same load centers. (auth

Soil Organic Carbon and Nitrogen Feedbacks on Crop Yields under Climate Change

Articles in A&EL are published under the CC-BY NC ND (non-commercial; no derivatives) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/). Users are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Any further publication of the article will require proper attribution; no derivative works may be made from this article; and the article may not be used for any commercial gain (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/). The author is given explicit permission to publish the final article in her/his institutional repository. There is an option for the CC-BY license if required by an author's institution.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC):A comparison of different size metrics for pulmonary nodule measurements

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES: To investigate the effects of choosing between different metrics in estimating the size of pulmonary nodules as a factor both of nodule characterization and of performance of computer aided detection systems, since the latters are always qualified with respect to a given size range of nodules. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This study used 265 whole-lung CT scans documented by the Lung Image Database Consortium using their protocol for nodule evaluation. Each inspected lesion was reviewed independently by four experienced radiologists who provided boundary markings for nodules larger than 3 mm. Four size metrics, based on the boundary markings, were considered: a uni-dimensional and two bi-dimensional measures on a single image slice and a volumetric measurement based on all the image slices. The radiologist boundaries were processed and those with four markings were analyzed to characterize the inter-radiologist variation, while those with at least one marking were used to examine the difference between the metrics. RESULTS: The processing of the annotations found 127 nodules marked by all of the four radiologists and an extended set of 518 nodules each having at least one observation with three-dimensional sizes ranging from 2.03 to 29.4 mm (average 7.05 mm, median 5.71 mm). A very high inter-observer variation was observed for all these metrics: 95% of estimated standard deviations were in the following ranges [0.49, 1.25], [0.67, 2.55], [0.78, 2.11], and [0.96, 2.69] for the three-dimensional, the uni-dimensional, and the two bi-dimensional size metrics respectively (in mm). Also a very large difference among the metrics was observed: 0.95 probability-coverage region widths for the volume estimation conditional on uni-dimensional, and the two bi-dimensional size measurements of 10mm were 7.32, 7.72, and 6.29 mm respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The selection of data subsets for performance evaluation is highly impacted by the size metric choice. The LIDC plans to include a single size measure for each nodule in its database. This metric is not intended as a gold standard for nodule size; rather, it is intended to facilitate the selection of unique repeatable size limited nodule subsets

Statistical properties of the Hadamard product of random vectors

The variance of the Hadamard product of two linear combinations of a random vector is presented in terms of the mean and the variance of the random vector when a normal distribution is assumed. The mean and variance of the Hadamard product are further given for any distribution