Price effects of an emissions trading scheme in New Zealand

Implementation of a New Zealand Emission Trading Scheme (NZ ETS) will begin in 2008, beginning with forestry, subsequently including energy and industrial emissions, and finally, agricultural GHGs from 2013. Reducing agricultural emissions is a major challenge for New Zealand as they account for over half its total GHG emissions. On the other hand, agriculture is critical to the economy, with its basic and processed products accounting for a third of exports. We use an environmental input-output model to analyse direct and indirect cost impacts of emissions pricing on food and fibre sectors. At NZ $25/t CO₂-eq, costs of energy-related emissions on the food and fibre sectors are very small; however, costs of agricultural emissions post 2013 would substantially impact on sheep, beef and dairy farming. Costeffective mitigation measures and land use changes should help reduce micro- and macroeconomic impacts, but the latter may also risk 'emissions leakage'.emissions trading, input-output price model, agricultural greenhouse gases, Demand and Price Analysis, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,

Price effects of an emissions trading scheme in New Zealand

Implementation of a New Zealand Emission Trading Scheme (NZ ETS) will begin in 2008, beginning with forestry, subsequently including energy and industrial emissions, and finally, agricultural GHGs from 2013. Reducing agricultural emissions is a major challenge for New Zealand as they account for over half its total GHG emissions. On the other hand, agriculture is critical to the economy, with its basic and processed products accounting for a third of exports. We use an environmental input-output model to analyse direct and indirect cost impacts of emissions pricing on food and fibre sectors. At NZ $25/t CO₂-eq, costs of energy-related emissions on the food and fibre sectors are very small; however, costs of agricultural emissions post 2013 would substantially impact on sheep, beef and dairy farming. Costeffective mitigation measures and land use changes should help reduce micro- and macroeconomic impacts, but the latter may also risk 'emissions leakage'

Intellectual disability health content within the nursing curriculum: an audit of what our future nurses are taught

Background: Individuals with intellectual disability experience chronic and complex health issues, but face considerable barriers to healthcare. One such barrier is inadequate education of healthcare professionals

Robotic Exploration of an Unknown Nuclear Environment Using Radiation Informed Autonomous Navigation

From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-05-15, pub-electronic 2021-05-24Publication status: PublishedThis paper describes a novel autonomous ground vehicle that is designed for exploring unknown environments which contain sources of ionising radiation, such as might be found in a nuclear disaster site or a legacy nuclear facility. While exploring the environment, it is important that the robot avoids radiation hot spots to minimise breakdowns. Broken down robots present a real problem: they not only cause the mission to fail but they can block access routes for future missions. Until now, such robots have had no autonomous gamma radiation avoidance capabilities. New software algorithms are presented that allow radiation measurements to be converted into a format in which they can be integrated into the robot’s navigation system so that it can actively avoid receiving a high radiation dose during a mission. An unmanned ground vehicle was fitted with a gamma radiation detector and an autonomous navigation package that included the new radiation avoidance software. The full system was evaluated experimentally in a complex semi-structured environment that contained two radiation sources. In the experiment, the robot successfully identified both sources and avoided areas that were found to have high levels of radiation while navigating between user defined waypoints. This advancement in the state-of-the-art has the potential to deliver real benefit to the nuclear industry, in terms of both increased chance of mission success and reduction of the reliance on human operatives to perform tasks in dangerous radiation environments

Simulating Ionising Radiation in Gazebo for Robotic Nuclear Inspection Challenges

From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-07-02, pub-electronic 2021-07-07Publication status: PublishedFunder: UK Research and Innovation; Grant(s): EP/P018505/1, EP/R026084/1Funder: Royal Academy of Engineering; Grant(s): CiET1819\13The utilisation of robots in hazardous nuclear environments has potential to reduce risk to humans. However, historical use has been largely limited to specific missions rather than broader industry-wide adoption. Testing and verification of robotics in realistic scenarios is key to gaining stakeholder confidence but hindered by limited access to facilities that contain radioactive materials. Simulations offer an alternative to testing with actual radioactive sources, provided they can readily describe the behaviour of robotic systems and ionising radiation within the same environment. This work presents a quick and easy way to generate simulated but realistic deployment scenarios and environments which include ionising radiation, developed to work within the popular robot operating system compatible Gazebo physics simulator. Generated environments can be evolved over time, randomly or user-defined, to simulate the effects of degradation, corrosion or to alter features of certain objects. Interaction of gamma radiation sources within the environment, as well as the response of simulated detectors attached to mobile robots, is verified against the MCNP6 Monte Carlo radiation transport code. The benefits these tools provide are highlighted by inclusion of three real-world nuclear sector environments, providing the robotics community with opportunities to assess the capabilities of robotic systems and autonomous functionalities

SLAMBench 3.0:Systematic Automated Reproducible Evaluation of SLAM Systems for Robot Vision Challenges and Scene Understanding

As the SLAM research area matures and the number of SLAM systems available increases, the need for frameworks that can objectively evaluate them against prior work grows. This new version of SLAMBench moves beyond traditional visual SLAM, and provides new support for scene understanding and non-rigid environments (dynamic SLAM). More concretely for dynamic SLAM, SLAMBench 3.0 includes the first publicly available implementation of DynamicFusion, along with an evaluation infrastructure. In addition, we include two SLAM systems (one dense, one sparse) augmented with convolutional neural networks for scene understanding, together with datasets and appropriate metrics. Through a series of use-cases, we demonstrate the newly incorporated algorithms, visulation aids and metrics (6 new metrics, 4 new datasets and 5 new algorithms)

CARMA II: A ground vehicle for autonomous surveying of alpha, beta and gamma radiation

Surveying active nuclear facilities for spread of alpha and beta contamination is currently performed by human operators. However, a skills gap of qualified workers is emerging and is set to worsen in the near future due to under recruitment, retirement and increased demand. This paper presents an autonomous ground vehicle that can survey nuclear facilities for alpha, beta and gamma radiation and generate radiation heatmaps. New methods for preventing the robot from spreading radioactive contamination using a state-machine and radiation costmaps are introduced. This is the first robot that can detect alpha and beta contamination and autonomously re-plan around the contamination without the wheels passing over the contaminated area. Radiation avoidance functionality is proven experimentally to reduce alpha and beta contamination spread as well as gamma radiation dose to the robot. The robot’s survey area is defined using a custom designed, graphically controlled area coverage planner. It was concluded that the robot is highly suited to certain monotonous room scale radiation surveying tasks and therefore provides the opportunity for financial savings, to mitigate a future skills gap, and provision of radiation surveys that are more granular, accurate and repeatable than those currently performed by human operators

A mechanistic proposal for the protodeboronation of neat boronic acids: boronic acid mediated reaction in the solid state.

A combined experimental and computational study suggests that a reduction in the entropy of activation in the solid state can lead to the protodeboronation of boronic acids

Vega—A small, low cost, ground robot for nuclear decommissioning

From Wiley via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2021-08-20, rev-recd 2021-11-03, accepted 2021-11-05, pub-electronic 2021-11-25Article version: VoRPublication status: PublishedFunder: Royal Academy of Engineering; Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000287Funder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000266Abstract: This paper presents the Vega robot, which is a small, low cost, potentially disposable ground robot designed for nuclear decommissioning. Vega has been developed specifically to support characterization and inspection operations, such as 2D and 3D mapping, radiation scans and sample retrieval. The design and construction methodology that was followed to develop the robot is described and its capabilities detailed. Vega was designed to provide flexibility, both in software and hardware, is controlled via tele‐operation, although it can be extended to semi and full autonomy, and can be used in either tethered or untethered configurations. A version of the tethered robot was designed for extreme radiation tolerance, utilizing relay electronics and removing active electronic systems. Vega can be outfitted with a multitude of sensors and actuators, including gamma spectrometers, alpha/beta radiation sensors, LiDARs and robotic arms. To demonstrate its flexibility, a 5 degree‐of‐freedom manipulator has been successfully integrated onto Vega, facilitating deployments where handling is required. To assess the tolerance of Vega to the levels of ionizing radiation that may be found in decommissioning environments, its individual components were irradiated, allowing estimates to be made of the length of time Vega would be able to continue to operate in nuclear environments. Vega has been successfully deployed in an active environment at the Dounreay nuclear site in the UK, deployed in nonactive environments at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, and demonstrated to many other organizations in the UK nuclear industry including Sellafield Ltd, with the goal of moving to active deployments in the future