2,466 research outputs found
Decision-support tool for assessing future nuclear reactor generation portfolios
Capital costs, fuel, operation and maintenance (O&M) costs, and electricity prices play a key role in the economics of nuclear power plants. Often standardized reactor designs are required to be locally adapted, which often impacts the project plans and the supply chain. It then becomes difficult to ascertain how these changes will eventually reflect in costs,which makes the capital costs component of nuclear power plants uncertain. Different nuclear reactor types compete economically by having either lower and less uncertain construction costs, increased efficiencies, lower and less uncertain fuel cycles and O&M costs etc. The decision making process related to nuclear power plants requires a holistic approach that takes into account the key economic factors and their uncertainties. We here present a decision-support tool that satisfactorily takes into account the major uncertainties in the cost elements of a nuclear power plant, to provide an optimal portfolio of nuclear reactors. The portfolio so obtained, under our model assumptions and the constraints considered, maximizes the combined returns for a given level of risk or uncertainty. These decisions are made using a combination of real option theory and mean–variance portfolio optimization
Valuing modular nuclear power plants in finite time decision horizon
Small and medium sized reactors, SMRs, (according to IAEA, ‘small’ refers to reactors with power less than
300 MWe, and ‘medium’ with power less than 700 MWe) are considered as an attractive option for investment
in nuclear power plants. SMRs may benefit from flexibility of investment, reduced upfront expenditure, enhanced
safety, and easy integrationwith small sized grids. Large reactors on the other hand have been an attractive
option due to the economy of scale. In this paper we focus on the economic impact of flexibility due to
modular construction of SMRs. We demonstrate, using real option analysis, the value of sequential modular
SMRs. Numerical results under different considerations of decision time, uncertainty in electricity prices, and
constraints on the construction of units, are reported for a single large unit and for modular SMRs
Imaging an Event Horizon: Mitigation of Source Variability of Sagittarius A*
The black hole in the center of the Galaxy, associated with the compact
source Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is predicted to cast a shadow upon the emission
of the surrounding plasma flow, which encodes the influence of general
relativity in the strong-field regime. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a
Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) network with a goal of imaging nearby
supermassive black holes (in particular Sgr A* and M87) with angular resolution
sufficient to observe strong gravity effects near the event horizon. General
relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations show that radio emission
from Sgr A* exhibits vari- ability on timescales of minutes, much shorter than
the duration of a typical VLBI imaging experiment, which usually takes several
hours. A changing source structure during the observations, however, violates
one of the basic assumptions needed for aperture synthesis in radio
interferometry imaging to work. By simulating realistic EHT observations of a
model movie of Sgr A*, we demonstrate that an image of the average quiescent
emission, featuring the characteristic black hole shadow and photon ring
predicted by general relativity, can nonetheless be obtained by observing over
multiple days and subsequent processing of the visibilities (scaling,
averaging, and smoothing) before imaging. Moreover, it is shown that this
procedure can be combined with an existing method to mitigate the effects of
interstellar scattering. Taken together, these techniques allow the black hole
shadow in the Galactic center to be recovered on the reconstructed image.Comment: 10 pages, 12figures, accepted for publication in Ap
Phosphorylation of the C-terminal tail of proteasome subunit ?7 is required for binding of the proteasome quality control factor Ecm29
Citation: Wani, P. S., Suppahia, A., Capalla, X., Ondracek, A., & Roelofs, J. (2016). Phosphorylation of the C-terminal tail of proteasome subunit ?7 is required for binding of the proteasome quality control factor Ecm29. Scientific Reports, 6. doi:10.1038/srep27873The proteasome degrades many short-lived proteins that are labeled with an ubiquitin chain. The identification of phosphorylation sites on the proteasome subunits suggests that degradation of these substrates can also be regulated at the proteasome. In yeast and humans, the unstructured C-terminal region of ?7 contains an acidic patch with serine residues that are phosphorylated. Although these were identified more than a decade ago, the molecular implications of ?7 phosphorylation have remained unknown. Here, we showed that yeast Ecm29, a protein involved in proteasome quality control, requires the phosphorylated tail of ?7 for its association with proteasomes. This is the first example of proteasome phosphorylation dependent binding of a proteasome regulatory factor. Ecm29 is known to inhibit proteasomes and is often found enriched on mutant proteasomes. We showed that the ability of Ecm29 to bind to mutant proteasomes requires the ?7 tail binding site, besides a previously characterized Rpt5 binding site. The need for these two binding sites, which are on different proteasome subcomplexes, explains the specificity of Ecm29 for proteasome holoenzymes. We propose that alterations in the relative position of these two sites in different conformations of the proteasome provides Ecm29 the ability to preferentially bind specific proteasome conformations
Dynamical Imaging with Interferometry
By linking widely separated radio dishes, the technique of very long baseline
interferometry (VLBI) can greatly enhance angular resolution in radio
astronomy. However, at any given moment, a VLBI array only sparsely samples the
information necessary to form an image. Conventional imaging techniques
partially overcome this limitation by making the assumption that the observed
cosmic source structure does not evolve over the duration of an observation,
which enables VLBI networks to accumulate information as the Earth rotates and
changes the projected array geometry. Although this assumption is appropriate
for nearly all VLBI, it is almost certainly violated for submillimeter
observations of the Galactic Center supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*
(Sgr A*), which has a gravitational timescale of only ~20 seconds and exhibits
intra-hour variability. To address this challenge, we develop several
techniques to reconstruct dynamical images ("movies") from interferometric
data. Our techniques are applicable to both single-epoch and multi-epoch
variability studies, and they are suitable for exploring many different
physical processes including flaring regions, stable images with small
time-dependent perturbations, steady accretion dynamics, or kinematics of
relativistic jets. Moreover, dynamical imaging can be used to estimate
time-averaged images from time-variable data, eliminating many spurious image
artifacts that arise when using standard imaging methods. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of our techniques using synthetic observations of simulated black
hole systems and 7mm Very Long Baseline Array observations of M87, and we show
that dynamical imaging is feasible for Event Horizon Telescope observations of
Sgr A*.Comment: 16 Pages, 12 Figures, Accepted for publication in Ap
Methyl 2-(methylthio)benzoate: the unique sulfur-containing sex pheromone of Phyllophaga crinita
The female-produced sex pheromone of Phyllophaga crinita (Burmeister) (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Melolonthinae; the adult has no common name) is identified as methyl 2-(methylthio)benzoate. This is the first identification of a sulfur-containing, long-distance, female-produced sex attractant from any insect taxa. The root-feeding larvae of this species are serious pests in many crops in Texas and Mexico. In field tests, many P. crinita males were captured in traps baited with the authentic compound. Interestingly, a heteroatom analog, methyl 2-methoxybenzoate, also captured P. crinita males, but only at a dose 10,000 times higher than the lowest tested dose of the authentic pheromon
Mathematical modeling of demand in marketing goals by metrods of linear regression
In this paper the mathematical modeling of the demand for marketing purposes. This uses regression analysis and least squares method
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