Estimations of toxic vapour concentrations, by atmospheric dispersion calculations, in a nuclear power plant control room, following an offsite accidental release in the frame of probabilistic safety assessment

This project is categorized as an atmospheric dispersion study about how a toxic gas external dispersion might reach a nuclear power plant control room with dangerous concentration. In fact, it is contained within a larger project, which studies how likely a train accident, related with hazardous materials transport, could end up in a dangerous toxic vapour concentration in the control room, affecting the plant safety. The scope of the actual study is to obtain control room toxic vapour concentrations by performing a probabilistic approach of atmospheric dispersion calculations. The goal is to apply a prospective approach, aiming to use the results in the probabilistic safety assessment of the plant. The tasks developed consist of regulations review, atmospheric dispersion codes comparison and selection, scenario design and release points distribution, meteorological analysis and calculations automation, and finally, control room vapour diffusion calculations. The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has provided the Nuclear Engineering Research Group (NERG) from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) with the dispersion and diffusion codes, HABIT and ARCON96, for the development of the present study, under consideration of academic purposes. The whole project is developed within the frame of a collaborative agreement between NERG group (UPC) and Nuclear Plant Licensee. Since this agreement is confidential, no real names and codification for the plant and its systems, components and materials are used. Therefore, the generic expression “The plant” is written instead

Urban Forest Tweeting: Social Media as More-Than-Human Communication in Tokyo’s Rinshinomori Park

Urban parks are places that have significant impact on the physical and mental health of citizens, but they are also for safeguarding biodiversity and thus fostering human–nature interactions in the everyday landscape. The exploration of these spaces through social media represents a novel field of research that is contributing to revealing patterns of visitor behavior. However, there is a lack of comparable research from a non-anthropocentric perspective. What if we could use social media as a more-than-human communication medium? This research aims to reveal the possibility of communicating the urban forest’s voice through the examination of the official Twitter account of a metropolitan park in Tokyo. To this end, an analysis of the content of the messages is carried out, focusing on the narrative voice from which the message is told, the protagonists, the action performed, the network of actors deployed, and the place where it occurs. It is found that the majority of these messages are delivered from a non-human perspective, where plants, animals, or meteorological agents behave deploying complex networks of more-than-human interaction. The current study reveals the latent potential of non-humans as possible agents within the realm of social media, which can mediate the relationships between humans and their environment. It introduces a layer that can be incorporated into future lines of research, as well as provides a model case that illustrates a good practice in the management and communication of urban green spaces.This research was funded by the European Union—Next Generation EU Margarita Salas Grant and by the project LABPA-CM: CONTEMPORARY CRITERIA, METHODS and TECHNIQUES FOR LANDSCAPE KNOWLEDGE AND CONSERVATION (H2019/HUM5692), funded by the European Social Fund and the Madrid regional government

A new special class of Petrov type D vacuum space-times in dimension five

Using extensions of the Newman-Penrose and Geroch-Held-Penrose formalisms to five dimensions, we invariantly classify all Petrov type $D$ vacuum solutions for which the Riemann tensor is isotropic in a plane orthogonal to a pair of Weyl alligned null directionsComment: 4 pages, 1 table, no figures. Contribution to the proceedings of the Spanish Relativity Meeting 2010 held in Granada (Spain