In the years following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the U.S. government has taken steps to ensure that research conducted at the nation's universities and research institutions does not fall into the wrong hands, including such measures as limiting participation of non-U.S. scientists and students in certain types of research and restricting the publication and exchange of research results. While the goal of these restrictions is to keep terrorists or rogue nations from using scientific information to do harm, many scientists and policymakers have questioned whether the measures are unduly slowing scientific progress in key areas.
Concerns about the conduct and exchange of research are legitimate and safeguards are needed, says a report by the National Research Council, but the United States will protect national security better by ensuring the open exchange of unclassified scientific and technical research. The report, Science and Security in a Post 9/11 World, says that the gains in science and technology that flow from the free exchange of information far outweigh the small risk that it could be misused. Additionally, meeting the challenges of future technological or biological threats depends upon developments that can only come from long-term academic research.
National Security Decision Directive 189 was enacted over 20 years ago to assure that basic research remain open to publication and foreign participation, although some government policies and practices have been at odds with it in recent years. To protect both security and scientific interests, the report says, the government should establish a standing entity, preferably a Science and Security Commission, that would review policies regarding the exchange of information and the participation of foreign-born scientists and students in research. The commission could be co-chaired by the national security adviser and the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
After holding a series of regional meetings on university campuses with officials from the national security community and academic research institutions, the Research Council committee that wrote the report identified several specific actions that should be taken to encourage the open exchange of scientific research -- all of which could be addressed by the proposed Science and Security Commission. For example, grants and contracts awarded to U.S. universities and research institutions should not place restrictions on the publication of unclassified research. In addition, the increasing categorization of research projects as "sensitive but unclassified" limits the scientific community's right to publish results and restricts participation of foreign-born researchers. A survey that examines the frequency of these restrictions and other restrictive clauses should be performed annually, the report says.
Foreign-born researchers are in fact significant contributors to U.S. science and technology endeavors, and the success of many universities and research institutions depends on attracting the best and brightest students from both this country and abroad. Although some visa restrictions put in place since 2001 have been lifted and foreign enrollment is again on the rise, the visa clearance process should continue to be monitored, the report says. The government and Congress should also consider extending temporary visas for those working in high-demand research areas and for doctoral and postdoctoral scholars. And the Technology Alert List -- which restricts some non-U.S. students and scientists from working on legitimate technologies that could be misused to threaten national security -- should be revised to include only areas of study that have explicit implications for national security.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
A Fresh Look at Nuclear R&D
The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 1979 left many Americans resistant to the notion of nuclear power. But a long period of safe operations at existing nuclear power plants, in addition to mounting concerns about greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and volatile natural gas prices, has renewed interest in this option. As a result, the budget for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy has grown nearly 70 percent since 2003. To ensure the office's set of research programs are meeting national goals, DOE asked the National Research Council to review and prioritize the programs.
Review of DOE's Nuclear Energy Research and Development Program says that the R&D component of a program to reprocess spent nuclear fuel from plants should not go forward at its current pace. Instead, the Office of Nuclear Energy should make the startup of new commercial nuclear power plants its highest priority.
Because of concerns about nuclear proliferation, the United States in the past had opposed reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, which removes materials from the radioactive waste that can be recycled for use at another plant. Reprocessing methods available at the time created a plutonium byproduct that would have increased that risk. But new technologies have been developed that could recycle the spent fuel without separating plutonium, allowing the government to reconsider its position and, among other things, propose a program called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP).
However, the technologies required for achieving GNEP's goals are too early in development to justify DOE's accelerated schedule for construction of commercial facilities that would use the technologies, the report says. Contrary to DOE's claims that the program will save time and money if pursued on a commercial scale, the opposite will likely be true. In addition, while the program aims to reduce the overall amount of radioactive waste, which would decrease the need for a second geological repository in addition to Yucca Mountain, no clear need for such a site currently exists.
Instead, the Office of Nuclear Energy should place greater emphasis on the Nuclear Power 2010 program, the report says. Key elements of this program include identifying sites for new nuclear power plants, completing novel design of advanced light water reactors, and assisting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in its efforts to grant both construction and operating licenses in one action. If nuclear power is going to play an increasing role in meeting U.S. energy needs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Nuclear Power 2010 needs full funding in all aspects of the program.
Another program of the office, called Generation IV, is unlikely to achieve its goal -- a next-generation nuclear power plant in operation by 2017 -- because of the focus on GNEP. The office's Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative, a program to generate hydrogen using nuclear energy, is dependent on the success of the Generation IV program, so its budget and timetable should reflect this connection, the report says.
The report also notes that the Idaho National Laboratory represents a significant part of the Office of Nuclear Energy's management responsibilities and budget. While the site will provide the office with important capabilities for research and development of nuclear technology, funding is substantially less than what is necessary to upgrade the facilities.
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Improving Federal Risk Assessments
When the federal government develops new regulations, the agencies involved are often required to perform a risk assessment -- an analysis that determines whether a hazard exists and the extent of risk to human health, safety, or the environment. The practice of federal risk assessment has evolved in different ways. Some agencies, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and NASA, have formalized guidelines for various types of risk assessment; others have no formal process. To improve the quality and objectivity of federal risk assessments, the Office of Management and Budget issued in January of 2006 a draft bulletin containing technical guidance and asked the National Research Council to review it.
OMB's draft focused heavily on human health risk assessments and did not address assessments of technology and engineered structures, which are critical to agencies like NASA, the report says. The integral role of risk communication and the risks faced by sensitive populations, such as children and pregnant women, also were not adequately addressed. In addition, the draft implied that only clinically apparent effects should be considered adverse, ignoring a fundamental public health goal to control exposures well before they cause functional impairment.
OMB also failed to establish a baseline of each agency's proficiency at conducting risk assessments, making it difficult to measure the success of any changes to current practice. Nor was the cost of implementing the standards estimated, even though it would likely be significant.
Although there is room for improvement in federal risk assessments, the report concluded that OMB should instead review agencies' practices and resources and issue a new bulletin that offers goals and general principles for risk assessment. Individual agencies should be responsible for developing their own technical guidelines for meeting those goals and principles.
After the report was released, OMB decided not to finalize the draft bulletin in its current form.
The study was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; the U.S. departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Labor; and NASA.
Floodplain Mapping Goes Digital
The National Flood Insurance Program requires property owners in flood hazard areas to purchase insurance as a protection against flood losses. In exchange, the states and participating communities enforce floodplain management regulations aimed at reducing such damages. The program, which now covers more than $650 billion in insured assets, relies on floodplain maps to determine whether property owners should purchase the insurance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been partnering with state and local governments in a $200 million-per-year modernization effort to replace paper floodplain maps with digital ones. Congress asked the National Research Council to determine whether underlying base maps currently available are adequate to support the new digital maps.
The resulting report, Elevation Data for Floodplain Mapping, says that new digital, high-resolution land elevation data are needed to support FEMA's modernization efforts. In addition, support should be given to a federal-state concept known as Imagery for the Nation, which would maintain 1-meter pixel resolution orthophoto products for the entire country.
The report focuses on two layers of floodplain maps: base map imagery and base map elevation. Sufficient two-dimensional imagery is available from digital aerial and satellite photographs, known as "orthophotos," to meet FEMA's standards for mapping landmarks such as streams, roads, and buildings that show the context necessary for mapping flood hazard areas, the report says. It asserts, however, that the elevation information nationally available to map the shape of the land surface in three dimensions is inadequate in terms of the accuracy needed for determining the likely direction, velocity, and depth of flood flows.
Most of the publicly available elevation data in the National Elevation Dataset (NED) are more than 35 years old. The NED is used by many states and local communities partnering with FEMA to produce new flood maps. Currently, FEMA requires elevation data in new digital maps to be about 10 times more accurate than most of the data in the NED. Land development and urban expansion in the last decades have significantly altered the land surface. New road embankments and flood drainage structures have also affected expected floodwater depth, as has land subsidence, which is significant in coastal areas. The older data do not account for these types of new elevation changes.
The report calls for a new elevation mapping program -- Elevation for the Nation -- which would parallel the existing Imagery for the Nation concept. The program should use light detection and ranging technology, or "lidar," to acquire elevation data. Lidar operates by projecting short laser pulses of light from a low-flying aircraft and measuring the time it takes for the light to bounce back from the surface. This proven technology is the only one that produces accurate elevation data within one to two feet in most terrain, meeting all of FEMA's elevation accuracy requirements. Several federal agencies agree that lidar is the current technology of choice for measuring surface elevation at that level of accuracy.
A seamless nationwide elevation dataset would have many applications beyond FEMA's flood insurance maps, the report says, but the cost of creating such a dataset would be significant. Elevation for the Nation should disseminate its data to the public as part of an updated National Elevation Dataset.
The report was completed quickly so that Congress could consider its findings and recommendations during the appropriations process.
The study was funded by National Academies.
The Potential of Plasma
In just the past few decades, plasma technologies have become a critical contributor to American society. Fluorescent lights, for example, which depend on plasmas to work, now supply four-fifths of the artificial light for U.S. businesses, roadways, and parking lots. Low-temperature plasma etching is essential to the integrated circuits found in almost every modern electrical device, such as computers, automobiles, television sets, and cellular phones. Plasma could one day contribute greatly in other areas as well; plasma holds the key to facilitating fusion energy, which has unparalleled potential to serve as a new and sustainable energy source. And because most of the observable universe is in a plasma state -- found in everything from the dense cores of stars to the space between galaxies -- plasma science has the potential to help answer many of the great questions in astrophysics and space science.
To fully realize the opportunities in plasma research, the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science should take a unified approach and reorient its research programs geared toward plasma, says Plasma Science: Advancing Knowledge in the National Interest, a report by the National Research Council. In particular, the office should expand the current portfolio of research to include magnetic and inertial fusion energy sciences; basic plasma science; high-energy-density plasma science that is not mission driven; and low-temperature plasma science and engineering.
Plasma science is on the cusp of a new era, the report says. For example, low-temperature plasma applications are already ushering in new products and techniques such as more biocompatible artificial joints and arterial stents, improved textiles and polymers, and computer chips. The international magnetic fusion experiment known as ITER is expected to confine burning plasma for the first time on a significant scale, a critical step on the road to commercial use of fusion to produce energy. And the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will provide a means to study plasma phenomena ranging from astrophysics to the behavior of nuclear weapons.
While the vitality of plasma science in the past decade validates the success of some individual federal research programs, the report identifies four significant research challenges that the federal plasma science portfolio is not equipped to exploit fully: fundamental low-temperature plasma science, discovery-driven high-energy-density plasma science, intermediate-scale plasma science, and crosscutting plasma research. Rather than replace or duplicate the plasma science programs in other agencies, the proposed broader portfolio would enable a science-based focal point for federal efforts in plasma-based research, the report says. New resources and perhaps a new organizational structure of the Office of Science may be necessary to make these changes.
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and NASA.
A View of the Universe 'Beyond Einstein'
The 20th century saw an amazing collaboration between physics and astronomy. Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, which in turn became a natural framework for astronomers' observations of the expansion of the universe. In the decades that followed World War II, astronomers began to suspect that their telescopes were not seeing all kinds of matter and inferred there must be unseen "dark" matter that exerts a gravitational pull on stars and galaxies. Astronomy again shook the foundations of physics in 1998. By relating the apparent brightness of certain supernovas in distant galaxies to their speed of recession, astronomers found that the expansion of the universe -- of space itself -- is speeding up. The speedup implies the existence of a new kind of energy, dubbed "dark energy," that comprises 70 percent of the energy in the universe, and it has generated a lot of excitement among scientists. To study the most compelling questions at the intersection of astronomy and physics, NASA developed a research roadmap known as "Beyond Einstein" that proposes five possible mission areas. In 2007, NASA and DOE asked the National Research Council to recommend one for first development and launch, beginning in 2009.
The report that resulted, NASA's Beyond Einstein Program: An Architecture for Implementation, says that NASA and DOE should first pursue the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) because the program will provide direct insight into a key scientific question: Does the acceleration of the universe's expansion vary over time? So far, three specific mission plans have been studied in this area: the Supernova Acceleration Probe (SNAP), the Dark Energy Space Telescope (DESTINY), and the Advanced Dark Energy Physics Telescope (ADEPT). The eventual JDEM could be any one of the three plans or be based on a different option altogether.
The underlying technology for a dark energy mission is, for the most part, in the prototype phase, and will require less development than most of the other Beyond Einstein missions, the report says. The potential gains for JDEM also outweigh its scientific risks, such as the possibility that the mission may not provide substantial insight beyond that provided by telescopes on the ground. NASA and DOE should proceed immediately with a competition for mission proposals that will investigate the nature of dark energy with high precision.
Eventually, another mission proposed to detect gravitational waves using the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) should become the flagship mission of Beyond Einstein, given that it is likely to provide an entirely new way to observe the universe. However, LISA needs more testing before a launch can be planned, whereas JDEM is ready now for a competitive selection of mission concept proposals. Development of critical technologies for LISA should be a high priority for the Beyond Einstein program. In addition, the other elements of the program are important endeavors and should receive continued support, even though they have not been identified for immediate implementation.
Since the report was released, the administration's FY 2009 budget incorporates the report's recommendations for JDEM. In addition, Congress has directed both DOE and NASA to cooperate on JDEM.
The study was funded by NASA and DOE.
A Global View of Earth
Natural and human-induced changes in the Earth's systems -- from the planet's interior to the land surface, atmosphere, and oceans -- affect all aspects of life. Understanding and responding to these changes and their implications requires a foundation of integrated observations taken from land, sea, air, and space to build the most useful database possible for making predictions and developing forecast models and other decision-making tools. The United States has made great strides in building and deploying a sophisticated set of Earth-monitoring satellites. This extraordinary legacy of global observations is in serious danger, however. Many NASA satellites are well past their original lifespan, and funding pressures are affecting plans for operational and research missions at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the next several decades, the overall number of U.S. space-based sensors and instruments is anticipated to decrease by approximately 40 percent. As a result, forecasts of hurricanes and other severe weather events could suffer, and major gaps may develop in some of the datasets most crucial to monitoring and detecting global climate changes.
A report from the National Research Council, Earth Science and Applications From Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond, says that NASA and NOAA should undertake a set of 17 missions of different sizes from 2010 to 2020 that would ensure continuity of several key measurements and develop urgently needed new capabilities. Scientific and technical advances make it possible to design a highly productive and integrated suite of satellite-based Earth sensors capable of providing observations that address a broad range of societal needs. The missions and associated programs will be the foundation for a renewed, cohesive Earth information system that could bolster capabilities for protecting life and property, addressing profound scientific questions, enhancing economic competitiveness, and improving stewardship of the planet for future generations.
Satellites cannot detect changes in how the environment affects populations or vice versa, however. To gather this kind of information, NASA should increase the number of its land-based and airborne programs and pursue socio-demographic studies of how human activities affect the environment. The agency should also create a new class of low-cost missions -- under $200 million -- to help foster innovative ideas and test higher-risk technologies.
The report also highlights an overarching concern that the nation's space institutions are not adequately prepared to meet society's rapidly evolving Earth information needs. These institutions -- including NASA, NOAA, and the U.S. Geological Survey -- have responsibilities that are in many cases mismatched with their authorities and resources, such as institutional mandates that are inconsistent with agency charters, and budgets that are mismatched to emerging needs. These issues should be addressed at the highest levels of government, the report says. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy should develop and implement a plan for achieving and sustaining global observations that recognizes the complexity of differing agency roles, responsibilities, and capabilities.
The study was funded by NASA, NOAA, and the U.S. Geological Survey.
Toward Timely Chemical Agent Disposal
As mandated by law, the U.S. Army is in the process of disposing of the nation's stockpile of chemical agents and munitions. While destruction and neutralization of the stockpiles at sites around the country is well under way, significant volumes of what are called secondary wastes are also being created, causing overall disposal operations to be slowed down or extended.
A report from the National Research Council says that it would be both advantageous and technically feasible for the Army to use off-site facilities to dispose of secondary waste that meets certain criteria concerning levels of contamination. Review of Chemical Agent Secondary Waste Disposal and Regulatory Requirements says that destroying the waste at off-site locations would allow a more timely and cost-effective closure of the facilities.
The report examined the waste disposal practices of all of the Army's currently operating incineration facilities, located in Anniston, Alabama, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Umatilla, Oregon, and Tooele, Utah, as well as the chemical neutralization facility in Newport, Indiana. The committee that wrote the report also drew from the experiences of the 2003 closure of the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System in the Pacific, which suffered from substantial increases in costs and delays due to thousands of tons of secondary waste that had accumulated on the site.
The report examines six specific types of secondary waste, which the Army says will amount to more than 10 million pounds by the completion of the chemical weapons destruction operations: spent activated carbon used in pollution abatement systems, brine solutions used to treat the gases from the incinerators, pallets and wood used to store munitions, scrap metal from munitions casings and bulk containers, plastic protective suits, and spent decontamination solutions. Wherever practical and environmentally sound, all of these secondary wastes should be sent off-site for disposal, the report says. Improved analytical methods also are needed for establishing agent contamination levels in porous wastes such as concrete scrabble generated during facility closure.
Waste management at the facilities is regulated by state permits that were issued before the facilities were constructed, when data about the quantities of waste were scarce. The permits have been modified since then, but great disparity still exists in how each site manages waste. In three of the five states, for example, all waste from chemical agent disposal operations is considered hazardous, regardless of whether it exhibits hazardous characteristics. Changes to allow more off-site treatment and disposal will in most cases require modifications to the site operating permits, the committee noted.
The report also examines regulatory requirements associated with trial burns at the incinerator facilities. Trial burns are used to ensure that 99.9999 percent of the toxic agents will be destroyed during regular operations, but they are quite lengthy. Because a previous burn has occurred for each type of incinerator with each agent, enough data exists to meet regulatory requirements and avoid further trial burns in many cases, the report says. It recommends using this process of data submission in lieu of a new trial burn to the fullest extent possible. In addition, the Army should provide funding to state authorities for third-party analysis of trial burn data to shorten approval times.
The study was funded by the U.S. Army.
Partnerships to Reduce Biological Threats
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States, along with several U.S. allies, developed large biological warfare programs. While the United States and its allies halted their activities in this area in 1969, the Soviet efforts continued until President Boris Yeltsin declared them illegal in 1992. At its peak, the Soviet program reportedly involved as many as 40,000 scientists and other specialists working in up to 40 facilities, which had the capability to produce hundreds of tons of biological materials annually for potential use in weapons. As part of a broader effort of contributing to the dismantlement and safeguarding of the former Soviet Union's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, the U.S. Department of Defense established the Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP) about a decade ago. BTRP was directed to dismantle biological production facilities of concern; strengthen biosecurity and biosafety procedures at research, surveillance, and storage facilities; and support activities to redirect former defense scientists to civilian projects in Russia and several other countries from the former Soviet Union. The aim of BTRP, along with similar efforts at other government agencies, is to reduce the risks of proliferation of expertise, materials, and technologies that could be used to create biological weapons. The National Research Council undertook a congressionally mandated review of the program's activities and identified areas for future development and improvement.
The report identified a number of positive changes brought about by BTRP activities within the former Soviet Union. For example, there is now unprecedented transparency at a number of important facilities with dual-use capabilities that had not been previously open to foreign specialists. More than a dozen facilities that were once part of the biological weapons-oriented complex have been redirected to civilian use, and hundreds of senior biological scientists, engineers, and technicians have made the transition from defense to civilian programs. Past U.S. investments in BTRP have provided substantial benefits to national security, and the opportunities for future contributions are manyfold, the report concludes.
To further solidify and strengthen BTRP gains, the program should be transformed from a U.S.-directed program of assistance to a program of true collaboration with governments and institutions of the former Soviet states. The foundation of the program should be built on strong partnerships between important scientific, public health, and agricultural institutions and specialists in these states and their counterparts in the United States. An important key to fostering these partnerships is to focus disease surveillance and research activities not only on especially dangerous pathogens such as anthrax, plague, and hemorrhagic fever, but also on illnesses that are of public health concern to partner countries, such as tuberculosis, influenza, and respiratory diseases. When diseases of special interest are addressed in cooperative activities along with global terrorism concerns, local support for the overall program increases, as does the likelihood of sustained support by local officials and specialists.
Reducing security risks associated with a wide variety of biological research and technology activities that have dual uses is a complex task requiring highly specialized skills. Therefore, the capabilities of a number of other departments and agencies are important, including the departments of State, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency. However, several of these organizations have only small budgets devoted to nonproliferation efforts. The legislation for BTRP should include a provision to help ensure that the program will engage other departments as appropriate and provide them with financial resources when necessary.
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
In the years following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the U.S. government has taken steps to ensure that research conducted at the nation's universities and research institutions does not fall into the wrong hands, including such measures as limiting participation of non-U.S. scientists and students in certain types of research and restricting the publication and exchange of research results. While the goal of these restrictions is to keep terrorists or rogue nations from using scientific information to do harm, many scientists and policymakers have questioned whether the measures are unduly slowing scientific progress in key areas.
The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 1979 left many Americans resistant to the notion of nuclear power. But a long period of safe operations at existing nuclear power plants, in addition to mounting concerns about greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and volatile natural gas prices, has renewed interest in this option. As a result, the budget for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy has grown nearly 70 percent since 2003. To ensure the office's set of research programs are meeting national goals, DOE asked the National Research Council to review and prioritize the programs.
When the federal government develops new regulations, the agencies involved are often required to perform a risk assessment -- an analysis that determines whether a hazard exists and the extent of risk to human health, safety, or the environment. The practice of federal risk assessment has evolved in different ways. Some agencies, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and NASA, have formalized guidelines for various types of risk assessment; others have no formal process. To improve the quality and objectivity of federal risk assessments, the Office of Management and Budget issued in January of 2006 a draft bulletin containing technical guidance and asked the National Research Council to review it.
The National Flood Insurance Program requires property owners in flood hazard areas to purchase insurance as a protection against flood losses. In exchange, the states and participating communities enforce floodplain management regulations aimed at reducing such damages. The program, which now covers more than $650 billion in insured assets, relies on floodplain maps to determine whether property owners should purchase the insurance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been partnering with state and local governments in a $200 million-per-year modernization effort to replace paper floodplain maps with digital ones. Congress asked the National Research Council to determine whether underlying base maps currently available are adequate to support the new digital maps.
The 20th century saw an amazing collaboration between physics and astronomy. Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, which in turn became a natural framework for astronomers' observations of the expansion of the universe. In the decades that followed World War II, astronomers began to suspect that their telescopes were not seeing all kinds of matter and inferred there must be unseen "dark" matter that exerts a gravitational pull on stars and galaxies. Astronomy again shook the foundations of physics in 1998. By relating the apparent brightness of certain supernovas in distant galaxies to their speed of recession, astronomers found that the expansion of the universe -- of space itself -- is speeding up. The speedup implies the existence of a new kind of energy, dubbed "dark energy," that comprises 70 percent of the energy in the universe, and it has generated a lot of excitement among scientists. To study the most compelling questions at the intersection of astronomy and physics, NASA developed a research roadmap known as "Beyond Einstein" that proposes five possible mission areas. In 2007, NASA and DOE asked the National Research Council to recommend one for first development and launch, beginning in 2009.
Natural and human-induced changes in the Earth's systems -- from the planet's interior to the land surface, atmosphere, and oceans -- affect all aspects of life. Understanding and responding to these changes and their implications requires a foundation of integrated observations taken from land, sea, air, and space to build the most useful database possible for making predictions and developing forecast models and other decision-making tools. The United States has made great strides in building and deploying a sophisticated set of Earth-monitoring satellites. This extraordinary legacy of global observations is in serious danger, however. Many NASA satellites are well past their original lifespan, and funding pressures are affecting plans for operational and research missions at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the next several decades, the overall number of U.S. space-based sensors and instruments is anticipated to decrease by approximately 40 percent. As a result, forecasts of hurricanes and other severe weather events could suffer, and major gaps may develop in some of the datasets most crucial to monitoring and detecting global climate changes.
As mandated by law, the U.S. Army is in the process of disposing of the nation's stockpile of chemical agents and munitions. While destruction and neutralization of the stockpiles at sites around the country is well under way, significant volumes of what are called secondary wastes are also being created, causing overall disposal operations to be slowed down or extended.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States, along with several U.S. allies, developed large biological warfare programs. While the United States and its allies halted their activities in this area in 1969, the Soviet efforts continued until President Boris Yeltsin declared them illegal in 1992. At its peak, the Soviet program reportedly involved as many as 40,000 scientists and other specialists working in up to 40 facilities, which had the capability to produce hundreds of tons of biological materials annually for potential use in weapons. As part of a broader effort of contributing to the dismantlement and safeguarding of the former Soviet Union's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, the U.S. Department of Defense established the Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP) about a decade ago. BTRP was directed to dismantle biological production facilities of concern; strengthen biosecurity and biosafety procedures at research, surveillance, and storage facilities; and support activities to redirect former defense scientists to civilian projects in Russia and several other countries from the former Soviet Union. The aim of BTRP, along with similar efforts at other government agencies, is to reduce the risks of proliferation of expertise, materials, and technologies that could be used to create biological weapons. The National Research Council undertook a congressionally mandated review of the program's activities and identified areas for future development and improvement.