GOVERNMENT & POLICY CONCENTRATES
REPRODUCIBILITY IMPROVEMENTS RECOMMENDED
ETHANOL MAKERS FIGHT EPA’S RENEWABLE FUEL RULE
The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology is recommending ways to improve research reproducibility. “We cannot take for granted the public’s trust in science,” says Parker B. Antin, president of FASEB, a consortium of 30 member societies. “It is time to enact policies and procedures that emphasize the tradition of rigor in research.” Reproducibility has become an increasing problem in the past few years as scientists and federal funders realized that many research findings cannot be replicated. To address the issue, FASEB called four meetings of its members, experts, and NIH representatives. The resulting report presents recommendations that are a consensus of its member societies. The report makes several suggestions for the scientific community overall. For example, research would be easier to reproduce if disciplines developed standards for describing protocols, laboratory tools, and reagents in publications and grant applications, it says. In two particularly problematic research areas—mouse models and antibodies—the report makes research recommendations for institutions and individual investigators. It also suggests actions specifically for professional societies.—AW
Ethanol industry groups are asking a federal court to review a recent EPA rule that allows refiners to purchase and blend a smaller amount of renewable fuels into the U.S. fuel supply than Congress ordered nearly a decade ago. The Renewable Fuel Standard requires increasing amounts of ethanol and other biofuels to be blended into millions of liters of transportation fuel each year. Late last year, EPA said refiners are required to blend a total of 68.55 billion L of renewable fuels in 2016, well below the 84.23 billion-L target set by Congress in 2007. The law gives EPA the authority to waive the mandated volumes if there are supply problems such as production shortfalls. But ethanol makers say, “By focusing on fuel distribution capacity and demand rather than supply, the agency erroneously concluded that there was an inadequate supply of renewable fuel to justify a waiver of the levels established by Congress.” The petitioners include the Biotechnology Innovation Organization and the Renewable Fuels Association.—GLENN HESS, special to C&EN
PLAN FOR PLUTONIUM DISPOSAL PANNED
DOE
Although the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico is still shuttered from a radiation leak in February 2014, the Department of Energy is considering a recommendation to bury 34 metric tons of plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons there. But a top U.S. nuclear scientist and policy expert and his colleagues Tons of plutonium are urging DOE from dismantled to reconsider nuclear weapons could end up at WIPP. (Nature 2016,
DOI: 10.1038/529149a). Rodney C. Ewing of Stanford University and collaborators question the safety record of WIPP and suggest that DOE consider “how difficult it is to predict potential failures of such a disposal system over millennia” before moving forward with disposal at the facility. An agreement between the U.S. and Russia calls for each country to dispose of excess weapons-grade plutonium from their respective nuclear weapon programs. Until last year, DOE was expected to move forward with a plan to convert the plutonium into mixed oxide fuel that can be used in reactors. But a task force commissioned by Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in June 2015 recommended disposal at WIPP as a cost-saving alternative.—JM
CONTEST AIMS FOR BETTER TOXICITY TESTS EPA has teamed up with NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and the National Toxicology Program to launch a $1 million challenge aimed at improving the predictive power of high-throughput chemical screening for toxicity testing. Most in vitro, humancell-based assays used to screen chemicals for toxicity do not provide metabolism information, leading to low overall confidence in the results. The challenge aims to turn existing high-throughput assays into tests with physiologically relevant metabolites so that both the parent chemCEN.ACS.ORG
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ical and its metabolites are tested. In the first round of the competition, up to 10 winners will be awarded $10,000 each and invited to advance to the second round. Up to five finalists will be awarded up to $100,000 each in the second round. The winning finalist could be awarded up to $400,000 for developing a commercially viable approach. —BEE
NUCLEAR RESEARCH BILL ADVANCES A committee in the House of Representatives approved legislation last week that seeks to stimulate private investment in advanced nuclear reactor technologies. The bill (H.R. 4084) would direct the Department of Energy to ensure that nuclear researchers have access to the department’s national laboratory complex and its high-end computing and related experimental capabilities. “This legislation enables our talented engineers in the private sector, academia, and at the national labs to develop the next generation of nuclear technology,” says Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas). Smith chairs the House Science, Space & Technology Committee, which approved the bill unanimously. One provision in the measure supports technology transfer from DOE’s national labs to the private sector. Another enables private firms to partner with the research facilities for the purpose of analyzing novel reactor concepts.—GLENN HESS, special to C&EN
