Country uses sterilization, contraceptives to reach fertility milestone

Back in the 1960s, India faced an exploding population, with a fertility rate of nearly six children per woman. When famine struck, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson initially refused to deliver food aid, citing the country’s high birth rate. In response, India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi dramatically expanded the first national family planning program in a major developing country, offering cash incentives for both men and women to be sterilized. The city of Madras, now called Chennai, paid men $6 a snip.

For the next 60 years, India continued to focus on sterilization as well as contraceptives and education for girls. Now, Indian health officials say the task of defusing their population bomb is finally done. Late last month, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), a periodic investigation of half a million households, announced a milestone: The country’s fertility rate had for the first time fallen below the widely accepted “replacement level” of 2.1 children per woman. (The U.S. rate is 1.8.) “Women are seeing the wisdom in having fewer children,” says Poonam Muttreja, director of the nonprofit Population Foundation of India.

India’s population growth is not over yet, however. Thanks to past high fertility rates, two-thirds of the population is under 35 years old, and a large cohort of people is now entering childbearing age. Even at replacement fertility rates, the children of these young people will continue to push up numbers, and India may exceed China as the world’s most populous nation as early as next year.

Still, India’s population is set to decline in about 3 decades, putting the country on the same track as a growing number of developing nations, such as its neighbor Bangladesh and Indonesia. India remains well behind China in falling fertility. In China, where the population may be at its peak, official figures put the fertility rate at 1.7 children per woman...

After serving in Vietnam, my dad moved to Grants, New Mexico, to mine uranium. Every day, he drilled out uranium in deep, poorly ventilated, confined, hot, and dangerous underground tunnels. After work, my mom washed his overalls and lunch bucket, soiled with radioactive dirt. One day, when I was in fourth grade, my dad came home early from the graveyard shift and said he was not going back. At the time, I did not understand the circumstances, but I later learned that the industry had collapsed due to declining uranium prices, leaving the local economy in shambles.

Uranium mining has always been controversial. Uranium fuels non–carbon-emitting nuclear energy, but uranium and its radioactive decay progeny may pose health concerns. Even so, my family is proud of my dad’s work in the mines because it afforded my parents a livelihood and the means to send their three kids to college, a luxury not given to them. With that opportunity, I pursued degrees in environmental engineering. For my PhD, I moved to Michigan to study iron sulfide–based media for use in cleanup of arsenic-contaminated groundwater. It was a difficult transition moving from sunny New Mexico to the cold, snowy upper Midwest, devoid of blue skies, New Mexico green chile sustenance, and, most importantly, my family. I began to question why I had started down this road, so far away from home without a clear vision of my destination...

...I realized that I could apply my expertise to research uranium! The following year, I accepted a Mendenhall postdoc position at the US Geological Survey to study the environmental impacts of uranium mining. Now, with over 14 years of uranium research stimulating my curiosity, I have returned to New Mexico seeking new insights for managing mine waste. It is fitting that my passion for science brought me home again, where it was nurtured from the beginning by a humble, hard-working uranium miner and his wife.

The author’s (letter writer) father, shown here, mined uranium in Grants, New Mexico

...As I prepared this work, I took some time to wander around the stacks of the Firestone Library at Princeton University where, within a few minutes, without too much effort, I was able to assemble a small pile of books[50] on the terrible case of the Dine (Navajo) uranium miners who worked in the mid-20th century, resulting in higher rates of lung cancer than the general population. The general theme of these books if one leafs through them is this: In the late 1940’s mysterious people, military syndics vaguely involved with secret US government activities show up on the Dine (Navajo) Reservation in the “Four Corners” region of the United States, knowing that uranium is “dangerous” and/or “deadly” to convince naïve and uneducated Dine (Navajos) to dig the “dangerous ore” while concealing its true “deadly” nature. The uranium ends up killing many of the miners, thus furthering the long American history of genocide against the Native American peoples. There is a conspiratorial air to all of it; it begins, in these accounts, with the cold warrior American military drive to produce nuclear arms and then is enthusiastically taken up by the “evil” and “venal” conspirators who foist the “crime” of nuclear energy on an unsuspecting American public, this while killing even more innocent Native Americans.

Now...

An Omicron investigator, a Mars explorer and an AI ethics pioneer are some of the people behind the year’s big research stories.|An Omicron investigator, a Mars explorer and an AI ethics pioneer are some of the people behind the year’s big research stories.

This UN leader knew that vaccine equity wouldn’t happen without a fight.

After losing her job at Google, an artificial-intelligence pioneer founded an independent institute to raise questions about ethics in technology.

A bioinformatician in South Africa helped to identify troubling variants of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

Before vaccines for COVID-19 even existed, Winnie Byanyima knew that distributing them equitably would be a challenge. In early 2020, she was one of the few voices warning that low- and middle-income countries could not rely on donations alone to vaccinate their people. The only way to get life-saving shots to everyone, she argued, would be by helping as many companies as possible to manufacture them and by setting up systems of distribution to get them where they’re needed...

...This May, Byanyima and her colleagues celebrated an unexpected victory when the United States — historically a strident patent defender — threw its weight behind a proposal from South Africa and India to waive the IP protections surrounding COVID-19 vaccines in the hope of bolstering manufacturing capacity...

...Byanyima says it was this thirst for justice that caused her to leave her career in aeronautical engineering soon after the overthrow of Uganda’s former authoritarian president Idi Amin. In 1981, she joined a guerilla movement fighting to restore democracy and human rights to Uganda. They prevailed, and by 1994, she was elected to Uganda’s parliament. She was appointed head of UNAIDS in 2019, where she is putting equity at the centre of the programme’s work around the world. Global-health-policy researcher Matthew Kavanagh took leave from a position at Georgetown University in Washington DC, to work for Byanyima because of the way she targets underlying inequalities that foster the spread of HIV...

Timnit Gebru, a researcher who studies the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), says her past year has been — in a word — horrible. Last December, she lost her job at Google after a row over the tech giant’s vetting of her work. The highly publicized ousting shocked scientists, including some in the firm, and thousands of researchers rallied to support her, amplifying her concerns around anti-Black discrimination in AI, and around the harms that the technology can cause to marginalized groups in society.

Now, Gebru has forged her own path. On 2 December this year, exactly 12 months after her split with Google, she launched a research institute to study AI independently of big tech companies. The events of the past year, she says, reflect a growing realization that the faults of AI should not be framed as technical problems: they are a symptom of the flawed environment in which the technology is developed...

Born in Ethiopia to parents from Eritrea, Gebru fled the region during civil war as a teenager and eventually arrived in the United States as a refugee. During her PhD at Stanford University in California, she co-founded a ‘Black in AI’ group with computer scientist Rediet Abebe. And while working at Microsoft, she and computer scientist Joy Buolamwini reported that facial-recognition software performed less well at identifying the gender of people who were not white men — a finding that drew more attention to bias in AI...

On 25 November, Tulio de Oliveira announced the discovery of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2. Omicron, detected in samples from Botswana, South Africa and Hong Kong, had a Swiss Army knife of mutations that de Oliveira and other leading scientists feared might help it to evade immunity from previous infection or vaccinations.

For de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP), it was eerily reminiscent of the previous year, when his team had discovered another SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern in South African samples. Beta, as that variant became known, led foreign governments to curb travel to and from South Africa many months after its discovery. Both variants were spotted after doctors and laboratory workers flagged unexpected rises in infections in areas that had already been hit hard by COVID-19.

De Oliveira knew that by reporting yet another concerning variant, he ran the risk of incurring fresh sanctions, which would economically penalize countries in southern Africa. But he also knew it was the right thing to do. “The way that one stops a pandemic is by quick action,” says the Brazilian-born bioinformatician. “Wait and see has not been a good option...”

...The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the first time that genomic sequencing has been used to trace outbreaks in Africa; scientists used it in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2014 to 2016. KRISP, created in 2017 with de Oliveira at the helm, has tracked pathogens behind diseases including dengue and Zika, and more common scourges such as AIDS and tuberculosis. But never before have so many different samples of the same virus been sequenced in such a short period of time — both in Africa and around the world...

...The centre will work to control epidemics in Africa and the global south, and will house Africa’s largest sequencing facility. The coronavirus pandemic has fuelled these investments, but the momentum is already spilling over into surveillance on other diseases, says de Oliveira. “The main thing we have shown the world is that these things can be done in developing countries.”

Not that those countries have been rewarded for it — quite the opposite. De Oliveira says he was extremely disappointed when rich countries imposed travel bans on southern Africa simply because the country had the scientific skill to discover new variants. The scapegoating of South Africa “was almost a smokescreen for the vaccine hoarding, and for rich countries losing control of the pandemic”, says de Oliveira. “Of course I expected more...”

Support for nuclear energy in Poland is overwhelming with 78% of people supporting the technology as a response to climate change, according to opinion polling. It comes as the country experiences a series of developments towards nuclear deployment.

"These are the best results in the history of research carried out since 2012," said Poland's Ministry of Climate and Environment, which commissioned the annual poll. The market research company DANAE used the CATI method to find the views of a representative group of 2148 people aged 15 to 75 years of age during November.

Results indicated that 74% of people support nuclear power plants in Poland, with 20% opposed. This was an increase in support of 11%, the government noted.

A similar increase was found among people who would be supportive of a nuclear power plant in their area. Some 58% said they would support this, up from 46% last year, with 39% opposed...

...A large majority of 82% said that building nuclear power plants would be a good way to increase Poland's energy security, which the government noted was up 9% from last year...

...In September it was announced that six new large reactors could be built by 2040 as part of Poland's plan to reduce its historic heavy reliance on coal, which is incompatible with climate commitments. EDF of France submitted an offer to supply six large EPR reactors in October, and Westinghouse has stepped up its engineering centres in Poland.

Separately Polish heavy industry is embracing small reactors as a way to avoid burning coal for process heat and power. Chemical producer Synthos has established a subsidiary which has right to develop projects around GE-Hitachi's BWRX-300, and is working with chemical producers PKN Orlen and Ciech on the potential for the BWRX to replace coal at their plants. Synthos is also working with power company ZE Pak to examine whether BWRX-300s could replace coal at the Pątnów power plant...

The Netherlands' new coalition government has placed nuclear power at the heart of its climate and energy policy. Some EUR500 million (USD564 million) has been earmarked to support new nuclear build in the period to 2025.

"We want to make every effort to keep our country and our planet liveable and habitable," wrote the VVD, D66, CDA and ChristenUnie parties. Today they released the coalition's plans for the period to 2025 as the result of negotiations that began after the general election in March.

"Nuclear energy can complement solar, wind and geothermal energy in the energy mix and can be used to produce hydrogen," the document said. "It also makes us less dependent on gas imports."

"That is why the nuclear power plant in Borssele will remain open longer, with due regard for safety," said the government. The 482 MWe single-unit plant has operated since 1973 and meets around 3% of the country's electricity needs...


...Accordingly, the government said it would provide financial support to the goal of building new nuclear power plants. It outlined EUR50 million (USD56 million) for this in 2023, EUR200 million in 2024 and EUR250 million in 2025.

It anticipated that cumulative support for new nuclear would reach EUR5 billion by 2030, while not assuming the power plants would be online by that time.

Uganda's government is strongly committed to developing the infrastructure needed for a safe, secure and peaceful nuclear power programme, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team of experts has found. The eight-day Integrated Nuclear Infrastructure Review (INIR) mission was conducted at the government's request.

The INIR mission reviewed the status of nuclear infrastructure development using the Phase 1 criteria of the IAEA's Milestones Approach, a comprehensive method to assist countries that are considering or planning their first nuclear power plant which splits the activities necessary to establish the infrastructure for a nuclear power programme into three progressive phases of development. The end of Phase 1 marks the readiness of a country to make a knowledgeable commitment to a nuclear power programme.

Prior to the mission, Uganda prepared and submitted a self-evaluation report and supporting documents covering all infrastructure issues to the IAEA.

To diversify its energy mix, which is now mainly based on hydroelectricity, Uganda has taken steps towards the introduction of nuclear power. It drafted an energy policy that includes nuclear power and established a Nuclear Energy Programme Implementing Organisation (NEPIO). A NEPIO coordinates efforts among organisations and individuals who have roles to play in the process. Uganda's NEPIO has completed several studies on different infrastructure issues and drafted a Nuclear Power Roadmap for Uganda that makes recommendations for key decisions on the development of the infrastructure for nuclear power in the short, medium and long term.

The INIR team of IAEA staff and experts from Algeria, Morocco, Turkey and the USA was hosted by Uganda's Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development.

The team made recommendations and suggestions aimed at assisting Uganda in making further progress in the development of its nuclear infrastructure and its readiness to construct the first nuclear power plant in the country...