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The EU Research team take a look at current events in the scientific news
Post BREXIT Britain is becoming less attractive to talented international researchers With the UK planning to increase R&D spending, questions are being asked about how to attract more people with advanced skills in science, technology, engineering and maths. The UK government’s plan to increase R&D spending requires a skilled workforce which its universities and research institutes will struggle to assemble, expert witnesses told the House of Lords’ science and technology committee today. “The attractiveness of the UK as a destination for scientists might have decreased in recent years,” said Maggie Dallman, vice president for international affairs and associate provost for academic partnerships at Imperial College London. In a strategy published in March, the UK government renewed its commitment to reaching a public and private R&D spending target of 2.4% of GDP by 2027, in a new five-year strategy. The strategy says the UK needs to “grow and diversify” its R&D workforce by 150,000 people over the next eight years. Harry Anderson, policy manager at Universities UK, which represents 140 institutions, told the committee the government has not provided any details about how it plans to do this. “My question is, are we actually on that trajectory? How are we going to meet those targets?” he said. Plans for establishing new international science links after breaking away from the EU have not been very successful do date. A visa scheme that aimed to attract leading scientists from around the world has failed to attract applicants. The subtext is that the UK’s reputation as an international science and technology hub has been damaged by the government’s post-Brexit stance on immigration.
Europe’s energy crisis hits researchers
Ottoline Leyser, CEO of UK Research and Innovation, the main public funding agency, said the government should give a stronger indication of its political and financial commitment to research and innovation. “It’s absolutely critical that the UK signals really clearly and loudly, with long term commitments from a funding point of view, its intention to drive up research and innovation, investment and opportunity right across the UK economy,” Leyser said. The hearing took place as Liz Truss was being appointed as the UK’s new prime minister. In her previous posting of foreign secretary, she last month announced legal proceedings against the EU for blocking its membership of the €95.5 billion research programme, Horizon Europe, in a move which move could set the scene for an increasingly heated dispute over EU-UK science cooperation. Universities and research institutions are having a hard time getting suitable candidates from abroad partly because the UK’s visa system is costly for researchers hired on longer term contracts who want to bring their families with them. As a result, academics have started “asking for shorter contracts,” said Anderson. He gave the example of a Turkish academic who was planning a move to the UK but the upfront cost including the visa, accounted for as much as ten times their salary in Turkey. Some universities do have loan repayment schemes to help cover these costs, but that option is not available everywhere. “I think that’s a real challenge and a real barrier,” Anderson said.
Universities, super computers and accelerator centres struggle with surging gas and electricity prices. Surging energy prices are hitting Europe hard—and it’s not just households that are feeling the pain. Institutes that operate energy-hungry supercomputers, accelerators, and laser beamlines are also struggling—and they may be coal mine canaries for the rest of science. If prices continue to soar this fall and winter, “The impact for science is going to be significant,” says Martin Freer, a nuclear physicist who directs the University of Birmingham’s energy institute. The primary cause of the crisis is a rebound from an economic slowdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Power generators that had been shut down could not ramp up in time to meet renewed demand, says Jonathan Stern, who studies natural gas at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February worsened the situation. Both European sanctions and Russian retaliation crimped supplies of Russian natural gas, which powers electric generators and heats buildings, pushing continental European gas prices to more than 10 times their average historical values. Early science casualties came in January, even before the Ukraine war, when Lumius, an energy contractor in the Czech Republic, declared bankruptcy, forcing many of the country’s universities and research facilities to buy energy at much higher prices from the region’s main supplier. IT4Innovations, a national supercomputing centre, was compelled to run Karolina, its most powerful
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supercomputer, at one-third of its capacity—creating delays for the 1500 users who used it for climate modelling and drug discovery. ELI Beamlines, a Czech facility that hosts high-power laser beams, had to shut down operations for a few weeks. By May, the Czech government had agreed to bail out both facilities until the end of 2023, but their fate beyond that point remains uncertain. Roman Hvězda, ELI Beamlines deputy director, worries the government will declare a state of emergency, which could restrict the gas supply that the facility needs to heat its buildings. But the electricity that powers the beamlines themselves is the bigger concern. If supplies are restricted, the facility may have to shut down again, for up to 6 months—which would not only curtail ongoing experiments for hundreds of users, but also delay calls for future ones, he says. “So, you’re effectively losing not 6 months, but maybe 12, maybe even 18 months.” There’s a similar concern at DESY, Germany’s largest accelerator centre. The centre has bought enough energy in advance to last into 2023, but DESY might not be able to use those supplies if the German government imposes national energy restrictions, says Wim Leemans, who leads DESY’s accelerator programs. Leemans says DESY is exploring options to run its machines at lower energies. For example, it might turn down its synchrotron, a circular particle accelerator that produces bright x-rays for imaging proteins and materials, so that it generates only lower energy
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“soft” x-rays. That way it could continue to serve some users, he says. However, DESY’s two large linear accelerators, used to produce laserlike pulses of x-ray light, would need to be shut down completely if the restrictions are severe. They rely on superconducting magnets that need constant power-hungry cryogenic cooling. It can’t be turned down, Leemans says. “We cannot say, ‘Well, we’re only going to run some parts of the machine.’” Reducing operations would hurt important research, Leemans says. During the pandemic, vaccine maker BioNTech used DESY’s x-ray facilities to reveal the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and how it uses its surface protein, spike, to dock on human cells. Other DESY researchers study materials used in solar panels and batteries. “It will have ramifications for slowing down innovations, right at the moment when we need them the most,” Leemans says. Big legacy machines may be hard to restart after a shutdown, adds AnkeSusanne Müller, who heads accelerator physics and technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Turning off vacuums may damage delicate systems, stopping the flow of water in cooling systems may cause corrosion, and older control electronics might not turn on again. “If you suddenly switch a component off, they might not easily come back,” she says. CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, in Switzerland, is also nervously watching the energy crisis unfold. The organization purchases energy from the French grid years in advance, but now the concern is supply. “For this autumn, it is not a price issue, it’s an
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availability issue,” says Serge Claudet, CERN’s energy coordinator. CERN uses 1.3 terawatt-hours of energy annually, roughly the equivalent of 250,000 households. French energy authorities might order CERN to not operate at times when the electric grid is least stable–typically mornings and evenings. Depending on the frequency of these requests, CERN’s data output could significantly decrease, Claudet says. He says CERN may have to shut down smaller accelerators in order to fulfil its top priority: maintaining operations for the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful accelerator. Even with energy procured for the short term, Claudet says CERN’s budgets will be stretched to buy energy for the coming years at such high prices. “This is a financial concern because the energy prices on the market are very high, up to 10 times higher,” he says. Stern predicts it will take at least 2 years for prices to fall to typical levels. Meanwhile, peak prices will depend on the severity of Europe’s winter and whether Asian countries bid against Europe for global supplies of liquid natural gas. Stern says it’s unclear whether governments will keep research labs afloat, or prioritize aiding industrial companies. Smaller research laboratories in universities may be left to fend for themselves, he says. That could have real-world consequences, Freer warns. He gives the example of accelerators at Birmingham that produce isotopes used in medical imaging—programs that would either need to be suspended, run at a loss, or run with their costs passed down to local hospitals. “It’s going to be a challenging time to get through,” he says. “It may mean, like with COVID, there will be a hiatus in science programs.”
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