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The need for policy makers to understand science and for scientists to understand policy processes is widely recognised. However, the science-policy relationship is sometimes difficult and occasionally dysfunctional; it is also increasingly visible, because it must deal with contentious issues, or itself becomes a matter of public controversy, or both. We suggest that identifying key unanswered questions on the relationship between science and policy will catalyse and focus research in this field. To identify these questions, a collaborative procedure was employed with 52 participants selected to cover a wide range of experience in both science and policy, including people from government, non-governmental organisations, academia and industry. These participants consulted with colleagues and submitted 239 questions. An initial round of voting was followed by a workshop in which 40 of the most important questions were identified by further discussion and voting. The resulting list includes questions about the effectiveness of science-based decision-making structures; the nature and legitimacy of expertise; the consequences of changes such as increasing transparency; choices among different sources of evidence; the implications of new means of characterising and representing uncertainties; and ways in which policy and political processes affect what counts as authoritative evidence. We expect this exercise to identify important theoretical questions and to help improve the mutual understanding and effectiveness of those working at the interface of science and policy.

The US government's helium reserve near Amarillo, Texas, meets around one-third of world demand for the gas. J. MARSHALL/FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM/MCT/GETTY 3 1 M A Y 2 0 1 2 | V O L 4 8 5 | N A T U R E | 5 7 3 COMMENT

There is no academic consensus on which electricity market design provides the least distorting investment incentives. Theory suggests that "energy-only market" can allow capacity cost recovery by generators. However, separate payments for capacity or reserve obligations do not need to rely on infrequent price spikes to remunerate reserve capacity. Three years after the controversial change from the compulsory British Electricity Pool with capacity payments to the decentralised energyonly New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA), we contrast the two market designs in terms of investment incentives, analyse NETA's balancing market failures, and review the case for regulatory support for investment.

Concerns about climate change, security of supply, and depleting fossil fuel reserves have spurred a revival of interest in nuclear power generation in Europe and North America, while other regions continue or initiate an expansion. We suggest that the first stage of this process will include replacing or extending the life of existing nuclear power plants, with continued incremental improvements in efficiency and reliability. After 2030, a large-scale second period of construction would allow nuclear energy to contribute substantially to the decarbonization of electricity generation. For nuclear energy to be sustainable, new large-scale fuel cycles will be required that may include fuel reprocessing. Here, we explore the opportunities and constraints in both time periods and suggests ways in which measures taken today might, at modest cost, provide more options in the decades to come. Careful long-term planning, along with parallel efforts aimed at containing waste products and avoiding diversion of material into weapons production, can ensure that nuclear power generation remains a carbon-neutral option.

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In this paper, we develop an agent-based model of a market game in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the U.K. government's 2008-2010 policy on promoting smart metering in the U.K. retail electricity market. We break down the policy into four possible policy options. With the model, we study the impact of the four policy options on the dynamics of smart metering diffusion and suggest policy implications. The context of the paper is a practical application of agentbased simulation to the retail electricity market in the United Kingdom. The contributions of the paper are both in the areas of policymaking for the promotion of innovation diffusion in the electricity market and in methodological use of agent-based simulation for studying the impact of policies on the dynamics of innovation diffusion.

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