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Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance
In Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the
Politics of Safety Governance , Florentine
Koppenborg argues that the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake
of the Fukushima disaster on March 11, 2011, directly and
indirectly raised the costs of nuclear power in Japan. The
Nuclear Regulation Authority resisted capture by the nuclear
industry and fundamentally altered the environment for nuclear
policy implementation. Independent safety regulation changed
state-business relations in the nuclear power domain from
regulatory capture to top-down safety regulation, which raised
technical safety costs for electric utilities. Furthermore, the
safety agency's extended emergency preparedness regulations
expanded the allegorical backyard of NIMBY demonstrations.
Antinuclear protests, mainly lawsuits challenging restarts,
incurred additional social acceptance costs. Increasing costs
undermined pronuclear actors' ability to implement nuclear power
policy and caused a rift inside the \"nuclear village.\" Small
nuclear safety administration reforms were, in fact, game changers
for nuclear power politics in Japan.
Koppenborg's findings contribute to the vibrant conversations
about the rise of independent regulatory agencies, crisis as a
mechanism for change, and the role of nuclear power amid global
interest in decarbonizing our energy supply.
eBook
Nuclear power
Presents information about nuclear power as an energy source, covering the history of nuclear power, its pros and cons, how people use nuclear power today, and how it may be used in the future.
Book
Producing Power
The Chernobyl disaster has been variously ascribed to human error, reactor design flaws, and industry mismanagement. Six former Chernobyl employees were convicted of criminal negligence; they defended themselves by pointing to reactor design issues. Other observers blamed the Soviet style of ideologically driven economic and industrial management. InProducing Power,Sonja Schmid draws on interviews with veterans of the Soviet nuclear industry and extensive research in Russian archives as she examines these alternate accounts. Rather than pursue one \"definitive\" explanation, she investigates how each of these narratives makes sense in its own way and demonstrates that each implies adherence to a particular set of ideas -- about high-risk technologies, human-machine interactions, organizational methods for ensuring safety and productivity, and even about the legitimacy of the Soviet state. She also shows how these attitudes shaped, and were shaped by, the Soviet nuclear industry from its very beginnings.Schmid explains that Soviet experts established nuclear power as a driving force of social, not just technical, progress. She examines the Soviet nuclear industry's dual origins in weapons and electrification programs, and she traces the emergence of nuclear power experts as a professional community. Schmid also fundamentally reassesses the design choices for nuclear power reactors in the shadow of the Cold War's arms race. Schmid's account helps us understand how and why a complex sociotechnical system broke down. Chernobyl, while unique and specific to the Soviet experience, can also provide valuable lessons for contemporary nuclear projects.
eBook
Constraints on Nuclear Symmetry Energy Parameters
A review is made of constraints on the nuclear symmetry energy parameters arising from nuclear binding energy measurements, theoretical chiral effective field predictions of neutron matter properties, the unitary gas conjecture, and measurements of neutron skin thicknesses and dipole polarizabilities. While most studies have been confined to the parameters SV and L, the important roles played by, and constraints on Ksym, or, equivalently, the neutron matter incompressibility KN, are discussed. Strong correlations among SV,L, and KN are found from both nuclear binding energies and neutron matter theory. However, these correlations somewhat differ in the two cases, and those from neutron matter theory have smaller uncertainties. To 68% confidence, it is found from neutron matter theory that SV=32.0±1.1 MeV, L=51.9±7.9 MeV and KN=152.2±38.1 MeV. Theoretical predictions for neutron skin thickness and dipole polarizability measurements of the neutron-rich nuclei 48Ca, 120Sn, and 208Pb are compared to recent experimental measurements, most notably the CREX and PREX neutron skin experiments from Jefferson Laboratory. By themselves, PREX I+II measurements of 208Pb and CREX measurement of 48Ca suggest L=121±47 MeV and L=−5±40 MeV, respectively, to 68% confidence. However, we show that nuclear interactions optimally satisfying both measurements imply L=53±13 MeV, nearly the range suggested by either nuclear mass measurements or neutron matter theory, and is also consistent with nuclear dipole polarizability measurements. This small parameter range implies R1.4=11.6±1.0 km and Λ1.4=228−90+148, which are consistent with NICER X-ray and LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave observations of neutron stars.
Journal Article
Atomic Environments
Demonstrates how policymakers influenced environmental
science during the early nuclear age In
Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World,
and Policymaking, 1945–1960 , Neil S. Oatsvall examines
how top officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations
used environmental science to develop nuclear strategy at the
beginning of the Cold War. While many people were involved in
research and analysis during the period in question, it was at
highest levels of executive decision-making where environmental
science and nuclear science most clearly combined to shape the
nation’s policies. Oatsvall clearly demonstrates how the
natural world and the scientific disciplines that study it became
integral parts of nuclear science rather than adversarial fields
of knowledge. But while nuclear technologies heavily depended on
environmental science to develop, those same technologies
frequently caused great harm to the natural world. Moreover,
while some individuals expressed real anxieties about the damage
wrought by nuclear technologies, policymakers as a class
consistently made choices that privileged nuclear boosterism and
secrecy, prioritizing institutional values over the lives and
living systems that they were ostensibly charged to protect. By
scrutinizing institutional policymaking practices and agendas at
the birth of the nuclear age, a constant set of values becomes
clear. Oatsvall reveals an emerging technocratic class that
routinely valued knowledge about the environment to help create
and maintain a nuclear arsenal, despite its existential threat to
life on earth and the negative effects many nuclear technologies
had on ecosystems and the American people alike. Although
policymakers took their charge to protect and advance the welfare
of the United States and its people seriously,
Atomic Environments demonstrates how they often failed
to do so because their allegiance to the US nuclear hierarchy
blinded them to the real risks and dangers of the nuclear
age.
eBook
Many-body correlations for nuclear physics across scales: from nuclei to quark-gluon plasmas to hadron distributions
It is an experimental fact that multi-particle correlations in the final states of high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions are sensitive to collective correlations of nucleons in the wave functions of the colliding nuclei. Here, I show that this connection is more direct than it intuitively seems. With an energy deposition scheme inspired by high-energy quantum chromodynamics, and within a linearized description of initial-state fluctuations in the quark-gluon plasma, I exhibit relations between
N
-particle correlations in the final states of nuclear collisions and
N
-nucleon density distributions in the colliding nuclei. This result formally justifies the sensitivity of the outcome of high-energy collisions to features such as nuclear deformations. It paves the way, thus, to systematic studies of the impact of state-of-the-art nuclear interactions in such processes.
Journal Article