artdiamondblog.com – Page 523 – Art Diamond's web log

Third Generation Nuclear Reactors Are Simpler and Even Safer

Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. R1) Researchers are working on reactors that they claim are simpler, cheaper in certain respects, and more efficient than the last generation of plants.

Some designs try to reduce the chance of accidents by automating safety features and minimizing the amount of hardware needed to shut down the reactor in an emergency. Others cut costs by using standardized parts that can be built in big chunks and then shipped to the site. Some squeeze more power out of uranium, reducing the amount of waste produced, while others wring even more energy out of spent fuel.
“Times are exciting for nuclear,” says Ronaldo Szilard, director of nuclear science and engineering at the Idaho National Lab, a part of the U.S. Energy Department. “There are lots of options being explored.”
. . .
(p. R3) As a whole, . . . , the U.S. nuclear industry has a solid safety record, and the productivity of plants has grown dramatically in the past decade. The next generation of reactors so-called Generation III units is intended to take everything that’s been learned about safe operations and do it even better. Generation III units are the reactors of choice for most of the 34 nations that already have nuclear plants in operation. (China still is building a few Gen II units.)
“A common theme of future reactors is to make them simpler so there are fewer systems to monitor and fewer systems that could fail,” says Revis James, director of the Energy Technology Assessment Center at the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent power-industry research organization.
The current generation of nuclear plants requires a complex maze of redundant motors, pumps, valves and control systems to deal with emergency conditions. Generation III plants cut down on some of that infrastructure and rely more heavily on passive systems that don’t need human intervention to keep the reactor in a safe condition reducing the chance of an accident caused by operator error or equipment failure.
For example, the Westinghouse AP1000 boasts half as many safety-related valves, one-third fewer pumps and only one-fifth as much safety-related piping as earlier plants from Westinghouse, majority owned by Toshiba Corp. In an emergency, the reactor, which has been selected for use at Southern Co.’s Vogtle site in Georgia and at six other U.S. locations, is designed to shut down automatically and stay within a safe temperature range.

For the full story, see:
REBECCA SMITH. “The New Nukes; The next generation of nuclear reactors is on its way, and supporters say they will be safer, cheaper and more efficient than current plants. Here’s a look at what’s coming — and when.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., SEPTEMBER 8, 2009): R1 & R3.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Massachusetts Dems Are “Gigantic Hypocrites”

(p. A3) BOSTON — The Democrat-controlled legislature in Massachusetts is poised to pass a bill in coming days giving Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick authority to appoint an interim senator to succeed the late Edward M. Kennedy, strengthening the party’s U.S. Senate majority and bolstering prospects for passage of a health-care overhaul.

The interim-appointment issue is contentious in part because five years ago, the Democrat-dominated legislature voted to take appointment power away from Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, changing rules so a seat remains vacant until a special election. The shift came as Sen. John Kerry campaigned as the Democratic nominee for president, and a Kerry victory would have given the governor the chance to name a Republican senator.
Some Democrats have expressed discomfort over the about-face, and Republicans are irate. State Republican party Chairman Jennifer Nassour called the Democrats “gigantic hypocrites.”

For the full story, see:
WILLIAM M. BULKELEY and JENNIFER LEVITZ. “Vacant Senate Seat Triggers Flip-Flop.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., SEPTEMBER 17, 2009): A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“The Animated Man” is a Useful Account of the Life of an Important Entrepreneur

Source of book image: http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/wp-content/e/a336.jpg

I have always believed, and recently increasingly believe, that Walt Disney was one of the most important entrepreneurs of our time.
One of the most favorably reviewed biographies of Disney is Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man. (At some point in the future, I will briefly discuss an alternative biography of Disney by Gabler.)
I have not thoroughly read The Animated Man, but have thoroughly skimmed it. It appears to be a very useful account of Walt Disney’s life.
I did not want to wait until I had fully read it, in order to highlight a few passages that I think may be of special interest. I will do so in the next few weeks.

Reference to the book discussed:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

Global Warming Is Least Worry of Vanuatu Island’s Poor

(p. A19) In a warning often repeated by environmental campaigners, the Vanuatuan president told the United Nations that entire island nations could be submerged. “If such a tragedy does happen,” he said, “then the United Nations and its members would have failed in their first and most basic duty to a member nation and its innocent people.”

Torethy Frank, a 39-year-old woman carving out a subsistence lifestyle on Vanuatu’s Nguna Island, is one of those “innocent people.” Yet, she has never heard of the problem that her government rates as a top priority. “What is global warming?” she asks a researcher for the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
. . .
Torethy and her family of six live in a small house made of concrete and brick with no running water. As a toilet, they use a hole dug in the ground. They have no shower and there is no fixed electricity supply. Torethy’s family was given a battery-powered DVD player but cannot afford to use it.
. . .
What would change her life? Having a boat in the village to use for fishing, transporting goods to sell, and to get to hospital in emergencies. She doesn’t want more aid money because, “there is too much corruption in the government and it goes in people’s pockets,” but she would like microfinance schemes instead. “Give the money directly to the people for businesses so we can support ourselves without having to rely on the government.”
Vanuatu’s politicians speak with a loud voice on the world stage. But the inhabitants of Vanuatu, like Torethy Frank, tell a very different story.

For the full commentary, see:

BJøRN LOMBORG. “The View from Vanuatu on Climate Change; Torethy Frank had never heard of global warming. She is worried about power and running water.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., OCTOBER 23, 2009): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version is dated Thurs., Oct. 22.)

Videos of Routines Are Better than Focus Groups and Surveys

Source of book image: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b75569e20120a5fa1e26970c-800wi.

(p. W8) Mr. Brown argues . . . emphatically for the close observation of users in their natural habitats. Traditional market-research tools–focus groups, surveys–rarely produce breakthrough findings, he claims. IDEO and others follow users around–making video recordings of them as they go about their routines, recording conversations with them–to build an understanding of what they really need. An IDEO employee in the health-care area, for instance, pretended to have a foot injury and checked himself into an emergency room with a hidden video camera to get a better view of the patient experience. This anthropological form of market research, Mr. Brown notes, has been adopted by companies such as Intel and Nokia.

For the full review, see:
DAVID A. PRICE. “The Shape of Things to Come; Design is more than aesthetics and ease of use. It’s a way of doing business.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., OCTOBER 9, 2009): W8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Reference the book being reviewed:
Brown, Tim. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: HarperBusiness Publishers, 2009.

“A Foolish Faith in Authority Is the Worst Enemy of Truth”

(p. A21) Several years ago I grew concerned about my postmenopausal mother’s risk of osteoporosis. I tried to convince her to initiate hormone replacement therapy. She didn’t listen to me. Instead, she spoke with her gynecologist, who–contrary to best medical evidence at the time–recommended against such treatment. I would eventually be thankful my mother listened to the gynecologist who had known her for decades instead of me and the published medical reviews I was relying on. Some years later my mother was diagnosed with early breast cancer. Had she been on estrogen replacement, it is likely that her tumor would have progressed more rapidly. The gynecologist likely saved my mother’s life.

Studies published in the medical literature are mostly produced by academics who face an imperative to publish or watch their careers perish. These academics aren’t basing their careers on their clinical skills and experiences. Paradoxically, if we allow the academic literature to set guidelines for accepted practices, we are allowing those who are often academics first and clinicians second to determine what clinical care is appropriate.
Consciously or not, those who provide the peer review for medical journals are influenced by whether the work they are reviewing will impact their standing in the medical community. This is a dilemma. The experts who serve as reviewers compete with the work they are reviewing. Leaders in every community, therefore, exert disproportional influence on what gets published. We expect reviewers to be objective and free of conflicts, but in truth, only rarely is that the case.
Albert Einstein once noted that “a foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”

For the full commentary, see:

NORBERT GLEICHER. “‘Expert Panels’ Won’t Improve Health Care; Government reliance on medical studies will make it harder to discard false prophecies and dogmas.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 19, 2009): A21.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated Sun., Oct. 18.)

John Mackey: “I Believe in the Dynamic Creativity of Capitalism”

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. Source of the caricature: online version of the WSJ interview quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) “I honestly don’t know why the article became such a lightning rod,” says John Mackey, CEO and founder of Whole Foods Market Inc., as he tries to explain the firestorm caused by his August op-ed on these pages opposing government-run health care.
. . .
. . . his now famous op-ed incited a boycott of Whole Foods by some of his left-wing customers. His piece advised that “the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us closer to a complete government takeover of our health-care system.” Free-market groups retaliated with a “buy-cott,” encouraging people to purchase more groceries at Whole Foods.
. . .
What Mr. Mackey is proposing is more or less what he has already implemented at his company–a plan that would allow more health savings accounts (HSAs), more low-premium, high-deductible plans, more incentives for wellness, and medical malpractice reform. None of these initiatives are in any of the Democratic bills winding their way through Congress. In fact, the Democrats want to kill HSAs and high-deductible plans and mandate coverage options that would inflate health insurance costs.
. . .
Mr. Mackey’s latest crusade involves traveling to college campuses across the country, trying to persuade young people that business, profits and capitalism aren’t forces of evil. He calls his concept “conscious capitalism.”
What is that? “It means that business has the potential to have a deeper purpose. I mean, Whole Foods has a deeper purpose,” he says, now sounding very much like a philosopher. “Most of the companies I most admire in the world I think have a deeper purpose.” He continues, “I’ve met a lot of successful entrepreneurs. They all started their businesses not to maximize shareholder value or money but because they were pursuing a dream.”
Mr. Mackey tells me he is trying to save capitalism: “I think that business has a noble purpose. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with making money. It’s one of the important things that business contributes to society. But it’s not the sole reason that businesses exist.”
What does he mean by a “noble purpose”? “It means that just like every other profession, business serves society. They produce goods and services that make people’s lives better. Doctors heal the sick. Teachers educate people. Architects design buildings. Lawyers promote justice. Whole Foods puts food on people’s tables and we improve people’s health.”
Then he adds: “And we provide jobs. And we provide capital through profits that spur improvements in the world.
. . .
“I don’t think anybody’s too big to fail,” he says. “If a business fails, what happens is, there are still assets, and those assets get reorganized. Either new management comes in or it’s sold off to another business or it’s bid on and the good assets are retained and the bad assets are eliminated. I believe in the dynamic creativity of capitalism, and it’s self-correcting, if you just allow it to self-correct.”
That’s something Washington won’t let happen these days, which helps explain why Mr. Mackey felt compelled to write that the Whole Foods health-insurance program is smarter and cheaper than the latest government proposals.

For the full interview, see:
STEPHEN MOORE. “The Conscience of a Capitalist; The Whole Foods founder talks about his Journal health-care op-ed that spawned a boycott, how he deals with unions, and why he thinks CEOs are overpaid.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., OCTOBER 3, 2009): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

(p. 4) The border guards, bereft of instruction from the command system that had trained them to defend this barrier with their lives, plainly did not know what to do. Some stood silent, others engaged in conversation with the crowd; what they did not do was what they ordinarily would have done: Drive them away.

Eventually, the good-natured crowd — “we just want to go and drink a beer over there; tomorrow we’ll be at work!” shouted one man — was allowed into a forecourt. West Berlin seemed tantalizingly close. But then the commander of the Eastern checkpoint sent them away, saying they would have to get visas the next morning from local police stations.
By contrast, I was spotted by the commander taking notes. Unmasked as a Western reporter working without authorization in a border area of the German Democratic Republic, I was declared persona non grata and shoved into a small corridor that led to a passport check and the door into West Berlin. And it was in that narrow passage that I met Angelika Wachs.
Whispering “Ja-a-a-a!” and smiling broadly, she had somehow squeezed in behind me, and had almost nothing of the scared reticence common to most East Germans. A pimply young man, barely in his 20s, sat at passport control. He looked at my British passport, and then at Angelika’s papers, which somehow bore a rare stamp permitting her to visit West Berlin. But it was only valid Nov. 17, he objected. I urged him to consider what was happening. He shrugged. He pressed the switch to open the door. We tumbled through.
It was the only moment in my life when I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. I had just crossed Checkpoint Charlie with this stranger, a woman exactly my age, 34, a citizen of Communist East Germany.
There were only a handful of West Berliners on hand to cheer our arrival. Shouting that it was “unglaublich,” or unbelievable, Angelika ran off to seek a ride to a friend who had escaped west years earlier, and I headed for a cheap bar where I glommed on to that precious commodity, a telephone.
. . .

. . . Americans, unlike Europeans, do not dwell much on the past. Tomorrow is always another day, and yesterday’s lessons fade.
Not so the story of Angelika Wachs. Once I found her name in the long-lost articles, it did not take many minutes on the Internet to track her down. She e-mailed; this past Saturday, we talked. I discovered that she had that precious stamp that night because, some years earlier, her parents had fled west, and she had been granted permission to visit. When we met, she had been working in administration at the Staatsoper, the state opera; her career has continued in P.R.
Ten years ago, she met an Englishman. They married this year, she said, on the deliberately chosen date of July 4 — “a way to mark independence, and freedom.” On Nov. 16, when a conference takes me to Berlin and a gleaming hotel among the skyscrapers that now fill Potsdamer Platz, we will meet for the drink we never had 20 years ago.

For the full story, see:
ALISON SMALE. “When the Future Swung Open in Berlin.” The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun., November 8, 2009): 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated Nov. 6, and has the title “Chasing the Story on a Night That Changed All .”)

“20 Years; Angelika Wachs posed last week at Checkpoint Charlie, remembering the jubilation on the Wall’s western side on Nov. 10, 1989.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

New Scientific Optimism on Life Extension

Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D1) It may be the ultimate free lunch — how to reap all the advantages of a calorically restricted diet, including freedom from disease and an extended healthy life span, without eating one fewer calorie. Just take a drug that tricks the body into thinking it’s on such a diet.

It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is. Yet such drugs are now in clinical trials. Even if they should fail, as most candidate drugs do, their development represents a new optimism among research biologists that aging is not immutable, that the body has resources that can be mobilized into resisting disease and averting the adversities of old age.
This optimism, however, is not fully shared. Evolutionary biologists, the experts on the theory of aging, have strong reasons to suppose that human life span cannot be altered in any quick and easy way. But they have been confounded by experiments with small laboratory animals, like roundworms, fruit flies and mice. In all these species, the change of single genes has brought noticeable increases in life span.
With theorists’ and their gloomy predictions cast in the shade, at least for the time being, experimental biologists are pushing confidently into the tangle of linkages that evolution has woven among food intake, fertility and life span. “My rule of thumb is to ignore the evolutionary biologists — they’re constantly telling you what you can’t think,” Gary Ruvkun of the Massachusetts General Hospital remarked this June after making an unusual discovery about longevity.
Excitement among researchers on aging has picked up in the last few years with the apparent convergence of two lines of inquiry: single gene changes and the diet known as caloric restriction.
. . .
In the view of evolutionary biologists, the life span of each species is adapted to the nature of its environment. Mice live at most a year in the wild because owls, cats and freezing to death are such frequent hazards. Mice with genes that allow longer life can rarely be favored by natural selection. Rather, the mice that leave the most progeny are those that devote resources to breeding at as early an age as possible.
According to this theory, if mice had wings and could escape their usual predators, natural selection ought to favor longer life. And indeed the maximum life span of bats is 3.5 times greater than flightless mammals of the same size, according to research by Gerald S. Wilkinson of the University of Maryland.
In this view, cells are so robust that they do not limit life span. Instead the problem, especially for longer-lived species, is to keep them under control lest they cause cancer. Cells have not blocked the evolution of extremely long life spans, like that of the bristlecone pine, which lives 5,000 years, or certain deep sea corals, whose age has been found to exceed 4,000 years.
Some species seem to be imperishable. A tiny freshwater animal known as a hydra can regenerate itself from almost any part of its body, apparently because it makes no distinction between its germ cells and its ordinary body cells. In people the germ cells, the egg and sperm, do not age; babies are born equally young, whatever the age of their parents. The genesis of aging was the division of labor in the first multicellular animals between the germ cells and the body cells.
That division put the role of maintaining the species on the germ cells and left the body cells free to become specialized, like neurons or skin cells. But in doing so the body cells made themselves disposable. The reason we die, in the view of Thomas Kirkwood, an expert on the theory of aging, is that constant effort is required to keep the body cells going. “This, in the long run, is unwarranted — in terms of natural selection, there are more important things to do,” he writes.
All that seems clear about life span is that it is not fixed. And if it is not fixed, there may indeed be ways to extend it.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Tests Begin on Drugs That May Slow Aging.” The New York Times (Tues., August 18, 2009): D1 & D?.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: thanks to Luis Locay for calling my attention to the article quoted above.)

Vaclav Havel Criticizes Obama for Failing to Meet Dalai Lama

It is interesting that President Obama is open to meeting with authoritarian dictators of terrorist nations, such as Iran, but is reluctant to meet with the peace-loving Dalai Lama.

(p. A12) PRAGUE — It was supposed to be an interview about the revolutions that overturned communism 20 years ago in Europe. But first, Vaclav Havel had a question.

Was it true that President Obama had refused to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington?
Mr. Havel is a fan of the Dalai Lama, who was among the first visitors to Prague’s storied castle after Mr. Havel moved in there as president, the final act in the swift, smooth revolution of 1989. A picture of the Dalai Lama is displayed prominently in Mr. Havel’s current office in central Prague.
Told that Mr. Obama had made clear he would receive the Dalai Lama after his first presidential visit to China in November, Mr. Havel reached out to touch a magnificent glass dish, inscribed with the preamble to the United States Constitution — a gift from Mr. Obama, who visited in April.
“It is only a minor compromise,” Mr. Havel said of the nonreception of the Tibetan leader. “But exactly with these minor compromises start the big and dangerous ones, the real problems.”

For the full story, see:
ALISON SMALE. “Former Czech Leader Assails Moral Compromises.” The New York Times (Thurs., October 15, 2009): A12.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated Oct. 13th, and has the title “Havel, Still a Man of Morals and Mischief.”)
(Note: I have added a missing quotation mark at the end of the quote after the word “problems.”)

How “Free” Government Health Care Works

“Michael Kellerman and daughter Jovi, 1, wait in line near 69th and Underwood for a flu shot Thursday morning.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

Thousands turned out this morning for Douglas County’s first public clinic for H1N1 flu vaccinations.

The line ran out of the First United Methodist Church to the east, then down 69th Street before hooking west along Cass Street toward 72nd Street.
Police estimated that 4,000 people had gathered by 9:20 a.m.
Phil Rooney of the Douglas County Health Department said the turnout was no surprise.
“There hasn’t been a clinic this size done in the county or in the surrounding counties recently, so we were prepared for a very large crowd, and that’s what we’ve got,” he said.
He said 252 people were vaccinated in the clinic’s first hour. “The pace the first hour was slower than we wanted, so we’re trying to pick that up,” he added.

For the full story, see:
John Keenan and Rick Ruggles. “Long line for flu shots.” Omaha World-Herald online edition (Thurs., Nov. 5, 2009).
(Note: as far as I can tell, having checked several online e-editions for Nov. 5 and Nov. 6, this version of the article was never published in any of the print editions of the paper.)
(Note: at some point the title of the online version of this article was changed to “Flu shot seekers turned away.”)