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Comments on an article about the diffusion paths of early steam power. Factors that influence diffusion; Aspects of technological monopolization.

The article presents several news briefs from the related to atomic energy with the involvement of the United Nations. The Control Committee completed the first discussion of the six working papers on the detailed functions of an international control agency. The Committee took up the statement in the coordinating paper which said the issue of international ownership of source material remains controversial.

The article reports issues and topics related to the United Nations Conference on Atomic Energy held on August 8 to 20, 1955, in Geneva, Switzerland. According to the event's organizers, the final count of papers accepted for the conference was 1,061, with 460 scheduled to be presented orally at one of the 60 sessions. The range of subjects is shown by the titles of the six volumes which will contain the published papers including "Safety Aspects of Nuclear Reactors," "Power Reactors," "Research Reactors," "Nuclear Fuels," "Atomic Raw Materials," and "Applications of Nuclear Radiation in Food and Agriculture."

The article shares the authors' insights regarding the paper "Global Effects of Increased Use of Energy." The authors' note that nuclear energy is potentially more dangerous than other forms of energy in which most of it is used as dominant energy source. Energy is essential in another basic way not only on the inconsistency of food requirement with agriculture subsistence but also the assumption of zero growth with inherent degree of wealth and energy use. Nuclear fuel has been studied in which the researchers find that the overall temperature regime of earth is noticeably affected by man-made energy. The overall average effect on the increase use of energy has appeared reassuring with considerations effect on global weather pattern that are driven by small fraction of total solar energy.

This paper presents the determination of the greatest stiffness and least power consumption of capillary compensated hydrostatic slideways, prestressed and non-prestressed, respectively. Design equations for determining the optimum values of supply pressure, pocket pressure, length of free-periphery of slideways rim, thickness of land of slideways rim, viscosity, capillary-discharge coefficient and power consumption are determined, other variables held constant. The paper determines the operative conditions which correspond strictly or approximately to the conditions assumed in the equations. Diagrams show the effect of discrepancy between optimum and actual conditions on the stiffness of slideways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the British view regarding safety issues in nuclear power plants, based from the paper presented to the Norwegian Atomic Energy Society. According to the author, all activities involve some risk of harm to people either through direct participation or indirectly. However, it is hoped that the risks will be minimized and more than compensated for by attendant advantages. Thus, minimum performance requirements for a large range of plant used may be able to reduce accident frequencies to levels below a pre-set target. Moreover, the British Atomic Energy Authority is sponsoring and developing techniques for the better understanding of reactor accidents and their consequences.

The article reports on issues and topics discussed during the 1954 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) at the University of California in Berkeley. Of the 3,000 papers read and discussed in 300 sessions, most were concerned with the specialized maze of minutiae. Early in the AAAS meeting, Farrington Daniels of the University of Wisconsin chemistry department chairman, reviewed the factors depleting the world's reserves of fossil fuels, which had been produced through photosynthesis. He cited the growing population, industrialization, and growing demands for power and higher living standards as factors contributing to pressures for finding fossil fuel substitutes.

The article examines the two factors affecting electrical rates. The present paper deals mainly with two fundamental questions: (1) the bearing of the time of consumption upon the rate, and (2) the proper influence of quantity taken upon the rate. While the importance of the load factor constitutes the great peculiarity of the electrical rate situation, quantity discounts constitute the most troublesome practical problem. Quantity taken is perhaps more important than load characteristics as the reason for class rates, even where the latter are ostensibly based on load-factor grounds.

Recent writings in the field of economic development place great emphasis on the human determinants of economic growth, such as the propensity to invest, the supply of entrepreneurship, social attitudes and the political climate. This paper is a study of energy resources and industrial development. It seeks to show how the availability of energy resources in Central Canada has affected the region's industrial development. Central Canada's energy supply is characterized by two features: a virtually complete dependence on imports for its fuels and excellent water-power resources. This supply situation is partially reflected in the relative contributions of different energy sources to total energy consumption in Central Canada as compared with the U.S. In industrial development, however, Central Canada has to compete with the United States. It is important, therefore, to appreciate the handicap with respect to coal supplies, which even Ontario suffers by comparison with American areas just across the Lakes.

The article discusses the proposals of experts, including Edward Teller, associate director of Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, on building underground nuclear power plants in the U.S. The vice president of Harza Engineering Co., Chicago, Franklyn C. Rogers, describes the procedures on how to build the underground power plants. According to them, the underground nuclear power plants offers the potentials for reducing or eliminating several environmental problems, including the radiation hazard of an accident, air pollution, and radioactive releases. These experts believe that locating the power plants underground offers the immediate and obvious advantages of superior biological and pressure containment and positive control in the event of an accident.

The article highlights the issues and topics discussed during the second conference on the peaceful use of atomic energy, held between September 1 and 13, 1958 in Geneva, Switzerland. The public at large had become accustomed to the miracle of nuclear energy and its devices. In general, the second conference was preceded by somewhat methodical and elaborate preparations involving the scientists and engineers of all countries, in much the same way as are meetings in other fields. It was evident that engineers are now playing a much more important role in the field than they had previously. In addition, it was clear that the participants from the smaller nations of the world were now actively engaged in exploring the possibilities of nuclear energy.

The article provides information regarding the peaceful uses of atomic energy in the U.S. The growth of nuclear power station in other underdeveloped countries will depend on their indigenous fuel supplies, on the available loads, and on their technological development. The nuclear power stations have been either dual-purpose power stations or demonstration power stations and would not be economic as commercial stations. The capital costs per kilowatt of the first of the commercial nuclear power stations have been very much reduced below those of Calder Hall and Shippingport.

The article presents a comment on a previous article New England Power Economics, by Roy G. Poulsen that appeared in the August 1965 issue of the journal Land Economics. According to the author, this article describes prospective improvements in electricity supply and costs in New England and looks forward to the time, not too far in the future, when atomic energy for utility generating plants will be widely used in the Northeast, and New England at long last will have a power source no more costly to the region than to any other part of the nation and its competitive power cost disadvantage will come to an end. The Poulsen paper learns heavily, as of course it must, on statements by utilities and their executives about future plans for larger, more efficient conventional and nuclear regeneration. According to the author, the reason for the present high level of electric rates in New England lies not solely in fuel cost. The fixed costs of operation and maintenance, depreciation, taxes and rate of return as well as the magnitude of the unit investment per customer and per kilowatt must be examined in depth before one can be sure of the reasons for the present situation.

During the last twenty years the gas and electricity industries have come to play an increasingly important role in the British economy and by 1963 these two secondary energy industries were meeting about one-third of the country's total energy demands. During this same period both industries have been subject to changing location forces and it is to an examination of these that this paper is devoted. Many factors are, of course, important in influencing the location of gas works and power stations. One thinks immediately of the size of their markets, the level of interest rates on capital, the load factors of the plants and the like. But above all it is primarily a matter of relative transport costs which influences the orientation and hence the location of secondary energy production. Transport, therefore, along with the changing primary fuel base of the two industries, has a key role to play in this discussion. We shall explore its significance in the gas industry first of all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how limited resource stocks must be taken into account in analyzing the decision making of firms. It also examines why the Malthusian model does not apply to aggregate resource stocks and, hence, cannot be used to judge the correctness of observed rates of resource use. Finally, since the newest conservationists have touched some sensitive nerves, the author considers some of the questions now posed for economists concerned with the use of natural resources. In order to limit the topic and to spotlight specific issues, the discussion is confined to energy resources. Crude oil and natural gas will be foremost among these because they are expected to be the key energy sources over the next several decades and because more information is available about them than about most others. The energy resources are typically nonreplenishable by nature and nonrecyclable by man. The author agues that resource scarcity is pertinent to the firm in an absolute, or Malthusian, sense. Asset maximization implies that development and exploration investment be determined, respectively, in light of quantities of resources in known deposits and well-defined expectations regarding undiscovered reserves.

The article reports that the sixth international conference on operation research was held in August 1972 on the campus of Dublin's sixteenth century Trinity College in the Republic of Ireland. An analysis of feedback reports circulated at the conference afforded deep satisfaction to the Irish committee led by Fred Ridgeway, which had striven hard to make the international meeting a memorable occasion. Four simultaneous streams characterized the conference. The mainstream was made up of three highlight papers, the "statement of the problem" by the chairman of each of the eight workshop groups, two papers read by representatives of Allied organizations, eight state-of-the-art sessions consisting of a central paper and two discussants, and finally the eight reports of the workshop groups. A second stream consisted of the twenty-eight national contributions. A third stream was comprised of the meeting of the individual workshops while the fourth stream was devoted to the discussion forum.

The closely controlled mutual characteristics of modern low-cost planar transistors permit the design of a novel complementary monostable circuit which has zero standby power dissipation, a predictable pulse duration and which is suitable for use with single power supply logic systems such as transistor logic (TL).
This paper considers the performance of a logic-compatible, saturating, complementary monostable circuit in which the pulsewidth is primarily dependent on the closely defined mutual characteristic of modern bipolar transistors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on research support. Of the 238 ten-minute-papers which were presented at the American Physical Society congress in Washington, D. C. on April 26 to 28, 1951, 165 of them were supported in part or in full by various government agencies. It is noted that 111 were supported by the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This move by different government agencies and the AEC is seen to forward the ongoing research on the use of nuclear energy and other developments related to this field.

This paper suggests theoretical and practical reasons for the use of electrical energy as a measure of capital input for econometric production functions and other uses. Several applications of this suggestion to time series and cross section data demonstrate the advantages of electrical energy over other measures of capital input. This approach could be helpful in econometric production function studies of µ-units or less developed areas where good data on capital are scarce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, before turning to the analysis of recycling, we move beyond the framework where the rate of interest is determined independently of resource consumption. We examine a variety of models to see how the significant presence of depletable resources (and, by extension, recycleable resources) would affect market interest rates. We conclude from this analysis that our optimality and equilibrium results derived later on do indeed generalize to the case where interest rates are determined endogenously. Then we turn to the analysis of recycling. The assumption of strict depletability can be relaxed to a variety of degrees. The polar opposite would be no depletion whatsoever. Diamonds are a fair example. Their value does not depreciate with use. Less extreme are situations where use does not exhaust a good, but does irrevocably deplete some fraction of it. Chemical compounds used as catalysts might lead such a physical existence. The major recycling model deals with a third case. It is assumed that the commodity is in fixed supply, but that it can be recycled at a cost. Different analytic structures are shown to arise depending on the relationship of marginal extraction costs to the cost of recycling. This most general model can be applied to a wide range of mineral resources for which recycling and additional extraction are both possible. For many resources, the stage of interesting switchovers in economic behaviour may not have been reached. But as demand shifts outward, as costs of extraction increase, and as technological progress yields less costly recyling procedures, we can expect to observe an ever increasing array of materials that are recycled for their resource values. In all of this analysis, capital markets and information are assumed to be perfect; storage costs to suppliers are assumed to be zero. It is shown in all cases that the socially optimal time stream of consumption is identical to the stream produced by perfectly competitive markets. The policy conclusion is, as in the case of absolutely depletable resources, that resource preservation considerations alone provide no justification for governmental intervention into the allocation processes of perfect free markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the balance of this paper we shall concentrate upon only one of many aspects of the energy problem—the race between the development of breeder fission and the exhaustion of low-cost natural uranium resources. Sequential probabilistic linear programming is employed to calculate optimal electricity plant-mix decisions during the decade of the 1980's—given the uncertainty on the date of availability of the breeder. The model allows for the possibility that future uranium resource scarcities will lead to an increase in electricity prices and hence a reduction in the projected demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In any given economy there must be a number of commodities that enter into production and which are used up, and whose available stock cannot be increased. Examples like fossil fuels come readily to mind. It would seem reasonable to argue that in the long run the limited availability of these commodities, together with their technological importance, would begin to act as a constraint on the economy's growth potential. In fact several recent studies have laid great emphasis on this possibility. Although the point is an obvious one, most economic studies of the properties of long-run plans neglect it. In this paper, therefore, we explore in a rather preliminary way the problems that appear to arise naturally when the existence of exhaustible resources is incorporated into the study of intertemporal plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Findings from a 1951 study in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon are reported. The 1,200 interviews, conducted by trained nationals, do not represent a cross-section but include persons of varying educational and economic status, as well as of urban arid rural residence. Radio listening in rural areas was found to be a social activity, the number of listeners per set being high. News ranked high in program preferences, and somewhat higher in rural areas than in cities even among persons of low education. Most radio listeners also read newspapers and attended movies, at least occasionally. A little over half of the listeners heard at least one foreign broadcast a month, although there was considerable variation between countries in this respect. The B.B.C., which reached 86 per cent of the listeners, was by far the most popular broad- caster. About a quarter of the respondents heard United States programs, and an eighth listened to Russia. Fewer rural than urban listeners heard foreign broadcasts, although in Egypt and Syria the audience for American broadcasts tended to be rural. A special analysis of the data from Egypt indicated that people there consider matters relating to nationalism as the biggest problem facing them, and tend somewhat to overlook the problems of agriculture and natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than a decade ago Leland Olds pinpointed the problem of private power companies in the cleverly phrased statement, "Rates are high because costs are high because consumption is low because rates are high." Presumably he meant that rates and costs of private power are high relative to those for public power, leading to lower consumption per potential consuming unit in areas serviced by private power. It is the purpose of this paper to elaborate on those aspects of cost and demand which support and enlarge the argument while leading to the same general conclusion. Private power companies have also been disadvantaged relative to public power in obtaining investment funds. First, they have needed to raise equity capital, which requires a greater return than does debt. Public power had no such problem. Government-financed river basin projects had many objectives only one of which was generation of electric power, and general taxpayers bore a large share of construction costs on that account.

Examines the allocation of energy resources in the United States. How some are worrying about the exhaustion of petroleum supplies; Discussion of the role of markets for resources; Details on the efficient allocation of energy resources; Recoverable energy resources in the world; Technologies used in processing energy resources; Cost of intermediate energy products without the cost of royalties; Terminal conditions and discount rates or backstop technology; Environmental constraints; Results of the basic case which states there are sufficient energy resources for two hundred years; Exploration of gasoline pricing; Role of foreign trade; Implications for energy policy.

A list of documents and publications published by the United Nations and other specialized agencies, including "Statistical Yearbook," "Administrative Problems of the Rapid Urban Growth in the Arab States," "The Medical Research Programme of the WHO, 1958-1963," and "Recent Developments Relating to New Sources of Energy."

A response by Amory B. Lovins to a letter to the editor about her article "World Energy Strategies" in the May 1974 issue is presented.

The article reports global events related to nuclear research and development. A European Atomic Energy Community is to be formed composed at first of the six members of the Coal and Steel Community, including Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. Great Britain has sent an invitation to the delegates at the Geneva Conference to visit Harwell and inspect its research facilities. In West Germany, an atomic energy bill will soon be prepared in the Bonn parliament to pave the way for creation of an atomic industry.

The article presents the summary of the provisional plan of producing a substantial proportion of electricity needs through nuclear power by 1965 in Great Britain. This plan is set to produce twelve power reactors in the next ten years, and provides an indication of likely developments in the following ten years. The Calder Hall is the first attempt in the country to produce electric power from nuclear energy, and further development are projected to use the main nuclear fuel and reduce the capital cost per kilowatt-hour. Details about the probable cost of nuclear power, the provisional program, the capital cost, the long-term and international aspects, and the place of program in government's fuel policy are discussed.

The article presents a detailed discussion about the purification and processing of source materials. It states that ownership of the source material from mines and mills and the handling of all plants producing nuclear fuel, implies the determination of arrangements for processing source material. It offers several specific proposals including an initial requirement of reports from nations and persons as to all source material refineries and chemical or metallurgical plants for treating key substances.

The article reports on the Lilienthal report and the Baruch proposals, which led to the debate regarding atomic energy control. The two papers succeeded in gathering support from a broad spectrum of American opinion. the opponents and proponents of world government dwelt on each other to proclaim their support of the proposals. Both the Lilienthal report and the Baruch proposals believed that an effective inspection is possible if the world atomic energy control authority were able to intervene throughout the whole range of human activity.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "World Energy Strategies," by Joseph Barnea in the May 1974 issue.

The article deals with the availability of the Earth's principal present energy resources and the implications of the continuing improvement. It examines other potential energy resources and discusses the need for early development of sound energy strategies focusing beyond the middle of the 1980s. It mentions that hydroelectricity could be expanded more than tenfold to supply several times the total current world electrical capacity. It explains that the total use cannot be put into practice because the accumulation of silt makes a lot of man-made reservoirs useless in a period of a century or two.

The article presents a brief survey of world energy strategies to explore what must be done at present and in the future for sustainable energy economy. It discusses the constraints surrounding fuel resources including physical scarcity, geopolitical, environmental and socio-technical aspects. It provides alternative strategies including oil as a main source of fossil energy capital, natural gas, reduced carbon sources such as tar sands in Alberta and oil shales in Colorado and Wyoming in South America. Other non-fossil fuel options include nuclear fission, which is the extraction of heat from fissile isotopes and nuclear fusion.

The article presents an examination of transportation energy use and conservation. The reasons considered for examining transportation energy consumption are presented, which include the fact that transportation of people and good consumes one-fourth of the total U.S. energy budget. Other reasons are the facts that world oil reserves are limited, U.S. transportation is dependent on oil as a fuel, use of petroleum present environmental problems, and that transportation contributes to urban congestion, inefficient land use and noise.

The article offers news briefs related to the U.S. atomic energy. The U.S. has announced the availability of 20,000 kilograms of U-235 for export. The U.S. offered to set up a $20 million nuclear and research training center in Southeast Asia. The U.S. nuclear exhibit previously shown at the Geneva Atom Conference will be demonstrated in Oklahoma City for three weeks in April and May 1956.

The article reports on issues and topics concerning international efforts towards the peaceful use of atomic energy. The seven-nation planning committee for the international scientific conference on peacetime atom developments convened at the UN headquarters in New York, on January 17, 1955, with Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjold presiding. A few days before the New York meeting, an announcement from Moscow offered the international conference a report on Soviet experience with power reactors gained from its 5,000-kilowatt reactor.