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This chapter discusses how changes in geography remade space in the Southwest, rendering the Colorado Plateau in many ways the center of the region's economic development. With the construction of Mojave Generating Station, and the expansion of Four Corners Power Plant from 230 megawatts to over 1,000 megawatts in the late 1960s, the landscape of the Colorado Plateau—and specifically the landscape of the Navajo and Hopi Nations—became the broad origin point for most of the electricity used by consumers in the Southwest. Even as this power opened up new possibilities for high-tech manufacturing industries and climate-controlled lifestyles in the region's metropolitan areas, its production increasingly structured and defined the lives of those people living on the Colorado Plateau.

This chapter provides a historical perspective and treatment to captive power generation in the law and policies. It then goes on to describe the vision behind the provisions on captive power generation under the Electricity Act, 2003. Significant flexibility brought in by the rules notified on captive generation and group captives has been presented. The chapter presents the current status of captive power generation in India. Major issues in the context of key provisions of the Act and the policy of encouragement of captive power plants (CPPs) have been examined. The chapter also presents illustrative cases of captive power generation by national-level organizations like National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), Indian Railways, and Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL). These illustrative cases highlight how captive power plants have been utilized for cost efficiency and increased availability in grid power.

This chapter explores how a new infrastructure of coal mines and power plants on the Navajo Reservation, and of power lines that stretched across the Southwest, changed the landscape of the Navajo Reservation. The political terms in which this infrastructure took place—terms set largely by the belief held by businessmen from Phoenix and elsewhere that the state should facilitate capital location—shaped this infrastructure's meaning and future. These politics meant that private companies, rather than the federal authorities, mined coal and set it alight. They meant that federal policy focused increasingly on unlocking resources on Navajo land rather than ensuring that employment accompanied development. Moreover, they meant that the power lines leading from Four Corners Power Plant became the main supply for the electricity demanded in Phoenix, rather than primarily being a source of Navajo economic modernization.

This chapter presents the reprinted article “Operator monitoring in a complex, dynamic work environment: a qualitative cognitive model based on field observations” by Kim J. Vicente, Randall J. Mumaw, and Emilie M. Roth. The chapter presents a qualitative cognitive model of a nuclear power plant operator's monitoring activities. The final word in the previous sentence is key: one of the most important findings was that monitoring a power plant is anything but passive. Instead, via extensive field observations, Vicente and his colleagues found that the operator engages in a rich set of activities, displaying a diverse cognitive and behavioral repertoire.

Capacities for meeting peak demand for power are the need of the hour. This chapter outlines perspectives from the supply side as well as the demand side for peaking power and also explains the pre-requisites for making investments in peaking power plants feasible. The Electricity Act, 2003 and the Tariff Policy have provisions for differential tariff based on total consumption for a specific period and introduction of differential rates for fixed charges for peak and off-peak generation for better management of load. The chapter presents the current scenario in this respect and also the regulatory response so far. The chapter analyses the various issues which are seen as a constraint to the development of peaking power capacity in the country. Required policy and regulatory interventions have been suggested to encourage setting up of peaking power plants which are urgently required for the power sector in India.

The decline in supplies of carbon fuels (coal, petroleum, and natural gas), the increased worldwide demand for modern energy, political instability because of the geographic location of carbon fuels, the needs of the least developed parts of the world, and the contribution of carbon fuels to climate change combine to compel a change in the current world energy picture with its heavy reliance on these fuels. Nuclear power addresses some of the carbon fuel concerns. However, the dark sides of nuclear power (accidental radiation release, risk of improper diversions, high costs) make it unattractive, and to some energy planners and thinkers, unacceptable. This chapter draws on statistics and commentary from some of the significant international organisations involved with nuclear power. The United States, despite its nuclear ambivalence, remains the nation with the most nuclear power plants and one of the major players in many aspects of nuclear energy. It has also been a pioneer in many aspects of nuclear law.

Labor policies in the electricity industry have been significantly impacted by its historical status as either a publicly-owned or regulated utility business. At the same time, evaluating and improving labor practices may have been given low priority due to the fact that labor costs constitute a small portion of industry costs. This chapter presents evidence that, despite the fact that overall labor costs are small, the quality of certain workers can have a significant impact on the operations of power plants. Power plant operators, in particular, can influence the fuel-efficiency of the plants under their control in a myriad of individually small, but in aggregate consequential, ways. There is good reason to believe that this effect is more prominent in the more complex coal facilities than in gas-fired power plants. The examination of performance data from U.S. power plants concluded that the individual operators could influence fuel efficiency by more than 3%. While this figure may sound modest, it translates into a difference worth millions of dollars in annual fuel costs at larger facilities. More generally, these results provide a clean measure of the extent of worker heterogeneity within the same job description at a particular plant.

This chapter presents Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan's recollections about the week immediately following the Great East Japan earthquake. Topics discussed include the response team meeting at the Emergency Disaster Response Headquarters; the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness; the declaration of a nuclear emergency; whether the state has authority over TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant; the responsibilities of the Nuclear Safety Commission and Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency; TEPCO's inability to resolve problems on their own; the evacuation of residents with within a three-kilometer [1.9 mile] radius of the nuclear power plant; and Kan's decision to address the Japanese people a day and a half after the earthquake.

This chapter presents Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan's recollections about the actions he took before his resignation. In particular, he explains the circumstances behind his gradual move away from the use of nuclear power. He says that his experience of the nuclear accident that began to unfold on March 11, 2011, made him realize that a nuclear accident carried with it a risk so large that it could lead to the collapse of a country. He became convinced that what they had been calling “safe nuclear power” could only be found through independence from nuclear power. He also describes the passage of a bill to promote renewable energy and the shutdown of the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant.

Monitoring a nuclear power plant (NPP)—even under normal operations—seems like an impossibly difficult attention task. Given that “the limitations of human attention represent one of the formidable bottlenecks in human information processing”, how can anyone possibly perform such a task reliably, day in and day out, as most NPP operators do? This chapter seeks to broaden our understanding of attention in yet another direction through field investigation. It discusses the results of a study on NPP monitoring and demonstrates the rich diversity of information sources used to support attention allocation in an operational context, as well as the clever strategies and devices used by operators to compensate for their limited cognitive resources. The chapter concludes that it is simply not possible to monitor an NPP using attentional resources alone.

This chapter presents the reprinted article “Toward theory-driven, quantitative performance measurement in ergonomics science: The abstraction hierarchy as a framework for data analysis” by Xinyao Yu, Elfreda Lau, Kim J. Vicente, and Michael W. Carter. The article focuses on the effects of various interface designs on the strategies people used to control a simulated power plant.

The large-scale energy grid often comprises both AC and DC transmission lines. DC transmission at ultrahigh voltages is more efficient, but consumers need AC at lower voltage so that AC/DC conversion stations are key elements. In modern conversion stations large silicon thyristors are key devices. Energy storage in pumped-hydro installations can be supplemented by compressed air storage. Thermal plants can store energy in molten salts to provide continuous power for consumers. Battery technology is expensive at grid scale but is expanding. The possibility of carbon capture at power plants is discussed. Energy in this chapter is assumed to be electrical energy, with a large portion devoted to the electric grid.

In this Supplement to the Third Class, Ibn Sina talks about the powers of the soul that produce the human actions and movements. He discusses the branches of the plant powers and their acts. These powers are said to be three: nutritive, growth, and reproductive. The plant movements or acts of nutrition, growth, and reproduction are involuntary and evidence the existence of these powers. The plant power on which the other two depend is the nutritive power whose life term is the longest of the three and continues to the end of the life of the individual. Contrary to that, the growth power terminates first among the three, followed by the reproductive power whose function is to preserve the species. Ibn Sina also considers animal powers with voluntary movements and advances the idea that the propensity celestial bodies have for circular motion is evidence that this motion is animated and voluntary. He concludes by exploring the notion of volition.

A wide variety of low-elevation and near-shoreline infrastructure and buildings of all kinds is at great danger of destruction by sea-level rise. Particular problems are toxic waste sites, landfills, and sewer plants which must be moved as sea level rises. Nuclear power plants which require water for cooling are frequently at low elevations. Overall the potential for pollution of nearshire water in a rising sea is immense. Rising seas also will cause salinization of agricultural soil which is already occurring along bays such as Delaware and the Chesapeake. In addition, coastal roads and accompanying water, sewer, and power lines are already frequently destroyed in storms (Outer Banks of North Carolina). Military installations are at risk, for example, the largest naval facility in the U.S. is in Norfolk, Virginia, where the sea-level rise is particularly rapid because of land subsidence.

Melusine is a fairy of French folklore, originating in the Poitou region of western France. She was cursed to metamorphose into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday, but in general is a positive figure, associated with fresh water and forests, the construction of castles and churches, fertility and maternity. Mélusine des détritus is a depressing new take on the fairy story. The Melusine of Chawaf’s novel is a young woman who suffers acutely from the contemporary industrial world in which she lives. She has developed severe asthma from breathing polluted air, she lives in the fear of a meltdown destroying the nuclear power plant near her town and has a vague fear that the human race as we know it will not survive much longer. She symbolizes the disenchantment of the modern world recounted by such contemporary French philosophers as Michel Maffesoli and Pierre Rabhi.

Nuclear energy is one of the most significant sources of low carbon energy in use in the power sector today. In 2013, nuclear energy represented roughly 11% of the global electricity supply, with growth projected to occur in China, India, and Russia (International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], n.d.a; NEA, n.d.). As a stable source of electricity, nuclear energy can be a stand-alone, base-load form of electricity or complement more variable forms of low carbon energy, like wind and solar power. Among the energy technologies considered here, nuclear energy is complex not only for the science behind it, but also for its societal, environmental, and economic dimensions.This chapter explores the rapid rise of French nuclear energy in the civilian power sector. It considers what a national energy strategy looks like under conditions of high concern about energy supply security when limited domestic energy resources appear to exist. The case reveals that centralized planning with complex and equally centralized technology can be quite conducive to rapid change. However, continued public acceptance, especially for nuclear energy, matters in the durability of such a pathway. France is a traditional and currently global leader in nuclear energy, ranking the highest among countries for its share of domestic electricity derived from nuclear power at 76% of total electricity in 2015 (IAEA, n.d.b). France is highly ranked for the size of its nuclear reactor fleet and amount of nuclear generation, second only to the United States. In 2016, this nation of 67 million people and economy of $2.7 trillion had 58 nuclear power reactors (CIA, n.d.; IAEA, n.d.b). Due to the level of nuclear energy in its power mix, France has some of the lowest carbon emissions per person for electricity (IEA, 2016a). France is also one of the largest net exporters of electricity in Europe, with 61.7 TWh exported (Réseau de Transport d’électricité [RTE], 2016), producing roughly $3.3 billion in annual revenue (World Nuclear Association [WNA], n.d). This European country has the largest reprocessing capacity for spent fuel, with roughly 17% of its electricity powered from recycled fuel (WNA, n.d.).

Solar thermal energy generated electricity is produced by heating water or a heat transfer fluid with concentrated solar energy to ultimately drive a Rankine cycle power plant. The analysis in this chapter builds on the previous chapter to take concentrated solar energy and heat the working fluid to the much higher temperatures required to drive a steam-based power plant. Relations are given that can be used to design the solar field, with results that compare well with actual operating power plants. The absorber assembly was considered with and without the glass envelope to demonstrate the large difference an envelope makes, which significantly reduces the heat loss from the system. The analysis was simplified to include a constant absorber pipe temperature in the solar field and is justified as a conservative estimate, which only differs from the more complete analysis by ~10%.

This chapter examines two “Small Towns, Big Projects” experiences, which refer to large energy projects located in small communities, as well as the problems arising from such mismatches. The first project discussed is the Maine Yankee Atomic Power Plant in Wiscasset, Maine. After a generally successful two decades of operation, the plant ran afoul of safety concerns and the economics of power production. It ceased operation in 1997, leaving the community with significant clean up burdens. The second is the Intermountain Power Project (IPP), a coal-fired electric generating plant in rural Millard County, Utah. The IPP began production in 1986 and remains in operation today. However, it faces environmental and cost concerns faced by all coal-fired plants in 2016.