Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Joint Fall 2011 Meeting of the APS New England Section and the New England Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers (NES/AAPT)
Volume 56, Number 17
Friday–Saturday, November 18–19, 2011; Amherst, Massachusetts
Session G1: Plenary Session: Nuclear Power and Climate Change |
Hide Abstracts |
Chair: Margaret McCarthy, STCC and UMass Amherst Room: Campus Center Auditorium |
Saturday, November 19, 2011 10:00AM - 10:50AM |
G1.00001: When Sciences Fails Society: Toxicology's 20th Century Legacy Invited Speaker: Edward J. Calabrese This presentation provides an assessment of hormesis, a dose-response concept that is characterized by a low-dose stimulation and a high-dose inhibition. It will trace the historical foundations of hormesis, its quantitative features and mechanistic foundations, and its risk assessment implications. It will be argued that the hormetic dose response is the most fundamental dose response, significantly outcompeting other leading dose-response models in large-scale, head-to-head evaluations used by regulatory agencies such as the EPA and FDA. The hormetic dose response is highly generalizable, being independent of biological model, endpoint measured, chemical class, physical agent (e.g., radiation) and inter-individual variability. Hormesis also provides a framework for the study and assessment of chemical mixtures, incorporating the concept of additivity and synergism. Because the hormetic biphasic dose response represents a general pattern of biological responsiveness, it is expected that it will become progressively more significant within toxicological evaluation and chemical and radiation risk assessment practices as well as having numerous biomedical applications. Particular application will be directed towards how hormesis may affect the risk assessment process for chemicals and ionizing radiation. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, November 19, 2011 10:50AM - 11:40AM |
G1.00002: Climate v. Climate Alarm Invited Speaker: Richard S. Lindzen The underlying physics of climate contains important elements that are widely agreed on though frequently misunderstood. In this lecture, the basic physics of greenhouse warming are simply described. It will be shown that the dynamic mixing of the troposphere is essential to the mechanism. It will further be shown that there is nothing intrinsically alarming in the basic physics. Alarm depends critically on the assertion that the climate system is dominated by large positive feedbacks that greatly amplify such warming as may be due to increasing CO2 alone. The nature of possible feedbacks will be described, and the conditions for observationally determining such feedbacks will be explained. It will be seen that the feedback factors, themselves, can be subject to fluctuations, so that large positive feedbacks could occasionally lead to instability. A variety of attempts to evaluate such feedbacks will be described. Some will be shown to be clearly incorrect. The remaining approaches suggest that feedbacks are small and even negative, suggesting little basis for alarm. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, November 19, 2011 11:40AM - 12:30PM |
G1.00003: TerraPower's Traveling Wave Reactor Invited Speaker: Tyler Ellis TerraPower is moving forward with detailed plans for a sustainable, economic, and safe nuclear reactor. The Traveling Wave Reactor (TWR) -- a reactor in the 500-megawatt electric range - uses unique core physics to initiate a breed and burn wave which can be completely sustained in fertile material. This process allows the TWR to convert depleted uranium waste into usable fuel as the reactor operates, providing a sustainable base-load power source. TerraPower is the first company to create a practical engineering embodiment of this previously studied concept thanks to a powerful advanced reactor modeling interface, developed in-house, which enables the analysis of traveling wave reactor technology in a way that has not been possible before. This presentation will provide more detail about the origins of the TWR, the project's current status as well as some of the safety differences between TWRs and currently operating light water reactors. [Preview Abstract] |
Follow Us |
Engage
Become an APS Member |
My APS
Renew Membership |
Information for |
About APSThe American Physical Society (APS) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics. |
© 2024 American Physical Society
| All rights reserved | Terms of Use
| Contact Us
Headquarters
1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3844
(301) 209-3200
Editorial Office
100 Motor Pkwy, Suite 110, Hauppauge, NY 11788
(631) 591-4000
Office of Public Affairs
529 14th St NW, Suite 1050, Washington, D.C. 20045-2001
(202) 662-8700