The End Game of Deregulation: Myopic Risk Management and the Next Catastrophe

By using the Kingston Fossil Fuel Plant’s spill into the Emory River as a case study, this article offers several explanations for why the twentieth century dynamic of crisis and reform has disappeared in the early twenty-first century. In Part I, it is argued that regulated industries dominate regulatory debates on Capitol Hill and at the federal agencies to an unprecedented extent. Part II examines what is known about the Kingston spill and the implications of that information for recurrence of such events. Part III explains how the EPA and Congress responded to this disaster, highlighting how politics driven by a deregulatory ideology eventually took over the EPA’s science-based rulemaking process. Part IV offers suggestions for rebuilding regulatory agencies like the EPA and for restoring public trust in government.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Field-reversed bubble in deep plasma channels for high quality electron acceleration

We study hollow plasma channels with smooth boundaries for laser-driven electron acceleration in the bubble regime. Contrary to the uniform plasma case, the laser forms no optical shock and no etching at the front. This increases the effective bubble phase velocity and energy gain. The longitudinal field has a plateau that allows for mono-energetic acceleration. We observe as low as 10^{-3} r.m.s. relative witness beam energy uncertainty in each cross-section and 0.3% total energy spread. By varying plasma density profile inside a deep channel, the bubble fields can be adjusted to balance the laser depletion and dephasing lengths. Bubble scaling laws for the deep channel are derived. Ultra-short pancake-like laser pulses lead to the highest energies of accelerated electrons per Joule of laser pulse energy

Workers at Risk: Regulatory Dysfunction at OSHA

This white paper explores the causes of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)’s regulatory dysfunctions and describes their negative impacts on OSHA and America’s Workers. With the decreasing power of unions to organize and press employers to implement strong health and safety programs, employees in every occupation rely on OSHA to protect them from occupational hazards. Yet, in the last decade, OSHA has dropped more standards from its regulatory agenda than it has finalized, largely due to insufficient budge authority. And the agency’s enforcement program has assessed such paltry fines for even fatality-related violations of the law that many employers see no incentive in addressing hazards, much less developing precautionary health and safety programs. After describing OSHA’s problems in detail, this paper outlines a number of reforms that could enhance the agency’s performance. Although certain aspects of the Occupational Safety and Health Act could use improvement, the recommendations in this paper focus on regulatory reform—administrative actions that OSHA could implement in the short term.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Spin-filtering by field dependent resonant tunneling

We consider theoretically transport in a spinfull one-channel interacting quantum wire placed in an external magnetic field. For the case of two point-like impurities embedded in the wire, under a small voltage bias the spin-polarized current occurs at special points in the parameter space, tunable by a single parameter. At sufficiently low temperatures complete spin-polarization may be achieved, provided repulsive interaction between electrons is not too strong.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Electromagnetic Contributions to the Schiff Moment

The Schiff moment, \smij, is a parity and time reversal violating fermion-fermion coupling. The nucleus-electron Schiff moment generically gives the most important contribution to the electric dipole moments of atoms and molecules with zero net intrinsic electronic spin and nuclear spin ${1 \over 2}$. Here, the electromagnetic contribution to the Schiff moment, \emij, is considered. For a nucleon, the leading chirally violating contribution to this interaction is calculable in the chiral limit in terms of the parity and time reversal violating pion-nucleon coupling. For the Schiff moment of heavy nuclei, this chiral contribution is somewhat smaller than the finite size effect discussed previously in the literature.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure (not included), Tex file, requires phyzzx, preprint SCIPP 93/4

Effect of the Coriolis Force on the Hydrodynamics of Colliding Wind Binaries

Using fully three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations, we investigate the effect of the Coriolis force on the hydrodynamic and observable properties of colliding wind binary systems. To make the calculations tractable, we assume adiabatic, constant velocity winds. The neglect of radiative driving, gravitational deceleration, and cooling limit the application of our models to real systems. However, these assumptions allow us to isolate the effect of the Coriolis force, and by simplifying the calculations, allow us to use a higher resolution (up to 640^3) and to conduct a larger survey of parameter space. We study the dynamics of collidng winds with equal mass loss rates and velocities emanating from equal mass stars on circular orbits, with a range of values for the ratio of the wind to orbital velocity. We also study the dynamics of winds from stars on elliptical orbits and with unequal strength winds. Orbital motion of the stars sweeps the shocked wind gas into an Archimedean spiral, with asymmetric shock strengths and therefore unequal postshock temperatures and densities in the leading and trailing edges of the spiral. We observe the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability at the contact surface between the shocked winds in systems with orbital motion even when the winds are identical. The change in shock strengths caused by orbital motion increases the volume of X-ray emitting post-shock gas with T > 0.59 keV by 63% for a typical system as the ratio of wind velocity to orbital velocity decreases to V_w/V_o = 2.5. This causes increased free-free emission from systems with shorter orbital periods and an altered time-dependence of the wind attenuation. We comment on the importance of the effects of orbital motion on the observable properties of colliding wind binaries.Comment: 12 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in Ap