Decarbonisation at home: The contingent politics of experimental domestic energy technologies

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordPolicy efforts to reduce the carbon intensity of domestic energy consumption have, over the last three decades, been dominated by an almost dichotomous reading of the relationship between technology and social change. On the one hand, there is a conception of personal responsibility that constructs domestic energy users as key actors in the adoption and (appropriate) use of low carbon energy technologies; from this perspective, environmental change becomes a matter of mobilising personal capacities such that individuals make better choices. On the other hand, decarbonising homes is conceived to be an outcome of top-down infrastructural interventions, with householders (or end users) positioned as relatively passive agents who will respond to engineered efficiency in linear and predictable ways. In practice, both positions have been found wanting in terms of accounting for how (and why) change happens and in turn delivering on ambitious policy goals. The argument we develop in this article goes beyond critiquing these problematic framings of technology and the locus of agency. Drawing on three contrasting low carbon energy technology projects in the UK, we present an alternative perspective which foregrounds a more experimental, ad hoc and ultimately provisional mode of governing with domestic energy technologies. We reflect on the meaning and political implications of this experimental turn in transforming (and decarbonising) domestic energy practices.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research on which this paper is based was funded by a grant from EON/EPSRC (EP/G000395/1)

Living with low carbon technologies: an agenda for sharing and comparing qualitative energy research

ArticleCopyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.There is another ORE record for this publication: http://hdl.handle.net/10871/36734Policies to reduce the carbon intensity of domestic living place considerable emphasis on the diffusion of low(er) carbon technologies - from microgeneration to an array of feedback and monitoring devices. These efforts presume that low carbon technologies (LCTs) will be accepted and integrated into domestic routines in the ways intended by their designers. This study contributes to an emerging qualitative energy research (QER) literature by deploying an analytical approach that explores comparison of data from two UK projects ('Carbon, Comfort and Control' and 'Conditioning Demand') concerned, in broad terms, with householder interactions with LCTs - primarily associated with the production and maintenance of thermal comfort. In-depth, and in many cases repeat, interviews were conducted in a total of 18 households where devices such as heat pumps and thermal feedback lamps had recently been installed. We discuss this comparative process and how a reflexive reading of notions of (and strategies associated with) credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmablity enabled new ways of working and thinking with existing data. We conclude by highlighting the contrasts, conflicts, but also creativities raised by drawing these connections, and consider implications for methodologies associated with qualitative energy research.EPSRCE.O

Living on with Sellafield: nuclear infrastructure, slow violence and the politics of quiescence

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordCommunities living with nuclear infrastructures have widely been positioned as quiescent and accepting of the risks posed. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in 2008 in the village of Seascale, which neighbours the UK’s Sellafield site, and on recent thinking on nuclear and toxic geographies, this paper troubles the idea of nuclear quiescence. In doing so it critically engages with a long tradition of geographical research on nuclear communities, much of which adopts a risk perception paradigm, foregrounding the presence (or absence) of localised concern. Within this body of work, interest has centred on the apparent paradox that those spatially exposed are also most quiescent, pointing to the play of economic dependency, risk denial and familiarity with nuclear infrastructure. This paper addresses the slow violence inherent in living on with nuclear infrastructure: drawn-out effects and affects of nuclearity on place that are barely visible in the routines of everyday life. I locate these expressions of social and geographic damage in techno-political relations which obscure the exceptionalism of the nuclear industry. The analysis challenges passive renderings of toxic victimhood by emphasising modes of pragmatic resistance - subtle and contingent ways in which residents challenge the identity and structural relations of being nuclear. I stress the need for geographers to find alternative ways of theorising the unjust relationship between nuclear economies, infrastructures and places in situations of political-economic dependency and domination. I argue that policy instruments aimed at securing social justice in nuclear infrastructure planning will need to more fully, and openly, grapple with questions around the socio-political relations of care that might sustain a ‘good life’ for places that have very long histories and even longer futures with toxicity

Fermi matrix element with isospin breaking

Prompted by the level of accuracy now being achieved in tests of the unitarity of the CKM matrix, we consider the possible modification of the Fermi matrix element for the $\beta$-decay of a neutron, including possible in-medium and isospin violating corrections. While the nuclear modifications lead to very small corrections once the Behrends-Sirlin-Ademollo-Gatto theorem is respected, the effect of the $u-d$ mass difference on the conclusion concerning $V_{ud}$ is no longer insignificant. Indeed, we suggest that the correction to the value of $|V_{ud}|^2 \, + \, |V_{us}|^2 \, + \, |V_{ub}|^2$ is at the level of $10^{-4}$

Medium Modifications of Hadron Properties and Partonic Processes

Chiral symmetry is one of the most fundamental symmetries in QCD. It is closely connected to hadron properties in the nuclear medium via the reduction of the quark condensate , manifesting the partial restoration of chiral symmetry. To better understand this important issue, a number of Jefferson Lab experiments over the past decade have focused on understanding properties of mesons and nucleons in the nuclear medium, often benefiting from the high polarization and luminosity of the CEBAF accelerator. In particular, a novel, accurate, polarization transfer measurement technique revealed for the first time a strong indication that the bound proton electromagnetic form factors in 4He may be modified compared to those in the vacuum. Second, the photoproduction of vector mesons on various nuclei has been measured via their decay to e+e- to study possible in-medium effects on the properties of the rho meson. In this experiment, no significant mass shift and some broadening consistent with expected collisional broadening for the rho meson has been observed, providing tight constraints on model calculations. Finally, processes involving in-medium parton propagation have been studied. The medium modifications of the quark fragmentation functions have been extracted with much higher statistical accuracy than previously possible.Comment: to appear in J. Phys.: Conf. Proc. "New Insights into the Structure of Matter: The First Decade of Science at Jefferson Lab", eds. D. Higinbotham, W. Melnitchouk, A. Thomas; added reference

THE INTERPLAY OF THE K+K- ATOM AND THE f_0(975) RESONANCE

We predict that production of the K+K- atom in pd-3^HeX and similar reactions exhibits a drastic missing mass spectrum due to the interplay with f_0(975) resonance. We point out that high precision studies of the K+K- atom may shed a new light on the nature of f_0(975).Comment: 13 page

Developing a framework for the analysis of power through depotentia

Stakeholder participation in tourism policy-making is usually perceived as providing a means of empowerment. However participatory processes drawing upon stakeholders from traditionally empowered backgrounds may provide the means of removing empowerment from stakeholders. Such an outcome would be in contradiction to the claims that participatory processes improve both inclusivity and sustainability. In order to form an understanding of the sources through which empowerment may be removed, an analytical perspective has been developed deriving from Lukes�s views of power dating from 1974. This perspective considers the concept of depotentia as the removal of �power to� without speculating upon the underlying intent and also provides for the multidimensionality of power to be examined within a single study. The application of this analytical perspective has been tested upon findings of the government-commissioned report of the Countryside and Community Research Unit in 2005. The survey and report investigated the progress of Local Access Forums in England created in response to the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. Consideration of the data from this perspective permits the classification of individual sources of depotentia which can each be addressed and potentially enable stakeholder groups to reverse loss of empowerment where it has occurred

Structure Functions of the Nucleon in a Statistical Model

Deep inelastic scattering is considered in a statistical model of the nucleon. This incorporates certain features which are absent in the standard parton model such as quantum statistical correlations which play a role in the propagation of particles when considering Feynman diagrams containing internal lines. The inclusion of the ${\cal O}(\alpha_{s})$ corrections in our numerical calculations allows a good fit to the data for $x\geq 0.25$. The fit corresponds to values of temperature and chemical potential of approximately $T=0.067$ GeV and $\mu=0.133$ GeV. The latter values of parameters, however, give rise, for all $x$, to a large value for $R=\sigma_{L}/\sigma_{T}$.Comment: 16 pages TeX, 11 figures available as Postscript files, University of Bielefeld preprint BI-TP 93/3

Pion Structure Function in the Nambu and Jona-Lasinio model

The pion structure function is studied in the Nambu and Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model. We calculate the forward scattering amplitude of a virtual photon from a pion target in the Bjorken limit, and obtain valence quark distributions of the pion at the low energy hadronic scale, where the NJL model is supposed to work. The calculated distribution functions are evolved to the experimental momentum scale using the Altarelli-Parisi equation. The resulting distributions are in a reasonable agreement with experiment. We calculate also the kaon structure function and compare the ratio of kaon to pion valence u-quark distributions with experiment.Comment: 15 pages with 5 figures as uuencoded postscript files, TMU-NT-930301 (plain LaTeX