Energy security and shifting modes of governance

The concept of energy security fits uneasily into contemporary security debates. It is neither a clearly traditional nor a fully ‘non-traditional’ security issue. There are also limits to the social constructedness of the concept. This article argues that, while it is important to identify the differing securitizations of energy, these must be contextualized within the material realities and the differing historical modes of governance of the political economy of resources. This is essential for understanding the differing meanings accorded to energy security, the shifting modes through which energy is governed, and the extent to which energy security concerns drive international politics. In this context, contemporary concerns over energy security have both material and ideological dimensions: anxiety over the dual shift of power from West to East and from resource-importing to resource-exporting countries; and concern over the normative weakening of the neo-liberal mode of energy governance

An update of the Worldwide Integrated Assessment (WIA) on systemic insecticides. Part 2: impacts on organisms and ecosystems

New information on the lethal and sublethal effects of neonicotinoids and fipronil on organisms is presented in this review, complementing the previous WIA in 2015. The high toxicity of these systemic insecticides to invertebrates has been confirmed and expanded to include more species and compounds. Most of the recent research has focused on bees and the sublethal and ecological impacts these insecticides have on pollinators. Toxic effects on other invertebrate taxa also covered predatory and parasitoid natural enemies and aquatic arthropods. Little, while not much new information has been gathered on soil organisms. The impact on marine coastal ecosystems is still largely uncharted. The chronic lethality of neonicotinoids to insects and crustaceans, and the strengthened evidence that these chemicals also impair the immune system and reproduction, highlights the dangers of this particular insecticidal classneonicotinoids and fipronil. , withContinued large scale – mostly prophylactic – use of these persistent organochlorine pesticides has the potential to greatly decreasecompletely eliminate populations of arthropods in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. Sublethal effects on fish, reptiles, frogs, birds and mammals are also reported, showing a better understanding of the mechanisms of toxicity of these insecticides in vertebrates, and their deleterious impacts on growth, reproduction and neurobehaviour of most of the species tested. This review concludes with a summary of impacts on the ecosystem services and functioning, particularly on pollination, soil biota and aquatic invertebrate communities, thus reinforcing the previous WIA conclusions (van der Sluijs et al. 2015)

A new experimental method to study the influence of welding residual stresses on fatigue crack propagation

This paper presents a study on the influence of welding residual stresses (RS) on fatigue crack propagation rate (FCPR) in mode I. The objective of this work is to develop a novel methodology that allows a variation of a RS field in the studied specimen while keeping constant all other variables influencing FCPR. This led to the development of a novel specimen geometry, named CT-RES, in which RS are introduced by weld bead deposition far from the region in which fatigue crack propagation (FCP) occurs. As a consequence, the effect of factors influencing FCPR other than RS such as microstructural changes or plastic deformation, often introduced by welding processes, can be avoided. The welding RS introduced in the CT-RES specimen were determined by the contour method and the weight functions method was used to calculate the stress intensity factor (SIF), Kres, resulting from the RS as the fatigue crack propagates into the specimen. The evolution of cyclic stress ratio at the crack tip, Rlocal, was then computed from Kres to quantify the influence of RS on the cyclic stress ratio. The results show that for a given stress intensity range, dK, the FCPR of the welded geometry with fixed externally low R ratio (R = 0.1), but constantly increasing Rlocal, is the same as for the as-machined geometry without RS, solicited at high cyclic stress ratio (R = 0.7). These observations partially validate the BS7910 standard philosophy in which the remaining life of a flawed structure in presence of tensile RS is calculated from a high cyclic stress ratio (R > 0.5) crack propagation curve to eliminate crack closure effects