Armageddon: The Inevitable Death of Nuclear Power and Whether New York State Has the Legal Authority to Keep It on Life Support

This Note seeks to make the argument for New York’s ZEC program as a legitimate exercise of state power. Part I provides context—the history of nuclear power, the rise and fall in the incidence of nuclear power projects, and why such investments are failing. Part II then provides an overview of the CES and the ZEC program contained therein. In Part III, the legal challenges filed in response to Tier 3 are discussed, as well as the Illinois case which parallels the conventional generator challenge in New York. Part III will also discuss relevant legal precedent the cases concern, namely the recent United States Supreme Court case, Hughes v. Talen Energy Marketing, LLC. Part IV analyzes federal preemption to the extent it affects the New York program. This analysis mirrors—and in some areas, expands upon—the district court’s findings regarding New York’s program. Further, it compares similar crediting mechanisms currently used across the United States and other analogs demonstrating that, although federal preemption appears to control, there is significant room for the states to regulate. This Note ultimately concludes in Part V that the ZEC program is likely a legitimate exercise of state power, despite incidental effects it may have on related federal regulation

Evolution of the N ion Jaynes-Cummings model beyond the standard rotating wave approximation

A unitary transformation of the N-ion Jaynes-Cummings hamiltonian is proposed. It is shown that any approximate expression of the evolution operator associated with the transformed hamiltonian retains its validity independently from the intensity of the external driving field. In particular, using the rotating wave approximation, one obtains a solution for the N-ion Jaynes-Cummings model which improves the standard rotating wave approximation solution.Comment: Presented at the Wigner Centennial Conference (Pecs, Hungary, July 2002) (to appear on Journal of Optics B, provisionally scheduled for June 2003 issue

Coherence and Efficiency in Nonlinear Optical Processes

A remarkable difference between linear and nonlinear processes lies in the fact that the efficiency of the latter depends on the coherence properties of the electromagnetic field (pump) from which the process is driven

Transmittivity measurements by means of squeezed vacuum light

A method for measuring the transmittivity of optical samples by using squeezed--vacuum radiation is illustrated. A squeezed vacuum field generated by a below--threshold optical parametric oscillator is propagated through a nondispersive medium and detected by a homodyne apparatus. The variance of the detected quadrature is used for measuring the transmittivity. With this method it is drastically reduced the number of photons passing through the sample during the measurement interval. The results of some tests are reported.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure