Regional and world level scenarios for sodium fast reactor deployment

The revival of interest towards fast neutron reactors is due to their capability of producing more fissile material than they consume and of reducing the burden on the disposal of high-level waste containing very-long life nuclides.Several studies on the impact of transition scenarios have been launched by international and national organizations. They show that the relevance of transitioning to fast reactors depends on the expected future role of nuclear energy and on the development of advanced nuclear technologies.The purpose of the present study is to investigate the maximum deployable capacity of sodium-cooled fast reactors at regional and world levels mainly from the viewpoint of natural uranium and fissile plutonium availability for presumed energy demand projections. The calculations have been performed with the DESAE code.The results show that the maximum deployable capacity of sodium-cooled reactors at regional level is not limited by the plutonium and uranium availability with a reprocessing capacity of 3000 t/yr, whereas for a global scenario it strongly depends on the availability of natural uranium resources and plutonium stockpiles.     

Emotional, cognitive, and family systems mediators of children's adjustment to interparental conflict.

Emotional, cognitive, and family systems processes have been identified as mediators of the association between interparental conflict and children's adjustment. However, little is known about how they function in relation to one another because they have not all been assessed in the same study. This investigation examined the relations among children's exposure to parental conflict, their appraisals of threat and blame, their emotional reaction, and triangulation into parental disagreements. One hundred fifty ethnically diverse 8- to 12-year-old children and both of their parents participated in the study. Comparisons of 3 models proposing different relations among these processes indicated that they function as parallel and independent mediators of children's adjustment. Specifically, children's self-blaming attributions and emotional distress were uniquely associated with both internalizing and externalizing problems, whereas perceived threat uniquely predicted internalizing problems and triangulation uniquely predicted externalizing problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional expression in the family as a context for children's appraisals of interparental conflict.

The cognitive contextual framework proposes that the emotional climate in the family plays a role in shaping how children perceive and evaluate interparental conflict. This hypothesis was tested in a sample of 144 8- to 12-year-old children and their parents. Children in families that expressed high levels of negative affect and low levels of positive affect reported greater self-blame for conflict, but parents' expressiveness did not predict children's threat appraisals. Positive and negative expressiveness moderated the association between exposure to parental conflict and children's internalizing and externalizing problems. These data suggest that the broader family context can shape the meaning of conflict to children and increase understanding of the conditions under which parental discord leads to child maladjustment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)