Stanford University

Reliability of Nuclear Reactor Materials and Its Importance to International Security

-

Abstract: Materials used in key components of nuclear power reactors, such as the fuel cladding and the pressure vessel, provide shields for the release of highly radioactive isotopes generated in the nuclear fuel to the environment, thus their reliability is an important issue in the safety evaluation.  The accident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 demonstrated that materials that are considered reliable during normal operating conditions will fail in an extreme accident condition. Subsequently, there has been an international effort on developing materials for Accident Tolerant Fuels (ATF). In addition, the development of new generation of nuclear reactors also calls for new materials that may withstand higher temperatures, higher radiation doses and with better performance under severe corrosive conditions.  This talk will outline the challenges and status for such developments using recent data from the authors’ own research group as examples.  Also, since China is building the most nuclear reactors now and “a nuclear accident anywhere of the world will be an accident of everywhere of the world”, the importance and challenges of collaborating with the Chinese in this area will be discussed. 

Bio: Dr. Lumin Wang is a professor of nuclear engineering, and materials science & engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (UM). He came to the US from China in 1982, and received his MS and PhD degrees in Material Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and a research scientist at the University of New Mexico before joining the faculty of UM in 1997.  His research has focused on the study of radiation effects of materials using ion beams and transmission electron microscopy. He served as the director of Electron Microbeam Analysis Laboratory, a campus-wide material characterization center at UM between 2005 and 2010. Dr. Wang has published more than 400 papers in research journals and delivered more than 100 invited talks internationally. He has been a member of the International Committee of the American Nuclear Society and an adjunct chair professor of Xiamen University of China since 2011. He has taken more than 100 UM students to China to observe the construction of nuclear reactors during the last 8 summers.

 

Professor
Lumin Wang Professor, College of Engineering University of Michigan
Research Seminar Series

Spring 2019 Stanford e-Japan online course now accepting applications

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Stanford e-Japan is currently accepting applications for the Spring 2019 session, which runs from April 22 to August 23, 2019. The deadline to apply is February 24, 2019.

Now in its eighth session, Stanford e-Japan is SPICE’s online course for high school students in Japan. Accepted students engage in an intensive study of U.S. society and culture and U.S.–Japan relations. Ambassadors, top scholars, and experts throughout the United States provide web-based lectures and engage students in live discussion sessions.

The Spring 2019 session is generously supported by the Yanai Tadashi Foundation, Tokyo, Japan.

This year, Stanford e-Japan has moved to an online application system. All applications must be submitted at https://spicestanford.smapply.io/prog/stanford_e-japan/ via the SurveyMonkey Apply platform. Applicants and recommenders will need to create a SurveyMonkey Apply account to proceed. Students who are interested in applying to the program are encouraged to begin their application early.

For more information about Stanford e-Japan, please visit http://stanfordejapan.org.

To stay informed of news about Stanford e-Japan and SPICE’s other student programs, join our email list or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

SPICE offers separate courses for U.S. high school students. For more information on those, please visit http://reischauerscholars.org (online course on Japan), http://sejongscholars.org (Korea), and http://chinascholars.org (China).

Related articles:

 

 

Hero Image
Honorees of the first Stanford e-Japan cohort in 2015, Stanford e-Japan instructor Waka Takahashi Brown, and SPICE director Gary Mukai. The honorees are Seiji Wakabayashi, Hikaru Suzuki, and Haruki Kitagawa.
Honorees of the first Stanford e-Japan cohort in 2015, instructor Waka Takahashi Brown, and SPICE Director Gary Mukai. The honorees are (left to right) Seiji Wakabayashi (now enrolled at Boston University), Hikaru Suzuki (now enrolled at the University of Tokyo), and Haruki Kitagawa (now enrolled at Keio University).
All News button
1

Defending Free Assembly in the Digital World: A Roundtable with the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly and Association

-

Stanford’s Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice, UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, and the Civic Space Initiative invite you to participate in a roundtable discussion with Clément Voule, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, on the role of technology companies in defending freedom of assembly and association online.

In recent years, the right to free assembly and association online has been challenged from numerous sides, often under the pretext of national security, public order, morality, and prevention of abuse. These restrictions include blocking of groups and websites focused on minority groups, large-scale Internet shutdowns, mass online harassment and doxing campaigns, and the use of facial recognition software to identify protesters. Violations of offline rights are spilling over into online spaces, where their impact ripples through entire societies. This creates an urgent need for the protection of these rights in new domains. The United Nations is seeking input from the private sector, academic experts, and the broader public on how to protect these shrinking spaces.

Participants are invited to share cases in which individual and collective rights to peacefully assemble online were violated. The conversation will inform the Special Rapporteur’s report to the United Nations Human Rights Council on threats to free assembly in the digital realm and how they can be addressed.

 Lunch will be provided prior to the event.

We Look forward to your attendance at this special event.

Clément Voule United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association
Panel Discussions
CDDRL Special Events

North Korea and the World in Flux

-

The 11th Annual Koret Workshop

A dramatic opening created by the unique strategic outlooks and personalities of Moon Jae-in, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump instigated a series of highly symbolic summits in the early months of 2018. The process kicked off by those summits has bogged down, however, as the necessary compromises for an agreement between the United States and North Korea have proved elusive. This year's Koret Workshop will therefore invite experts from a variety of areas in order to reflect on what the stumbling blocks have been as well as prospects for overcoming them. Conference participants will work towards better understanding and supporting potential emerging solutions to the persistent conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

The workshop will consist of three sessions:

Session I: Assessments of Summit Diplomacy

Session II: Challenges and Opportunities in Media Coverage

Session III: Prospects and Pitfalls in the Near-Term

NOTE: During the conference, a keynote address is open to the general public. Please click here to register for the public event on March 15.
 
The annual Koret Workshop is made possible through the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Bechtel Conference Center
Encina Hall, 616 Serra Street
Stanford University

Conferences
Koret Workshop

Japan-US Trade Frictions Past and Present: Implications for China-US Trade War

-

The event is jointly sponsored by the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

urata shujiro1
Japan and the US were involved in fierce trade frictions beginning with textiles in the 1950s to semi-conductors in the 1990s. Bilateral trade problems between Japan and the US have resurged recently after Donald Trump became US President. Analysis of Japan-US trade frictions can provide useful implications for ongoing trade war between the US and China.

Shujiro Urata is a Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda Univeristy.  His focus of research is in international and development economics.  He received his PhD in Economics from Standford University in 1978.

Philippines Conference Room Encina Hall, 3rd Floor 616 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305
Shujiro Urata Professor Waseda University
Seminars
Japan Colloquium Series

Information Session - Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program

This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 
 
The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is currently accepting applications from eligible juniors due February 15, 2019 who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department. CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.
 
For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.
 
honors info session 2019 1
 

 

Ground Floor Conference Rm E008 Encina Hall616 Serra MallStanford, CA 94305-6055

 

Stephen J. Stedman

CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-2705 (650) 724-2996
0
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Stedman_Steve.jpg PhD

Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.

In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.

In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.

In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.

His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).

Director, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law
Director, Program in International Relations
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label

Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

0
Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
didi_kuo_2023.jpg

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label

Winners announced for the Spring 2018 Stanford e-Japan Award

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Stanford e-Japan is a distance-learning course sponsored by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. The Spring 2018 session was supported by the Capital Group and the Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project, Japan Program, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, FSI. Offered for the first time in 2015, Stanford e-Japan presents a creative and innovative approach to teaching Japanese high school students about U.S. society and culture and U.S.–Japan relations, and most importantly, the course introduces both U.S. and Japanese perspectives on many historical and contemporary issues. The Spring 2018 cohort was the sixth group of students to complete Stanford e-Japan.

In August 2019, three of the top students of the Spring 2018 Stanford e-Japan session will be honored at an event at Stanford University. The three Stanford e-Japan Day honorees—Naoya Chonan (Waseda University Senior High School), Miki Fujito (Senri International School of Kwansei Gakuin), and Luana Ichinose (Shibuya Senior High School)—will be recognized for their coursework and exceptional research essays that focused respectively on “Two Possible Ways to Adopt a Flipped Learning Method into Japanese High School Classrooms,” “Differing Views on the A-bomb in Japan and the U.S.,” and “A Comparative Analysis of the Right to Resist in Japan and the U.S.”

Anna Oura (Tokyo Gakugei University International Secondary School) received Honorable Mention for her research paper on “A Comparative Study on Japanese and U.S. History Textbooks.”

Applications for the Spring 2019 session of Stanford e-Japan will be accepted online from January 10 to February 24, 2019.

To stay informed of news about Stanford e-Japan and SPICE’s other programs, join our email list and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Related articles:

 

Hero Image
Research papers of students in the Spring 2018 cohort of Stanford e-Japan
Compilation of the final research papers of students in the Spring 2018 cohort of Stanford e-Japan
All News button
1

Reelection, Political Selection, and Economic Development

-
Abstract:
 
We assemble novel data from approximately 120 countries around the world on recent reelection rates of legislators to the national lower house of representatives. Data
show that incumbent reelection rates increase substantially with acountry's level of economic development. Using a formal model to inform our understanding, we argue that as acountry develops economically, the pool of individuals who seek political office improves. As better candidates enter the political arena, more good types are elected and then reelected. Historical data buttresses this line of argument.  We use empiricalmethods to explore mechanisms to account for the pattern in political entry that we identify. 
 
 
Speaker Bio:
 

miriam golden
Miriam Golden is Professor of Political Science. She was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Cornell University.  Professor Golden's research is in the area of political economy. She has conducted field research on issues of corruption and political malfeasance in Europe, Asia, and Africa.  With economist Raymond Fisman, Professor Golden has recently authored Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017).  Her current field project concerns political responsiveness in Pakistan. She is also engaged in a cross-national and historical study of how and when politicians secure reelection.

 
 
Miriam Golden Professor of Political Science, University of California at Los Angeles
Seminars
Subscribe to The Americas