Thorium reactor #1 (only by 2025)

March 4, 2014 Brown Pundits Archive 1 Comment filed under Archived Authors

Hopefully the powers that be mean what they say and say what they mean. The dream of a Thorium reactor lives on, even as we get to hear of rumors that the huge thorium reserves in Kerala and elsewhere are being depleted at a rapid scale (sold off to the Chinese?). Since this is India, of course anything is possible.

Design of the world’s first mainly thorium-based nuclear reactor is ready. Indiatoday.in
brings you the first look of the design and prototype of the Advanced
Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR). It is the latest Indian design for a
next-generation nuclear reactor that will burn thorium as its fuel.

The
design is being developed at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in
Mumbai and is an important step towards the third stage of Indian
nuclear power programme, which envisages use of thorium fuel cycles for
commercial power generation.

The AHWR is a vertical pressure tube
type reactor cooled by boiling light water under natural circulation.
The unique feature of this design is a large tank of water on top of a
primary containment of vessel called gravity-driven water pool (GDWP).
This reservoir is designed to perform several passive safety functions. Dr
R.K. Sinha, chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, in an exclusive
interview to Indiatoday.in said: “This reactor can continue to cool its
core after passive shutdown without an external source of cooling water
and electricity and even without any operator action for nearly 110
days.”

The AHWR will be fuelled by a mix of uranium-233 and
plutonium, which will be converted from thorium and uranium-238
respectively by previously deployed and domestically designed fast
breeder reactors. Another version of the AHWR called AHWR-LEU will use
low enriched uranium along with thorium.

Thorium is an element
that is three times more abundant globally than uranium. India’s
reserves of thorium constitute 25 per cent of the world’s total
reserves.

Earlier, India had set up KAMINI – a 30 kWth
experimental reactor at Kalpakkam which incidentally is the world’s only
reactor fuelled by U-233 derived from thorium.

The
AHWR, a technology demonstrator, is supposed to be launched during the
12th five-year plan and will take seven to eight years for completing
the construction. Thus generation of electricity from AHWR is expected
to be somewhere in 2025.

regards

Caste system explained?

March 3, 2014 Brown Pundits Archive 3 Comments filed under Archived Authors

We inherit our “social competences.” Social mobility is low in the USA (and everywhere else).The shadow of past poverty/prosperity lingers for 10-15 generations. Your surname says a lot about your prospects (which is a truly surprising conclusion). Gregory Clark does not say it explicitly but his surname test is implicitly a caste test, whereby people are classified by the work they do and the status they carry in society (nobles, artisans, shopkeepers).

….new research from Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez indicating that social mobility in the United States is not falling,
offering the not-so-reassuring news that the reason it isn’t falling is
that it’s been low for a long time.
…..

………a different research program, associated with UC–Davis economic historian Gregory Clark, which argues that economic mobility is low almost everywhere. He reaches this conclusion with a different research method that lets
him explore much longer-term trends than most of the research you see
on this. …….if you have a noble surname in Sweden today, we know that
your father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father (or
whatever) was a member of the Swedish elite more than 300 years ago. By
contrast, if you have the last name “Andersson” then that means that
your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather
wasn’t a nobleman and probably didn’t practice a skilled trade either.
That’s why he wound up with the generic surname. So we can look at the
present-day incomes of people with noble surnames and compare them to
the present-day incomes of people named “Andersson” and get a picture of
the long-term persistence of the noble/Andersson class gap.

And it’s all the more striking precisely because this identification
strategy is rather crude. A person with a noble surname could still be
of mostly lower- or middle-class ancestry and vice versa, so the
surname thing should underestimate the long-term persistence of the
class gap in Sweden.
…..

According to a new book, The Son Also Rises, by academic Gregory Clark, our chances of getting on in life are largely down to what our family did 300 years ago. Contrary to brighter estimates, which suggest that
past prosperity or poverty can be erased in three to four generations,
Clark reckons it takes 10 to 15.

“Social mobility rates are similar across societies that vary
dramatically in their institutions and income levels. Cradle-to-grave
socialist Sweden and dog-eat-dog, free-to-lose America have similar
rates. Communist China and capitalist Taiwan have similar rates.

regards

East Africa’s growth potential from a Private Equity Perspective

February 27, 2014 Brown Pundits Archive No Comments filed under Archived Authors

This is the one graph you need to know to understand the Rise & Rise of Uganda (despite being the headlines for all the wrong reasons). Demand for Capital is going to be most intense from medium-cap funds in Anglophone Eastern Africa. Isn’t the definition of Serendipity being about at the right place at the right? It’s almost as if the McKinsey Report is describing TLG Capital.

http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Africa/Uncovering_hidden_investment_opportunities_in_Africa

Brown in space

February 18, 2014 Brown Pundits Archive 4 Comments filed under Archived Authors

Science in India has to some extent a reputation for lassitude. Mind you, not Indian scientists, but institutional Indian scientific culture. So what explain’s the space program? From India, Proof That a Trip to Mars Doesn’t Have to Break the Bank:

While India’s recent launch of a spacecraft to Mars was a remarkable feat in its own right, it is the $75 million mission’s thrifty approach to time, money and materials that is getting attention.

Just days after the launch of India’s Mangalyaan satellite, NASA sent off its own Mars mission, five years in the making, named Maven. Its cost: $671 million. The budget of India’s Mars mission, by contrast, was just three-quarters of the $100 million that Hollywood spent on last year’s space-based hit, “Gravity.”

My explanation is simple: national pride and motivation to do something that matters. Soviet science did great things too, when it could motivate people. The issue in places like Italy and India is to incentivize this sort of productivity in their general scientific cultures.

Hello from Baroda

February 13, 2014 Brown Pundits Archive 2 Comments filed under Archived Authors

It’s my fourth visit to India since Dec’12. I’m very find of the place but it seems the Indian economy is definitely in slow-down mode, most of the bill boards around Calcutta airport were empty of ads.

The new airports cropping up in the metros are simply amazing (admittedly I’m referencing this to Africa but Bombay Airport’s can trump even Heathrow – the brief given to the interior decorators at Bombay airport was that amenities should be of such a standard that “people should miss their flights”).

I think the world is beginning to segment where we are also beginning to see a “Frontier” First, the urban regions (probably coastal America, Ny-Lon, Tokyo-HK) that are on the cutting edge of development and than the stable First World (Berlin, Paris).

I think that the upcoming elections in India are going to be a watershed and it seems that Modi will be good for the economy. However the Gujarat riots were really something else (in the aftermath of those riots however they’ve come to a complete stop) since apparently there were detailed lists of minority-owned businesses and it had spread from Ahmedabad old town to the prosperous suburbs (one Hindu woman who had owned a Benneton? business with her Muslim husband had to stand outside it and recite the Gayatri Mantra? to prove she was Hindu).

Anyway I think that though Modi’s track record is patchy (the riots do seem to be a failure either way) he is the man to bring India back on track. Big government just cannot work here (or in Africa or elsewhere for that matter) since the largesse gets distributed all around.

My journeys to India now span east (Calcutta), south (Chennai), west (Mumbai, Baroda, Kolhapur) but ironically not the heart and north of India (the most “Pakistani” parts of the country Lolz).

Mathew Martoma = “Triple Package” + Sociopathy

February 7, 2014 Brown Pundits Archive 2 Comments filed under Archived Authors

The extent of Mathew Martoma’s fraud at Harvard is almost farcical. The fact that someone like him (born Ajai Mathew Thomas) could succeed in high finance tells you something about high finance. But, it also tells you about the toxic brew of individuals with high intellectual competency but low moral compass. These are far more dangerous than garden variety sociopaths, because their success is contingent upon eating away at the fabric of civil society.

But another aspect hinted at in the story is the role that pressure driven Asian immigrant cultures play in incentivizing this sort of behavior.* To be frank I suspect many Asian immigrant parents might be able tolerate a little corner cutting if their child could make it to Harvard. Naturally when you have someone with sociopathic tendencies like Martoma that tends to be interpreted as carte blanche toward a success-at-any-price mode of operation.

Of course culture is not destiny. The man prosecuting Martoma is himself a 1.5 generation Indian American.

* This sort of problem also crops up in corporations where all rewards are based on outcomes. In which case there is a strong incentive to cheat the system.