German Legacy Research Articles

Development and application of the PBMR fission product release calculation model

At PBMR, long-lived fission product release from spherical fuel spheres is calculated using the German legacy software product GETTER. GETTER is a good tool when performing calculations for fuel spheres under controlled operating conditions, including irradiation tests and post-irradiation heat-up experiments. It has proved itself as a versatile reactor analysis tool, but is rather cumbersome when used for accident and sensitivity analysis. Developments in depressurized loss of forced cooling (DLOFC) accident analysis using GETTER led to the creation of FIssion Product RElease under accident (X) conditions (FIPREX), and later FIPREX-GETTER. FIPREX-GETTER is designed as a wrapper around GETTER so that calculations can be carried out for large numbers of fuel spheres with design and operating parameters that can be stochastically varied. This allows full Monte Carlo sensitivity analyses to be performed for representative cores containing many fuel spheres. The development process and application of FIPREX-GETTER in reactor analysis at PBMR is explained and the requirements for future developments of the code are discussed. Results are presented for a sample PBMR core design under normal operating conditions as well as a suite of design-base accident events, illustrating the functionality of FIPREX-GETTER. Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis principles are explained and presented for each calculation type. The plan and current status of verification and validation (V&V) is described. This is an important and necessary process for all software and calculation model development at PBMR.

A populist island in an ocean of clan politics: the Lukashenka regime as an exception among CIS countries

THE COLLAPSE OF SOCIALIST REGIMES in Eastern Europe and Eurasia resulted in the polarisation of politics.' In East Central European and Baltic countries (henceforth, Western post-communist countries2) political parties began to play an important role already in the early stage of transition. In these countries unitary constitutional regimes and free market economies are predominant. In contrast, in the politics of CIS countries informal clan relations are prevalent. It is true that since the end of the 1990s we have seen several examples of successful party building even in the CIS. However, these successful parties, such as Unified Russia and the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine, have been merely an official facade of clan relations.3 In contrast to the unitary state building in the Western post-communist countries, in CIS countries national-subnational political relations have been extremely deconcentrated, although the constitutions of most of these countries, except for Russia, declare that they have chosen a unitary path of state building. In these countries a patrimonial capitalism, advantageous not only to domestic enterprises but also to the population in general, took shape. The purpose of this article is to examine the Belarusian political regime under President Aleksandr Lukashenka as a populist one, which is uncommon for a CIS country. In order to understand this peculiarity, it is insufficient to compare Belarusian politics with the politics of other CIS countries. It can only be understood in the context of polarisation of post-communist political and economic regimes. Table 1 lists nine criteria distinguishing the two types of post-communist regime. Criterion 1: constitutional definition. While Western post-communist countries adopted either parliamentary or, at best, weak presidential systems, superpresidentialism has become the norm for CIS countries, with the exception of Moldova. These superpresidencies are the successors of the former central committees of communist parties and are functioning as a guarantee for personalised distribution of resources and assets. It is true that most CIS countries adopted semi-presidential, not pure presidential, systems. Under semi-presidential systems the president appoints the

The rise and fall of Brahms the German

Johannes Brahms's reputation during the years between his death in 1897 and the end of World War II in 1945 has received little attention in Brahms‐reception studies. The Brahms portrayed at that time was a distinctly German artist whose conservative style was comforting during a socially (and artistically) turbulent period. That image of Brahms is unfamiliar to our modern idea of the composer, shaped as it is by Arnold Schoenberg's 1947 essay “Brahms the Progressive.” Schoenberg painted Brahms as a harbinger of modernism whose flexible phrase structure and supple use of forward‐looking harmony led to the emancipation of the dissonance and the free prose style of the early twentieth century. Later Brahms scholars have read Schoenberg's essay largely as a self‐serving attempt to legitimize his own atonal language by ascribing some of its principles to a revered master. Yet, when Schoenberg first delivered his remarks as a radio address in 1933, he was also attempting to overturn several decades of increasingly reactionary readings of Brahms, whereby German writers had championed Brahms as a bulwark against a decadent modernism that was perceived to be driven by foreign elements. This essay examines some of the best‐known German writers on Brahms from the first half of the twentieth century (Walther Niemann, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Schoenberg, Karl Geiringer, and others) and traces an increasingly nationalistic and at times even racist trend in Brahms reception. Finally, the uneasy attempts after World War to deal with Brahms's German legacy are briefly assayed.

The German Legacy: Richmond in Braunschweig

The German Legacy: Richmond in Braunschweig

Cultural Revolution or Cultural Shock? Student Radicalism and 1968 in Germany

The sixties generation came to power recently in Germany. Its symbolic figure is Joschka Fischer of the Green Party, who was a student radical in 1968 and thirty years later was appointed foreign minister. While foreign and domestic policies have changed fundamentally since reunification in 1989, diminishing the historical impact of the sixties in West Germany, Germans today still debate the meaning of 1968. Former activists claim that their protest movement created a cultural revolution and a political enlightenment which marked the actual birth of a democratic Federal Republic. Conservative critics disagree; to them, the year was a cultural shock which led to social disintegration. As in many Western countries, the German legacies of 1968 are mired in debate.

Japan's encounter with Germany, 1860–1914: An assessment of the German legacy in Japan

(1996). Japan's encounter with Germany, 1860–1914: An assessment of the German legacy in Japan. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 245-249.

Lukacs as Interpreter of German Culture

Much has been written about Georg Lukacs the philosopher, the aesthetician, the critic, the party functionary, and the interpreter of modern European Geistesgeschichte.1 But commentators have shown less interest in Lukacs' deep and abiding preoccupation with the German legacy in particular, although he wrote more on this subject than on any other: Soul and Form (1910), Goethe and His Age (1947), The Young Hegel (1948), Essays on Thomas Mann (1949), German Realists of the Nineteenth Century (1951), Outline of a History of Modern German Literature (1953), The Destruction of Reason (1954), and many individual essays and articles on German philosophers and writers not included in these works. Most of Lukacs' other writings also take Germany, implicitly or explicitly, as their frame of reference, which leads us to ask why Lukacs attached so much importance to the German question and how relevant his critique of Germany is to the rest of his work. My answer, as I shall try to show in what follows, is that, far from being secondary or derivative, Lukacs' preoccupation with the German legacy, at its best and worst, actually forms the architectonic center of his whole development and theory of culture.

Progress in Research on High Speed Flow

PARALLEL with the quest for higher speeds in aircraft of the traditional type, there has been a remarkable advance in rocket and missile design in recent years. The German legacy of the V2 gave both East and West a long start in this development, and full advantage of this has been taken in the period of intensive research of the past ten years. Lately the possibility of space travel has made a very profound appeal to people in all spheres and this has caused the pace of research in this field to be stepped up.