Activities in other Countries

Apart from work on fuel cells and their peripherals (such as equipment for reforming and gas purification), the platform targets included many hydrogen-energy-related items. 

The financing of scientific research is fixed in five-year Framework Programs of the EU. These programs include selected priorily projects. Fifty percent of the cost of each project is covered by the EC, the other 50% by partners of the projects. The following are examples of projects from the current sixth Framework Program (Adamson, 2005)  

In 2007, the European Commission announced that it is to support a project concerned with the development of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies. Over the next six years, 470 million will be provided to fund the Euel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Technology Initiative (JTI), a sum expected to be matched by industry. It is hoped that the program will accelerate the development of hydrogen technologies to the point of commercial take-off between 2010 and 2020 Fuel Cell Today, October 17, 2007). 

In earlier chapters we pointed out that in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s, a relatively large number of stationary power plants of various sizes, including different fuel cell variants, had been built and operated over extended periods 

Early in 2008, China announced it will invest more than 10 billion on renewable energy as part of its commitment to generate 15% of its energy from renewables by 2020, up from 8% today (Butler, 2008a). 

---

Nuclear power has achieved an excellent safety record. Exceptions are the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and at Chernobyl in 1986. In the United States, safety can be attributed in part to the strict regulation provided by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which reviews proposed reactor designs, processes appHcations forUcenses to constmct and operate plants, and provides surveillance of all safety-related activities of a utiUty. The utiUties seek continued improvement in capabiUty, use procedures extensively, and analy2e any plant incidents for their root causes. Similar programs intended to ensure reactor safety are in place in other countries. 

Pesticide residues consist of chemicals that might occur in a commodity as a result of application of a pesticide. Such chemicals typically correspond to compounds for which a regulatory agency has or will set a tolerance, i.e., a maximum residue limit, specific to the commodity. In either a field study or a market basket survey, residues to be determined will be those which result from application of the specific pesticide that the study is intended to support. A market basket survey, however, might be intended to support not just one but several different pesticides of the same or different chemical classes. In addition, a market basket survey might include pesticides not used in the USA but for which import tolerances exist. For example, some uses of the parathion family of pesticides on food products have been abandoned in the USA but remain in other countries that export the products to the USA. A market basket survey offers a means to evaluate actual dietary exposures to residues of such pesticides. In addition, tolerance expressions frequently include multiple compounds, all of which must typically be determined in residue field trials. The sponsor of the market basket survey must decide whether to analyze for all compounds in the applicable tolerance expression or to restrict the program to selected analytes, such as the active ingredient. 

Similarly, the degree of freedom available to optimize transfer prices depends on factors outside the model such as accumulated deficits or the profitability of other business activities in a country. Furthermore, legal constructs such as principal trading companies (cf. Murphy 1998) are employed in practice to optimally allocate profits within a company. Finally, from a modeling perspective the simultaneous optimization of network design and transfer prices leads to a non-linear model (cf. Schmidt and Wilhelm 2000, p. 1510 Verter and Dincer 1995, p. 278) that is difficult to solve to optimality for realistic problem instances. Therefore, transfer prices are not optimized but instead determined outside the optimization model. Furthermore, transfer prices are assumed to be independent of the transfer destination because tax authorities in the country of origin usually do not accept differentiated transfer prices. In literature differentiated approaches can nevertheless be found as well (e.g., Kouvelis et al. 2004, p. 130). 

G-32911, simetryn Simetryn was one of the first methylthiotriazine candidates tested, but was developed slowly until it was confirmed that rice had a higher crop tolerance to simetryn than to prometryn. It found its commercial place in the transplanted rice of Japan and in other countries in the subtropical rice belt. Simetryn is used to control broadleaf weeds in mixtures with other herbicides that are active against grasses. 

A large number of patents published during the last thirty years indicate that considerable activity has been displayed in the application of electrolytic methods to the production of organic substances. Most of the patents1 are of German origin, but during the past five years much attention has been devoted to this branch of chemistry in other countries. 

---