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The bioeconomy model provides an alternative view of global economic systems by putting sustainable practices combined with digital approaches at the forefront to tackle issues such as climate change. To address this new business trends, financial institutions began to set up the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) business units to evaluate their business strategies. This paper is aimed at examining the nonfinancial effect created by the digital transformation (DT) activities, highlighting the role of enterprise heterogeneity after the implementation of Environmental Protection Law (EPL) in China. We employ the panel data of A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2020, selecting DT and ESG indicators as the important representations of "Industry 5.0." Our empirical results demonstrate a positive impact of EPL on the ESG performance in sight of resource enterprises (REs), environmental enterprises (EEs), and polluting enterprises (PEs), but a negative impact of EPL on the DT indicators among those environmental related industries. Additional causal relationship regression reveals that enterprise DT has an intrinsic promoting effect on the ESG performance, emphasizing on the high risk of digitization process being the shock transmitters to enterprise nonfinancial indices. Notably, the connectedness of environmental policy illustrates dynamic patterns by parallel trend test and propensity score matching (PSM) DID regression. This paper is prone to benefit lawmakers, regulators, and firm executives responsible for analyzing and assessing enterprise digitization behavior by exploring the influence of macrolevel environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Human activities are directly related to fossil fuel consumption and cause global warming and climate change effects by emitting greenhouse gas into the lower atmosphere. To reduce and adapt to such effects, renewable energy sources such as surface dams, including hydroelectric energy (HE) generation units, are gaining importance. In the current literature, HE potential calculations are based on formulations that are quite simple, clear and do not distinguish between different situations. In this paper, two classification methodologies are proposed for better assessment of HE production. The first one is based on the concept of the hypsographic curve to distinguish different drainage basin features into "Young," "Mature" and "Old." The second classification takes into account the newly defined energy index (EI) principle, which helps to classify the HE generation capability of drainage basins into "Very low," "Low," "Normal," "High" and "Very high." The application of the proposed methodology is presented for three drainage basins from the upstream sub‐basins of the Tigris River in Turkey. A comparison of the results shows that the proposed methodologies not only give numerical values but also sets linguistically rational and logical rules for the HE potential of a drainage basin. In the upstream basin of the Tigris River, the EI values vary between 0.705 and 0.122, corresponding to the "High" and "Low" categories, respectively. It is recommended that these two classification procedures be considered before the construction of any dam for HE production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Recently, due to climate change and global warming, carbon free power generation is becoming important. Among various heat sources to replace fossil fuels, a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) can be a successful alternative power source. The MSR uses liquid nuclear fuel instead of solid fuel which enables to have high power density, compact size, and inherent safety features. The MSR Experiment (MSRE) which was conducted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) had demonstrated these possibilities. However, since the MSRE focused on the nuclear reactor design and operation rather than generating electricity, many issues are still needed to be addressed to fully evaluate potential of an MSR. One of the key issues is to calculate the optimal pinch temperature range of the primary and secondary heat exchangers of the MSR heat transport system. Thus, in this study, to calculate the optimal pinch temperature range of the heat exchangers of the MSR heat transport system, heat transport system, and power conversion system for MSRE are designed conceptually. A Plate Fin type Heat Exchanger (PFHE) is newly suggested and evaluated in this paper for MSR heat transport system application to achieve high compactness and satisfactory performance. Furthermore, to calculate the optimal pinch temperature range from an economic point of view, a PFHE annual cost model is utilized to estimate the cost of PFHE with respect to the pinch temperature. An optimal pinch temperature range is recommended from the study for the early design phase of MSR, which is 5 ~ 15 K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]