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This contribution analyses six challenges with which candidate countries must successfully cope if they are to fulfil the environmental acquis and promote the more fundamental goal of building a sustainable environment in Central and Eastern Europe. These six challenges are as follows: (1) the fiscal challenge of providing requisite monies; (2) the administrative challenge of building both institutional and staffing capacity; (3) the environmental challenge of promoting a sustainable environment while fulfilling the acquis; (4) the ‘democratic deficit’ challenge of ensuring substantive input for Vox Populi; (5) the energy challenge of reducing the excessive consumption of environmentally threatening fuels and coping with dangerous Soviet-built nuclear power stations; (6) the political challenge of mobilising the support necessary to respond effectively to these foregoing challenges. It concludes that we should be cautiously optimistic about the prospects for environmental accession.

The metalfuel version of the FPIN2 fuel element mechanics model has been incorporated into the SASSYS/SAS4A code system. In this implementation, SASSYS/SAS4A provides the fuel and cladding temperat...

Under steady state conditions, irradiation resorption of fission gas from bubbles limits the swelling rates of metallic fast-reactor fuels to relatively small values. During transient thermal excursions, however, resorption effects diminish relative to thermal kinetics. Various bubble-growth mechanisms then become important components of the swelling These mechanisms include growth by diffusion, for bubbles within grains and on grain boundaries; dislocation nucleation at the bubble surface, or "punchout"; and bubble growth by creep. Analyses of these mechanisms are presented and applied to provide information on the conditions and the relative time scales for which the various processes should dominate fuel swelling. The results are compared to a series of experiments in which the swelling of irradiated metal fuel was determined after annealing at various temperatures and pressures. The diffusive growth of bubbles on grain boundaries is concluded to be dominant in these experiments.

This paper characterizes the areas of Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) safety research in terms of their importance in addressing the risk of core disruption sequences for innovative designs. Such sequences have traditionally been determined to constitute the primary risk to public health and safety. All core disruption sequences are folded into four fault categories: classic unprotected (unscrammed) events; loss of decay heat; local fault propagation; and failure of critical reactor structures. Event trees are used to describe these sequences and the areas in the IFR Safety and related Base Technology research programs are discussed with respect to their relevance in addressing the key issues in preventing or delimiting core disruptive sequences. Thus a measure of potential for risk reduction is obtained for guidance in establishing research priorites.

Communist governments have traditionally contended that "negative" phenomena, including drug abuse, were alien to socialism and could flourish only within the exploitation, moral depravity, and spiritual vacuousness of capitalism. Recent accounts in official media of Eastern Europe–often employing lurid and perhaps hyperbolic language–now admit that the New Socialist Man can, like his capitalist counterpart, become a victim of what the media themselves often call "narcomania."1 Regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the U.S.S.R., and Yugoslavia, to varying degrees, are willing to acknowledge the existence of drug abuse in their societies. A Soviet source explains why: "Concealing an illness will not make it go away; it will only drive it inward. We have come to realize that openness is needed in the struggle against drug addiction; that we must look the truth in the eye, no matter how unsavory it is.

Campylobacter species are the major cause of acute bacterial enteritis reported in the United Kingdom, nonetheless many aspects of campylobacteriosis epidemiology remain poorly understood. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli in fresh bovine, ovine, and porcine liver and chicken portions from retail outlets and compare strain subtype distributions with those associated with cases of human campylobacteriosis occurring within the same period and study area. Meat samples were examined by both enrichment culture and direct plating, and Campylobacter isolates were subjected to the same test procedures (identification, serotyping, phagetyping, resistotyping) applied to the clinical strains. Campylobacter species were isolated from 73.2% of 489 samples examined. Chicken exhibited the highest contamination rate (83.3%), followed by lamb (72.9%), pig (71.7%), and ox (54.2%) liver. C. jejuni predominated in chicken (77.3%), lamb (75.0%), and ox (49.0%) liver, and C. coli predominated in pigs' liver (42.4%). Campylobacter fetus was identified in 12.5% of ox liver samples and also in pig and lamb. Of the human isolates, 89.3% were C. jejuni and 10.7% C. coli. The greatest variation in C. jeuni subtypes was observed among the chicken isolates (57 sero/phage-types), followed by human (48 types) and lamb (30 types). A significant proportion of the chicken and lamb isolates shared identical subtypes with the human strains, indicative of their role as potential sources of infection. Almost 30% of samples yielded multiple strains of Campylobacter, a finding that reinforces the epidemiological importance of selecting and testing more than one presumptive isolate per sample.

Suggesting that nonalcoholic drug abuse can eliminate the Russian nation “in the very near future” is undoubtedly hyperbolic, but the available data on the evolving status of this pathology in the Russian Federation are indeed worrisome. Thus, the findings from one of the most comprehensive surveys to date, conducted in 1992, on drug abuse among residents of urban centers in Russia, reportedly “exceeded all expectations,” with 11.5 percent of the respondents (and 23 percent of them in Moscow) admitting that they had consumed unspecified illicit “narcotics” at least once, whereas researchers had hypothesized that the respective figure would be between 2 and 3 percent.1 Overall, this survey concludes that a “fundamentally new narco-situation” has emerged in Russia.2

A 17-year-old boy and his father had acute gastroenteritis after eating spaghetti and pesto that had been prepared four days earlier. Within two days, fulminant liver failure and rhabdomyolysis developed in the boy and he died. The father had hyperbilirubinemia and rhabdomyolysis but recovered. We investigated the cause of these illnesses.Bacteria were isolated and characterized by conventional methods, and bacterial toxins were quantified by immunoassays and cell-culture techniques. The effect of the isolated toxin on the rates of oxidation of various substrates was analyzed in rat-liver mitochondria.Autopsy of the boy's liver revealed diffuse microvesicular steatosis and midzonal necrosis that suggested impaired beta-oxidation of liver mitochondria due to a mitochondrial toxin. There was no evidence of ingestion of heavy metals, halogenated compounds, hepatotoxic drugs, or staphylococcal enterotoxin. However, high concentrations of Bacillus cereus emetic toxin were found in both the residue from the pan used to reheat the food and the boy's liver and bile. B. cereus was cultured from the intestinal contents and the pan residue. The emetic toxin isolated from the B. cereus cultures was found to be a mitochondrial toxin.Fulminant liver failure developed after the ingestion of food contaminated with the B. cereus emetic toxin. The toxin inhibits hepatic mitochondrial fatty-acid oxidation, indicating that it caused liver failure in this patient.

Bacillus cereus is an established cause of food poisoning in addition to being a troublesome and persistent contaminant, responsible for a variety of spoilage defects in processed foods and dairy products. A range of diagnostic and selective media has been developed to facilitate the detection and enumeration of B. cereus in routine surveillance situations and food poisoning investigations. These media are reviewed with respect to the selective and diagnostic systems they employ, their ability to recover and differentiate the target organism, and their advantages and limitations in particular applications.

Of 85 strains of Bacillus cereus isolated in Norway from dairy products, 59% were found to be enterotoxigenic, and 15% were psychotrophic. Six of the isolates (7%) were identified as potential psychotrophic food-poisoning strains as they were both enterotoxigenic and exhibited good growth at 6°C. Enterotoxin production was detected using the Western immunoblot technique, and a commercially available reversed passive latex agglutination (RPLA) assay (Unipath BCET-RPLA TD950). Both methods gave essentially the same results. In a separate study, the Western immunoblot and RPLA assays were used in a conjunction with the in vivo vascular permeability reaction (VPR) assay to determine enterotoxin production among 25 isolates of Bacillus cereus referred to the PHLS Food Hygiene Laboratory from incidents of diarrhoeal- and emetic-syndrome food poisoning and non-gastrointestinal infections. Eighty-four percent of these isolates were found to be enterotoxigenic by the Western immunoblot and the RPLA assays, and these results were in good agreement with those obtained by the VPR assay. In both studies, the BCET-RPLA kit proved to be a simple and reliable means for determining enterotoxin production by strains of Bacillus cereus .

Bacillus cereus is an established cause of food poisoning in addition to being a troublesome and persistent contaminant, responsible for a variety of spoilage defects in processed foods and dairy products. A range of diagnostic and selective media has been developed to facilitate the detection and enumeration of B. cereus in routine surveillance situations and food poisoning investigations. These media are reviewed with respect to the selective and diagnostic systems they employ, their ability to recover and differentiate the target organism, and their advantages and limitations in particular applications.

The FRAS3 code, developed to model transient fission-gas behavior in oxide fuel, has been modified for application to metallic fuel. The code has been applied to analyze a series of experiments on irradiated uranium fuel, in which fission-gas bubble distributions were measured following isothermal anneals under various pressures. Comparison of the calculated bubble-size distributions to those measured indicates that grain-boundary bubbles are an important components of the observed size distributions. The calculated results agree will with the observed results in both the general nature of the distributions and their variation with pressure. Results are not as consistent for an anneal under vacuum, during which a large amount of gas was released.

OVIET commentators traditionally have associated political corruption with public officials in decadent capitalist systems. The "New Soviet Man," they assert, is a dedicated public servant who would never pursue private gain to society's detriment. Such commentators generally attribute instances of corruption among Soviet officials today to "vestiges of the past" that will wither away as the socialist system becomes ever more firmly established. Yet, an examination of political life in societies as disparate as ancient Rome and the contemporary United States indicates that none of them, including the U.S.S.R., has been entirely free from political corruption. Certainly enough public officials throughout history have been sufficiently tempted to pursue private gain at public expense to suggest that defects in the human character are an important cause of corruption. Indeed, Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers writes that "man is vindicative, ambitious, and rapacious," and that it has been "invariably found that momentary passions and immediate interests have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than do general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice." While the notion that human nature is base may explain why all political systems have experienced corruption, it does not explain why some officials engage in corruption while others do not, nor why some political systems seem to have more corruption than do others. The opportunities and incentives for corruption within and among political systems help explain these differences. An analysis of such factors in the U.S.S.R. suggests that, despite Soviet claims, they are similar in kind if not degree to those found in many other societies.1 The following analysis examines the scope, incentives and opportunities for, and efforts to combat corruption in the U.S.S.R. The study defines corruption as the behavior of public officials which diverges from the formal duties of a public role to serve private ends.2 Three aspects of the definition require brief elaboration.

Environmental pollution is the price that has to be paid for industrial development and the development of civilization. Arresting and eliminating these processes is extremely costly and we do not always have the means at our disposal for the necessary action. (Kurier Szczecinski [Szczecin], June 9, 1981)Judging by most indexes of modernization, Joseph Stalin's long cherished dream of the socialist East overtaking the capitalist West remains unfulfilled. Ironically, however, the states of Eastern Europe may be close to preeminence in one unwelcome area: environmental pollution. Atmospheric emissions of sulfur dioxide in Czechoslovakia and Poland reportedly approximate similar emissions in France and the Federal Republic of Germany. Many waterways in Yugoslavia are said to be “polluted beyond all domestic, European, and world standards,” and in East Germany and Romania less than 20 percent of the main water-courses are sufficiently pure to provide potable water. The Slovak capital of Bratislava allegedly possesses the “worst environment among our own and other European cities,” while Western experts consider air pollution levels in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia to be among the highest in the world.

Although the founder of the Catholic church said that “My Kingdom is not of this world,” one commentator correctly has observed of the church that “few contemporary institutions have been more intimately — and none more continuously — involved in the political order.” Never was the church's temporal dimension more graphically illustrated than in the June 1979 visit to his homeland of Pope John Paul II, the former Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, Archbishop of Cracow, Poland. Millions of people, many of them from other Communist countries, heard the first pontiff ever elected from a Soviet bloc nation repeatedly call for respect for human rights, for provision of religious liberties, and for the primacy of the individual over the state — demands that many regimes, including Communist ones, have been notably reluctant to grant. The pontiff also publicly raised the delicate issue of Polish-Soviet relations, asserting that alliances must be based on mutual respect and equality and that “there can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map.”

The effective management of the economy is incompatible with the capitalist system. This is manifested most clearly by the vast amount of environmental degradation in most capitalist countries. It is clear that within the framework of a capitalist economy there is no point in even raising the question of the management of the environment an a nationwide scale. But such a formulation is logical and necessary in conditions of a planned socialist economy.

Characteristics of solid fuel fragmentation and energetic spallation during hypothetical accident transients are calculated. Fission gas, having migrated to the grain boundaries as intergranular bu...

An analysis of thermal and mechanical loads acting on an inertial confinement fusion (or fusion/fission) reactor is presented. It is shown that, as a result of the pulsed mode of operation, quasi-steady-state temperatures and stresses can be separated into static and dynamic components. Numerical results are presented for a specific design of a spherical fusion/fission reactor with a lithium-wetted wall. For the purpose of scaling, materials selection, and fatigue damage assessment, approximate formulas for temperatures and stresses are also given.

(1973). Prices and the conservation of natural resources in the Soviet Union. Soviet Studies: Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 364-373.