[9/8] Integrated version. (Final_ completed)

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* Small Talk 

proverb

1. What is the most sympathetic proverb for you?

  (가장 공감하는 속담이나 격언이 있다면 무엇인가요?) 

2. What is the least sympathetic proverb for you?

 (가장 공감가지 않는 것은?)

3. What proverb has to be changed in this mordern times?

(어떤 속담이 현대의 시대상황에 더 이상 어울리지 않나요?)

4. What is the most controversial proverb, you think?

(가장 논쟁이 될 만한 속담은?)

5. What is your own life motto?

(인생 좌우명이나 모토가 무엇인가요?)

6.Make proverbs by yourself.

(한번 스스로 속담을 만들어 보지요~)

* Main topic 1

Japan's election

Banzai!

Aug 31st 2009 | TOKYO
From Economist.com

A landslide victory for the DPJ in Japan

AFP

The victors have an emotive name for it: seiken kotai, or regime change. It came in brutal fashion on Sunday August 30th when Japan, Asia’s richest democracy, dumped the party that has ruled it for almost all of the last 53 years and gave a huge win to one that until recently had little idea of how it would govern.

In a historic result, unofficial results showed that the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), a leftist grouping of ruling-party renegades, social democrats and socialists, was heading for a landslide. It is led by Yukio Hatoyama, a mild-mannered career politician likely to be the next prime minister. He promises a government less beholden to the powerful civil service, wants to temper the free market and is keen to dole out cash to the disadvantaged in the economically stagnant and ageing country. He declined to name a cabinet until he is confirmed as prime minister in a special session of the lower house, or Diet. That may be within the next two weeks.

Jubilant cries of Banzai! echoed around the DPJ’s victorious campaign offices. NHK, the public broadcaster, said the party had won 308 seats in the Diet, with almost all the seats counted, as polls had largely predicted. The DPJ hopes to forge a coalition with two minor parties that would give it a two-thirds majority, enabling it to force through legislation. But the three parties do not see eye to eye on all issues, which means plenty of haggling will be needed. The DPJ already holds the upper house.

For the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) there was no disguising its anguish, as discredited heavyweight after heavyweight fell, often to young, telegenic DPJ novices shrewdly drafted in as giant-killers. Taro Aso, the visibly shaken prime minister, conceded defeat, describing the result as “very severe”. When he dissolved parliament in July to hold the elections, the LDP held 300 seats. NHK’s count showed it had won 119 seats so far, almost the same as the puny number the DPJ held before the elections.

The raw numbers, however dramatic, only partly tell of the upheaval this could mean for Japanese politics. The LDP has had its hands on almost every lever of power for more than half a century; even when it briefly lost office in 1993, it regained it within 11 months because the forces assembled against it fell apart.

During much of its tenure, it held power because it helped deliver rising prosperity to a country that had only recently endured the ignominy of second-world-war defeat and American occupation. After taking office in 1955, it turned Japan into one of America’s firmest cold-war allies.

But as Japan’s economic miracle faded, and the country sank into a deflationary funk in the 1990s, the LDP clung onto power largely thanks to an entrenched system of patronage and lavish use of the pork barrel. It used public funds or access to Japan’s vast pool of private savings to launch public-works projects that for its last two decades in power kept its grass-roots supporters, such as farmers and construction workers, loyal.

None of that spending generated a sustainable recovery, however, nor did reforms by Junichiro Koizumi, a political one-off who revived the LDP’s fortunes during the last election in 2005, but whose followers, known as “Koizumi’s children”, were crushed by the DPJ this time round. Instead Japan has become saddled with a debt projected to rise to twice the country’s ¥497 trillion ($5.3 trillion) GDP, and it remains dangerously dependent on its large exporters. Figures released in the closing days of the campaign showed unemployment, exacerbated by the global financial slump, hit a record 5.7% in July. Deflation has also re-emerged; consumer prices fell 2.2% in July from a year earlier.

The LDP’s failure to improve people’s lives was one of the twin pillars of the DPJ’s successful campaign. The other was the LDP’s complicity with an all-encompassing bureaucracy that has been guilty of staggering incompetence recently, not least by losing millions of personal-pension records in 2007. The public has also been vexed by the practice of rewarding top civil servants with plum jobs at firms they formerly supervised. The DPJ has vowed to stamp out that policy.

But how well it can fulfill its manifesto pledges—repeated with worthy insistence on the campaign trail—will depend on many factors. Firstly, it may need to reach some sort of accommodation with civil-service mandarins, because only a handful of its most senior members have experience at cabinet level. Its spending proposals are largely to be funded by cutting waste from government spending; that is always easier to promise than to deliver.

Meanwhile, Japan’s economy is still poised precariously between recovery and renewed slump. If the recovery fails to materialise, it will not necessarily be the DPJ’s fault. But it will be the first test of its administrative competence in a country that is crying out for good leadership.

Besides naming a cabinet, Mr Hatoyama, who has appeared to flip-flop on sensitive issues such as Japan’s occasionally subordinate relationship with America, is soon likely to have to step onto the world stage. He hopes to travel to New York in September for the UN general assembly, and will probably meet Barack Obama on that trip.

But as he sets out to introduce a new era of political openness and accountability to Japan, he will be dogged by a thorny question that was already being put to him as he cautiously claimed victory on Sunday night. That is the position of Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ’s former leader, who orchestrated this remarkable election victory and is a master manipulator eminently capable of pulling Mr Hatoyama’s strings.

So far, the new leader has ducked the question. But Japan, for all that it will celebrate dealing the LDP a punishment it has long deserved, will want an answer. Otherwise its people may fear they have replaced one dark force with another

* Words & Expressions 
renegades : 탈당자,배신자
beholden : 은혜를 입은
temper : n.기분 vt.완화시키다.
dole out : 나누어 주다
stagnant : 활기없는, 발전이 없는
cabinet : (의원내각제의) 내각
lower house: 하원
Diet : 국회,의회(일본,영국 등의)
forge : n.대장간, 단조 공장 vt.(꾸준히) 연마하다, 다듬다.
poll : 투표, 여론조사
coalition : 연합,제휴
legislation : 입법, 법률제정
see eye to eye : 견해가 완전히 일치하다.
discredit : vt. 신용을 떨어뜨리다. n.불신
heavyweight : 거물, 유력인사
telegenic : TV 방송용의, TV방송에 알맞은
novice : 풋내기
shrewd : 예민한, 빈틈없는, 재빠른
concede : 시인하다. (마지못해) 인정하다
dissolved : 용해하다, 녹이다.
upheaval : 밀어올림, 융기
tenure : 신분 보장, 종신 재직권
ignominy : 면목없음, 불명예
fade : (빛깔등이) 바래다. 쇠퇴하다
cling onto: ~에 달라붙다, 매달리다.
entrench : 참호를 파다. <수동형> 자기 몸을 지키다.
patronage : 보호, 후원; 단골
lavish : 아끼지 않는, 후한, 헤픈
pork barrel : 《미·구어》연방 의회 의원이 선거구의 이익을 위해 정부 보조금을 획득하는 것
grass roots : 서민의, 민중의
revive : 되살리다, 재개하다.
saddle with : 짐을 지우다.
exacerbate : 악화시키다.
pillar : 기둥
complicity : 공모, 연루
staggering : 비틀거리는
incompetence : 무능력
all encompassing : 포괄적인, 총체적인
vex : 귀찮게 하다, 화나게 하다
manifesto : 성명, 공약
mandarins : 관리
flip-flop : (태도,소신등의) 급변
accountability : 책임, 의무
be dogged by : 끌려다니다.
duck question : 질문을 회피하다

Questions

1. How do you feel about Japan's regime change to leftist party?

2. What changes of Japan do you expect from new regime(DJP)?

3. What do you expect from new Japan in terms of relationship between Korea and Japan?

* Main Topic2

Solar-thermal technology

The other kind of solar power

Jun 4th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Energy: Think of solar power, and you probably think of photovoltaic panels. But there is another way to make electricity from sunlight, which arguably has even brighter prospects

AP

IN THE past few months BrightSource Energy, based in California, has signed the world’s two largest deals to build new solar-power capacity. The company will soon begin constructing the first in a series of 14 solar-power plants that will collectively supply more than 2.6 gigawatts (GW) of electricity—enough to serve about 1.8m homes. But to accomplish this feat BrightSource will not use photovoltaic cells, which generate electricity directly from sunlight and currently constitute the most common form of solar power. Instead, the company specialises in “concentrating solar-thermal technology” in which mirrors concentrate sunlight to produce heat. That heat is then used to create steam, which in turn drives a turbine to generate electricity.

Solar-thermal power stations have several advantages over solar-photovoltaic projects. They are typically built on a much larger scale, and historically their costs have been much lower. Compared with other renewable sources of energy, they are probably best able to match a utility’s electrical load, says Nathaniel Bullard of New Energy Finance, a research firm. They work best when it is hottest and demand is greatest. And the heat they generate can be stored, so the output of a solar-thermal plant does not fluctuate as wildly as that of a photovoltaic system. Moreover, since they use a turbine to generate electricity from heat, most solar-thermal plants can be easily and inexpensively supplemented with natural-gas boilers, enabling them to perform as reliably as a fossil-fuel power plant.

Besides these benefits, the main drivers for the growth of the solar-thermal industry are moves to limit carbon-dioxide emissions and requirements to increase the proportion of electricity produced from renewable sources. According to New Energy Finance, about 12GW of concentrating solar-thermal power capacity is being planned worldwide—a vast amount, given that only about 500 megawatts (MW) of such capacity has been built to date. To maximise the energy that can be collected from the sun, solar-power facilities are being constructed in regions that enjoy daily uninterrupted sunshine for much of the year. According to Mark Mehos of America’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, solar-thermal power could in theory generate 11,000GW in America’s south-west. That is about ten times America’s entire existing power-generation capacity.

Simple techniques for concentrating sunlight to generate heat date back thousands of years. In China and ancient Greece, people focused the sun’s rays with mirrors or glass to light fires. In times of war, the same approach is said to have been used to set enemy ships ablaze. By the early 20th century several scientists had built simple machines that could run on concentrated heat from the sun.

A significant milestone was reached in 1913 when Frank Shuman, an American inventor, created the first large solar-thermal pumping station in Meadi, Egypt. He designed a system based on five large reflectors, each 62 metres long and made of glass mirrors arranged to form a trough in the shape of a parabola. Each parabolic trough focused sunlight onto a tube running along its length, heating the water inside it. The resulting steam powered an engine connected to a pump capable of delivering 6,000 gallons of water a minute from the Nile to nearby fields.

Do try to concentrate

The modern history of solar-thermal power began after the oil crises of the 1970s, which prompted many nations to start to investigate clean and renewable energy sources as alternatives to fossil fuels. Over the following decades America, Spain and a handful of other countries built solar-thermal pilot plants for research purposes. The first company to implement the technology on a commercial scale was Luz International, an Israeli company founded in 1980.

Drawing on prior research, Luz began building a series of solar-thermal power stations in California’s Mojave desert in the mid-1980s. Like Mr Shuman before, the company used parabolic troughs to focus sunlight on to liquid-filled tubes, but instead of water they used oil as the heat-transfer fluid. Once it reached a temperature of about 390°C, the hot oil was pumped to a so-called “power block” where it went through a series of heat exchangers, turning water into steam and powering a conventional steam-turbine. The turbine then turned a generator to produce electricity.

Getty Images A power of tower near Seville

By 1990 Luz had constructed nine plants with a total capacity of 354MW. At the time, solar-thermal power was producing about 90% of all solar electricity in the world, says Arnold Goldman, the former chief executive of Luz, who is now chairman of BrightSource. But when the price of natural gas fell and America’s tax incentives for solar power were not renewed, the industry came to a grinding halt. For nearly two decades no new commercial solar-thermal plants began operating. In the meantime, solar-photovoltaic technology slowly took over the market, and by 2007 worldwide installed capacity reached 9.2GW. Although it is more expensive per kilowatt-hour, solar panels can be deployed in small, modular systems, and thus require much less capital investment. Moreover, they can generate power off the grid, which turned out to be an important market for solar power in its early days.

Now, as the solar-thermal industry is experiencing a revival, parabolic-trough projects are garnering much of today’s investment money because of their proven track record. To improve the economics still further, SkyFuel, a firm based in New Mexico, is replacing curved glass mirrors, which are expensive to make, with a thin, reflective low-cost film. And other competing solar-thermal technologies that were developed in parallel with trough-based systems, but never commercialised, are also ready to be deployed.

Among them is an approach that BrightSource uses, in which a field of small, flat mirrors called “heliostats” redirect and concentrate sunlight onto a central receiver at the top of a tower. The tower contains a fluid, typically water, which boils and the resulting steam is then transferred to a nearby “power block”, where it spins a conventional turbine. The advantage of this “power tower” approach is that it can produce steam at a temperature of 550°C and can thus achieve a higher thermal-to-electric efficiency than trough-based systems, says John Woolard, the chief executive of BrightSource. In addition, he says, power-tower systems suffer from fewer pumping losses than trough-based designs. The first commercial power-tower began operating in Spain in 2007.

Another advance that makes solar-thermal power more economically and technologically viable than in the past is the ability to use a large number of smaller and less expensive mirrors, steered by computer systems, to ensure more accurate and automatic tracking and redirection of sunlight than was ever possible before. Bill Gross, the chief executive of eSolar, a developer of “power tower” technology based in Pasadena, California, says his firm is using software to turn thousands of flat mirrors and shape them into a continuously evolving parabola around the tower.

Storage and hybrids

Both power-tower and parabolic-trough systems can store thermal energy in the form of hot, molten salt. It is then possible to generate steam, and thus electricity, even when the sun is not shining. Solar-thermal plants without storage can operate about 30% of the year; but with storage that number could climb to 70% or higher. Unfortunately storage is expensive, and is only economical when regulators provide incentives. In Spain, for example, producers of solar-thermal power receive a guaranteed feed-in tariff. That makes it particularly appealing for Spanish plants to have storage capabilities, to maximise their ability to sell electricity to utilities. In America the main incentives for solar-thermal projects are a 30% investment-tax credit or an equivalent cash grant. As a result, American plants have to be built more cheaply in order to make a profit, and thus typically do not include storage.

Eyevine Power from a parabola

A cheaper alternative to storage is hybridisation. All the original Luz plants also have natural-gas boilers that can generate steam when the sun is not shining. Because solar-thermal plants have a power block and turbine already in place, the extra cost is marginal. Hybridisation could also be done the other way around, by using steam generated from solar-thermal collectors to help drive the turbines at existing coal or gas plants. The Electric Power Research Institute, based in Palo Alto, is studying the feasibility of this approach as a means of reducing fuel costs and emissions at existing power stations.

In addition to parabolic troughs and power-towers there is also a third solar-thermal technology, which combines curved, dish-shaped mirrors with heat engines. In a dish-engine design, the mirrors concentrate sunlight to generate heat, which then typically powers a Stirling engine—a machine that converts heat into mechanical energy by compressing and expanding a fixed quantity of gas. The change in pressure drives the engine’s pistons, which drive a shaft that turns a generator to produce electricity.

Although they are highly efficient, Stirling engines have seen little practical use since their invention nearly two centuries ago, and so far there are no commercial solar-thermal systems that use this approach. Critics of the technology say it involves too many moving parts, making it more complex and expensive to operate and maintain than competing technologies. Stirling Energy Systems, based in Phoenix, Arizona, hopes to prove the doubters wrong. It has signed two large power-purchase agreements, for up to 1,750MW, and plans to fulfil them using dish-engine systems built in conjunction with its sister company, Tessera Solar. Both projects are due to start construction as early as 2010.

One obstacle hampering the growth of the entire field is the difficulty of obtaining financing for solar-thermal projects in the current economic climate, says Thomas Mancini, programme manager for concentrating solar-power at Sandia National Laboratories. As a result, some announced projects may be delayed or perhaps never be built. The situation has prompted some companies to change their business models: Ausra, a solar-thermal company based in Mountain View, California, has switched from being an independent power-producer to being mostly an equipment supplier, for example.

Although solar-thermal power produces no carbon-dioxide emissions, it can have some negative environmental impacts. Both power-tower and trough-based systems are typically water-cooled, and require millions of gallons of water annually. That can cause big problems, especially in desert environments. The California Energy Commission recently urged NextEra Energy Resources, a renewable-energy company, to consider dry cooling instead of using water for its proposed solar-thermal power project in Kern County, California. (Stirling-engine designs do not require water for cooling.) Another potential problem when building power plants in remote locations is a lack of transmission lines, since it is difficult and expensive to get new transmission lines approved and built.

Despite these problems, many people think a massive scale-up of the industry is imminent. Among them is Mr Woolard, who believes that solar-thermal power could regain its historical lead over the solar-photovoltaic approach. Competition from photovoltaic systems for large-scale power generation should not be underestimated, however. According to Mr Bullard, thin-film solar-cell modules are rapidly falling in price, and can generate electricity more cheaply than solar-thermal power in some situations. But no matter which approach comes out on top, competition between the two technologies is sure to foster continued innovation, and a growing supply of clean electricity, in the years to come.

* Words & Expressions

thermal : 열의, 온도의

arguably :이론의 여지가 있지만
supplement : 추가, 보충하다
fluctuate : 변동하다

parabola: 포물선

prompt : a.즉석의, vt.자극하다.

implement : 실행하다, 이행하다 

conventional : 기존의, 틀에박힌

grinding halt: 끼익 소리를 내며 정지하다. 멈추다.

hamper : 방해하다.

garner :  모으다, 축적하다

steer : 키를 잡다, 조종하다

imminent : 절박한

foster : 육성하다

Questions

1. Explain the process of solar thermal power generating.

2. What is the bad effect to enviroment that solar thermal power has?

3. What is the strong point and weak point of solar thermal power?

4. Let's talk about the other renewable- green energy like solar engery.

GEB_Topic_090908.doc

[레밍턴스틸]

멋진 토픽입니다. 특히 마지막 퀘스천... 이제 이비도 이런거 해야죠.

[메메]

와우, 어렵다~ ㅠㅠ

[Elena !]

이거 지금부터 읽고준비해서 내일 가능할까 ㅡㅜ 난 노는것과 공부하는걸 동시에 못하겠어;;

[레밍턴스틸]

불쌍한 녀석. 노는 것과 공부하는 것은 다를게 없어.