Progress in Nuclear Power Technologies and Implications for ASEAN

As Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) exports to the United States increased over time, some of those countries became subject to antidumping duties by the United States from 1985. The cumulation proviso introduced in the Trade and Tariff Act of 1984 made the relatively smaller exporters like the ASEAN countries exposed to the antidumping measures of the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC). By industry, iron and steel shared about half of the decisions against ASEAN. The percentage of the U.S. ITC Commissioners' affirmative antidumping decisions against the ASEAN member countries was a little higher than that against the other countries. The Democrat Commissioners tended to take more affirmative antidumping decisions against ASEAN than the Republican Commissioners. I. Introduction The reductions in tariffs over the past half century have led the contracting parties and Members of the GATT/WTO to resort to practices other than tariff imposition which constrain trade. The restriction that came to be most often applied is antidumping, which is allowed under certain conditions by the GATT/WTO. In 1995, for instance, antidumping actions reported by the Members to the WTO Committee on Antidumping Practices reached some 352. In the same year, the United States completed 57 preliminary and final antidumping injury investigations on products imported from 16 different countries (U.S. International Trade Commission [ITC], 1996). Although the United States has been one of the largest users of administered protection like antidumping, the ASEAN members were not subject to the U.S. antidumping neasures until the first half of the 1980s. The United States began to take antidumping measures against some of the ASEAN members from 1985. Being highly dependent on international trade, they have been concerned with such measures. Even when the ASEAN members successfully defended themselves against the antidumping petitions, time and resources were wasted. This article intends to show the characteristics of the U.S. antidumping measures against ASEAN, which have rarely been studied in the literature. For this purpose, the WTO regulations on antidumping as well as the U.S. antidumping laws and policies are explained. With this background, the reasons for the upsurge in the U.S. antidumping actions against the ASEAN members are revealed. Furthermore, the U.S. ITC Commissioners' antidumping decisions are investigated to check whether they show partisan or sectoral characteristics. The structure of the article is organized as follows. In the next section, the WTO regulations on antidumping are briefly described. In section III, the U.S. antidumping law and the procedure of its implementation are explained. In section IV, the characteristics of the U.S. antidumping decisions against the ASEAN members are revealed. The U.S. ITC Commissioners' behaviour is also analysed depending on their affiliation with the parties. The final section summarizes the overall results. II. The WTO Regulations on Antidumping Although most international economists do not refute the superiority of free trade over protection in improving national welfare, policy makers in most countries actively practised some form of trade protection. Multilateral trade negotiations have brought down average tariffs to alleviate the trade barriers. The Tokyo Round in the 1970s began to alleviate the non-tariff barriers practised by the then GATT contracting parties. Important advances were made in the Uruguay Round negotiations to guarantee the freer and more transparent trade policies of the WTO Members: mandatory, not voluntary, nature of various Agreements on the non-tariff barriers; strengthening the dispute settlement mechanism; and comprising new areas such as trade in agricultural goods, trade-related intellectual properties, and trade in services.' However, despite the successive, multilateral trade negotiations, the uses of contingent protection such as antidumping certainly have been on the increase. …

Dynamic evaluation of green development level of ASEAN region and its spatio-temporal patterns

Transient testing involves placing fuel or material into the core of specialized materials test reactors that are capable of simulating a range of design basis accidents, including reactivity insertion accidents, that require the reactor produce short bursts of intense highpower neutron flux and gamma radiation. Testing fuel behavior in a prototypic neutron environment under high-power, accident-simulation conditions is a key step in licensing nuclear fuels for use in existing and future nuclear power plants. Transient testing of nuclear fuels is needed to develop and prove the safety basis for advanced reactors and fuels. In addition, modern fuel development and design increasingly relies on modeling and simulation efforts that must be informed and validated using specially designed material performance separate effects studies. These studies will require experimental facilities that are able to support variable scale, highly instrumented tests providing data that have appropriate spatial and temporal resolution. Finally, there are efforts now underway to develop advanced light water reactor (LWR) fuels with enhanced performance and accident tolerance. These advanced reactor designs will also require new fuel types. These new fuels need to be tested in a controlled environment in order to learn how they respond to accident conditions. For these applications, transient reactor testing is needed to help design fuels with improved performance. In order to maximize the value of transient testing, there is a need for in-situ transient realtime imaging technology (e.g., the neutron detection and imaging system like the hodoscope) to see fuel motion during rapid transient excursions with a higher degree of spatial and temporal resolution and accuracy. There also exists a need for new small, compact local sensors and instrumentation that are capable of collecting data during transients (e.g., local displacements, temperatures, thermal conductivity, neutron flux, etc.).

The Chinese government is adopting a 'going-out' strategy to promote China's high-end rail technology overseas and strengthen its global competitiveness. This article examines China's high-speed rail diplomacy towards the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and uncovers the link between China's ambitious foreign policies towards the ASEAN and both national pride and commercial stakes in promoting high-speed rail in the region. It analyses the rationale behind China's high-speed rail development proposals for the ASEAN in the context of the rise of China and rivalry between China and Japan. China is especially eager to participate in the construction of high-speed railroads with ASEAN members. The high-speed rail link can forge regional economic integration within the ASEAN. For ASEAN member states, China is a key external investor and contractor for their infrastructure development. Nevertheless, China is facing serious challenges to the realization of its proposals.

This paper examines the role of regional cooperation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the fight against human trafficking for Indonesia. ASEAN members have been collectively active in responding transnational security issues with series of talks and collaboration agreements since early 2000s. Lately in 2015, ASEAN agreed on ASEAN Convention against Trafficking in Persons, particularly Women and Children (ACTIP) that requires each member to collaborate in information sharing and providing effective safeguard and protection of victims. Yet, the frequency of human trafficking crime occurrence remains high and tend to increase in Indonesia in 2017-2018. The objective of this paper is to examine the effectiveness and success of ACTIP implementation in the fight against human trafficking in Indonesia. Based on two years research (2017-2018) in three provinces with the largest number of victims in Indonesia, this paper shows the tendency of persisting crime despite the implementation of regional and national anti-trafficking policies. The research was conducted by archive study, literature study, discourse analysis, and depth interviews with local government officials, police, prosecutors, victims, and traffickers. This paper argues that the relative success of ASEAN in establishing convention at the high-level meetings has not been followed with the success in its implementation in the society. Three main factors have contributed to the ineffectiveness of the agreements, i.e. (1) ASEAN institutional arrangement as a collection of sovereign states instead of supranational organization with binding authority; (2) the lack of commitment of ASEAN sovereign member-states to the agreements; and (3) the complexity and variety of the nature of the crime in each member-state. In effect, these factors have contributed in generating the regionalism paradox in ASEAN where states tend to revert to national policies instead of seeking regional collective solution.

Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) established on August 8, 1967 still accords to the principle of non-intervention which has been arranged in the ASEAN Charter. This principle, however, has been debated among ASEAN members, specifically when it is dealt with human rights. While the instutionalization is one of ASEAN’s achievements, human rights become one of pivotal issues in Southeast Asia which subsequently raises questions on the commitment of ASEAN to support the Responsibility to protect at the Summit on 2005. This article revisits the responsibility to protect in international law which is accorded to international customary law of Article 38 paragraph (1) of the Statute of International Court of Justice (ICJ). By using legal research, this article asserts that the responsibility to protect is essentially applicable to be adopted by regional intergovernmental organization like ASEAN, though it was initially only adopted by the Security Council of the United Nations. But, the principle of non-intervention would be the primary barrier to applying it. Therefore, this article recommends to wielding power to the Security Council of the United Nations with respect to solving such problem at the ASEAN level with the following idea to include ASEAN as the UN member.
 Keywords: Responsibility to protect, Human Rights, ASEAN

Vietnam and Laos have acceded to ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Co-operation, bringing them into the ASEAN political process. This rapprochement was preceded by initiatives characteristic of behaviour between ASEAN partners; bilateral consultations and development of trade and investment ties were begun significantly with those ASEAN members which had been most suspicious of Vietnam. To that extent, the Treaty can be seen as confirming and articulating economic co-operation. and evidence of amity already demonstrated. To borrow a metaphor from Philippine President Fidel Ramos, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have begun a process of building bridges to Vietnam and Laos that will span decades of hostility between Cold War adversaries and expand the security order in Southeast Asia. In the past, observed Sukhumbhand Paribatra, dur ing the late 1960s such a regional security order existed only among the ASEAN states. ASEAN was joined together by establishing certain rules and norms in the conduct of relations with one another.1 Examining relations among present ASEAN partners can yield important lessons about the nature of the Association and the means for integrating new states, namely, building bridges of strong bilateral ties based on the foun dation principles of commitment to amity and pragmatic co-operation, leaving details to be worked out later in low-level, quiet diplomacy.

A vital part of the licensing process for advanced (non-LWR) nuclear reactor developers in the United States is the assessment of the reactor’s source term, i.e., the potential release of radionuclides from the reactor system to the environment during normal operations and accident sequences. In comparison to source term assessments which follow a bounding approach with conservative assumptions, a mechanistic approach to modeling radionuclide transport, which realistically accounts for transport and retention phenomena, is expected to be used for advanced reactor systems. As the designs of advanced reactors increase in maturity and progress towards licensing, there is a need to advance modeling and simulation capabilities in analyzing the mechanistic source term (MST) of a prospective reactor concept. In the present work, a survey is provided of existing computational capabilities for the modeling of advanced reactors MSTs. The following reactors are considered: high temperature gas reactors (HTGR); molten salt reactors (MSR) which include salt-fueled reactors and fluoride salt-cooled high temperature reactors (FHR); and sodium- and lead-cooled fast reactors (SFR, LFR). A review of relevant codes which may be useful in providing information to MST analyses is also completed, including codes that have been used for source term analyses of LWRs, as well as those being developed for other aspects of advanced reactor system modeling such as reactor physics, thermal hydraulics, and chemistry. A discussion of MST modeling capabilities for each reactor type is provided with additional focus on important phenomena and functional requirements. Additionally, a comprehensive survey is provided of tools for consequence modeling such as atmospheric transport and dispersion (ATD).

In recent years, scholarly discussions on the relations between the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been dominated by economic issues, in particular the negotiation of a planned interregional Free Trade Agreement (FTA) which has, for the time being, failed to materialize. In an attempt to escape the centrality of economic issues, this volume illuminates central aspects on the relatively unexplored theme of political — or simply ‘non-economic’ — relations between the two entities. We also distance ourselves from security-centred approaches, prevalent in contemporary US debate, which tend to look at the ASEAN region primarily from a geopolitical perspective. Instead, this volume explores the long-neglected EU-ASEAN political relationship. From a geopolitical point of view, the EU and ASEAN are not of central importance to each other, and this is not expected to change in the immediate future. The relationship between the two regional groupings is characterized by a stark economic imbalance, whereby the economic might of the EU remains largely unmatched by ASEAN. In contrast to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which weakened many ASEAN members considerably, the 2008 global financial crisis has left ASEAN largely unscathed, with some states even experiencing economic growth.KeywordsEuropean UnionFree Trade AgreementEnergy SecurityASEAN MemberPublic DiplomacyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Effective Return and Reintegration of Migrant Workers With Special Focus on ASEAN Member States

The 1990s has proven to be a decade of great change for the members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The beginning of the 1990s brought fears that ASEAN would be unable to adjust to the new post-Cold War era. In 1989 the then Foreign Minister of Singapore, Wong Kan Seng warned, ‘the continued relevance of the organisation, post-Cambodia, cannot be taken for granted’, and that ASEAN would need ‘new rallying points or risk drifting apart to the detriment of regional cooperation and bilateral relationships’.1 The combination of weapons procurements by the ASEAN members; the thawing of territorial disputes frozen during the Cold War; the emergence of China as a regional hegemon; and the prevalence of ethnic tensions throughout the region, all indicated that Southeast Asia was entering a period of uncertainty at best and rising tension at worst. Yet prior to the economic crisis of the late 1990s ASEAN was touted as a success story. The association had not only managed to avoid drifting apart, but with the accession of Vietnam in 1995, Burma and Laos in 1997 and Cambodia in 1999 its membership increased to include all the states of Southeast Asia — the goal of an ASEAN-Ten has been achieved.KeywordsEthnic ConflictASEAN MemberSpiral ModelASEAN Regional ForumSecurity RegimeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Organisational aspects of international relations in tourism on the example of Vietnam’s activity in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) In 1995, Vietnam became a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – ASEAN, through which, among other things, international relations were regulated with China and the USA. Strengthening ASEAN, with more countries joining the Association and its partners, has influenced the economic development of the region. In this context, tourism has proved to be one of the key sectors of the economy of Vietnam and other ASEAN members, contributing to the competitiveness of Southeast Asia vis-à-vis China.

The article sets out to gauge the usefulness of the concepts of legitimacy, sovereignty and nation in theorising a specific, South-East Asian case of nation building. It looks at the interplay between nation building and regionalist ideology in Vietnam, within the context of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). As one of the world's last communist states, the way in which Vietnam has reconciled hard-won sovereignty with regionalisation is all the more intriguing. The article distinguishes the state-led ideology of regionalism from the macro-level process of regionalisation in charting how sovereignty, legitimacy and nation are constructed in the Vietnamese case, with a view to drawing parallels with experiences in other regions. The first section looks at the concepts of legitimacy, sovereignty and nation and how they underpin the state construct, before relating these to Vietnam's ongoing nation-building project in the second section. The final section evaluates the evolution of these concepts within a regional framework, with specific reference to Vietnam's experience as a member of ASEAN. It concludes that official nation building in Vietnam continues to be based on the premises of state sovereignty and legitimacy, an approach eminently compatible with ‘the ASEAN way’. The Vietnamese Communist party seeks to reconcile regionalism with its ongoing nation-building project in a bid to bolster both domestic legitimacy and external sovereignty.

Public safety and acceptance is extremely important for the nuclear power renaissance to get started. The Advanced Burner Reactor and other potential designs utilize liquid sodium as a primary coolant which provides distinct challenges to the nuclear power industry. Fire is a dominant contributor to total nuclear plant risk events for current generation nuclear power plants. Utilizing past experience to develop suitable safety systems and procedures will minimize the chance of sodium leaks and the associated consequences in the next generation. An advanced understanding of metal fire behavior in regards to the new designs will benefit both science and industry. This report presents an extensive literature review that captures past experiences, new advanced reactor designs, and the current state-of-knowledge related to liquid sodium combustion behavior.

This paper explores the realms of global economic integration by comparing the two prominent international organizations: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the South Africa bloc (BRICS) and new entrants to BRICS Plus. The study examines the shared objectives, divergent approaches, and potential complementarity of these organizations. By analyzing their economic diversity, regional and global initiatives, and trade agreements, the research investigates the question of collaboration between BRICS and ASEAN organizations. This research finds a variety of economic disparities among members of both ASEAN and BRICS, a variety of investment patterns, economic policies, population and labor force dynamics, net portfolio investments, and capital flows. The paper provides a nuanced holistic analysis of ASEAN and BRICS. This article offers a unique, holistic analysis, comparing and contrasting ASEAN and BRICS countries and the nature of these two organizations. This paper includes policy recommendations related to fostering collaboration between nations in various aspects of their economies, and areas in which countries may strengthen financial ties. Knowledge of BRICS, BRICS Plus, and ASEAN gained through reading this article may enable them to decide on strategies to avoid trade barriers and may also enable them to identify countries with growth areas in various economic sectors.