Posted on 05/16/2011 1:29:19 PM PDT by Sprite518
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) admitted for the first time on May 15 that most of the fuel in one of its nuclear reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant had melted only about 16 hours after the March 11 earthquake struck a wide swath of northeastern Japan and triggered a devastating tsunami.
(Excerpt) Read more at mdn.mainichi.jp ...
Two nuclear rectors buildings exploded. It became a world wide problem at those specific instances. Ask yourself why the US government decided to stop monitoring radiation release from Japan within the US just a few days before the Japanese officially admitted three nuclear meltdowns ? If you think this government is here to protect you, you are sadly mistaken. Just ask the residents of West Texas who got burned out.
Read the thread. Rummy is worried about her...investments. Is she your investment conciliar?
Apparently you are unaware that the first concrete tomb for Chernobyl has cracked. The Russians are spending billions on constructing a new much large concrete tomb. Should be in place by 2015. So Chernobyl is still a concern now and will be into the future.
She is worried about this worlds investments. Get a clue.
Oh I see now. You two morons shorted Japan stock.....
Actually Rummychick, Fukushima will not be a localized disaster. It will help Russia, China, and India, where they will proceed with their nuclear reactor development as rapidly as their finances permit, because they will make those countries even more powerful as principal suppliers of manufactured goods to those nations like the US currently handicapped by governmental regulatory agencies populated by luddites such as yourself. It is no conincidence that regulators produce nothing, and live as parasites on the productivity of the diminishing class of the productive in the US.
Having observed the games played by the left, whether ‘no-growthers’ like Amory Lovins and Paul Ehrlich, Marxists as John Holdren and John Harte, Communists like Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, they all march in the same parades. They get fed talking points that, in the case of nuclear power, are technical enough to stem conversation. Many, like Holdren, Harte, Ehrlich, and Lovins, are very bright, and lie with a purpose. Who knows if their purpose is financial or doctrinal? Holdren, Ehrlich, and Lovins have become millionaires being wrong, receiving the awards and accolades such the MacArthur Genius Award, of the left. Left wing politics where tribal allegiance trumps truth and science can be an excellent career path if you have the gift of arrogance, which all of the above surely do.
Here are a few facts. The core meltdowns at Fukushima were a virtual certainty as soon as cooling water was lost. TMI was a core meltdown. The two worst disasters in the seventy year history of commercial nuclear power have hurt no one. Fukushima has confirmed exactly what our state-controlled media would like you not to notice; nuclear power is the safest source of electricity, by far, ever created by society. The workers at Fukushima at the plant site were not hurt by the Tsunami, though the plant is on the coast. Away from the plant the death toll is (another antinuclear person on FR said only 28,000, where Japanese friends report 30 to 40 throusnd, so let's use the conservative number) 28,000. Where would you rather have been?
Coal, used to generate replacement electricity, by estimates from the US EPA, albeit from a couple of decades ago when I was involved, causes about two hundred premature deaths from respiratory illness each year. Being shutdown is the greatest health risk due to Fukushima. (A Czech defector in the 1960s, Petr Beckmann, a scientist, recognized the communist influence in his adopted country shortly after arriving, and wrote a provocative little book "The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear." It remains, forty years later, one of the most cogent analysis of real health risks, and political intrigue surrounding nuclear power generation.)
The greatest threat to human health from the Fukushima shutdown will be the strokes and heart attacks among the workers throughout Japan, and in the US, because Japan is not able to ship Hondas and Toyotas, causing more financial hardship among citizen in both countries. Visit a Honda dealer in the US. They can't get new cars to sell and are not getting trade-ins to sell. More will lose their jobs.
Radiation is all around you. There are towns in a number of countries with background radiation levels, ionizing radiation from natural radium, ten time the level deemed safe by our Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and there is no correlation with illness. In some cases it is exactly to the contrary.
Fukushima was designed anticipating a worst case event. You can be sure that designs of today (the Fukushima reactors and site were designed about forty five years ago) will better protect the backup generators. Had they not been buried in the tsunami Fukushima would have been back on line in hours.
The worst reactor meltdown in history, at Chernobyl, occurred to a graphite core reactor designed to produce near weapon's grade plutonium, whose reactor containment was a warehouse-like room accessed by swinging doors. Yet, depending upon the politics of the agency reporting the results, killed two workers from radiation within forty eight hours. Then things get fuzzy. Some will claim there were nearly a thousand cases of leukemia cause by radiation during the ensuing months, but add that ninety five percent of those cancers were cured. Conveniently, the numbers of those who died from leukemia differed little or not at all from the number of leukemia deaths in Chernobyl reported before the meltdown. An additional number, sixteen to sixty, died from other reactor-related causes, but not from radiation. The animals living near, within a kilometer, of the plant are studied carefully, and while there is small increase in radioactive isotopes in bones, the animals are unusually healthy - some say more healthy than those samples tested from the Ukraine at great distances from Chernobyl.
So even Chernobyl caused more injuries from not being on line generating electrical power (Chernobyl also provided heating water to a large number of homes in and near the city, as well as heating for hothouse nurseries.) Its replacement was coal with the known contamination from burning coal. This is not to condemn coal. The world is a better place because of inexpensive energy. As some Indian studies dramatically showed, and anyone looking at facts can easily learn, a petrolium-powered tractor is enormously more efficient than an ox or horse, both of which consume much more energy than they deliver.
About the radionuclides measured around the world, they attest to the extreme sensitivity, indeed the ease with which ionizing radiation can be detected. Since anti-nuclear politics to scare the naive public is so successful, the message is kept focused and omits coal. Coal plants during normal operation emit significant quantities of ionizing radiation. Many, depending upon their sources of coal, would fail Nuclear Regulatory Commission emissions standards for ionizing radiation, but they don't get monitored for ionizing radiation. The decision not to monitor them is sensible, since emission levels are low. Whether they are significant is a political debate about whether near zero levels of radiation are dangerous - the straight line hypothesis. Data show that low levels of radiation actually promote health, but the data are so close to the noise that the volume of voices may be the determining factor for what politically-driven agencies decide.
The real bottom line is that China, in its wisdom, set a goal of 132 new electricity generating nuclear reactors by 2028. They purchased the first four of those reactors from Westinghouse in 2006. Westinghouse Nuclear was sold to Toshiba in 2007. Part of the contract, because of the uncertainty in the financial viability of nuclear power manufacturers, granted rights to the design by China. Those four reactors are nearing completion and, last I heard, projected to be on line this year. The last plants brought on line in the US took about fifteen years from site license to full power. Those delays were largely the result of civil suites funded by generous taxpayer salaries to the prosecution and defense for environmental law firms and EPA lawyers (some legal families had husband and wife working on different sides of the same case). China has not changed its plans, and would be foolish to do so.
France, ninety+ percent nuclear electric, has excess electric capacity and sells electricity to other European states. France has the cleanest air in Europe. No one has been hurt by nuclear energy production in France. A better way to put it is, nuclear power production is infinitely safer than attending antinuclear rallies - anywhere in the world. Fukushima is dramatic proof of the safety of nuclear power generation, all of its workers and neighbors, those having not been killed in the tsunami, were unaffected by the complete loss of coolant suffered at the reactor. No one was hurt in one of the worst earthquakes and tsunamis in history. It is not unlike watching those buildings sway in downtown Tokyo; I would not want to have been seventy stories up with the building swinging thirty feed back-and-forth, but those buildings are still there. It is because, as Julian Simon famously explained in the book John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich challenged and were proved completely wrong, humans are “The Ultimate Resource.” As for Japan's economy, the smartest move they can make is to build or buy nuclear reactors to replace those recently lost. Obviously, this time they need to defend the diesel generators. You say they should build wind mills? Wind mills and solar are only effective if you have a gullible public to provide subsidies. Solar energy has sufficient flux density to assist water heating in sunny climates. neither Japan, nor any competitive manufacturing country, can suffer the handicap of ten or twenty times the cost per unit of energy, or the cost of backing store for when the sun doesn't shine or the wind blow. They are a con job, like Barack Obama. Curiously, they are surprisingly dangerous. There are good data for the numbers of people who fall from roofs doing repairs. Having plumbing on the roofs has already cost the deaths of a few thousands of people working on their solar panels at their homes. Dead is dead.
If you've ever driven through the graveyard of giant windmills at Altamont Pass in California, you may have thought of the tax shelter these still monuments provided. Were you to have gotten closer you could begin to count the tens of thousands of dead birds on the ground. The reality is that more birds die flying into the windows of skyscrapers. The important observation is that anyone depending upon all those windmills to generate electricity for their factory and even their office, must be paying as well for a reliable energy source. Wind and solar are a monument to Utopian idealism, and both have killed many more, even while providing a tiny bit of commercial energy. (they add hydro power to claims of renewable energy sources, and, while dams have broken, and towns buried in water, hydro is still relatively clean - just limited.)
Meanwhile, idiots here that think it is a localized disaster don’t understand the economics.
try a little reading comprehension.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20110516a1.html
Of course, the leading and largest US Treasury holder sold off all his bonds and shorted the treasury market. He was doing this BEFORE the Japanese disaster.
Do you think he just looks at the US or do you think he thinks GLOBAL.
Anyone who values their holdings should be paying attention.
I have no use for idiots who think this is a localized problem.
“Fukushima was designed anticipating a worst case event. You can be sure that designs of today (the Fukushima reactors and site were designed about forty five years ago) will better protect the backup generators. Had they not been buried in the tsunami Fukushima would have been back on line in hours.”
Have you not been paying attention???????
It appears the Tsunami did NOT create this situation.
Keep researching.
I am so sick of people coming onto these threads crowing about the Nuclear Industry and how safe it is.
maybe it is..maybe it isn’t..
But the Tepco disaster has shown a light on CORRUPTION ...and that is NOT safe.
Given the history of this company..it is not outside the realm of possiblity that their history of falsifying records and insepctions may have contributed to this disaster.
Everyone crowed that this wouldn’t have happened but for the Tsunami.
You better do some more research on that belief.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110516a3.html
Again, don’t post to me. I have no desire to read the posts from people crowing about the indusry. Tell it to someone else.
I want information on current disaster...including how much radiation is making it’s way to the US.
And yes, that is happening.
The issue is that supposedly smarter conservatives who buy into all the worst hype put out by the anti-nuclear crowd. They think that a nuclear accident at one of the oldest-type reactors sustaining a near-record earthquake and a record tsunami, along with mismanagement and lack of good crisis response, should mean that all nuclear power is dead.
One wonders, given that so far nobody has been killed by radiation, whether the real argument is that nobody should live near a fault line or near a shore, given that while the nuclear reactor hasn’t killed anybody yet, the building of houses in the region cost over 20,000 people their lives, and hundreds of thousands of people their livelyhoods.
Well, there was a near-record earthquake, and a devastating Tsunami. The nuclear reactor accident is the localized disaster, and it isn’t what caused the major disruption in the economy. It’s having all the factories shut down, and hundreds of thousands of poeple displaced, their homes destroyed.
It’s tens of thousands of people dead, and tens of thousands more injured. The surviving victims and their families I’m sure could explain how the earthquake and tsunami were a little more of a tragedy than a destroyed nuclear reactor.
I've explained how you can avoid illness by ignoring others, or not participating in the threads.
It appears the Tsunami did NOT create this situation. Keep researching.
I explained last night how the very article you linked to make this claim did not support your contention. There are multiple difficulties at the plant. It appears that ONE of those difficulties MAY have been caused by the earthquake itself, something they have learned now that they have gotten more control over the situation and been able to get into the building and set up better instrumentation.
But the initial cause of low water levels in one reactor is just one small part of the "situation", while a major part of the situation was caused by the loss of power.
Even the situation in reactor 1 was exascerbated by the loss of power. If they had kept power, they may not have had a problem with 2 and 3, and when they had trouble at 1, they would have known it wasn't because of a loss of cooling, and may well have figured out there was a leak a lot quicker. That could have led to a better, quicker solution.
Because of the tsunami, they never had a chance to figure out whether there was a broken pipe, or to try to fix that problem.
That's not "investments", and that's not "this world's investments".
What happened in Japan has effected a lot of our finances. Things are more expensive, some products are harder to find. Businesses have had to route flights around the damaged areas.
Now, none of the real upheaval in finances, markets, and investments has anything to do with the nuclear plant. But taking Japan as a whole, the earthquake and tsunami caused tremendous devastation, far beyond (and this is a prediction I am making) any final "fallout" from the nuclear plant. The most dangerous thing in Japan wasn't building a nuclear plant, it was putting a house on the ground near a fault line and the ocean. That's what killed thousands of people, and destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands more. Not a nuclear plant.
It's like watching a hurricane destroy a state, and then complaining about how a local shop didn't secure their sign well enough and it fell over and smashed your car. Sure, for the guy who owns the car it's a "tragedy", but in the grand scheme of things, it's only a little part of the big picture.
On the other hand, I take some small amount of comfort that we are now reduced to arguing over whether the 1st plant's nuclear fuel melted 16 hours after the accident, or 36 hours after the accident. There was a time when we were worried about much worse things happening at the plant, now we are doing introspective analyses. THings are getting somewhat stable when you start arguing over blame and cause.
Well, if it’s something that shows bad things, we take what they say as gospel, if it doesn’t indicate the sky is falling, then they must be lying. :-)
That paper indicates what I read last night, that the core being melted seems to have kept more of it under water, which explains why it seemed to be cool when they thought it was mostly exposed. But it’s hard to argue that a melted slab at the bottom of the reactor isn’t a horrible disaster “waiting to happen”, even when measurements seem to indicate stability.
But until they can figure out where the water is leaking, and get a setup that filters and recirculates that water, instead of it pouring out into the enviroment, they will have trouble on their hands.
we don't really have to imagine it. The venting was done because of high pressure in the containment vessel. That high pressure was a clear sign that the fuel was exposed and melting. So we know there was radioactive elements in the steam.
The venting led to an explosion, because there was also hydrogen gas in the vapor. So, we know that the explosion released radiocative particles and isotopes from within the containment vessel, and a good supply of hydrogen gas. A lot of the hydrogen gas was burned off in the explosion.
The venting and explosion were always known to be a result of a meltdown. The only difference is that we now know the meltdown started earlier in the process. It doesn't change what happened in the explostion.
Do you know anything about economics?????
The Tsunami isn’t the problem.
At least 3 core meltdowns with leaks are going to cause a HUGE GLOBAL problem
I am not going to sit here and give you an economics lession
Do you know ANYTHING about yen carry trades and credit default swaps?
How about what happens when the manufacturers have to shut down because of the power issues.
Ever consider that Japan’s exports are going to plunge while they are going to have to do a lot of buying.
What about if they have to sell our bonds??
What if they can’t buy any more of our bonds??
This is about more than ..oh no one died yet..or oh..the radiation level isn’t high 250 kilometers away.
DID YOU PAY ATTENTION TO 2008 Market meltdown and the RIPPLE EFFECT ACROSS THE GLOBE????
Japan is the 3rd largest economy (at least last time I looked..it had been Number 2). Have you noticed why Greece is in trouble??? Credit default swaps are part of the problem for them. Remember AIG in 2008??? Credit default swaps.
Right now the world economy is on the brink. In 2008 I think all it took was a Senator from New York leaking some information for the house of cards to collapse.
This time, I am watching to see what it will be. It could come from anywhere at anytime.
The world is in chaos.
But I am not going to go through the economics of this.
I am NOT interested in people posting to me like you are.
Come back in 30 days. Until then don’t post to me.
I AM NOT INTERESTED.
Here is an example of the magnitude of TEPCO’s debacle.
Vanguard owned slightly under 18% of Tepco’s stock in 2010
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/tepco-shares-suspended-after-nationalization-report-billions-capital-flux
Dick Cheney, at one time, had millions and millions and millions in Vanguard.
Nothing nefarious about that.
It just shows one example of why information may not have come out in a timely fashion and why this is not a local event. TEPCO had some BIG shareholders.
I don’t know where the share price is right now but it had at one point dropped 80%. THAT IS A HUGE HIT.
Just blame it on an employee, that’s the ticket
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/17_04.html
Back-up cooling systems at Fukushima
failed
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has admitted that the reactors’ back-up cooling systems failed to function after the March 11th earthquake and tsunami.
Tokyo Electric Power Company on Monday revealed the plant’s operation records for the period following the disaster on March 11th.
An emergency condenser system at the Number 1 reactor functioned for less than 10 minutes after the earthquake. The failure lasted for 3 hours.
The utility suspects that workers manually shut down the system as pressure inside the reactor became so low that they were afraid of damage.
Another type of back-up cooling system at the No. 1 and 2 reactors lost power when the tsunami engulfed batteries.
TEPCO is still analyzing the data to assess the failure’s impact on fuel rods.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 07:31 +0900 (JST)
U.S., Japan Debt Risk Underestimated by Credit Swap Markets, Rabobank Says
http://hansafx.net/blog/?p=855
“The most noteworthy observation is that debt-ridden Japan is the most vulnerable to a sovereign-debt crisis after Greece,” said Kamalodin, who is based in the Dutch city of Utrecht. “Interestingly, the large structural deficit of the U.S. puts it ahead of Spain and Italy and our index, which is not the case according to the CDS spreads.”
Warren Buffett,”They are weapons of mass destruction” when asked his opinion about credit default swaps.
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