Beaked whales ‘scared’ by navy sonar BBC
Sperm Whales May Have Names Wired
Is Happiness Overrated? Wall Street Journal
Reactor Core Cooling Union of Concerned Scientists
Tokyo Electric to Build US Nuclear Plants: The no-BS info on Japan’s disastrous nuclear operators Greg Palast. Read about how routine false results on emergency systems are.
Japan’s nuclear crisis grows more dire after third explosion, reactor fire Washington Post
Radiation Levels Drop in Ibaraki, Near Damaged Nuclear Plant Bloomberg
For Elderly, Echoes of War’s Horrors New York Times
NHKWORLD Japan Quake News (in English, hat tip reader c)
Crisis casts doubt on nuke industry P.R. campaign Salon
The Shocking Way US Cops Are Trained to Hate Muslims Alternet (hat tip reader Lance N)
Crisis Fatigue? Make a list Calculated Risk
Gulf states send forces to Bahrain following protests BBC
A Down Under View On Public Broadcasting CJR
Jury: Blogger Johnny Northside must pay $60,000 to fired community leader Star Tribune
The clarifying Manning/Crowley controversy Glenn Greenwald
Tax Haven USA attracts over $3 trillion in foreign dirty money Nicholas Shaxson
MERS Prevails in New York Supreme Court Housing Wire (hat tip Richard Smith). Confusingly, NY Supreme Court is its run of the mill trial court. And to keep your even more confused, its “supreme” court is the Court of Appeals. So this ruling is by one judge. He ruled MERS could transfer the note. A BK judge (Federal) in NYS has ruled otherwise. Pretty much no one buys that MERS can transfer the note (MERS has maintained consistently that it is not the owner or holder of the note and is only the nominee with respect to the mortgage, which is the lien). And MERS has started settling cases where it looks like a decision will go against it. So this decision probably reflects not so hot borrower defense.
Demise of foreclosure firm could cost courts Bradenton Herald (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
Antidote du jour (hat tip reader Buzz Potamkin, story here):
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Pretty amazing with the foreclosure mill filings funding the court system. No wonder we saw rocket dockets instead of meaningful justice…
Demise of foreclosure firm could cost courts Bradenton Herald
uh – because the navy sonar IS REALLY LOUD ?
“Beaked whales ‘scared’ by navy sonar” – my, what fun from the BBC. It didn’t, of course, mention that the same report said that the noise of wind turbines also upsets the poor wee whales. And, I must say, I wonder why only “navy” sonar upsets them.
I had that thought re the headline too, but since some people refer to the whales’ own echolocation as sonar, they needed a tidy way to say it was human sonar that set them off.
Re blogger:
That jury must’ve been some piece of work. And what kind of judge would allow obvious SLAPP suits to go forward in the first place?
So let’s recap: It’s perfectly fine for the system to impose a top-down systemic blacklist any dissenter through its criminal codes, credit scores, etc. [This includes “grass roots” conservative bloggers etc. This verdict would of course be far less likely if it were the other way around, e.g. ACORN suing James Okeefe. I added this parenthesis in case anyone was thinking, “but this kind of verdict can protect activists as well”. The record shows that such things go only one way. Rememeber the idiots who applauded the Congressional defunding of ACORN because they thought the same mechanism would then be used against contractors who had been convicted of felonies? Always remember – in this kleptocracy, such things always go only one way.]
But for citizens to seek ongoing justice against proven criminals can in principle be called “tortious”.
Once again we see how there is no law in this cesspool. There is only a one-way vector of might-makes-right pseudo-law imposed by criminals on the people.
Nothing will change until the people become fully aware of this, fully reciprocate it, and turn it rightside up.
This verdict is obviously wrong from a purely first amendment perspective. But it’s truly deranged when you look at it from the class perspective. I bet the idiots on that jury aren’t rich. I bet many or all of them are beleaguered. And yet here they are voting for their own liquidation.
Anyone who goes onto a jury with any mindset other than a class war mindset is a sap.
@attempter…I will not regale you with how many times I’ve heard_wealthy individuals_say to me, but, I can afford to break the Law or bug out if I have too. The higher up the food chain the easier it gets.
=========
Greg Palast link…What he said 10x cubed…robo-signing has been around longer than the mortgage debacle, and with regards to much nastier consensuses.
Skippy…the sad fact is some financial characters are licking their already blotted chops over what has occurred in Japan.
PS…: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeI5ke0BENw
Juries in Minnesota are an unforgiving bunch. The music racket sued a Minnesota mother of four for sharing 24 songs (Capitol v. Thomas). The jury rewarded this legalized extortion with $220,000 in damages. When the case was retried the second jury disagreed with the first bunch — they thought she should pay $1.9 million. And when the case was tried yet again a third jury found it in their stone cold hearts to reduce the damages to a mere $1.5 million. Surely indifference on this scale is a kind of hate…
It makes you wonder at the people who live here. They clearly have no conception of the corruption of the law that will someday, inevitably, reach out to grab them too. When that happens I doubt Michelle Bachmann will save them.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. – Nietzsche
Rez: That is a wonderfull and very appropriate quote.
I don’t know what causes the people of some regions to be far more dogmatic and narrow than others. I’m certain not all Minnesotans think like these juries. Possibly the attitudes have cultural and economic roots. The urge to punish any divergence from authority must stem from a feeling of personal impotence and a lack of individual identity.
The following book investigates the problem quite thoroughly.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6433397/The-Authoritarians
I’ve read Altemeyer’s book and found it interesting, especially how well it applies to liberal behavior over the last two years, just as much as to the pro-Republican types he discusses in the book.
In that connection, I can’t resist dredging this up:
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/question-for-readers/
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/who-said-it-bob-altemeyer/
Guess who’s an authoritarian follower himself?
I remember that. Now it’s several groups of idiots who picture themselves somehow having lucrative IP franchises someday. “Never mind that I’m assaulting an individual on behalf of a corporation which itself steals all this property from those who really created it, and who knows how much they stole? This is still the system by which creators get paid some of what’s coming to them, and if I’m not severe on its behalf, how am I gonna get paid when I record my own hit record?”
Minnesota and Wisconsin sound like weird, schizophrenic places. It goes to show how absurd it is to claim we have coherent societies even at the state level, let alone the national.
re palast’s article; what strikes me is that the problem is not nuclear power itself, but the system they’re being built under…for private contractors, economic incentives are to take money saving short cuts that come back and bite the rest of us…
Sure as long as everyone in the profit chain and direct responsibility, has a stick of_sweaty dynamite_*super glued* to the back of their head and lives for over a year.
Skippy…I’ll give my trust too.
“what strikes me is that the problem is not nuclear power itself, but the system they’re being built under”
Hear, hear!
Palast scares me because he has a nasty habit of being right. His long experience as a private investigator make him one of the few investigative reporters left.
The biggest concern is not that safe nukes can’t be built, but that they won’t be built. You mention “the system they’re being built under”, but what system would work? IIRC France’s nuke industry is under government auspices, and seems to have a good track record, but would that translate? I’m mildly pro-nuke, but if we can’t trust the US government to lock up uber-scale bankers (i.e. crooks), can we trust them to run or even regulate nukes?
I wonder hy the Canadian built ‘Candu’ reactors have never been able to gain any recognition or market share? Is it because they are not built by GE? It certainly isn’t on grounds of saftey. And since they use such low enriched uranium, there would never be any concern about “terrorists” gaining access to the nuclear fuel.
Sounds like they were the best design going during the “Gen II” era. They did seem get underserved blame for enabling India’s atomic weapon program in the 70s.
But they have been evolving as well, at least on the drawing board. Here’s the latest and greatest.
______________
The ACR-1000 represents the continuing evolution of CANDU design to match changing market conditions. ACR-1000 is the next-generation (officially, “Generation III+”) CANDU technology from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), which maintains proven elements of existing CANDU design, while making some significant modifications:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
Plutonium is among the many dangerous fission products present in spent fuel from Candu style reactors
Thanks Ced. I have zero knowlege of nuclear technology, so I am more in the dark than many people.
Moslof: Do you have a comparison of spent fuel from Candu’s compared to other reactors?
The wiki article covers that in the “proliferation” section. The short answer is “about the same”.
I just noticed I typoed my sentence above. I meant “undeserved”, not underserved. My wireless keyboard and spell checker conspire against me at times.
The Candu reactor does make some plutonium, and maybe minute traces of tritium, which is used as a trigger in an H bomb, but in the case of India they used alternative better ways to make this stuff.
The Candu generator can also use plutonium as fuel, so it could be used to eat dangerous stuff. At any rate, the spent fuel needs to be enriched a whole lot(difficult) to get to bomb grade stuff.
Quite simply, US nuclear engineers have no experience designing or running heavy water reactors. Our first reactors were light water moderated reactors, largely because those would work on submarines, and that’s all we have ever built for industrial use. At the same time Canada took up heavy water moderated reactors, and England took up graphite moderated reactors. You can imagine where these reactors can be found today. Japan and France largely either bought or built off of our technology. Russia has built both light water and graphite moderated reactors. Hard to say where their technology came from.
There’s no technical reason why we couldn’t go to Thorium reactors, and more than a few good reasons to do so, we just don’t have the experience to build off of the way we do with light water reactors.
Most of our weapons material was produced in large heavy water reactors from the 1950’s through the 1980’s. The SRP was the prime location.
Fair enough, but a plutonium production reactor is not optimized for power production (even thought they are used for power production, especially in Russia). The engineers in the US who have designed and built power reactors have experience with light water moderated reactors.
Edward Teller said that the evolution from production to power reactors was simply a “plumbing problem”.
I submit that if the RBMK reactor was a power reactor instead of a plutonium production reactor utilized for power production the Chernobyl accident would not have been so catastrophic.
Hmmm.
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the risk of radioactive material leaking from the crippled plant was very high, and a government spokesman warned people within 18 miles of the facility to stay indoors.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/15/markets/premarkets/index.htm
“Reactor Core Cooling Union of Concerned Scientists”
Aha. Finally a good concise explanation, including pictures, of how reactor cores fail.
Additionally, I’ll add some more clarification of terms…reactor containment vessel [also called reactor pressure vessel]-a very large steel vessel holding the reactor core that ultimately channels pressurized superheated steam to the steam turbine-generator which generates electricity.
Containment area – the concrete dome enclosing the reactor containment vessel.
Condensate pumps – electric driven pumps which circulate hot reactor cooling water thru heat exchangers, cooling the water, then returning it to the reactor pressure vessel.
I’m a Purdue Boilermaker, so they told us about this stuff back in college.
Can you please simplify this to a Hoosier level?
Yep. I’m reasonably sure I can sketch out the failure mode that applies to all the reactor units. I’ll ignore the recent news that we got about certain reactor designs (maybe all of these…I can’t tell from the news reports) where they are starting to worry about “spent fuel rods” which are stored in a cooling pool located inside the reactor pressure vessel. This sounds like part two of what is turning into a nasty saga.
First some key info. The link above states the reactor pressure vessel will boil off it’s internal cooling water 11 hours after cooling pump failure to a level which exposes some control rods to air and they begin to overheat. This causes two problems. First, the zirconium casing around the control rods begins reacting with air and water to form hydrogen. Second, the zirconium melts off allowing large amounts of radioactive material to contaminate air, water and hydrogen inside the pressure vessel. The hydrogen explodes, the pressure vessel vents off, and voila, we have a dirty bomb. How this gets outside the cement dome containment area, I’m not sure. We need more drawings to understand that part.
So, how did we get here.
The reactor cooling pumps are electric motor driven pumps. These plants had emergency backup generators. When a plant is running, it generates it’s own power to drive all equipment in the plant. When it is shutdown on purpose, the backup generators provide power to run the reactor cooling pumps. I’ve read some units had electric motor driven standby generators and some had diesel powered standby generators. In the case of electric driven generators, they are connected to the grid for external power. This can fail in a number of ways. A quake may cause high tension lines to sway and contact, shorting the grid and blowing a big transformer in a distribution station. A tsunami can flood a transformer and blow it. It can flood the standby generator itself and short it out. In the case of the diesel unit, it can flood the diesel. In any case, the beginning of the end was when the reactor cooling pumps stopped working.
So 11 hours later, they exposed the fuel rods and we got the evidence of that with the hydrogen explosions. That means emergency efforts to flood with seawater, bring in fire trucks, bring in mobile generators, took longer than 11 hours and were too late.
This is my best guess based on the news we have, but I believe it’s pretty accurate.
The longer the period of time from the last radiation release from the plant, the better.
At the moment, no news is good news.
Status update 3-15-11 19:00:
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/tepco_status_4.jpg
Did you see Figure 2, the plot of rate of water boiloff (i.e. rate of heat production by the secondary decay of the reaction byproducts) as a function of time? It decays logarithmically! If true ( I have no reason to doubt the U of CS but it’s always possible), then they are going to need to be pumping sea water to cool the reactor for a long time. I did not know this.
Crisis fatigue?
Well, Nature never sleeps.
Greed never sleeps.
Avarice never sleeps.
7,000 million people are well able to keep the three rings of the media circus completely active.
Nature is all too happy to oblige those Homo Not-So-Sapiens Not-So-Sapiens.
…and we are pleased to return the favor.
No need for that.
Just turn the other cheek.
Cedric Regula: Can you e-mail me at Angry Bear. Thanks. Dan
On The clarifying Manning/Crowley controversy: constitutional scholar and Nobel laureate Obama has now outdone GWB and the dick Cheney. Greenwald, quoting Obama on the torture of Bradely Manning: “I’ve actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures . . . are appropriate. They assured me they are.”
So his torturers have assured him that their (and his) crimes are appropriate. How reassuring. It’s exactly like GWB appointing Weasel-General Gonzales to change the definition of torture, thus bootstrapping a papier-mâché defense for his own crimes.
Obama is Bush-Cheney 2.0. Following Guantnamo, he has now passed the buck too often to possibly claim ignorance as a defense. Meet the new dick, worse than the old dick.
Vernor Vinge, in “A Fire Upon the Deep”, describes Obama well in his character ‘Flenser’:
“Flenser could chat for casual pleasure, all the while mixing truth with lies. One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability… ‘The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.’”
Obama’s brilliant use of empathy as a weapon has enabled him to deceive complacent liberals and (indefinitely) emasculate black progressives. Eventually this sort of betrayal can lead to the most incendiary kind of blowback, but so far he seems to be wearing the gipper’s teflon.
It’s amazing that in two short years we have:
the Obama tax cuts for the rich
the Obama patriot act
the Obama war on whistleblowers
the Obama welfare for corporate barons
the Obama Guantanamo policy
the Obama predator drone terror
the Obama torture of US citizens
What is there that is genuinely attached ONLY to Bush right now?
Will history record that Obama’s primary achievement is solidifying the progress GWB made against civil liberties and institutionalization of corruption?
I like what so-and-so asked Greenwald in a q&a the other day:
“Should there be a second political party?”
http://podcast.lannan.org/2011/03/13/glenn-greenwald-with-david-barsamian-conversation-8-march-2011-video/
Much like Germany in 1942-43, one of the main impediments to solving the problem, is that people realize: that because we did nothing to prevent the abuses, we are now all “accesories” to the crimes…:(
Smell the roses! Just because we helped make the bed, doesn’t mean we have to sleep in it!
Re: “MERS Prevails in New York Supreme Court”
NY foreclosure attorney here. Allow me to debunk- I can’t find this decision in the NY Official Reports online, but I looked up the case on the court administration website. The article’s statement that the court is “validating the company’s [MERS’] ability to foreclose on a mortgage and assign it” is flat out wrong.
First of all, MERS is not the foreclosing plaintiff here, BONY Mellon is.
Secondly, the article states that the Supreme Court (a trial court, not an appellate court, btw) ruled that BONY Mellon had standing to foreclose based on its PHYSICAL POSSESSION OF THE NOTE. That would be a correct decison, because the mortgage follows the note in New York. Since MERS never has physical possession of any mortgage notes, this ruling HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MERS.
It appears that the judge gave no effect to a retroactive assignment executed by a MERS “VP”. I don’t see how that is validating MERS ability to assign mortgages. I’ll post more once I get a hold of the decision.
Sheesh, Yves, I wish you would insert some question marks to alert us to the dubious provenance whenever you link to one of these bankster-spinned articles on Housing Wire.
Can you not read? I discussed that I thought the decision was pretty meaningless (it CLEARLY stated that MERS has nada to do with the note) and that the NY Supreme court was a trial court.
She didn’t link it. I did. Knowing Housing Wire is VERY pro-bankster. Notice though, I also pointed out that no one else was talking about it, and I couldn’t find the ruling either.
It’s not the first time HW over-hyped an outcome. They have to. They know all is lost. But unless they do it, they have no business.
Meanwhile…
Goldman Puts Mortgage-Servicing Unit Up for Sale
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/goldman-puts-mortgage-servicing-unit-up-for-sale/?src=busln
How much do they want for it?
Anyone else want to chip in to see how the sausage is made?
Sorry I did not make it to the last sentence of your commentary. My bad.
I have found the decision, which as you suspect reflects a not so hot borrower defense. The judge does include a paragraph about MERS’ “broad powers” under the mortgage, but that is dicta given that the decision is based on the plaintiff’s assertion that it had possession of the note (and thus the mortgage, see my 1st comment) at commencement of the action.
Many thanks for the Greg Palast article.
After the initial reports of diesel failure in the MSM, there’s been nary a peep, which is odd considering that this failure was the key to the nuclear disaster.
Palast’s inside information ties everything together.
I just got around to reading this article. I’ll point out that I used to work for a company that made half the generators used by Cat Tractor in their line of emergency and standby generators. They also made mobile generators that anyone in sudden need can lease and transport by trailer truck to a facility.
They work great. They might need occasional maintenance, and it’s good to start them up once and a while. Especially if you are near a salt sea corrosive environment which can corrode and lock up things like bearings, crankshaft mains, piston rings…etc…and the facility has a design life of 40-50 years.
So don’t fire the maintenance guy at a nuclear power plant in order to save a little money…
Life is a airfare, plane-ticket…eh…risk is assigned as a loss of profit and what it can bare. The generators in Palast’s post failed at one of the two most critical parts, not once, but thrice, main bearings / crank shaft. It all comes down to friction, so electric, steam or gravity feed, to me, is not the issue but, the capacity of large mass objects subjected to forces ie earthquakes, inundation, explosions and their ability to survive, plus fail rates.
Skippy…large scale testing…lolololol…more like under payed CAD kids w/little physics back ground, popping in values…garbage in…garbage out.
Yes, well, if you buy a new car then park it by the ocean for 10-20 years, then return and expect it to start, you should flunk any employment test except one that tests your aptitude to be in finance.
Would love to see the maintenance budget, work logs, accompanying photographic / video, before after archives…eh.
That aside the idea of building where they did and speculating on catastrophic failure, based on profit (returns short term social or monetary), is well, absurd.
Skippy…a kingdom for coolant…nay a world economy. Do you see now, all the worlds wealth at risk of massive contraction, debasement, de-value, further dilution, pushed like the Island it self, further in the direction….cliff. I can hear the engineer Scotty in the back of my head..can you.
“Skippy…large scale testing…lolololol…more like under payed CAD kids w/little physics back ground, popping in values…garbage in…garbage out.”
When those in charge are sociopaths then you can assume that they will hire folks that “create their reality” for them…..poor us.
http://www.themonthly.com.au/world-economic-outlook-richard-koo-3085
This is a really good vide
“Black Hole” Award presented to Utah’s Governor for passing huge anti-FOI bill:
http://www.standard.net/topics/featured-utah-government-awards/2011/03/14/spj-honoring-governor-herbert-black-hole-award-clo
Could it possibly be that Fukushima 1 was practising “full-core offload” with its BWRs?
From Time Magazine, “Nuclear Warriors”, 4 March 1996 [15 years ago!]
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,984206-1,00.html:
[Whistleblower George] Galatis wanted to know about a routine refueling operation at the Millstone Unit 1 nuclear plant in Waterford, Connecticut. Every 18 months the reactor is shut down so the fuel rods that make up its core can be replaced; the old rods, radioactive and 250 degrees F hot, are moved into a 40-ft.-deep body of water called the spent-fuel pool, where they are placed in racks alongside thousands of other, older rods. Because the Federal Government has never created a storage site for high-level radioactive waste, fuel pools in nuclear plants across the country have become de facto nuclear dumps – with many filled nearly to capacity. The pools weren’t designed for this purpose, and risk is involved: the rods must be submerged at all times. A cooling system must dissipate the intense heat they give off. If the system failed, the pool could boil, turning the plant into a lethal sauna filled with clouds of radioactive steam. And if earthquake, human error or mechanical failure drained the pool, the result could be catastrophic: a meltdown of multiple cores taking place outside the reactor containment, releasing massive amounts of radiation and rendering hundreds of square miles uninhabitable.
To minimize the risk, federal guidelines require that some older plants like Millstone, without state-of-the-art cooling systems, move only one-third of the rods into the pool under normal conditions. But Galatis realized that Millstone was routinely performing “full-core off-loads,” dumping all the hot fuel into the pool. His question for Betancourt was, “How long has this been going on?”
Betancourt thought for a minute. “We’ve been moving full cores since before I got here,” he said, “since the early ’70s.”
“But it’s an emergency procedure.”
“I know,” Betancourt said. “And we do it all the time.”
…
If Millstone lost its primary cooling system while the full core was in the pool, Galatis told Betancourt, the backup systems might not handle the heat. “The pool could boil,” he said. “
Compare this with Suzanne Goldberg, The Guardian’s US environment correspondent, who at 9.15pm UTC is quoting UCS’s David Lochbaum in the paper’s liveblog (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/mar/15/japan-earthquake-and-tsunami-japan):
“If the spent fuel pool is on fire, the chances of radioactivity getting to the public are very much higher,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
He said the unit 4’s reactor core was emptied out into the spent fuel pool last year following a shutdown. “There is much more material there because there is at least one reactor core plus what there was to start with, and it is in a building that has a big hole in the side of it,” he said.
The mind seethes at the stupidity of all this, while the heart is broken.
This is man-made disaster, nothing to do with the tsunami.
The “disaster” as you call it has not happened.
Has even one death occurred as a result of this?
The nuclear bru-ha-ha is like a sideshow to the real horrors of the earthquake and tsunami, which killed many thousands, and blighted the lives of many thousands more.
With luck, the nuclear accident will be over, with no loss of life.
The inundation is a toxic sludge which also carries viral and bacterial agents, this has a rather long shelf life in its self but, it pales to the spectrum of radioactive particles and their shelf life…plus the long term illnesses chromosome damage is orders above the other consequences of this disaster.
Skippy…BTW humans can handle more of both, toxins and radiation, not the same for the food chain. So whilst we focus on the human tragedy (mostly profit biased now), there is potentially a greater one, are the markets pricing in that?
aet; I’ve been doubting much here since it occured. I don’t want to diminish the suffering and cost to the Jappanese people, but they are handling it well.
The MSM and much of the rest of the world cannot say the same.
What a ‘Godsent??’, incident to distract from all those inconvenient things we can do something about: crooked government, crooked business, popular uprisings, loss of freedom.
aet blurted, “The “disaster” as you call it has not happened.
Has even one death occurred as a result of this?
The nuclear bru-ha-ha is like a sideshow to the real horrors of the earthquake and tsunami, which killed many thousands, and blighted the lives of many thousands more.
With luck, the nuclear accident will be over, with no loss of life.”
—
Yee gads! I think 4 people died in the first explosion. Four of six reactors in the complex are in grave danger and already releasing radioactive contamination. The other two need water maintained or they will join the crisis.
The earthquake and tsunami did amazing, horrible damage, but this reactor issue may last much longer than the other damage and spread it to a wider, not untouched, area. I won’t go further to refute your cluelessness. Unfortunately, time should take care of that by inevitable progression.
Easy Rex; We are bumping from disaster to disaster here. That any people died is sad, but these people like the 11 on the GOM oil rig died from a chemical not nuclear explosion. I know nothing except what I can sort from third hand reports, but I don’t like to see people panicked when they don’t know the facts.
There are also huge discrepancies in the numbers of people killed by the tsunami. Everyone is hoping that both situations don’t get worse. Beyond hoping, and supporting the Salvation Army, there is nothing we can do.
That it has. Alas!
…but we shall see what the toll shall be: the workers are doing their jobs, and for them, it is occupational hazard.
The potential is grave, ’tis said; yet we must hope.
But I had thought that the reactors were the problem; these pools are another kettle of fish.
But unless I am mistaken, they ought to be incpapable of fission, if the fuel, pent in the pool, was truly spent.
aet will have them putting spent nuclear fuel in toothpaste and the water supply to prove how safe it is.
Yeah. No way to store waste safely. Plants that can’t handle earthquakes above 7.0 (in San Onofre). Lying plant contractors. Captured regulators. Potential for terror plots.
No sale.
Some remain sanguine: the isotopes are heavy,and short-lived, and short-lived, say some experts: sop as always it may not be so bad as fancy paints it.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/experts-divided-on-radiation-risk-20110316-1bwtl.html
News from tomorrow today. Good ol’ Oz.
Ahem, there is no disagreement among anyone with at least one non-irradiated brain cell and a functioning gieger counter that “spent fuel rods” which are stored in a cooling pool until we can find a safe place to put them for some reason, are indeed dangerously radioactive.
what an incredible reply from an “apparently intelligent” frequent commenter to this site.
I notice that you have not actually responded to the substance of any of the numerous responses below…
Really, what is the point of your question: “Has even one death occurred as a result of this?”
What ignorance on display.
The deaths to date resulting from this damaged plant are from explosion; not radiation.
Potentials ought not to be treated as actualities. Ppeople are anticipating, and letting their fears carru them away.
I remain optimistic that they can overcaome the damage caused by the tsunami and mega-quake to cool this down without further endangering the health of the public, and hope their workers too.
Those who seek to lynch TEPCO officials for failing to anticipate this all-natural disaster (this is NOT an “accident”) ought to give their head a shake.
Asbestos had a nice run, people made lots of money and folks had jobs, really a good product too.
Stress is a silent killer.
Suffering in the cold without power is a man-made disaster.
It’s a disaster now.
It could be an evne bigger disaster.
Beware the Ides of March
The sun is entering its period of solar activity
There are coronal mass eruptions sending waves of geo magnetic energy towards earth which exert a gravitational pull on earths molten metal core
Plus this Saturday 3/19 the moon will be full and closest to earth as it will be for the next 5 years exerting additional gravitational pull
Maybe a good idea to stay in Saturday
Order a pizza and watch the brackets
One of the most important financial links ever posted on this blog has been totally ignored. It is clear and understandable. Yves; please re link.
Daniel Smith says:
March 15, 2011 at 3:38 pm
http://www.themonthly.com.au/world-economic-outlook-richard-koo-3085
This very sadly demonstrates that the leaders of the Western countries did not want to avoid depression!
No matter what ‘The Ben Bernanke’ said!