Archive - Mar 27, 2011

And so the great decade + old eurozone game theory project of Europe is about to come crashing down. Following Europe's decision to leave Ireland out in the cold, due to the country's ongoing unwillingness to pander with unilateral concessions to the global banking syndicate, the Emerald Isle has apparently decided to call the EU's bluff. Reuters reports: "Ireland's government wants to impose losses on some senior bondholders in Irish lenders to reduce the burden on taxpayers from a prolonged banking crisis, a senior minister said on Sunday...Analysts widely expect the government to impose losses on senior
bondholders in nationalized lenders Anglo Irish Bank and Irish
Nationwide because they have sold their deposits and are being wound
down. Hitting any unsecured unguaranteed senior bonds in Bank of
Ireland and Allied Irish Banks (AIB), which amount to over 11 billion
euros, would be more controversial." Yet most controversial would be the fact that the Eurozone is now unable to control its wayward son, which seems set on actually following the will of its people than that of the plutocrats. And just like Tunisia set a precedent to the MENA region with an act many thought was unthinkable, should Ireland follow through with this near-revolutionary act of a debt impairing chain-reaction, most other countries are set to follow suit, leading not only to the inevitable end of the one currency block, expected for so long by many euroskeptics, but yet another US taxpayer funded bailout, as was revealed on Thursday of last week, when we observed the upcoming "threat to the international monetary system" as predicted by the IMF.

And the hits just keep on coming. Earlier today, TEPCO announced that the radiation in the water pool of reactor #2 had been measured at 1,000 millisieverts/h (1 sievert/h) - the highest reading so far recorded since the Fukushima disaster started. As a reminder, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says a single dose of 1,000 millisieverts is enough to cause haemorrhaging, which a ten hour exposure to this dose is enough to result in death. "The situation is serious. They have to pump away this water on the floor, get rid of it to lower the radiation," said Robert Finck, radiation protection specialist at the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, speaking before the operator expressed doubt about the high reading. "It's virtually impossible to work, you can only be there for a few minutes. It's impossible to say how long it will take before they can gradually take control." From Kyodo: "Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the concentration of radioactive substances of the puddle was 10 million times higher than that seen usually in water in a reactor core, but later decided to reanalyze the data because it found some errors." And keep in mind this is the idiocy that is resulting after last week the brilliant geniuses at TECPO came up with the plan to water each and every reactor: now it's time to remove the water, but the water just happens to be so radioactive, nobody can remove it. In the meantime the leak into the ocean keeps getting worse: "Radioactive iodine-131 at a concentration 1,850.5 times the legal limit was detected in a seawater sample taken around 330 meters south of the plant, near a drainage outlet of the four troubled reactors, compared with 1,250.8 times the limit found Friday, the agency said." And while Zero Hedge has long believed that the only possible outcome here is the Plan Z concrete entombment, which will guarantee an 80 km non-inhabitable radius around Fukushima in perpetuity, finally the "experts" are warming up to this idea: per Reuters: "Experts say there is still too much heat in the reactor cores and spent fuel at the Fukushima plant for a similar last-ditch solution to be considered yet."