Archive - Mar 2011 - Story

• A helicopter was unable to drop water to cool the No.3 reactor at the quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex in northeastern Japan probably because of the high radiation, Kyodo news agency said, quoting the defence minister.
• Police will attempt to cool No.4 reactor's spent nuclear fuel pool using a water cannon, TV says.
• Japan's top government spokesman says radiation levels around the complex are not at levels to cause an immediate health risk.
• There is no evidence of a significant spread of radiation from Japan's crippled nuclear plants, the World Health Organisation says.
• Operator says it is unable to resume work cooling the reactors due to radiation risk. Workers ordered to leave the plant were allowed back in after radiation levels fall. Operator says there were 180 workers on site as of 0230 GMT.
• Operator of the nuclear power complex in northeastern Japan recorded the site's highest levels of radiation at the No.3 reactor on Wednesday.
• Water is being poured into reactors No.5 and No.6 at the plant, the operating company says. Those two reactors had been shut down for scheduled maintenance.

RANsquawk European Morning Briefing - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 16/03/11

A choppy futures session has seen some modest profit-taking in line with Nikkei trading, following news that all TEPKO personnel around Fukushima are to be evacuated due to abnormally high radiation levels. Keep an eye on the Japanese market for an indication of where we open tomorrow.A somewhat bigger problem is that according to Bloomberg, which has now caught up to our radiation reporting by prefecture, the radiation in Ibaraki has reached 15,800 nanosieverts/hour at 11:40 am, which is 300 times normal. The spin: this is one third the amount of radiation in a chest X-ray. What is not mentioned is that an X-ray is exposure measured in one instant, whereas in this case the irradiation goes on for hour, after hour, after hour. And some other unpleasant news: NTT DOCOMO has announced it will limit up to 80% of voice calls in neighboring Chiba and Ibaraki prefectures, and up to 50% in Tokyo. Whether this is to conserves some mystical telephonic energy or to prevent the spread of panic is unclear. As this latest news is digested watch for the drift.

Tis but a scratch. We have just one question: why isnt Fukushima crawling with iRobots armed with cameras and geiger counters?

NHK is currently broadcasting live footage from its helicopter showing white smoke from the Fukushima #3 reactor. As we reported earlier, fire was earlier observed in the 8 by 8 meter hole in the outer shell of Reactor 4,which had since extinguished itself. However, that it has been replaced with billowing smoke from a new reactor is not good. Reuters speculates that the smoke is emerging from the fuel pool which is now overheating. It is highly probable that the smoke is radioactive. In a press conference that just concluded Edano said that the area around reactor 1 is too radioactive for TEPCO workers to approach and as such all have been withdrawn. He also said the US military will likely be called in for assistance.

It's another day for the BOJ, which more than anything is hell bent on preventing a rerun of last night's tumble in the futures to a 7 handle. The solution: add another several trillion into money markets. Following Monday's ¥15 trillion plunge protection deposit, and yesterday's ¥8 trillion, just announced was the first tranche for tonight, which amounted to ¥3.5 trillion. And so the total involve to prevent the market from plunging a more 1,000 points is now ¥26.5 trillion, or $325 billion.

Desperation in Fukushima is growing as one by one the remaining options to prevent the "recriticlaity" of reactor 4 slide away. After the idea floated earlier to pour water on the core in hopes of cooling was dashed following a fire which broke out about 2 hours earlier and technical difficulties associated with the actual implementation , the latest and probably last recourse proposed is to disperse boric acid - a radiation retardant - all over everything in a blind "shotgun" strategy. How that will do anything to prevent the nuclear fall out from the containment bed which is now supposedly exposed to the open air, remains a mystery. And another update from Kyodo: "Fuel rods damage at Fukushima's 2 reactors estimated at 70%, 33%"

All the sophist idiots (Corrigan's word not ours) in the media and the bleeding edge of financial lemmingdom who believe there could be no greater boon to global economy than the death and suffering of hundreds of thousands(you know who you are) are kindly requested to read the following missive from Diapason's Sean Corrigan who cleanly and clinically blows out this latest moronic piece of uber-false groupthink out of the water: "We cannot abstain from expressing our utter contempt for the many idiots who have already begun parroting the standard Keynesian nonsense that this calamity will ultimately 'prove positive for GDP', or that the rebuilding efforts can only redound to the nation's well-being to the extent that they shake it out of its ongoing 'deflation'... If the awful spectacle of vast swathes of land littered with shattered buildings and crumpled vehicles—or the concern that they suffer the invisible hazards of radioactive contamination—offers such grand opportunities for advancement, why stop there? Why wait for the vagaries of the climate, or the tortured creaking of continental plates to bring about such a 'stimulus' to growth? Why not declare war on ourselves and unleash our titanic arsenals of destruction on our own towns and cities, and rain down hellfire upon our own farms and gardens, razing the first to the ground and sowing the last with salt, until we make a self-inflicted Carthage of them, one in whose midst we can hope to become rapidly richer than our neighbours as, shivering and starving, we pick our way among the debris of our former civilisation to the nearest construction site? This is all such arrant nonsense that you should banish from your consideration, henceforth and forever, all of the jejune scribblings of the fool whom you once catch propounding it!

And just as the regular trading session, which is now obviously composed exlusively of the occasional bipolar lunatic and a whole lot of 'buy only' algorithms, levitated stocks above the inferno of Japanese reality, so the after hours session provides a convenient buffer for all those who have access to daily ES trading to take advantage of old mom and pop who are stuck with their IBM shares until tomorrow's gap down, and reintroduce gravity to the equation. Behold afterhours futures trading, er, sliding. Japan opens in an hour and a half. Bring your fireman's helmet.

Just headlines for now. We can only hope that the containment pool is not involved.

• TOKYO ELECTRIC WORKER SAW FIRE AT 5:44 LOCAL TIME
• FIRE AT FUKUSHIMA DAI-ICHI NO. 4 REACTOR, NHK REPORTS

As actual (not to mention credible) news out of Fukushima and Japan slow to a trickle, potentially due to the recent imposition of Article 15 by the Japanese government (an emergency regulatory clause that allows the senior levels of the Japanese government to stop other Japanese government agencies from communicating with the public and news media) which bans nuclear regulatory and protection agencies, from issuing any statements about the nuclear crisis situation in Japan, the only objective information may soon be flyby analysis by third party satellite companies which do not have skin in the game. Below we present the most recent analysis conducted

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 15/03/11

It is not yet clear how devastating the nuclear-reactor damage will prove to be, but the situation appears to be worsening. What is clear is that the potential crisis in the Persian Gulf, the loss of nuclear reactors and the rising radiation levels will undermine the confidence of the Japanese. Beyond the human toll, these reactors were Japan’s hedge against an unpredictable world. They gave it control of a substantial amount of its energy production. Even if the Japanese still had to import coal and oil, there at least a part of their energy structure was largely under their own control and secure. Japan’s nuclear power sector seemed invulnerable, which no other part of its energy infrastructure was. For Japan, a country that went to war with the United States over energy in 1941 and was devastated as a result, this was no small thing. Japan had a safety net. The safety net was psychological as much as anything. The destruction of a series of nuclear reactors not only creates energy shortages and fear of radiation; it also drives home the profound and very real vulnerability underlying all of Japan’s success. Japan does not control the source of its oil, it does not control the sea lanes over which coal and other minerals travel, and it cannot be certain that its nuclear reactors will not suddenly be destroyed. To the extent that economics and politics are psychological, this is a huge blow. Japan lives in constant danger, both from nature and from geopolitics. What the earthquake drove home was just how profound and how dangerous Japan’s world is. It is difficult to imagine another industrial economy as inherently insecure as Japan’s. The earthquake will impose many economic constraints on Japan that will significantly complicate its emergence from its post-boom economy, but one important question is the impact on the political system.

You asked for it, and here it is - a fully interactive Japan wind map which includes forecasting up to 3 days forward. By the looks of things, the Jetstream is about to start glowing in the dark.

SSDD