This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
Japan's Nuclear Meltdown, the Economic Meltdown, and the Gulf Oil Meltdown All Happened for the SAME REASON
Apologists for the nuclear power industry pretend there are no better
alternatives, so we just have to suck it up and suffer through the
Japanese nuclear crisis.
But this is wholly illogical. The truth
is that we can store spent fuel rods in dry cask storage, which is much
safer than the spent fuel rod pools used in Fukushima and many American
reactors.
As the Nation pointed out:
Short
of closing plants, there is a fairly reliable solution to the problem
of spent fuel rods. It is called “dry cask storage.” Germany adopted it
twenty-five years ago. Instead of storing huge amounts of spent fuel
in pools with only roofs over them, small amounts of spent fuel rods
are surrounded with inert gas inside large steel casks. These casks are
quite stable and secure. At Vermont Yankee one of them was mistakenly
dropped a yard or more when a crane malfunctioned—and the cask was
fine.
But there is a problem with dry cask storage: it costs
money. The track record of the atomic energy industry in the United
States—less so in Japan—is to spend as little money as possible and
extend the life of old plants for as long as possible, no matter the
risks.
We could build a new, safer generation
of nuclear power plants which have inherently safer designs, such as
low-temperature reactors and thorium reactors.
But the owners of the
nuclear plants can make more money with the ridiculous designs and
cost-cutting measures used at Fukushima and elsewhere.
As the Christian Science Monitor notes:
Just
as the BP oil spill one year ago heaped scrutiny on the United State's
Minerals Management Service, harshly criticized for lax drilling
oversight and cozy ties with the oil industry, the nuclear crisis in
Japan is shining a light on that nation's safety practices.***
Russian
nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev, who as director of the
Soviet Spetsatom clean-up agency helped in the efforts 25 years ago to
clean up Chernobyl ... said the sequence of events at Japan's Fukushima I
suggested that the plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company
(TEPCO), may have put profit before safety. The fire that broke out
Tuesday in reactor No. 4's fuel storage pond may have been caused by a
desire to conserve space and money, he suggested.
"The Japanese were
very greedy and they used every square inch of the space. But when you
have a dense placing of spent fuel in the basin you have a high
possibility of fire if the water is removed from the basin," Andreev
told Reuters.
TEPCO has come under fire in the past for falsifying safety records at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. In 2002, according to The Wall Street Journal,
TEPCO admitted to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency that it had
falsified the results of safety tests on the No. 1 reactor.
This
was only one in a string of scandals and coverups to mar the Asia's
biggest utility company. In 2007, the company initially said there was
no release of radiation after an earthquake damaged its
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, but later admitted that radioactive water
spilled into the Sea of Japan.
And less than a year ago, on June 17, a reactor at Fukushima I lost electricity and saw a dangerous drop in cooling water, Bloomberg reported.
TEPCO's president failed to adequately investigate to prevent the
current crisis, said Iwaki City council member Kazuyoshi Sato ...
Indeed, Tepco has covered up cracked reactor core containment vessel and other serious problems for decades.
And this is not limited to Tepco. As one commentator writes:
Back
in the late 80’s, when I was working for an environmental firm in New
Jersey, one of the temps who came through said he’d just come from
working at a nuclear plant. He said that his design, as delivered, had
sufficient margin and backups to take care of whatever could possibly
happen.
The owners thanked him for his work, then sent it to
other engineers who cheapened down the whole design. Thinner walls in
the pipes, fewer fasteners in the connections, less mass in the
building walls, the whole bit. Saving money on the build to pay for
higher profits, higher interest to the backers, and generally
harvesting the value that should have been spread over the plant’s
lifetime. He just shook his head.
The
nuclear accident was largely caused because of Tepco's penny-pinching,
just as the Gulf oil spill was caused by the fact that BP cut every
corner in the book ( see this, this, this, this, and this).
And
just like BP captured the agencies which were supposed to regulate it,
nuclear agencies have been wholly captured by the nuclear power
companies. For example, as the above-quoted Christian Science Monitor
article notes:
Andreev, the Russian scientist, has also accused the IAEA of being too close with corporations. "This is only a fake organization
because every organization which depends on the nuclear industry – and
the IAEA depends on the nuclear industry – cannot perform properly."
And the same is true of the economic crisis. As I've extensively documented,
the crisis was caused by big banks and other financial players taking
irresponsible and speculative gambles, committing fraud and fudging the
numbers, using too much leverage, and other dangerous behavior. See this and this.
And - just as with the nuclear and oil industries - the government
"regulators" have all be captured by the big companies they are supposed
to police, helped the bank robbers pull off the heist, and then helped cover it up afterwards.
Stiglitz Speaks Truth to Power
Nobel prize winning economist Jospeph Stiglitz has been speaking out on this same theme this week.
As Linda Keenan and Janine R. Wedel note:
Stiglitz describes well the intertwining of state and private power [quoting Stiglitz]:
The
personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually
all U.S. senators, and most...[House] representatives...are members of
the top 1 percent....are kept in office by money from the top 1
percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will
be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large,
the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also
come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a
trillion-dollar gift--through legislation prohibiting the
government...from bargaining over price--it should not come as cause
for wonder....Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you
would expect the system to work.Stiglitz points
out that a system gamed to benefit only that 1 percent is destined to
sink us all, eventually, because it means America is squandering its
productivity, efficiency, and much-needed infrastructure dollars. We
would go a step further and say that this system, of, by, and for the 1
percent, is what paved the way for some of the greatest disasters of
the new century. The BP-Transocean Oil Spill and the Wall Street
collapse might never have happened without the promotion by shadow
lobbyists of loose regulation and/or weak enforcement that benefited
themselves and their elite brethen. Japan might not be facing a nuclear
crisis, were it not for the fact that the very old reactors at the
Fukushima Daiichi plant got an extension to keep operating despite
safety concerns. That decision was a byproduct, critics say, of Japan's
own gamed system known as amakudari, or "descent from heaven",
a longstanding, widespread practice in which Japanese senior
bureaucrats retire to high-profile positions in the private and public
sectors.
A string of smaller, but still terrible disasters can be
traced to weak regulation and/or spotty enforcement: the half-billion
eggs that had to be recalled last year; a 2009 plane crash that killed
50 people, which Frontline traced back to the "cozy"
relationship between the FAA and carriers, allowing some of them to
operate flights despite safety violations; and several mine disasters
that have killed dozens in recent years. A Washington Post
analysis found that more than 200 former congressional staffers,
regulators and retired lawmakers work for the mining industry as
lobbyists, senior executives, or consultants. Those last two roles make
it possible for top power brokers to shadow lobby - they go
unregistered simply by evading formal registration and refusing the
accept the title of lobbyist, even if lobbying is essentially what they
are doing.
***
A signature feature of the shadow
lobbyist era is not just a manipulation of public policy, but also an
embrace of "failing upward". No matter the track record, the elite 1
percent seek more of the same. Transocean executives thought they
deserved rich bonuses, as did their unabashed, deeply entitled peers on
Wall Street, despite their staggering failures.
The CEO of mine
operator Massey, who retired a few months back, is due to get a
reported 12 million dollars, a year after Massey's Upper Big Branch
mine exploded, killing dozens. And then there's egg producer Jack
DeCoster, who's been called "Teflon Chicken Don." For years DeCoster
has fought various workplace safety and environmental violations. Yet
here's what one lawyer who sued DeCoster's company said about him, to Tribune reporter Andrew Zajac: "He gets fined and things happen to him, but he comes back. He always bounces back."
The insulation from failure is galling, to be sure, but it's much more than that. It is both an outrage and
a clear and present danger. If executives and stealth power brokers
face no repercussions for making risky bets or pushing the limits on
safety to save a buck or working the system to their advantage no matter
the consequences, what incentive do they have to act more responsibly
in the future?
As Stiglitz wrote Wednesday:
The
entire financial sector was rife with agency problems and
externalities. Ratings agencies had incentives to give good ratings to
the high-risk securities produced by the investment banks that were
paying them. Mortgage originators bore no consequences for their
irresponsibility, and even those who engaged in predatory lending or
created and marketed securities that were designed to lose did so in
ways that insulated them from civil and criminal prosecution.
This
brings us to the next question: are there other "black swan" events
waiting to happen? Unfortunately, some of the really big risks that we
face today are most likely not even rare events. The good news is that
such risks can be controlled at little or no cost. The bad news is that
doing so faces strong political opposition - for there are people who profit from the status quo.
We
have seen two of the big risks in recent years, but have done little
to bring them under control. By some accounts, how the last crisis was
managed may have increased the risk of a future financial meltdown.
Too-big-to
fail banks, and the markets in which they participate, now know that
they can expect to be bailed out if they get into trouble. As a result
of this "moral hazard", these banks can borrow on favourable terms,
giving them a competitive advantage based not on superior performance
but on political strength. While some of the excesses in risk-taking
have been curbed, predatory lending and unregulated trading in obscure
over-the-counter derivatives continue. Incentive structures that
encourage excess risk-taking remain virtually unchanged.
So, too,
while Germany has shut down its older nuclear reactors, in the US and
elsewhere, even plants that have the same flawed design as Fukushima
continue to operate. The nuclear industry’s very existence is dependent
on hidden public subsidies - costs borne by society in the event of
nuclear disaster, as well as the costs of the still-unmanaged disposal
of nuclear waste. So much for unfettered capitalism!
***
In the
end, those gambling in Las Vegas lose more than they gain. As a
society, we are gambling – with our big banks, with our nuclear power
facilities, with our planet. As in Las Vegas, the lucky few - the
bankers that put our economy at risk and the owners of energy companies that put our planet at risk - may walk off with a mint. But on average and almost certainly, we as a society, like all gamblers, will lose.
That, unfortunately, is a lesson of Japan’s disaster that we continue to ignore at our peril.
The
bottom line is that if we continue to let the top 1% - who are never
satisfied, but always want more, more, more - run the show without
challenge from the other 99% of people in the world, we will have more
Fukushimas, more Gulf oil spills and more financial meltdowns.
As one commentator passionately put it:
Make
no mistake. Nuclear power can be safe... if designed by honest and
prudent people. Make no mistake. The economies of nations and planets
can function well, and life can continuously improve... if only real,
physical goods (including gold and silver) are exchanged in
transactions.
Make no mistake. Life can be good. Life can be
efficient. Life can be benevolent. Life can continuously improve as
years go by, and as humans learn more about the nature of reality. The
reason everything is getting worse can all be traced back to the
predators-that-be, the predator-class, and their endless dishonesty.
Honesty => life, health, happiness, success.
Dishonesty => death, disease, misery, failure.
The dishonest [...] the predators must go.
Note: This is not a question of
left-versus-right. The war between liberals and conservatives is a
false divide-and-conquer dog-and-pony show created by the powers that
be to keep the American people divided and distracted. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.
Instead, it is a question of the powers-that-be waging war on the freedom and wealth of the American people. ... and the people of the entire world.
»
- advertisements -
Thanks! I'll try to raise awareness on this end.
Apart from that: At this point in time, I'm seriously doubting the sanity of our leaders.
Motherfuckers need to put engineers, not accounting, finance, real estate, and lawyer dweebs, in charge of the economy.
In all recorded history, there never was a engineer led society. Maybe, there is a reason for that.
Jimmy Carter?? Milestones
Hoover, and how did that progressive work out?
Carter too...lol.
my bad
I suspect Hoover and Carter were really salesmen/entertainers with a hard hat. Real engineer/analysts have trouble selling the crowd.
China and Japan are fairly recent examples of such. Japanese earthquake aside, both countries seem to be doing quite well.
YES! Lawyer dweebs/politicians (Harry Reid the trial liar, big on the dweeb factor) manipulate words for personal gain.
Moral hazard is the common denominator. If a private insurer had to insure nuclear plants they would all be safer. Governments have had to take on the backing of these hell-holes to that they can be built cheaply. Now the Japanese government is going to take on the liabilities of TEPCO. Housing is backed by the gov't and mortgage insurance is just a hollow shell of a scam. Monthly payments for what? There ain't no insurance to be had. Mortgage brokers and Fannie/Freddie are not making claims against the mortgage insurers 1. to keep them solvent, and 2. to keep the loan balances on the books to minimize losses. Let's not even go to the TBTB "banks", which weren't even banks until they became insolvent. The Fed is printing because a busted economy can't produce. All due to MORAL HAZARD which the politicians have been happy to subsidize in order to fatten their own purses. It's about time to end this monstrous Ponzi (with apologies to Charles Ponzi who would never have dreamed this up).
You Sir, Appear to be sane! I have enjoyed your comments for a long time lurking in the shadows. As the destructive pace accelerates at some point the amish model may be the new " High Tech."
Me, sane? Sanity is relative. As Randle said:
"Jesus, I must be crazy to be in a loony-bin like this."
Awesome RR !
+ 1,000,000,000,000
+2,000,000,000,000
+14,268,184,774,780.93
does the clock stop if there is a shutdown?
My guess is no, since ARRA projects are still funded, but not exactly by surplus. Looks like we might find out. Perhaps a convenient trick to avoid the debt ceiling?
In Uncle Ben fiat bucks?
Let's go back to the Chrysler bail out of 1979, and the S&L bail out of the 90s, and the LTCM bail out of the late 90s. Some significant history could be rewritten had these events not happened. Once a trend was started, and pockets started being lined, we were well on the road to perdition. Many earlier and interim events could be added to the list, but the ones I listed were well-known enough to be pertinent to common folk.
Unlimited campaign contributions and lobbyist "bribes" are the sine qua nons of systemic corruption-- aided and abetted by the fascist five on the S Ct.
You got any pre-1971 examples?
I picked the ones that I lived through and were main stream news. A more historically oriented person could fill in the pre-71 era I'm sure. None come to mind without research, although I'd slap my forehead when someone else posts them.
I just wonder how much harder it is to get bailed out when currency is tied to gold in some way.
At least Uncle Ben produces something vaguely edible. However, that fiat can still get our Dr. Benanocide a Becky Quicky, or at least an unlicensed massage. Not too shabby.
One thing most people fails to mention is the unwillingness of these companies to pay for the losses when things go wrong. I mean... just look at TEPCO's balance sheets.
WRONG!!
They happened because The Bernank didn't print enough money.
The U.S. is too big and too centralized.
All big and centralized things corrupt.
Who's for breaking it up in three chunks?
One for Liberals/Democrats -
One for Republicans/Coporatists -
One for Libertarians -
Who's for that - and who want which states?
Since the cold war ended, I'm surprised Alaska wants anything to do with the US. That place could flip libertarian upon collapse even before the break-up. The plains states could also be libertarian. Unfortunately, all of the good real estate will be blue or red... figures.
Speaking of collapse, Martin Armstrong has his first article out after being released from prism. He says we'll have to wait till mid 2015 time frame for the real collapse.
http://goldandsilverlinings.com/?p=541
Half right.
Too large by a factor of ten.
Breaking up the U.S. into ten (at least) regions would be a good first start. That would put us somewhere between Euro-land and Africa.
Centralization is not so much corrupt (though it certainly is, and utterly so) as it is attempting to force a singular solution on multiple conditions. There isn't a reason in the world why an environemental dictate that affects the air over Los Angeles should be be imposed on Wyalusing Pennsylvania. There isn't a reason in the world why a central bank in D.C is needed that is not controlled by the people of the U.S. and since that is imossible, it shouldn't exist at all, and there should only be State-chartered banks with properly trained overseers to monitor their lending and other habits.
We need DIVERSITY since it is a no-brainer that the natural law will eventually kill off ALL clones if even one gets an infection. We enforce diversity at the cost of trillions, now even the gay guys can feel free to hit on the straight men in the army and the lesbians can freely dilute the hot young Corporal, with the bodacious ta-tas without fear of prosecution. But we allow our central government to squash our diversity in real life with their disregard of state's rights. Abe Lincoln had 2million killed and maimed and 2 million of their families made poverty stricken all to stop some states from doing what was natural. Think how much different life would be today if the south and the democrats had succeeded in seceding. How much less power would be concentrated in one very wealthy and corrupt town on the Potomac.
Yes, many more governments in the continental part of North America is a result devoutly to be wished for. Three, Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. are too few for so many highly disagreeable people.
We used to have it until the direct election of Senators.
.
The upper 1% is King George - they won't let go without a fight. We need a new revolution.
Problem: we can kill the upper 1% percent -
but what about the upper 10-15%, who aide and abet and profit from supporting them...?
The way this typically works is the upper 1% gives up the next 14%. After the bloodlust is sated, the upper 1% carries on. At a lower efficiency, but that's OK.
ya, in the queue. the nomenclatura be in a really fine place in NH. Wonder how Soros would do on the Inferno down Tuck's? Nope, he's on the other side of the ridge, can't get there. dang
- Ned
Trickle-down economics, bitchez. I almost think that if the upper 1% were King George, then we'd have something resembling a democracy. I'm too far down on the scale to know for sure, but I suspect today's King George is more like a few dozen to a few hundred people. The guys at Bilderberg who protect their identity the best. People like Bill Gross and Bill Gates are interesting cases.
Oh, you think there might be a reason why there's no known photograph of the M&M and KalKan Dogfood magnate, Forrest Mars, Jr? Or that the Associated Press was ecstatic and got out their cameras when the Mellon heir Richard Scaife crawled out of his hole to offer Ken Starr a position at Pepperdine because the AP file photo of him was 25 years old?
You must mean people like that. Yah, those sorts of people will be chuckling softly in the background as the public douchebags are led to the guillotines in tumbrils provided by the Ford Foundation.
You're living up to your name, Dirt Rat. Keep it up!
Rabble Rabble Rabble!
The implication of the top 1% being the problem may very well be the case. BUT, I'm of the opinion that it is also a human issue to the extent that I think you can take some folks, put them into a situation of privilege and position (whether they've earned it themselves or not) and over a long enough timeline (i.e. generational or much shorter in the case of windfall cash flow, etc.) they'll tend or barrel toward that ruthless at-all-cost top 1% mentality observed/lamented in this article. It takes a disciplined/principled person to not fall into the "I'm better than you syndrome 'cause I can/have". Furthermore some humans (does seem to be especially viral in the top 1%) also fall down miserably 'cause so many start to believe that they are who they think they are. In other words just because it passes between their own ears it must be true and acceptable. Additionally, it seems that when real craftsmanship left this country/world, and its focus on a quality end product and process, and was replaced by the self-serve Depot mentality all bets were off and TEPCO is a result. What does all this mean? Probably a malady not easily reversed until, like the extreme substance abuser, a severe bottom (fill in the blank) is reached within the individual/corporation/county/state/country/world. That's the real bitch, the others that don't subscribe/perform to those "substandards" get dragged off the cliff too. And just the prospect of a possible forced high dive into granite boulders sometime in the future further entrenches that lack of trust against those who base their lives on a franchise-of-lies and shortcut-for-profit path and track record.
Only fuel rods that have been outside the reactor for a long time, perhaps 3 years I recall, are subject to dry cask storage. I have no clue about the amount of spent and cooled fuel assemblies sitting in the fuel pools that could and should be in casks in the US however there is some dry cask storage here now.
We do use such storage, probably not as much as we should but remember the operators have to make a profit. Within the year I am certain we will see a subsidy given to them to move as much spent fuel from the pools as possible. Now don't go pissing and moaning about this. It's how the free market works.
That is why these old nuke plants have two to four core-loads of spent fuel on site near the reactors. It's difficult and dangerous to move the ultrahot fuel rods around -- they need to be kept submerged in water.
And in no way is the nuclear industry a "free market". It would not exist without massive gov't subsidies.
From everything I've read, fuel rods must be cooled in highly treated water under ideal circumstances for 4-6+ years depending on the size and type of fuel.
Don't know how long it takes from post-pool to dry cask storage and what the steps are in between.
Does that mean Caviar is a good short?
Capitalism and humanism are counterforces balancing one another.
As soon as you start overweighting either side, you are going to make a big asymetical mess.
My point is, you can't employ unchecked capitalist systems when it comes to education, healthcare, biological sustainability. It's just that simple. History proves it time and time again.
Actually, history has proved time & time again that human suffering is directly proportionate to government control. Said opposite, human prosperity has always varied directly with human rights & freedom (civil & economic).
agree mang
.
if we are going to pay people extra money to be CEO's as consumers... they should pitch solutions and actions that put them in leadership positions that insulate the people they care about from risk...
.
profits wont remove 8 centimeters of earth for all 25 miles radius from fukashima... or the oil from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico... really they didnt care enough in the first place
.
the 'burden' the wealthy shoulder in 'taxes' is just self pitty we use to vote for their lawyers in congress
.
the rich want to be leaders or what... pray for the rest of us jesus
My 1st Zerohedge post : I AGREE.