looked to me to be an explosion confined to a tubular space with a breakout headed WNW along the ground. Photos of buildings in that direction seem to show that they were impacted from that vector. The plume was straight and columnar and rose to a huge height. It was like a mortar shot. I suspect the top blew off the reactor and took the contents of the cooling pool with it. Fuel rods are brittle and easily pulverised. I would not be the least bit surprised if substantial amounts of MOX dust are now wafting on the breeze at various altitudes. Iodine 131 is one thing, but vaporized Plutonium is quite another altogether. TEPCO has destroyed the future of Japan and perhaps many others as well. If there is any sense of honor remaining in it's management, then the seppuku will be starting soon.
The unions will bring Radial Homosexual Death Panel Job-killing regulations attached to a government take-over of social security. Tell Obama: hands off my Orwellian fascist hyperbole !! !! !!
I'd say it's a close call. Incredible reserves of talent in this country and squandered on useless projects or benched to save a few bucks on salaries. We can't afford this any longer from the people who brought us Fukushima, Ira1, Afghanistan, 9/11, and ten years of no net new jobs.
I'm all for that. The hybrid approach is very interesting. As described, it may be necessary to employ that just to get rid of the Fusion is particularly appealing. They're varying degrees of down the road. We need viable solutions underway 10 years ago. Solar and wind have been around. Make them work wit major projects like the Germans are moving toward.
There is little likelihood of solar and wind or the hybrid wile the incumbents in the ticking time bomb nuclear business are allowed to build and serve plants and build the substrate of that with suitcases full of cash for our (s)elected officials.
We have the means and talent but the system is so toxic it vaccinates against creativity and progress.
AIG was basically denied a subsidy by the Fed, which is good on their plan to buy maiden lane II a pool of MBSes taken over by the Fed, for $15.7 billion.
You should see AIG rant, as if they were shocked, finally the Fed didn't let them have some more free money (in the link).
I haven't written about the "tax loophole to offshore outsource your job" in a while, but if you have something to say that's good, unique and you're on a roll, it's perfectly cool to write a separate piece.
It seems we're about to get hit with two things, one is yet another corporate lobbyist wish list even on the corporate tax code and another is an unlimited importing of their "offshore outsourcing the jobs" trick of importing foreign labor through various means to manipulate the U.S. immigration system,, completely ignoring the statistics on U.S. citizens being displaced by this.
The article was getting lengthy enough however. There have been several news reports on this tax gimmick granted corporations by Congress. They get to keep their earnings offshore and "defer" taxes until they repatriate the earnings back to the US. The problem is, they never repatriate the earnings. Rather than pay US taxes, companies go to great lengths to manage their cash flow by taking on debt. Microsoft last year came to the debt markets for the first time ever, precisely to raise the cash that they could have just as easily repatriated.
What companies are gambling on is Congress granting a tax holiday so that this money can be repatriated tax free; it has happened at least once before. The behavior is exactly the same as illegal immigrants who stay below the radar in the US until the government grants an immigration holiday; that too has happened before, so both illegal immigrants and multinational corporations are governed by the same behavior.
It is estimated the tax break costs the US Treasury $60 billion a year in lost revenue. Interestingly, the Treasury has resisted the current pleas by corporations to grant a tax holiday; they don't want to encourage bad behavior. Good luck to them, especially since the matter is really up to a spineless Congress (which will of course be completely opposed to an illegal immigrant amnesty).
Great writeup. Amazing how fast these amoral multi-nationals are to take
stimulus funds (Caterpillar, GE), TARP (eg GE taking FDIC funds STILL), government guarantees of the commercial paper market at the height of the crisis (GE, Caterpillar, Chase) ad nauseum.
And Robert gets it exactly right re the 60-minutes BS piece on corporate efforts to get a tax holiday on repatriation. At one time I respected 60 Minutes but that piece with Leslie Stahl could have just as easily been written by the Koch Brothers
with their latest "tax holiday" demand, which is to bring their parked offshore profits back, tax free...
and the Cisco CEO was claiming this would "help the economy and create jobs". He's so full of shit! They simply want to bring back the profits in order to distribute them to shareholders and bump up their stocks, dividends.
Cisco has literally demanded employees move to India, move to China AND take pay on the pay scales of China and India. Cisco at one point proclaimed they wanted to be a Chinese company.
IBM has gotten tax breaks, routinely from local, state and federal governments, subsidies, gifts, all the promise of creating jobs....so what does IBM do? Fires Americans and offshore outsources the jobs or brings in foreign guest workers to displace Americans....
amazingly enough local governments, state have not demanded the subsidies back that I am aware of.
For example, read somewhere that a plant in TN went from $1.4 M to 3/or 4M$ cost - rapid rise, no end in sight. Cash cow for investors, at the expense of humanity. Short term profits win... longer term - humans lose.
Similar to WHY we have no alternative energy solutions - because the big co's can't collect their "monthly rent" when people go off grid and do for themselves?
Just as R's want to ban energy saving bulbs - because they work! They work so well, they decrease the money the energy co's get monthly... So, we MUST go backwards to keep the money flowing to the top.
SICK. Time for change - Nuclear is INSANE.
•"brutes have risen to power, but they lie!" Charlie Chaplin
I don't know if there is anywhere safe and think the same along with you.
As we certainly don't think as -- shock doctrine "low in the gutter" as the Bush crime family, the Cheney crime family... and minions...
...who are suddenly silent and missing from the national scene, while "small radioactive particles" fly overhead thru the air.
Perhaps, just perhaps... they landed with the Moonies in their Paraguay hideout, next to the worlds largest clean water source - out of the radioactive winds?
Inquiring minds want to know...
----------------------
• Until the industry is ready to accept all responsibility and liability for any incident, then WHY should a Nuclear Power Co. be allowed to operate?
Point of fact: all light water reactors contain plutonium. It is converted from the U238 which makes up about 95% of the initial uranium fuel load. Roughly 40% of the power actually comes from fissioning Plutonium at about half the way into a two or three year run.
At the risk of really spinning up Michael Collins, there is another developing nuclear option: the hybrid-nuclear power plant. This technology marries a small helium reactor with a large combustion turbine, with a nuclear turbine driving the combustion turbine’s air compressor. The plant is fueled by nuclear energy and natural gas or gasified coal. The reactor is ideally suited to use thorium in addition to uranium and plutonium.
The net result of the hybrid approach is large amounts of reasonably priced energy from a physically small power plant, with all emissions cut in half. Nuclear wastes are reduced by about 80% because the plant is exceptionally efficient and half the energy comes from coal or natural gas. Is also a real nice fit with renewable energy.
Unlike conventional nuclear plants, virtually no operator action is required to keep the public safe; the reactor’s fuel can not melt, with reactor decay heat passively removed.
I understand Nexus' phrase "operates to extract value" through the fundamental axiom of the so-called 'Austrian' (von Mises) school of economics, namely, that the proper definition of 'good' (or 'utility') is the creation of accumulations of capital. That these ideas have been proclaimed as neoclassical or libertarian or in any way related to the great founder of a true libertarian school of economics, Henry C. Simons, is so offensive to history as to be downright foul.
The basic premise of Simons was simply to ask the question "What economic system is (or would be) most compatible with individual liberty?" The answer is that such an economic system can only be based on an understanding of the necessity (for individual liberty) of the breaking up of concentrations of power. Since great concentrations of wealth are inherently also great concentrations of power, the ideas of Henry Simons -- although initially admired by anti-collectivists of all kinds -- were discarded and selectively ignored by everyone from J. M. Keynes to F. D. Roosevelt and finally to the late Milton Friedman (ultimately sacrificing the ideals of his mentor on the altar of globalism) and Alan Greenspan.
Another way of looking at the problem (and solutions) is to recall that the Constitution empowers Congress to mint and print the currency. Not that Congress should do that directly. And, to be sure, there is a threat of concentration of power in any central bank. Simons recommended a stable monetary policy through a government-owned central bank, regulated by a relatively inflexible legal code rather than by the whims or genius of anything like a Federal Reserve or Chairman thereof. It is a question, for Simons, of a necessary monopoly. I think it's also possible, computers and networks being what they are, to think in terms of another old and mostly forgotten idea -- mutual banking.
Anyway you look at it, the key to success is honesty and probity. Without that ... where are we? Well, here we are.
It is heartening to see, after all these years, a renewal of interest in the original Chicago Plan after so many years of what ultimtely amounts to betrayal by the so-called 'Chicago School' (e;g., Milton Friedman) or the so-called 'Austrian School' (Ludwig v. Mises and the Institute). For example, here is an excellent summary about this from --
Disclaimer: I am not associated with Chris Martenson or his blog, and neither endorse nor dismiss his writings, which can stand on their own. Similarly, I neither endorse nor dismiss publications of the American Monetary Institute or of Stephen Zarlenga, although I do think that the way forward for survival of the U.S.A. lies in the direction indicated.
'Nexus' in comment titled "Frame of Reference" --
To consider your question I think you have to totally change your frame of reference.- ...
Accepting that Finance Capital is distinct and apart from the real economy we have to seek a different explanation as to how the 'system' operates and define its parasitic mode of operation. Neoclassical models of economic behaviour are totally inadequate for explaining the operation of the 'system' and the emergence of multiple asset class 'bubbles'. These 'models' are based [on] a simplistic rationalistic view of the way humans behave and how markets clear and that simplistic model is then translated into financial models, albeit complex mathematical models.
[What] we have to do is look at the world not through the prism of mainstream neo classical economics but through political economy which seeks to understand the interplay of the world of commerce with government as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth but most importantly the creation and distribution of surplus value. ... Bubbles and financial markets are instruments to extract unearned value and they will tend to a systemic collapse.
Basically, the justification is that the financial system operates to extract value ...
Hiroshe Takashi (in CounterPunch): "Now they’re talking about iodine and cesium, but that’s only part of it, they’re not using the proper detection instruments."
Comment: "Reactor 3 has used MOX-fuel and should have released plutonium."
Michael Collins comment: "This is looking like BP and the White House. Tokyo Power wants to run the show and control information."
TEPCO today reported significant releases of Plutonium "a week ago, the company said {Bloomberg)."
"The Loss in State Revenues is Due to Manufacturing Job Loss"
I distinctly recall this exact point being made, as a logical consequence of the 'free trade' movement, by Ross Perot when running for president back in the 1990s.
Could it be that not enough of us were willing to take a chance on someone from outside the two major parties?
Who else is beyond frustrated that we cannot get some simple, objective, based on facts, statistics, possibilities, policies in the national interest?
Case in point is energy. Green jobs were front loaded with special interests, faux paus agendas and ended up being offshore outsourced to China to boot.
The real research money never gets to the real engineers who can solve, invent these problems (U.S. citizen engineers) it's going to the coffers of corporations and going lord knows where (try China and India again).
They we have paradigms that people are plain stuck in. They get on their favorite technology or soapbox, say fast speed rail or bikes or solar panels or whatever...
instead of looking or even having the ability to think about, the entire system.
In other words, we have energy all around us, from flushing your toilet to walking across the room to those waves nearby to methane gas to even small voltage differences in marshes and chemical reactions....
But of course, there are no lobbyists representing a system of heterogenous elements....
looked to me to be an explosion confined to a tubular space with a breakout headed WNW along the ground. Photos of buildings in that direction seem to show that they were impacted from that vector. The plume was straight and columnar and rose to a huge height. It was like a mortar shot. I suspect the top blew off the reactor and took the contents of the cooling pool with it. Fuel rods are brittle and easily pulverised. I would not be the least bit surprised if substantial amounts of MOX dust are now wafting on the breeze at various altitudes. Iodine 131 is one thing, but vaporized Plutonium is quite another altogether. TEPCO has destroyed the future of Japan and perhaps many others as well. If there is any sense of honor remaining in it's management, then the seppuku will be starting soon.
The unions will bring Radial Homosexual Death Panel Job-killing regulations attached to a government take-over of social security. Tell Obama: hands off my Orwellian fascist hyperbole !! !! !!
Lobbyists or fissionable material?
I'd say it's a close call. Incredible reserves of talent in this country and squandered on useless projects or benched to save a few bucks on salaries. We can't afford this any longer from the people who brought us Fukushima, Ira1, Afghanistan, 9/11, and ten years of no net new jobs.
Jack the prices up to the maximum and get the monopoly service revenues in line for future price increases.
I'm all for that. The hybrid approach is very interesting. As described, it may be necessary to employ that just to get rid of the Fusion is particularly appealing. They're varying degrees of down the road. We need viable solutions underway 10 years ago. Solar and wind have been around. Make them work wit major projects like the Germans are moving toward.
There is little likelihood of solar and wind or the hybrid wile the incumbents in the ticking time bomb nuclear business are allowed to build and serve plants and build the substrate of that with suitcases full of cash for our (s)elected officials.
We have the means and talent but the system is so toxic it vaccinates against creativity and progress.
AIG was basically denied a subsidy by the Fed, which is good on their plan to buy maiden lane II a pool of MBSes taken over by the Fed, for $15.7 billion.
You should see AIG rant, as if they were shocked, finally the Fed didn't let them have some more free money (in the link).
I haven't written about the "tax loophole to offshore outsource your job" in a while, but if you have something to say that's good, unique and you're on a roll, it's perfectly cool to write a separate piece.
It seems we're about to get hit with two things, one is yet another corporate lobbyist wish list even on the corporate tax code and another is an unlimited importing of their "offshore outsourcing the jobs" trick of importing foreign labor through various means to manipulate the U.S. immigration system,, completely ignoring the statistics on U.S. citizens being displaced by this.
That is the minimum amount being reported on corporate balance sheets in offshore accounts. See further comments below on this tax scheme.
The article was getting lengthy enough however. There have been several news reports on this tax gimmick granted corporations by Congress. They get to keep their earnings offshore and "defer" taxes until they repatriate the earnings back to the US. The problem is, they never repatriate the earnings. Rather than pay US taxes, companies go to great lengths to manage their cash flow by taking on debt. Microsoft last year came to the debt markets for the first time ever, precisely to raise the cash that they could have just as easily repatriated.
What companies are gambling on is Congress granting a tax holiday so that this money can be repatriated tax free; it has happened at least once before. The behavior is exactly the same as illegal immigrants who stay below the radar in the US until the government grants an immigration holiday; that too has happened before, so both illegal immigrants and multinational corporations are governed by the same behavior.
It is estimated the tax break costs the US Treasury $60 billion a year in lost revenue. Interestingly, the Treasury has resisted the current pleas by corporations to grant a tax holiday; they don't want to encourage bad behavior. Good luck to them, especially since the matter is really up to a spineless Congress (which will of course be completely opposed to an illegal immigrant amnesty).
Great writeup. Amazing how fast these amoral multi-nationals are to take
stimulus funds (Caterpillar, GE), TARP (eg GE taking FDIC funds STILL), government guarantees of the commercial paper market at the height of the crisis (GE, Caterpillar, Chase) ad nauseum.
And Robert gets it exactly right re the 60-minutes BS piece on corporate efforts to get a tax holiday on repatriation. At one time I respected 60 Minutes but that piece with Leslie Stahl could have just as easily been written by the Koch Brothers
with their latest "tax holiday" demand, which is to bring their parked offshore profits back, tax free...
and the Cisco CEO was claiming this would "help the economy and create jobs". He's so full of shit! They simply want to bring back the profits in order to distribute them to shareholders and bump up their stocks, dividends.
Cisco has literally demanded employees move to India, move to China AND take pay on the pay scales of China and India. Cisco at one point proclaimed they wanted to be a Chinese company.
IBM has gotten tax breaks, routinely from local, state and federal governments, subsidies, gifts, all the promise of creating jobs....so what does IBM do? Fires Americans and offshore outsources the jobs or brings in foreign guest workers to displace Americans....
amazingly enough local governments, state have not demanded the subsidies back that I am aware of.
of building small.
For example, read somewhere that a plant in TN went from $1.4 M to 3/or 4M$ cost - rapid rise, no end in sight. Cash cow for investors, at the expense of humanity. Short term profits win... longer term - humans lose.
Similar to WHY we have no alternative energy solutions - because the big co's can't collect their "monthly rent" when people go off grid and do for themselves?
Just as R's want to ban energy saving bulbs - because they work! They work so well, they decrease the money the energy co's get monthly... So, we MUST go backwards to keep the money flowing to the top.
SICK. Time for change - Nuclear is INSANE.
•"brutes have risen to power, but they lie!" Charlie Chaplin
In response to Marj Creech:
I don't know if there is anywhere safe and think the same along with you.
As we certainly don't think as -- shock doctrine "low in the gutter" as the Bush crime family, the Cheney crime family... and minions...
...who are suddenly silent and missing from the national scene, while "small radioactive particles" fly overhead thru the air.
Perhaps, just perhaps... they landed with the Moonies in their Paraguay hideout, next to the worlds largest clean water source - out of the radioactive winds?
Inquiring minds want to know...
----------------------
• Until the industry is ready to accept all responsibility and liability for any incident, then WHY should a Nuclear Power Co. be allowed to operate?
Are we talking about fusion here?
I have been wondering "where now brown cow" so much lately since we cannot get corruption out of government and thus our private institutions.
Point of fact: all light water reactors contain plutonium. It is converted from the U238 which makes up about 95% of the initial uranium fuel load. Roughly 40% of the power actually comes from fissioning Plutonium at about half the way into a two or three year run.
At the risk of really spinning up Michael Collins, there is another developing nuclear option: the hybrid-nuclear power plant. This technology marries a small helium reactor with a large combustion turbine, with a nuclear turbine driving the combustion turbine’s air compressor. The plant is fueled by nuclear energy and natural gas or gasified coal. The reactor is ideally suited to use thorium in addition to uranium and plutonium.
The net result of the hybrid approach is large amounts of reasonably priced energy from a physically small power plant, with all emissions cut in half. Nuclear wastes are reduced by about 80% because the plant is exceptionally efficient and half the energy comes from coal or natural gas. Is also a real nice fit with renewable energy.
Unlike conventional nuclear plants, virtually no operator action is required to keep the public safe; the reactor’s fuel can not melt, with reactor decay heat passively removed.
I understand Nexus' phrase "operates to extract value" through the fundamental axiom of the so-called 'Austrian' (von Mises) school of economics, namely, that the proper definition of 'good' (or 'utility') is the creation of accumulations of capital. That these ideas have been proclaimed as neoclassical or libertarian or in any way related to the great founder of a true libertarian school of economics, Henry C. Simons, is so offensive to history as to be downright foul.
The basic premise of Simons was simply to ask the question "What economic system is (or would be) most compatible with individual liberty?" The answer is that such an economic system can only be based on an understanding of the necessity (for individual liberty) of the breaking up of concentrations of power. Since great concentrations of wealth are inherently also great concentrations of power, the ideas of Henry Simons -- although initially admired by anti-collectivists of all kinds -- were discarded and selectively ignored by everyone from J. M. Keynes to F. D. Roosevelt and finally to the late Milton Friedman (ultimately sacrificing the ideals of his mentor on the altar of globalism) and Alan Greenspan.
Another way of looking at the problem (and solutions) is to recall that the Constitution empowers Congress to mint and print the currency. Not that Congress should do that directly. And, to be sure, there is a threat of concentration of power in any central bank. Simons recommended a stable monetary policy through a government-owned central bank, regulated by a relatively inflexible legal code rather than by the whims or genius of anything like a Federal Reserve or Chairman thereof. It is a question, for Simons, of a necessary monopoly. I think it's also possible, computers and networks being what they are, to think in terms of another old and mostly forgotten idea -- mutual banking.
Anyway you look at it, the key to success is honesty and probity. Without that ... where are we? Well, here we are.
It is heartening to see, after all these years, a renewal of interest in the original Chicago Plan after so many years of what ultimtely amounts to betrayal by the so-called 'Chicago School' (e;g., Milton Friedman) or the so-called 'Austrian School' (Ludwig v. Mises and the Institute). For example, here is an excellent summary about this from --
Blog entry at Chris Martenson forums
Disclaimer: I am not associated with Chris Martenson or his blog, and neither endorse nor dismiss his writings, which can stand on their own. Similarly, I neither endorse nor dismiss publications of the American Monetary Institute or of Stephen Zarlenga, although I do think that the way forward for survival of the U.S.A. lies in the direction indicated.
'Nexus' in comment titled "Frame of Reference" --
Hiroshe Takashi (in CounterPunch): "Now they’re talking about iodine and cesium, but that’s only part of it, they’re not using the proper detection instruments."
Comment: "Reactor 3 has used MOX-fuel and should have released plutonium."
Michael Collins comment: "This is looking like BP and the White House. Tokyo Power wants to run the show and control information."
TEPCO today reported significant releases of Plutonium "a week ago, the company said {Bloomberg)."
Bloomberg report
Plutonium-239 is said to have a half-life of 24,100 years. One atom of it is deadly, over time, if ingested.
"The Loss in State Revenues is Due to Manufacturing Job Loss"
I distinctly recall this exact point being made, as a logical consequence of the 'free trade' movement, by Ross Perot when running for president back in the 1990s.
Could it be that not enough of us were willing to take a chance on someone from outside the two major parties?
Who else is beyond frustrated that we cannot get some simple, objective, based on facts, statistics, possibilities, policies in the national interest?
Case in point is energy. Green jobs were front loaded with special interests, faux paus agendas and ended up being offshore outsourced to China to boot.
The real research money never gets to the real engineers who can solve, invent these problems (U.S. citizen engineers) it's going to the coffers of corporations and going lord knows where (try China and India again).
They we have paradigms that people are plain stuck in. They get on their favorite technology or soapbox, say fast speed rail or bikes or solar panels or whatever...
instead of looking or even having the ability to think about, the entire system.
In other words, we have energy all around us, from flushing your toilet to walking across the room to those waves nearby to methane gas to even small voltage differences in marshes and chemical reactions....
But of course, there are no lobbyists representing a system of heterogenous elements....
So, we go nowhere, like almost every policy.
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