TEPCO Cover Story Now in Full Meltdown

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Fukushima has been another TEPCO cover-up of a radioactive disaster since before the tsunami hit, and their slow, incomplete notifications have enticed regulators and the government as a whole to go along with it. A price will be paid.

After the Japanese government forced TEPCO to release hundreds of pages of documents relating to the accident in May, Bloomberg reported on May 19 that a radiation alarm went off 1.5 kilometers from the number one reactor on March 11 at 3:29 p.m., minutes before the tsunami reached the plant.

via Meltdown: What Really Happened at Fukushima? – Global – The Atlantic Wire.

[This is an amazing story by Jake Adelstein whose ability to wring truth from stones in Japan is legendary, and David McNeill, of whom I … Continue reading →

Blaming Bush Achieves Low Earth Orbit

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I am shocked — SHOCKED to see Obama political appointees blaming their predecessors.

“We have a program. We have a budget. We have bipartisan support. We have a destination,” NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said. “We are just putting finer points on the rocket design.”

But Garver and other administration officials are getting heat from some of the most famous astronauts on the planet, not to mention members of Congress and aerospace industry executives. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and someone never known to be a rabble-rouser, recently co-wrote with fellow Apollo astronauts Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan an op-ed in USA Today declaring that the space policy of the Obama administration is in “substantial disarray.” The astronauts protested the decision to kill the … Continue reading →

Blame the Customers

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Here’s a stunningly inept analysis of Japan’s problems, by somebody from a company that markets chinese crap to welfare moms.

Another problem is that Japanese business people and companies are lacking in individuality. Too many people think that everyone must be the same. That’s a basic fault.

Finally, Japanese companies seem to have their eyes in the rearview mirror. They have become introspective. I think we should get back to something more like we were at the end of the war when Japan rose to prominence from a situation in which it had nothing. (It was during this period that Fast Retailing got started, in 1949.)

I do not intend to fisk this article, but it gets thick real fast. He complains that Japan looks in the rearview, … Continue reading →

The Japan Fan Club

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This is a good article on some of the electricity-conserving measures ravaging the lives of workers in Japan and the productivity thereby lost.  I have no criticism (shockah!), as this is a healthy response to an awful set of circumstances.  There a few good answers, and plenty of worse ones.  I think Japan’s approach is right on the mark with power-savings.

I worry a little about some of the numerical targets, in that a company which never gave a damn about saving power can easily generate a 15% reduction year-to-year for 2011, whereas a “green” plant will be hard pressed to improve what they were already doing.  I hope that penalties (which are expected to be fierce) will be assessed with an eye toward that fact, but as … Continue reading →

Already Gone

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Being President is just no fun when you have no talent and no friends. It must be even less fun joined with Richard Trumka through an interference fit.

I’ve been wondering how long it will take for him to crack up, and I now think it may have already happened. Just putting a marker out there. His speeches are described as combative, erratic, divisive, tough, mean, petty, and so forth. I have an adjective for that stack: paranoid. Fund-raisers are reportedly not going well. Mass defections from his team. God knows the economy has not helped him, and that in fact he is the problem. And his friends are all enemies, and our enemies are his friends.

His position is … Continue reading →

"Cut, Cap, Balance" A Bunch of Unicorn Poop

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[Update: 19JUL2011: Cut Cap and Balance is going for a vote as early as today, in the House. I support it fully. I am pleased with the fight so far shown by the Speaker and the Leader, and while I do not agree with everything, I can hardly make that my condition for support. We must offer support whenever possible, and be blunt about when we feel support is not possible. I sincerely think that efforts such as refusing to “sign any more damned pledges” makes for a more attentive GOP and a Republican presence worth defending and expanding in Washington. Who knows: they might even pull off the cut and the cap this time. I might justsign the next pledge, if they can manage not to … Continue reading →

Obamacare Death Star Will Strike Soon

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Excellent write-up by Senator Jim DeMint.  Here’s a part, the whole ting is quite good.

Obama’s use of waivers also conceals the financial blowout that is coming in 2014. More than three million Americans haven’t seen any changes in their health insurance, yet because the president gave them a waiver, provided they first prove that ObamaCare would hike their premiums or slash their benefits.

But, all those waivers expire in 2014. And when the waivers are no longer available, rising costs will force businesses to push their employees off of private plans into the government system.

Caterpillar Corp. has said it could save 70 percent on health care costs by dropping coverage and paying the penalties. AT&T’s $2.4 billion in annual health care expenses would drop to just … Continue reading →

To Palinize, or not to Palinize?

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That is the question facing the mainstream media in their approach to Michele Bachmann. They are at the cusp. George Stephanopolous just set the scene by making it Bachmann’s responsibility to prepare 28 kids and foster kids (most all grown by now) for the media nightmare which is about to descend upon them. Gee, nice family you got there. It would be a reeeal shame if something happened to them, you know?

CNN’s Kiran Chetry spent her whole session clearly wrestling with Bachmann for control of the narrative. Five of six questions asked by Chetry were distractions about gaffes, including one in which she asked if this was all too distracting. Have you EVER seen any of the lefty press ask Bachmann her position on tax policy? She … Continue reading →

Fukushima Leaks 15K Liters

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The news gets worse and better.

About 15 metric tons of water with a low level of radiation leaked from a storage tank at the plant on the Pacific coast, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) said it was investigating the cause of the leak which was later repaired.

via Radioactive water leaks from Japan’s damaged plant | Reuters.

 

If my math is right (I don’t have my Fukushima cheat sheet with me), this is less than one hour’s worth of water throughput, and it is lightly contaminated, not heavily. That’s not good, but it’s a lot better than it could be.

And, the decontamination machinery which was abruptly stopped after running only an hour and a half … Continue reading →

TEPCO's Other Cooling Problem

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TEPCO hosted a record-breaking shareholders’ meeting, not only becoming he longest, but perhaps the most contentious in living memory.

“I apologize from the bottom of my heart for the trouble and fear that we have brought to our shareholders, and to society,” said the chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata, at a tightly guarded Tokyo hotel.

“We will do our utmost to bring the accident to a resolution and to work toward our mission of providing a stable source of electricity,” he said.

Some investors refused to be placated. “Go jump into a reactor and die!” one elderly man shouted at the row of executives present, before being escorted out by attendants.

At one point, when Mr. Katsumata tried to wrap up a question-and-answer session, angry shareholders rushed the stage. The … Continue reading →