Grayson w/ Cenk on Drug Testing Public Employees In Florida
TheYoungTurks
Friday, April 08, 2011
THE PEOPLE WHO COUNT THE VOTES IN WISCONSIN...
Thu Apr 07, 2011 at 08:06 PM EDT
Why Prosser needed EXACTLY +7500 votes....
by Cieran
In WI, a recount at state-expense is triggered if an election is within .5% if the candidate requests it, and we have a fully verifiable paper trail to audit election results. That means in this election with approximately 740k for Kloppenburg and 739k for Prosser, the vote gets recounted at state-expense if the election is within ~7400 votes.
So the last 2 days the WI-GOP has been scrambling trying to figure out how they can still get Prosser into office. What was the result of their brain-storming? Add a few extra votes in a friendly area (Waukesha), and call it a clerical error. But in order to steal the election, they NEED to be able to keep a recount from occurring, because a recount would expose their attempted fraud to the light of day.
So they couldn't just give Prosser a couple hundred to put him barely in the lead by 40. They had to give him more than 7500 in order to get above the threshold for a free recount, so that the only way for a recount to happen would be if Kloppenburg ponies up the money for a state-wide recount, which could be expensive. Granted, all of us in WI would be happy to donate to a potential recount effort if it gets to that point, but the resolve of the Kloppenburg camp remains to be seen.
When the Republicans have declared victory starting tomorrow, they will use the full power of their media empire to pressure KloJo to concede instead of paying for a recount. They'll say she's a sore loser if she pushes for a recount outside of the .5% margin. They'll say the gap is so wide that a recount couldn't possibly swing enough votes her way, so she shouldn't waste the time of election workers. They'll say she's just further trying to divide the people of WI. They will do EVERYTHING they can to make sure NO ONE checks the paper trail. Because the paper trail will be the nail in their coffin.
We must not let them succeed in this attempted fraud.
It is NOT a coincidence that Prosser didn't get +300 votes or +1000, it had to be +7500 or more in order for the fraud to work. +7400 just wouldn't have been enough.
RECOUNT WISCONSIN!
UPDATE:
Why did the GOP aim for the .5% mark?
In WI we know that an election that is within 200ish votes deserves to have a careful examination of every ballot - whichever side is ahead. We have a sense of fairness here. While technically the losing side would have to request a recount if under .5%, it's understood that no one would be accusing said candidate of having sour grapes or being a sore loser if they requested it in an election determined by ~200 votes out of 1.5 million.
But it's different when there's a 7500 vote difference, it breaks that psychological barrier that it's not close enough for a critical re-examination as the likelihood of overcoming such a deficit would be unlikely. When the candidate has to pony up their own cash because the state considers a recount of that wide of a margin to be frivolous, public opinion changes.
And you KNOW Fox News and Rush will be hammering home this meme: She's pursuing a frivolous recount and dividing the state, sour grapes, sore loser, don't be Al Gore, etc etc. The GOP is acutely aware of this psychological barrier, which is why they went for +7500 instead of +7400.
Great new diary about the criminal clerk from Walkersha county.
And it turns out she's lying when she says Microsoft Access didn't save when she closed the file. See this diary for more info
Updated by Cieran at Thu Apr 07, 2011 at 07:10 PM PDT
Statement from JoAnne Kloppenburg campaign manager Melissa Mulliken:
"Wisconsin voters as well as the Kloppenburg for Justice Campaign deserve a full explanation of how and why these 14,000 votes from an entire City were missed. To that end, we will be filing open records requests for all relevant documentation related to the reporting of election results in Waukesha County, as well as to the discovery and reporting of the errors announced by the County. We are confident that election officials in Waukesha County will fulfill these requests as quickly as possible so that both our campaign and the people of Wisconsin can fully understand what happened and why. Just as Assistant Attorney General Kloppenburg has run to restore confidence in the court, Wisconsin residents also deserve to have full confidence in election results."
Updated by Cieran at Thu Apr 07, 2011 at 07:41 PM PDT
Statement from state Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller (D):
"It stretches the bounds of credibility to think that over 14,300 votes were somehow 'overlooked' until two days after the election.
Based on the partisan, political history of Ms. Nickolaus and the serious concerns that have been raised, by other Waukesha County officials, about the quality of her election administration and the possibility for fraud, an independent investigation of her conduct and the county's election results is not just warranted but urgently demanded to protect the integrity of our electoral system in Wisconsin."
The group Citizen Action of Wisconsin is calling for an immediate federal investigation and impoundment of all computer equipment, ballots, and other relevant evidence needed to verify a fair vote count in Waukesha County.
“Given the shocking character of this afternoon’s revelations, and its tremendous importance for the perceived integrity of Wisconsin’s governmental institutions, it is absolutely essential that there be a full investigation which is so beyond reproach that all Wisconsin citizens can have faith in the validity of the outcome,” said Robert Kraig, executive director of Citizen Action. “In the current political climate in Wisconsin, only an investigation by a U.S. Attorney can be seen by all citizens of the state as independent and above politics."
HOW BAD IS THE FALLOUT IN THE U.S. OF RADIONUCLIDES FROM THE FUKUSHIMA DISASTER? TWO PIECES OF GOOD NEWS: (1) VERY, VERY LITTLE YET AND (2) VERY, VERY SENSITIVE MEASUREMENTS ARE BEING MADE AND PUBLISHED!
Blogger's Note: I used radiation sources for 33 years while at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC and for several years before my retirement I was curator of NRL's very hot Cobalt-60 gamma ray source. So I know a lot more about nuclear radiations than the guy in the street, but much, much less than those who actually specialize in radiation.
However, by joining the Ionizing Radiation Detection Group on LinkIn, I've gained access to some of the real experts. In particular, I learned from F. Patrick Doty, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories, that the highest reported activity as of the end of March due to Fukushima-fallout measured by the University of Washington was only 32 mBq/m3, meaning that "about 2 atoms of iodine decay per minute per cubic meter of air." Trivially small!
The other part of the good news is the extremely high sensitivity of the measurements and the fact that they are being published. Although the data below end at the end of March, I presume measurements continue to be taken and that any new spikes in activity will be published shortly at the UW Physics site.
Otherwise, for those wanting a better understanding of the means of analyzing radionuclides in the air, Dr. Doty recommended downloading this EPA guide book.
The Japanese earthquake and tsunami caused a severe event at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant. At the University of Washington Physics Department we rapidly adapted one of our basic research labs to monitor for the arrival of trace amounts of fission products produced at Fukushima. On Friday, March 18, we detected the first trace amounts of radioactive isotopes from Fukushima in Seattle. We stress that the overall amount of the radioactivity is extremely low, at least thousands of times below EPA limits. For all of the details, see our recent article on the arXiv!
Here are the most recent data
Click here to view more peaks visible in our data.
Thursday, April 07, 2011
ANOTHER REAGAN ADMINISTRATION ECONOMIST DECRIES THE FEDERAL RESERVE'S CURRENT POLICIES, SPECIFICALLY IT'S SUPPORT OF CENTRAL BANKING CARTEL'S MARKET RIGGING IN SUPPORT OF THE YEN
OUTSIDE THE BOX
Crony capitalism strikes again
Commentary: The Federal Reserve juices speculators
By David Stockman
This is part one of a two-part series by David Stockman.
GREENWICH, Conn. (MarketWatch) — Someone has to stop the Federal Reserve before it crushes what remains of America’s Main Street economy.
First, joining the central banking cartels’ market rigging operation in support of the yen, the Fed helped bail-out carry traders from a savage short-covering squeeze. Then, green lighting the big banks for another go-round of the dividend and share-buyback scam, it handsomely rewarded options traders who had been front-running this announcement for weeks.
Indeed, this sort of action is so blatant that the Fed might as well just look for a financial vein in the vicinity of 200 West St., and proceed straight-away to mainline the trading desks located there.
In any event, the yen intervention certainly had nothing to do with the evident distress of the Japanese people. What happened is that one of the potent engines of the global carry-trade — the massive use of the yen as a zero cost funding currency — backfired violently in response to the unexpected disasters in Japan.
Accordingly, this should have been a moment of condign punishment — wiping out years of speculative gains in heavily leveraged commodity and emerging market currency and equity wagers, and putting two-way risk back into the markets for so-called risk assets.
Instead, once again, speculators were reassured that in the global financial casino operated by the world’s central bankers, the house is always there for them—this time with an exchange rate cap on what would otherwise have been a catastrophic surge in their yen funding costs.
Is it any wonder, then, that the global economy is being pummeled by one speculative tsunami after the next? Ever since the latest surge was trigged last summer by the Jackson Hole smoke signals about QE2, the violence of the price action in the risk asset flavor of late — cotton, met coal, sugar, oil, coffee, copper, rice, corn, heating oil and the rest — has been stunning, with moves of 10% a week or more.
In the face of these ripping commodity index gains, the Fed’s argument that surging food costs are due to emerging market demand growth is just plain lame. Was there a worldwide fasting ritual going on during the months just before the August QE2 signals when food prices were much lower? And haven’t the EM economies been growing at their present pace for about the last 15 years now, not just the last seven months?
Similarly, the supply side has had its floods and droughts — like always. But these don’t explain the price action, either. Take Dr. Cooper’s own price chart during the past 12 months: last March the price was $3.60 per pound — after which it plummeted to $2.80 by July, rose to $4.60 by February and revisited $4.10 per pound.
That violent round trip does not chart Mr. Market’s considered assessment of long-term trends in mining capacity or end-use industrial consumption. Instead, it reflects central bank triggered speculative tides which begin on the futures exchanges and ripple out through inventory stocking and de-stocking actions all around the world — even reaching the speculative copper hoards maintained by Chinese pig farmers and the vandals who strip-mine copper from the abandoned tract homes in Phoenix.
The short-covering panic in the yen forex markets following Japan’s intervention, and the subsequent panicked response by the central banks, wasn’t just a low frequency outlier — the equivalent of an 8.9 event on the financial Richter scale. Rather, it is the predictable result of the lunatic ZIRP monetary policy which has been pursued by the Bank of Japan for more than a decade now--and with the Fed, BOE and ECB not far behind.
Japan has been suffering from a real estate asset deflation which followed the collapse of its spectacular 1980’s financial bubble — but not price deflation on consumer goods and services. In fact, Japan’s headline CPI index was 94.1 in 1990 compared to 99.8 during the last quarter of 2010. Thus, during the past 20 years there has been a slight CPI inflation (0.3% annually) — notwithstanding the incessant deflation-fear mongering of the Keynesian commentariat.
To be sure, Japan’s so-called “core” CPI is down several points during that long period, but by all accounts the Japanese people have been eating, driving and heating their homes for the past two decades on a regular basis. Accordingly, they have paid slightly more for mostly imported food and energy and slightly less for everything else. But the overall consumer price index has been flat, meaning that real interest rates have been zero for the better part of a decade now.
And that’s the evil. Free money has not reflated domestic real estate because Japan’s bubble era prices were absurdly high and can’t be regained, and because Japanese real estate — both residential and commercial — is still heavily burdened with debt which cannot be repaid. Yet market economies — even Japan’s cartelized kind — are not disposed to look a gift horse in the mouth. Free money always finds an outlet, and the pathway of choice has been the transformation of the yen into a global “funding” currency.
This sounds antiseptic enough, but it means that in its wisdom the BOJ has invited the whole world — everyone from Mr. and Mrs. Watanabe to state-of-the-art London hedge fund traders — to short the yen in order to finance speculations in the Aussie dollar, the big iron and copper miners, cotton futures, the Brent/WTI spread, and an endless procession of like and similar speculative cocktails. Yet as the speculators rotate endlessly from one risk asset class to the next they can remain supremely confident that their yen carry cost will remain virtually zero. Yen interest rates will not go up because the BOJ is intellectually addicted to ZIRP, and because, in any event, it dare not surprise the market with an interest rate hike, thereby triggering a violent unwind of the yen carry trades it has fostered
In short, the BOJ is sitting on a financial fault line. The post-intervention rip to 76 yen to the dollar was not the work of a fat finger; instead, it represented a real-time measure of the furies bottled up in the system due to Japan’s foolish rental of its “funding currency” to global speculators. Having long ago urged the BOJ to embrace this absurd monetary policy, it is not uprising that Bernanke and his confederates have come to the rescue—for the moment.
It is only a matter of time, however, before the yen explodes under the accumulated short seller’s pressure, and then the lights will really go out on Japan Inc. In the meanwhile, ordinary people the world around will get less food per dollar from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT) and speculators, basking in the wealth effect, will have even more dollars to spend at Tiffany & Co. (NYSE:TIF)
In this context, there can also be little doubt that the Fed is trying really hard to transform the dollar into a funding currency, too. In the name of fighting a phantom deflation, the nation’s central bank has kept interest rates absurdly low—transforming the dollar into a weakling even against the misbegotten Euro, and therefore something which speculators can more safely short.
But just like the case of Japan, there is no sign of CPI deflation in the U.S. Our headline CPI index has gone from 130.7 in 1990 to 218.1 in 2010 — marking a 2.6% annual inflation over the past two decades. And, no, it hasn’t slowed down much during the Bernanke era of deflation phobia.
The headline CPI index has risen at a 2.4% rate in the last 10 years, hardly a measureable de-acceleration; and it has gained at a 2.2% rate in the last five years — a rate at which, as Paul Volcker right observed, the purchasing power of the dollar would be cut in half during the typical American’s working lifetime. Even since the alleged June 2009 recession bottom, the headline CPI has climbed at a 2.1% annual rate.
So there is no deflation — just a simulacrum of it based on the observation that the CPI less food and energy has randomly fluttered around the flat-line on several recent monthly readings. It is not obvious, of course, that the rise of this index at a 1.1% annual rate during the last 20 months of recovery is a bad thing — for at that rate we begin to approach the idea of honest money. But the spurious circular logic of the Fed’s focus on this inflationless inflation index is self-evident upon cursory examination of its internals.
Fully 40% of the CPI less food and energy is owner’s equivalent rent—the one price that is actually deflating and which is doing so precisely due to the Fed’s own policies. Residential rents are falling or flat because the market is being battered with a) millions of involuntary rental supply units owing to the wave of home mortgage foreclosures, and b) an extraordinary shrinkage in the number of rental units demanded due to the doubling-up, and even tripling-up, of destitute households.
Part two of this column will be published next week.
David Stockman is a former member of the House of Representatives and a member of the Reagan administration. He currently owns his private equity fund, Heartland Industrial Partners, L.P.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
HOW MUCH OF THIS DID YOU HEAR ABOUT FROM THE "MAINSTREAM MEDIA"?
theREALnews
April 6, 2011
Thousands Across USA Rally in Support of Workers' Rights
In hundreds of cities, thousands rally to show support for public sector workers
Monday, April 04, 2011
TODAY AMERICANS FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE (EXCEPT THE FILTHY RICH) TOOK TO THE STREETS TO DEMAND BACK THE RIGHTS OF WHICH THEY ARE BEING ROBBED
Blogger's Note: The turnout today is certainly being short-schrifted by the so-called "mainstream media," so below I show a map of the major demonstrations planned and a video of a demonstration against the Koch brothers in D.C.
The full article below spells out all of the reasons why up to 90% of all Americans are being shafted by our kleptocratic national and state governments.
AlterNet/by Leo Gerard
Greedy Corporations and the Wealthy Fatten Themselves on the Rest of Us -- Join "We Are One" Rallies to Stop the Freeloaders
The rich have been sucking the economic lifeblood from the middle class for decades. Today, "We Are One" rallies are happening all over the country.
April 3, 2011 | The nation’s greedy corporations and insatiable wealthy are fattening themselves on workers. There’s no trickle down. It’s the opposite; the rich have been sucking the economic lifeblood from the middle class for decades.
When reckless Wall Street banksters get taxpayer-funded bailouts, billionaires get tax breaks and gigantic corporations like GE and Bank of America pay absolutely no federal income taxes, they’re getting for free the very public services that enable them to make massive profits in this country – the courts, the roads, the trade regulators, the patent enforcement.
The middle class doesn’t get those big time special deals and loopholes. Workers pay their taxes. As a result, it’s workers footing the bill for the government services that enrich the rich. Greedy corporations, their CEOs and the right-wing politicians they buy with tens of millions in campaign cash are freeloaders.
It’s time workers stood up to the freeloaders. Join Monday’s We Are One rallies. These demonstrations across the country by religious groups, social justice organizations and labor unions will illustrate that the middle class is mad as hell and not going to take trickster economics anymore.
It’s time for greedy corporations and the insatiable rich to pay their fair share. It’s time to stop cuts to the government programs most treasured by and vital to the middle class and the vulnerable in this country – education, public transportation, Social Security. It’s time to stop right-wing attempts to terminate democratic rights like collective bargaining and voting without harassment. It’s time for the middle class to stop paying for everything and for the insatiable rich and greedy corporations to start sharing the sacrifice required to recover from the economic crisis caused by reckless gambling by Wall Street bankster corporations.
March for your rights Monday. March for the middle class facing record rates of foreclosure, unemployment, child poverty, and loss of opportunity as country club conservatives cut off college loans and Head Start. March for the right of college students to register and vote in the towns where they study. March for the right of workers to band together, elect representatives and bargain with employers for better pay and working conditions. March for the right of the people to insist that corporations pay at least the same rate of taxes as workers do. March to end tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent who have now acquired more wealth than all the workers in the bottom 90 percent.
Greedy corporations, the insatiable wealthy and their purchased politicians have for three decades skewed public policy to enrich themselves while pushing down wages and benefits for the middle class.
From 1947 to 1975, a time of strong unionization in the workforce, real wages of average workers increased with productivity. The 75 percent rise in productivity and the nearly matching rise in wages gave the United States the largest, most vibrant middle class in the history of the world.
Since 1978, productivity grew 86 percent, but compensation for workers grew only 37 percent, and if the cost of benefits, mostly uncontrolled health insurance increases, is removed, the real average hourly wage did not rise for 35 years, according to Alan S. Blinder, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Here’s how it works: The nation’s largest corporation, General Electric, earns tens of billions in profits from the labor of its workers but refuses to share the benefits with them. GE is expected to demand that its 15,000 unionized U.S. workers accept benefit cuts. So they’ll pay more for their retirement and health care and have less money to live and to pay taxes.
Meanwhile, the share of national income captured by the richest one percent rose from 8 percent in 1975 to 23.5 percent in 2005.
Under Dwight D. Eisenhower, the president in the 1950s, the nation’s richest paid an effective tax rate of 70 percent after loopholes. Today, it’s 16 percent – significantly lower than the 25 percent forked over through payroll deductions by individual workers earning between $34,500 and $83,600 a year.
That resulted from deliberate policy changes. Beginning with Ronald Reagan, country club conservatives cut taxes for the wealthy, while at the same time ending routine minimum wage increases and undermining the bargaining rights of labor.
The changes were made by increasingly wealthy politicians increasingly influenced by lobbyists. For example, 60 percent of the freshmen in the U.S. Senate and 40 percent in the U.S. House are millionaires. By contrast, only 1 percent of Americans are worth more than $1 million.
Compounding that is corporate influence, which worsened last year when the U.S. Supreme Court enabled corporations to donate unlimited money in secret. The upshot is corporations like General Electric, spending millions to lobby and paying zero in federal income taxes. GE spent $200 million to lobby for loopholes in the federal income tax code over the past decade, made $26 billion in American profits over the past five years, and not only paid absolutely no federal income taxes, but got itself a $4.1 billion rebate from the IRS.
That is far from an anomaly. Two out of every three U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. And the situation hasn’t improved since then. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has written repeatedly about tax avoidance by the likes of Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, Wall Street banks that former President George W. Bush handed hundreds of billions in bail out dollars.
Bank of America got a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, even though it made $4.4 billion. Goldman paid only 1.1 percent in federal income taxes on its $2.3 billion in profits. New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski wrote in his story about GE that such tax dodging by corporations has resulted in a significant decline in federal revenue from corporations – from 30 percent in the 1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.
Tax avoidance is a virtuous cycle for greedy corporations and the wealthy. They pay less in taxes, then have more money to lobby politicians to lower their taxes. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that lawmakers are hiring lobbyists right from their K Street firms to write legislation. And Congress’ new right wingers are increasing this trend. Since they took office in January, nearly half of the 150 former lobbyists working in top policy jobs in Congress were hired.
For workers, however, it’s a vicious cycle. They’re forced to pay the taxes shirked by greedy corporations and the insatiable wealthy. And they’re forced to suffer service cut backs.
Right now, right wingers are trying to cut $51.5 billion from the federal budget – demanding elimination of programs essential to the middle class and poor such as subsidies for home heating for the impoverished. But if the wealthy paid their share, say hedge fund manager John Paulson who earned $2.4 million an hour in 2010 – then those cuts would be unnecessary because the federal government would have an extra $69.5 billion in revenue.
Forty-three years ago on April 4 Martin Luther King was assassinated after standing up for the right of public sector workers in Memphis, Tenn. to negotiate for better lives.
In his last speech, Rev. King said God had allowed him to go to the mountaintop where he’d looked over and seen the Promised Land. “I may not get there with you,” he cautioned, “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land.”
Greedy corporations and the wealthy have made it to the mountain top. And they’re shoving American workers down the hillside to ensure the Promised Land is reserved only for the richest.
The promise of America democracy is equality. Equal rights, equal treatment under the law, equal opportunity. Freeloading by greedy corporations and the insatiable wealthy is denying those promises to the vast majority of citizens. Americans must unify and march to wrest back those rights and secure the American Dream for all.
Take a first step. Join one of the 600 We Are One demonstrations on April 4.
Leo W. Gerard is the international president of the United Steelworkers union. He is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee.
EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS: Latest Satellite Imagery From Fukushima Tells Sobering Tale
Friday, April 1, 2011, 4:54 pm, by cmartenson
Drawing upon the expertise of our resident nuclear engineer and Ann Stringer, imaging expert, we conclude that the situation at Fukushima is not stabilized: Things are not yet at a place of steady progress in the containment and clean-up efforts. It's still a dance, forwards and backwards, with the workers making gains here and there but the situation forcing them to react defensively all too often.
In this report, we will tell you what we know for sure, what we are nearly certain of, and what we remain forced to speculate about.
Here is a portion of a much larger image (covering 25 square kilometers in total) showing the reactor complex as of March 31, at roughly mid-day:
 |
| Photo Credit, 2011, DigitalGlobe |
What We Can See
Here's what we can directly observe in the larger satellite image:- Steam is still rising from Reactors #2, #3 (circled in green), and #4.
- Of the four reactor buildings, three are nearly or totally destroyed, while the outside (at least) of the fourth is in relatively better shape.
- We can count 7 fire trucks 'on site' with another 7 just to the north, all with water lines strung out across the ground.
- There is only one ship/vessel to be seen, located inside of the breakwater and nearly as far to the north as it can go inside that boundary.
- A significant number of the vehicles that can be seen at the core of the site have not moved since the first released photos on March 12.
- There is a parking lot slightly to the north and west with approximately 250 passenger vehicles in it and a side lot with 30 large green tanks neatly arranged in rows.
- The rest of the area contains one-, two-, and four-lane roads (no traffic at all), worked farmland, residential and commercial areas, mostly empty parking lots, and two baseball diamonds.
Here's what we don't see...
- Nowhere in the 25 km area in the main photo can we find anything that looks like a staging area with a large collection of assets such as tanker trucks, pumpers, cement trucks, piles of pre-staged materials, ambulances, and fire trucks.
- The cement pumper truck seen a week ago has been apparently replaced by the boom at Reactor #4.
- There's no obvious barge delivering fresh water for the reactor cooling efforts as recently reported. (Perhaps it has come and gone?)
- There are no obvious changes to the roofs of any of the reactors.
- We don't see any people outside the plants working.
Things we can logically conclude...
The steam that is venting is a mixed blessing. It implies that cooling water is getting to some hot material, which is a good thing, but it also means that something is hot enough to vaporize water, leading to the continued release of radioactive contamination into the surrounding environment and further bombarding the reactor complex with radiation, which complicates the work efforts. [Note: prior sentence edited for clarity on April 2, 2011].This means that the lack of steam coming from Reactor #1 is either a very good sign, or a very bad sign. Good because it could mean that the containment vessels are intact and cooling water is circulating. Bad because it could imply that no water is getting to it, and it is a very hot mass right now. According to TEPCO, Reactor #1 has had seawater, and now freshwater, circulating through the reactor vessel - and since both containment vessels are intact, we'll conclude the lack of steam is a good sign.
The situation at Fukushima is going to drag on for years. First there's the matter of stabilizing the situation, and this has not yet been fully achieved. Recent surprises in terms of the amounts and locations of radioactivity are one sign that the situation is not fully stabilized. Still, nothing has blown up in quite a while, the steam venting appears consistent, and the major surprises seem to be over for now. While the TEPCO workers are still reacting to things as they arise, these are smaller issues than last week, which is another hopeful sign.
The detected presence of neutron beams, I-134, and radioactive chlorine are all strongly supportive of the idea that criticality has resumed. Our best guess is that these are localized pockets, probably of short duration, and do not involve the entire core mass of any particular reactor conflagrating in some gigantic, greenish blob of uncontrolled fission. The geometries of the fuel in relation to neutron moderators requires precise conditions to support sustained fission and so it is rather unlikely to be occurring in anything other than localized pockets. If the entire reactor in its fully operational state was capable of supporting what we might scale to 100% fission, the amount of fission happening after a partial (or complete) meltdown will be a far lesser percentage. Still, any amount of fission is unwelcome at this point, because it is adding to the heat and generating fresh radioactive elements that can escape.
The constantly rising levels of radioactivity found in the seawater are a further unwelcome development, but without a proper isotope analysis, we cannot conclude anything about the potential resumption of fission from their gross amounts alone. It's always possible that the leftover fission products are now being washed in larger amounts into the sea for some reason.
Additional Drone Photos
These are the most detailed photos yet to emerge into the public space (released yesterday, March 31, as far as I know), and they are purported to come from a drone flyover on March 20 and 24. They are really quite good, and worth viewing in their entirety here.Beginning with Reactor #3, one thing we can say is that this thing is a right proper mess:
There's a significant hole to the left of center that goes deep into the sub-structure (with a strange greenish cast that we've not been able to resolve after much conjecture) and it's clear that this building alone will take a long time to resolve.
Interestingly, we get our clearest image yet of the hole in turbine building #3 that was created by something ejected into the air during the Reactor #3 explosion.
Looking like one of those cartoon cutouts that happens when the coyote hits the ground, we get the impression that whatever it was happened to be quite heavy and possibly shaped like an Apollo capsule. It has been my suspicion, contradicting the official story, that the concrete containment vessel was what actually blew up in Reactor #3. I have been looking for evidence of in the form of large, heavy chunks of concrete (especially the refueling plug) lying about. I don't know what made this hole in the roof of the turbine building, but it was heavy.
Reactor #4 provides us with proof that serious damage can result from the effects of an overheated spent fuel storage pool:
Here the watering boom can be clearly seen. A camera was recently attached to the boom, and it took some interior shots that were suggestive of the idea that the spent fuel pool is damaged and largely drained of water. Spraying water into this pool, then, is probably a balancing act, with the desire to spray enough water on the rods to keep them cool being offset by the risk of having radioactive water drain away for parts unknown.
Almost certainly this same balancing act defines the efforts for Reactors #2 and #3 as well.
Conclusions
The efforts at Fukushima are probably weeks away from even basic stabilization, and we are years away from any sort of a final resolution. This crisis is going to be with all of us for a very long time. Radioactive material will continue to escape from the complex into the environment for weeks at best, and months or years at worst.The chief concern here is that things might still take a turn for the worse, whereby radiation spikes to levels that prevent humans from getting close enough to perform meaningful operations and work on the site. If the radiation spikes high enough, it will force an evacuation from the vicinity, complicating every part of what has to happen next, from monitoring to remediation.
The general lack of staged materials anywhere in the vicinity indicates that authorities have not yet decided on a plan of action, feeding our assessment that they are still in 'react mode' and that we are weeks away from nominal stabilization.
On Thursday we learned from the Wall Street Journal that TEPCO only had one stretcher, a satellite phone, 50 protective suits, and enough dosimeters to give only a single one to each worker group. Given this woeful level of preparation, it is not surprising to see that regular fire trucks, cement trucks, and a lack of staged materials comprise much of the current damage-control mix.
We don't yet know enough to conclude how much fission has spontaneously re-occurred, but we have strong suspicions that the number is higher than zero. Here we make our call for the release of more complete and timely radiation readouts and sampling results by TEPCO and Japan so that we can assess what the true risks are. The situation remains fluid, and quite a lot depends now on chance and which way the wind blows.
And as I detailed in the Alert report I issued soon after the tragic events of the Japan earthquake and tsunami on March 10, the impact of Japan's tribulations on the global economy will be large and vast. World markets are simply unprepared for the third-largest economy to suddenly and violently downshift. The persisting crisis at Fukushima simply worsens the picture.
As always, we'll continue montioring developments closely and reporting our findings and conclusions on this site.
best,
Chris
Sunday, April 03, 2011
HOW THE FED IS DESTROYING THE US ECONOMY
Presented March 17, 2011, to the hearing of the Domestic Monetary Policy & Technology Subcommittee, chaired by Ron Paul.
James Grant is the long time publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer.
In just five minutes he lays out in vivid detail how the Federal Reserve and its policies and powers are undermining the US economy by favoring banksters over the best interests of savers and productive people.
Saturday, April 02, 2011
IN THE U.S. WORKERS BATTLE FOR FORMER RIGHTS NOW BEING THREATENED BY ANTI-UNION PLUTOCRAT GOVERNORS
April 01, 2011
Democrats Vow to Seek Public Referendum as Ohio Enacts Anti-Union Bill
Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich has signed a bill that strips collective bargaining rights for more than 360,000 state workers and bars them from striking. Democrats have announced plans to collect some 230,000 signatures in the next 90 days to block immediate implementation of the law and put it to a public referendum on the November ballot. “This idea of government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations has actually taken hold,” says our guest, Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who represents Ohio’s 10th District. “Unions are one of the last lines of defense against a corporate plutocracy.” [Original w/ transcript]
IN HONDURAS THE PEOPLE BATTLE POLICE TO TAKE BACK THEIR RIGHTS FOLLOWING A U.S.-SPONSORED RIGHT-WING COUP
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| Mayan ruins of Copan, Honduras (Blogger's photo) |
theREALNEWS
April 1, 2011
Students Battle Police at Honduran University
Students and teachers defend against police attack on resistance movement at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras
March 31, 2011
Report from Land Occupations in Post-Coup Honduras
Poor farmers are taking land from agribusiness that supported the 2009 military coup--and paying with their lives
March 31, 2011
Brutal Repression in Honduras Targets Teachers, Popular Resistance
Weeks of demonstrations continue against de-facto regime and its plans to privatize public education
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