Economic Undertow

Fukushima Update ...

2011-06-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

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The lack of urgency in Japan regarding the 'Fuku-sham-a Meltdown Madness' is astounding. The Japanese are facing unspeakable consequences. A not- quite worst case scenario will have Tokyo or much of the main Japanese island of Honshu queasily 'habitable' for years to centuries with a large 'dead zone' surrounding the N- plants.

A worst- case will poison the entire country along with the atmosphere and the Pacific ocean food chain and the ocean itself.

Where is the world on this? Where is the International Atomic Energy Agency?

In Japan, patting TEPCO and the Japanese government on the back!

The Chinese aren't saying a word because they are in the process of building a hundred of their own cardboard-box reactors. South Korea and post- Soviet Russia are nuclear consumers. Nobody cares about what North Korea thinks about anything.

Nuclear disasters lead inevitably to the reactor disaster cover-ups. Fuku-shame-a is an existential threat to the industry. For this reason, the industry's government promoters dare not speak to the facts too loudly or appear to respond to them.

The Japanese government is AWOL. Prime Minister Kan has announced his resignation but has given no firm date for it.
TEPCO falls farther behind in the water-pumping race against itself, The establishment clearly has no clue.
Every passing day brings closer the inevitable calamity: a prompt criticality within a reactor, a steam explosion, a more powerful hydrogen explosion, the collapse of a reactor building, a spent fuel fire leading to a 'large release' at one time of intense radiation (+100 Sieverts) that causes a hard-to-deny number of instant fatalities among the plant workers ... or something else much worse, all of the above.
TEPCO's puny efforts have failed to 'stabilize' anything. They have produced some colorful graphics but these are meaningless.
TEPCO never says how much radioactivity is in the waste-water.

Inquiring minds would like to know ...

Fukushima Water Has More Radiation Than Released Into Air

(Bloomberg) -- The water level in basements and trenches at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima plant rose and may contain more radiation than is known to have been released into the atmosphere in the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

The amount of contaminated water rose to about 105 million liters (28 million gallons) from 100 million liters on May 18, and may start overflowing after June 20, the company known as Tepco said in a statement today. Radiation in the water is estimated at 720,000 terabecquerels, general manager Junichi Matsumoto said at a media briefing in Tokyo.

Tepco has pumped millions of liters of water to cool three reactors that melted down at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi station after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out power and backup generators, crippling its cooling systems. With Japan's rainy season in full swing, heavy downpours threaten to flood the plant and leak more radiation into the sea, soil and air.

"The risk of overflow is as serious as the meltdown of reactor fuel rods that's already happened," Tetsuo Ito, the head of the Atomic Energy Research Institute at Kinki University in western Japan, said in a phone interview. "Tepco should've acknowledged this risk weeks ago and could've taken any urgent measures."

It has never been enough for a country to simply have ... electricity. There has to be electricity that conforms to a cultural ideal; American-style 'Tail- Fin Capitalism'. Within modernity, it is not enough to have enough, there must be excess ... so there is a plenitude to waste.

Modernity appears to defy diminishing returns. This is a large part of modernity's appeal: it pretends to void Steve's First Law of Economics which has surplus- management costs rising faster than the value of the surplus itself. The waste- based economy turns the surplus- cost defect on its head. As a cultural -- rather than an economic -- asset, greed (surplus) becomes a cost- free good that rationalizes other goods' cost- free waste.

It is modernity's persistent and hopeful illusion of goods and waste that has undermined the processes that would allow modernity's excesses to self-correct. 'Endless growth' becomes modernity's marching song as it limps to the abyss, with growth itself masquerading as its own cost- free good.

Meanwhile, back at the reality ranch the costs of surplus electricity multiply like cockroaches. What about all the other reactors @ Fukushima? What about the other 50 reactors in Japan? What happens to these fifty reactors after Japan becomes too radioactive to comfortably endure, or too poor to afford reactor maintenance? All of this eludes public discussion, which presumes the immediate past extending endlessly/effortlessly into the waste- endowed future.

Once the current 'rough spot' gets past itself, that is ...

Modernity promises a future of yellow- brick super-highways lined on both sides with electricity- driven 'progress'. The Japanese have determinedly unlearned their own history as part of the 'progress process'. Beginning when US Admiral Perry and his 'Black Ships' appeared in Tokyo Bay in 1853, the country has made one Faustian agreement after the other with industrial modernity, all of which have brutally failed.

Japan's nuclear bargain is set to turn out no better than all the others. Yet modernity succeeds by its 'act of positive forgetting' which insists the past in all of its iterations is a thing devoid of value. Modernity's past failures never matter because only a truncated, undeveloped form of modernity has ever been allowed to exist ... that form being 'The Past' itself! Like Catholic transcendentalism, the tautology/circular logic of modernity exists always out of reach within the future, one that conveniently never arrives to challenge modernity's own claims upon it.

'Action words' that emerge like demons from the modernity's nuclear cauldron speak to incomprehensible truths: 'meltdown', 'radiation', 'fissile', 'Cherenkov', 'criticality'; this is the new-technocratic banality of evil-speak. People cannot endure the power of ideas that grasp the hand and snatch into the void: horrors of their childrens' monstrous deformities, of inedible food as ashes- in the mouths of the starving, of skin sloughing off and teeth falling out, of dead organs rotting within living bodies and of freakish cancers. This is cyborg/post- humanoid terror that orbits in dimensions outside the reptilian brain- fear of tooth and claw we are all born with.

This is also the 'innovation' of the post- food stamp, poverty- based 'Niewe Economy' that we have built for ourselves. Caught between pet devils, humans curl into the fetal position rejecting all responsibilities. We have 'evolved' into larvae in the laboratory of easy credit and 24 hour convenience, constantly orienting ourselves toward the shiny: neon/LED blinking advertising signs, parking garages with 24 hour illumination, the flat-screen televisions with 'vacant' on and uber- chic maglev bullet trains that go from nowhere to nowhere faster than do the current bullet trains.

The Japanese crisis response is easy to understand from the cultural standpoint, incomprehensible from the standpoint of physics. Occasionally, children are required to stop playing and conquer fears so as to escape large consequences. The Soviets may have over-reacted at Chernobyl but they understood physics. By relocating hundreds of thousands of people and by putting hundreds of thousands more to work clearing the site they were responding to the dynamic imposed by splitting atoms -- leaving the various cultural/political constituencies to take care of themselves.

By acting as they did, the Soviets insured a margin of safety for the other three RBMK reactors at the Chernobyl site and other reactors elsewhere. The three could have all melted down and exploded but didn't. Meanwhile, the politics did indeed take care ... the Soviet Union itself melted down on realized surplus- electricity costs that the reactors had incurred behind the Soviet's military- industrial facade.

TEPCO is running out of time. They need to start pumping that sand, boron and lead grit into the reactors in place of some of the water. The solid material will displace water at the bottoms of the reactor containments, stopping the leaks and perhaps quelling ongoing reactions at the same time. As the cores heat increases beneath sand- boron layers the solid material will act the same way as the water flows do now, insulating the what remains of the core from water or steam that remains in the reactor buildings. Insulating the core would make a steam explosion less likely. As more sand, boron and lead are added to the containments, water would be pumped out of the buildings and treated. Adding new water would not be required.

Sand and boron can be added with just enough water to cause it to flow easily through the piping currently being used to pump water into the containments.

If the cores cannot be accessed by existing plumbing, then holes must be drilled through the concrete containment walls to allow concrete pumps to force the sand mix into the containments.

The Japanese also need to start building a sheet- pile cofferdam around the entire facility to prevent the radioactive water from leaking though the ground into the water table or the ocean.

None of this is rocket science. Meanwhile, the country is whistling past the graveyard: reactor unit 3 is bubbling away (please click on image for a clearer image):

The temperature trend in this reactor unit is rising. Keep in mind that much of Fukushima's instrumentation was damaged of destroyed by the earthquake and subsequent meltdowns/explosions. Individual instrument readings are not reliable.

Nobody has any idea where the core of this unit is located. Nobody has entered the building since a crew spent ten minutes inside on May 18.

Here is the breakout on reactor unit 1.

Its temperature trend is rising too, (click on the image for a sharper version):

There are fewer instrument readings, due to long period of zero- cooling, extreme temperatures and pressures during the night of the 12th when the reactor unit melted down then exploded. The pink area indicates a rising trend although this could be a fluctuation due to the flow of water through the reactor.

Because nobody knows where the cores are located or in what condition they are in, it is hard to determine whether there is effective cooling or not. If the cores have completely melted down, the pressure vessels would be empty tubes, completely open at the bottom, subject to rising temperatures from steam or from the molten cores, themselves.

Here is reactor unit 2: (click on the image for a larger version):

The temperature reading from one of the sensors at the bottom of (what is left of) the pressure vessel fluctuates wildly. The temperature is also on the borderline. Judging from temperatures, unit 3 is reactive. Units 1 and 2 may be critical as temperatures are above boiling point of water with a lot of water being pumped into the PVs.

Physics indicates the remnants of Japan's nuclear/cultural 'self' will vanish when the next important item breaks. There are no nuclear industry prerogatives left to preserve, only shadows. There are fatal problems everywhere within the Fukushima site. The Japanese can accept the institutional cost and buy some time for the rest of their nuclear plants or follow the current strategy and lose everything.

Japan will have no choice but to bring to bear every resource it commands to assault these reactors. This is not simply the subjective speculation by a layman thousands of comfortable miles away, rather it is common sense. The force at work is entropy. The reactor cores and spent fuel represent concentrated energy far in excess of means to on hand to contain it. TEPCO and the Japanese government refuse to assemble adequate tools with which to manage the entropy process. Energy dissipation takes place whether the establishment acknowledges the facts of it or not.

The only thing to be done is to create a form of informal containment that can slowly dissipate enough of the intense energy being emitted so as to keep the bulk of the energy separated from the outside world.

The water could do this if the containments were leak free. The containments would become over-sized spent fuel pools, in addition to the pre- existing pools. Over a decade or so the fuel would cool after which time the fuel mass could then be removed.

The containments' fractured states makes water containment impossible. There have been non- stop earthquakes and aftershocks of the Great March 11 earthquake. The water flow since March 12 is eroding the containments and the ground beneath them, compromising the reactor buildings' foundations. The explosions within the reactors damaged the containments and piping. Instead of being pools, the reactor buildings are sieves.

TEPCO had extreme difficulties repairing water leaks that were out in the open/accessible. It is hard to see how TEPCO intends to fix the large leaks under the containments or within the drywells and suppression pools. The buildings -- not the containments -- are too radioactive to spend more than ten minutes or less inside. Conditions within the containments themselves by TEPCO's own reports are lethal, within minutes or seconds. Workers are rapidly accumulating doses under current conditions. How will massive repair projects take place with TEPCO's minuscule staffs?

TEPCO's approach to keeping radiation contained is sheer idiocy: to build plastic tents around the reactor buildings. These tents will undoubtedly keep moths out of the reactors. What about typhoons?

The TEPCO crew has convinced themselves they are dealing with decay heat from shut-down reactors. The isotope ratios and the heat in both unit 3 and the spent fuel pool in unit 4 indicate something more energetic than decay is taking place.

The Japanese are content to wait until its too late to attack these reactors. This is a form of contentment that the Japanese are sure to regret.

...

Bits ... Pieces ...

2011-05-30T11:04:00.001-07:00

More good stuff is taking place at the Wonderful Nuclear Resort Fukushima:

TEPCO says plants won't be in 'cold shutdown' by the end of the year after all. Have a nice day!

TEPCO readings point to a massive increase in Iodine 131 in seawater outside the plant, from 5,200 Bequerels/Liter to 24,000 Bq/L. High levels of radioisotopes are found in areas outside the 20 km exclusion zone.

TEPCO instruments indicate reactor unit 3 is starting to heat up again even with an flood of 13.5 cubic meters of water injected into it every hour.

TEPCO jury- rig at unit 5 tempts fate as pump fails then repair is put off for 15 hours. Of course, nobody at the Fukushima Spa bothers to inform anyone until after the fact that the reactor in 'cold shutdown' was close to boiling.

Tropical storm Songda passed over Fukushima Bar and Grill apparently without causing another meltdown. How many bullets have the Japanese dodged at Fukushima since March 11th?

How many more can they dodge?

Here is what the clock on the wall is saying, first about the delay in 'shutting the plant down':

TEPCO official admits there will be “major delay” to contain crisis because of triple meltdown (Energy News/Japan Times)

Stabilizing the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant by the end of the year may be impossible, senior officials at Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Sunday, throwing a monkey wrench into plans to let evacuees return to their homes near the plant.

The confirmation of core meltdowns hitting reactors 1 through 3, accompanied by breaches to the critical pressure vessels that hold the nuclear fuel, has led officials to believe that "there will be a major delay to work" to contain the situation, one official said.

Tepco, the plant's operator, announced on April 17 its road map for bringing the troubled reactors into a cold shutdown within six to nine months.

... on May 12, it was confirmed that a meltdown had occurred at the No. 1 reactor, forcing the utility to abandon the water entombment idea and try to install a new cooling system that decontaminates and recycles the radioactive water flooding the reactor's turbine building instead.

Given that the contaminated water has leaked from the No. 1 reactor's containment vessel, a Tepco official said, "We must first determine where it is leaking and seal it."

This is complete ass- hattery on TEPCO's part as there is no way anyone or thing can 'seal' any but the easiest leaks and TEPCO management knows it. The leaks are underneath the massive reactors, beneath the water- flow, in radiation environments that are hostile for humans and human- designed machinery other than a few, specially constructed robots.

The rad- proof robots available cannot work underwater and underground at the same time. TEPCO cannot even find the leaks: it does not know which reactor is leaking or if all of them are! It cannot locate the cores within the reactor buildings or determine what these cores are doing.

TEPCOs insistence on the 'fixing leaks' fairy tale indicates the company has no idea: the crisis is managing the company. The question is how long before the government fires TEPCO and installs competent management?

Under what horrific circumstance will this 'regime change' take place?

The delay allows radiation to accumulate outside the plant:

Fukushima Risks Chernobyl ‘Dead Zone’

Yuriy Humber and Stuart Biggs (Bloomberg)

Radioactive soil in pockets of areas near Japan’s crippled nuclear plant have reached the same level as Chernobyl, where a “dead zone” remains 25 years after the reactor in the former Soviet Union exploded.

Soil samples in areas outside the 20-kilometer (12 miles) exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant measured more than 1.48 million becquerels a square meter, the standard used for evacuating residents after the Chernobyl accident, Tomio Kawata, a fellow at the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan, said in a research report published May 24 and given to the government.

Radiation from the plant has spread over 600 square kilometers (230 square miles), according to the report. The extent of contamination shows the government must move fast to avoid the same future for the area around Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant as Chernobyl, scientists said. Technology has improved since the 1980s, meaning soil can be decontaminated with chemicals or by planting crops to absorb radioactive materials, allowing residents to return.

Soil samples showed one site with radiation from Cesium-137 exceeding 5 million becquerels per square meter about 25 kilometers to the northwest of the Fukushima plant, according to Kawata’s study. Five more sites about 30 kilometers from Dai- Ichi showed radiation exceeding 1.48 million becquerels per square meter.

When asked to comment on the report today, Tokyo Electric spokesman Tetsuya Terasawa said the radiation levels are in line with those found after a nuclear bomb test, which disperses plutonium. He declined to comment further.

Here are the sea- water contamination charts. Readings don't necessarily relate to particular reactors as all are conjoined within the complex. Most of the water is being pumped into unit 3 so it makes sense that reactor is the source of the high radiation. (TEPCO, click on chart for larger image):

Figure 1: this was from the 27th of May, the following was from the 29th: (Click on image for sharper image):

Figure 2: Sharp rise to 24,000 Bq/L is meaningful. Half- life of ¹³¹I is a bit over 8 days. Generally, activity declines to small levels over a period of 10 to 13 half- lives. Iodine isotopes are volatile, released after reactivity. A method to determine reactivity is to measure the ratio of ¹³¹I to longer- lived ¹³⁷Cs. An increase in Iodine relative to Cesium indicates that a nuclear reaction -- criticality -- is taking place somewhere within the ruins.

This TEPCO chart is of reactor temperatures in troublesome unit 3 (click on image for larger version):

Figure 3: The pink area indicates the most recent rise in temps with some sensors at the top of the 'pressure vessel' increasing dramatically. Pay attention to the line indicated by the black arrow. This is a sensor in the suppression pool and is an indicator of the overall temperature of the reactor building. Whatever is going on in unit 3 is slowly heating up the immense reactor building itself ... which has 13.5 metric tons of cold water being poured into it every hour (click on image for a larger version):

Figure 4: TEPCO is manfully pumping that water! It seems all they know how to do. Despite this water flood, the temperature is over twice boiling: 243C. This heat is in a reactor with minuscule pressure which indicates a reactor 'containment' in name only.

Also note the high temperature in the reactor unit 4 spent fuel pool.

While all this excitement has been taking place the service water pump circulating seawater into the heat exchanger used to cool the core of reactor unit 5 failed Saturday due to "Fouling".

Pump failure nearly brings No. 5 to a boil
Tepco installs backup unit 15 hours later for halted reactor

Reiji Yoshida (Japan Times)

The seawater pump in the cooling system for the Fukushima power plant's No. 5 reactor broke down Saturday evening, prompting repair crews to install a backup pump 15 hours later on Sunday afternoon, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

Tepco discovered the pump had stopped at 9 p.m. Saturday but didn't announce it to the public until Sunday morning.

The beleaguered utility said it notified the local and central governments of the situation on Saturday evening.

The seawater pump was set up after the reactor's original pumps were knocked out by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. It was part of the critical Residual Heat Removal System that was later used to safely ease the reactor into a cold shutdown on March 20.

It's hard to know where to begin with this. First is the delay in starting repairs, assuming there would be no problems with the replacement pump and that emergency water injection would work as advertised. As per usual, TEPCO only notified the greater world when it suited arrogant TEPCO.

Right now it doesn't appear that any great change is going to take place in Japan until something catastrophic takes place. The candidate as usual is reactor unit 3 with its boiling core in an undisclosed location. Of course, there is nothing to be done, we are all sinners now in the hands of an angry nuclear god ...

>>>>

Bits and Pieces at the Pump and Elsewhere ...

2011-05-29T11:37:00.000-07:00

In Japan, the Fukushima reactor complex is being rained- upon by tropical storm Songda. Right now, the storm center is about 300km WSW of Tokyo, heading in an easterly direction. Cooler ocean water temperatures are sapping the storm of energy.

Keep in mind this storm was two days ago a supertyphoon. The storm has momentum -- any storm is a 'curve' in the atmosphere -- and a lot of energy remains with the storm, just not in the form of high wind. There will be heavy rain, perhaps enough to add significantly to the reactors' museum collection of intensely radioactive water.

Caught with its 'cheap' pants pulled up tight around its neck, TEPCO begs forgiveness for not being prepared for a typhoon @ the beginning of typhoon season ... TEPCO must have hoped the entire season would be canceled this year like "Secret Diary Of A Call Girl" .

From the 'Not As Completely Useless As We First Thought' department: Bill Clinton and New York mayor Mike Bloomberg are gearing up the fight against climate disruption (New York Times):

“This is enough to choke a horse, one of the two or three biggest challenges in the world,” Mr. Clinton said in an unusual joint telephone interview last week with Mr. Bloomberg. “But if we can prove that this is good economics, good public health and fights the most calamitous consequences of climate change, then we will have done a world of good.”

They are expected to announce a new formal partnership with the World Bank, which will eventually provide financial and technical assistance for cities seeking to reduce emissions by improving energy efficiency in transit, power generation, lighting and public buildings.

Cities now house more than half of the world’s population, and while they occupy 2 percent of the globe’s land mass, cities consume 70 percent of global energy and produce 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. If anything meaningful is going to happen on climate in the short term, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bloomberg and their advisers say, it has to start in the cities.

“We are putting a stake in the ground around the idea that national and international governments have failed, possibly quite permanently, or at least in a way that they will not make any serious progress before it’s too late,” said Kevin Sheekey, a former deputy mayor of New York and principal political adviser to Mr. Bloomberg. “If you address the problems of the cities, there will be no need for China and India to sign onto some international accord. And thank God, because that’s not going to get done. It’s time to say it.”

The real challenge is to combat energy company sourced climate change deniers who have co-opted the discussion with well- funded, cleverly targeted misinformation campaigns.

What Clinton/Bloomberg can work on is a 'one- size- fits- all' energy policy that centers on conservation. Solving both energy shortage and climate problems starts with re-examining car- centric transportation.

This re-examination will not solve the culture, modernity, the progress narrative or role-playing by participants, including post- Warhol 'superstars' such as Clinton and Bloomberg. Maybe the duo can somehow step 'outside' the Disco 54 art- world context they have both created for themselves and which was waiting for them when they arrived. This might allow some breathing space for the rest of us before climate/energy reality pops over the horizon and annihilates modernity.

Meanwhile; the country at large appears perhaps to maybe/possibly be getting somehow/somewhat ready to come to some kind of terms with the peak oil climate/energy reality concept. When the words "Peak Oil" bleat from a headline of the Wall Street Journal rather than Economic Undertow it means that somewhere, somebody important is taking the oil- shortage reality seriously. How about on the American highway?

Um ... uh, no?

Gas tanks are draining family budgets

Damian Dovarganes, AP

NEW YORK (AP) — There's less money this summer for hotel rooms, surfboards and bathing suits. It's all going into the gas tank.

High prices at the pump are putting a squeeze on the family budget as the traditional summer driving season begins. For every $10 the typical household earns before taxes, almost a full dollar now goes toward gas, a 40 percent bigger bite than normal.

Households spent an average of $369 on gas last month. In April 2009, they spent just $201. Families now spend more filling up than they spend on cars, clothes or recreation. Last year, they spent less on gasoline than each of those things.

Jeffrey Wayman of Cape Charles, Va., spent Friday riding his motorcycle to North Carolina's Outer Banks, a day trip with his wife. They decided to eat snacks in a gas station parking lot rather than buy lunch because rising fuel prices have eaten so much into their budget over the past year that they can't ride as frequently as they would like.

"We used to do it a lot more, but not as much now," he said. "You have to cut back when you have a $480 gas bill a month."

The dynamic illustrated by this article cannot be a surprise to readers here: high energy prices allocate funds and returns away from non- energy opportunities. Returns to energy companies reduce returns elsewhere. Jeffery Wayman's lunches are stranded by high oil prices, soon his motorcycles will be stranded, then his family's house if it hasn't been stranded already. Everything that is stranded is someone else's business and source of income. Businesses stranded by high energy prices find themselves in a desperate twilight struggle to survive, firing staff and emptying out credit lines in the hope against hope that customers will somehow reappear before the lights go out.

... Customers don't show up because they are broke, stranded themselves by high energy costs.

Both the stranding process and business struggles run counter to any inflationary impulse associated with the high prices. Eventually the demand is destroyed when the businesses fail. Allocation works up to the point where it stops. Jeffrey Wayman will allocate away from lunches toward gasoline but cannot allocate away from food. Comes the time comes when Wayman is hungry enough, he will 'allocate' his motorcycle to the pawn shop in order to eat.

None of this reality is allowed to puncture the narrative. Excess consumption is a condition. All else in the economy must give way to the consumption imperative:

Demand for gasoline has fallen for eight straight weeks as drivers try to cut back, but higher prices can't keep drivers parked for long. Even with high prices this year, the government expects gasoline demand to grow slightly for the year.

"Drivers try to do what they can, but they have to go almost all the places they go," says David Greene, a researcher at the Center of Transportation Analysis at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and manager of the Department of Energy website fueleconomy.gov. "There's no magic gizmo that will drastically change someone's gasoline use."

Mike Siroub clutched his heart as he described the experience of filling up lately. He owns a Union Oil gas station in Arcadia, Calif., but one of his cars is also a 1975 Oldsmobile.

"Think about it," he said. "If you've got a car with a 30-gallon tank and gas is $4 a gallon and you fill it up, you're out $120."

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's- and US Department of Energy's man David Greene personifies the narrow- mindedness that informs America's Waste- Based Economy. He chooses to overlook what is right under his nose! Our gizmos do indeed drastically change gasoline use by pricing the economy that has been built up around cheap fuels into bankruptcy. The stranding process is conservation by another name.

When Mike Siroub buys $120 worth of gasoline, other businesses lose the chance to earn a part of that money. Returns concentrate rather than cycling throughout the broader economy. The $120 payment to Exxon-Mobil and Saudi Aramco is "less money this summer for hotel rooms, surfboards and bathing suits. It's all going into the gas tank."

It's not just this summer, but summers going back to 2004. The consequence can be seen in the declining level of business transactions:

Figure 1: this is M2 velocity or non- velocity (St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank). People and things are hanging onto their money. The bumpy line within the pink bubble represents transactions during our puny 'Potemkin Recovery'.

Figure 2: this base money - zero maturity instrument - velocity. Zero- maturity money is a good substitute for late- lamented M3 which included term deposits such as CDs. It is interesting to note the long- term trends. There is less 'currency- money' in circulation right now, much less over a very long period of time.

There was a trend increase in velocity or transactions from the Vietnam War period to the Iranian Revolution. During much of this period the US suffered from inflation. Fed Chairman Paul Volcker raised Fed short- term lending rates beginning in 1979 and into the early 1980s to quash it.

Velocity was both the cause and consequence of peoples' desire to gain goods at almost any price rather than hold onto money.

Velocity has been on a long- term decline since, coinciding with the 'great moderation' and an exponential increase in credit. Credit transactions would not appear as base- money velocity, the credit mechanism is different from the cash- transaction mechanism.

The trend has been the cause and consequence of people desiring to take on debt and then use additional debt to service it.

Dollars also began to flow overseas beginning with US peak oil, into reserves, with less velocity an outcome.

A thousand entities can borrow simultaneously from a lender and gain tremendous aggregate purchasing power instantly. The same thousand can only gain incremental purchasing power over a long period from returns on cash transactions with each other. This is 'quantity of money' versus 'ability/willingness to borrow'. Borrowing wins ... for awhile.

At some point borrowing represents more debt service than it does purchasing power. When that point is reached, borrowing becomes counterproductive. This is where the indebted world is now ... drowning in the stuff and unable to roll it over because of debt's negative purchasing power.

All the drivers can purchase without limit as much gas as they like with their credit cards starting tomorrow.

Like Greece, they can then 'find it difficult' to repay for whatever reasons, casting the lenders into insolvency. What happens next? Credit represents cash returns brought from the future which is why businesses with intermittent cash flows rely on credit. However, credit is only viable when cash flow/current output is able to service the loans.

Borrowers can ignore the debts (default) and start transacting with cash again. Velocity will increase. The starting point or 'growth basis' of velocity is low. The serial transaction mechanism requires time and liquidity for an increase in transactions -- velocity -- to become noticeable.

This is why the current flood of bank credit does not appear in the money supply as indicated by MZM any more than it did at other times. People borrow to buy specific goods when they need or want to buy them, not to hold onto the borrowed funds 'for a rainy day'. Nobody borrows for the future, they save for it if they can ...

The lack of velocity is some people holding onto cash with the rest having cash unavailable. Credit becomes a substitute. For those with cash, credit is cost- free: that is, the 'real' cost of credit is zero when the rate of inflation is the same or greater than debt service costs.

For those without cash, debt grants some temporary purchasing power. The effect of this 'undeserved' purchasing power is the increasing bid on goods to be had with credit.

The insinuation of credit- money into every sphere of the economy made transacting with currency- money less necessary. Credit has made money scarce, the bad having driven out the good, in this case ...

Junk Strategy ...

2011-05-27T08:42:00.001-07:00

Fukushima Faces ‘Massive’ Radioactive Water Problem

Stuart Biggs and Yuriy Humber (Bloomberg)

As a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency visits Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s crippled nuclear plant today, academics warn the company has failed to disclose the scale of radiation leaks and faces a “massive problem” with contaminated water.

The utility known as Tepco has been pumping cooling water into the three reactors that melted down after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. By May 18, almost 100,000 tons of radioactive water had leaked into basements and other areas of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, according to Tepco’s estimates. The radiated water may double by the end of December.

“Contaminated water is increasing and this is a massive problem,” Tetsuo Iguchi, a specialist in isotope analysis and radiation detection at Nagoya University, said by phone. “They need to find a place to store the contaminated water and they need to guarantee it won’t go into the soil.”

An unknown number of tons of radioactive water have already leaked into the soil and from there into the ocean. How much exactly is a guess but the number is likely to be big. Leaks are discovered in buildings that can be monitored. There are certainly more leaks in reactor buildings and under basements that cannot be approached due to radioactivity dangers.

Large and unknown is how much radioactivity each measure of water carries. Like so much else having to do with the reactor, this figure is shrouded in TEPCO mystery. The fact of the secrecy itself indicates radiation levels that are too high to endure for anything but shortest periods -- and are too high for the public to know about. Indicative was the water in a basement area that burned the feet of workers in water in March. The water measured 2 Sv/hr, nearly a lethal dose. This is unsurprising as waste-water in basements carry radioactive materials directly from the molten cores.

What is reported in the water is iodine 131 and cesium 134 and 137. Uranium, chlorine, plutonium, technetium, cobalt and other elements have been indicated on and off by TEPCO. Dozens or hundreds of other elemental isotopes and toxic compounds are in the plant water, but like guests arriving at the ball, they have not been publicly announced yet. Perhaps the IAEA can persuade the Japanese government to list exactly what is to be found in the waste-water.

Japan has deployed its version of Wall Street's extend and pretend junk strategy at the reactor complex. TEPCO emits soothing bromides about nothing in particular, insisting that everything is going to 'be alright' some months- or three into the future. The establishment sends managers to public meetings who say nothing but bow a lot. Occasionally, someone resigns. Day follows day with little happening other than the flow of 'liquidity', numbers and charts.

So far, the establishment's strategy seems to have worked extremely well. The three reactor cores melted away months ago -- within days or hours of the March 11 earthquake. Keeping quiet about the meltdowns and pretending that little radiation has leaked for months meant that when the news finally emerged it had little consequence. There is no outrage, only passive acceptance.

The strategy indicates the greatest danger is not the physical consequence of the reactor failures but the political danger to the reactor industry. While these hazards are significant, the real danger is the economic consequence of reactor failure(s) within a peak energy context. Somebody has to pay the industry to manage the safety of these reactors over a very long time period. Meanwhile, the industry as a whole is captive to the same 'insufficiency of returns' dynamic as the rest of modernity. The nuke industry's product -- cheap baseload electricity -- is only useful and profitable in the context of industrial economies of scale. Industries in this context can only derive profits -- and therefor exist -- when capital (natural) inputs are mis- priced.

When inputs are repriced to reflect scarcity value the returns to industries shrink. This decreases the relative value of the industries themselves. It is this shift of values consequent to input repricing that forms entirely the current 'economic crisis'. It is the reason why our 'recovery' slips further out of reach with the passage of time.

Modernity, with ever greater efficiently, has been digging its own grave.

Safety management is the reactor industry's most important form of natural capital. Reactors are a child of the parent nuclear weapon establishment. After World War Two, building weapons gained a social ascendancy that exceeded any utility the weapons themselves could possibly provide. Nuclear weapons are too indiscriminate to be militarily useful. This internal logic doomed N-bomb making in most countries: increasing the kind and number of nuclear weapons cannot increase 'security', rather security decreases because of associated safety management costs.

The child of the parent: the Soviet RBMK reactor that melted down so spectacularly in the Ukraine was of a design intended to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. So also was the Windscale pile in Great Britain whose graphite/uranium fire was the world's worst radiation disaster prior to Chernobyl.

The nuclear power establishment demands for itself the same social ascendancy as weapons- making but cannot earn it. Land- sited reactors only produce electricity: the steam or hot water outflow is too potentially dangerous to use for domestic heating. Reactors cannot be located far from users due to costs. Reactors also cannot be designed or constructed as safety requires due to costs. Safety management strategy is to mis-price tail risks, often by way of subsidies or by cost- shifting of risks to other, non- nuclear entities. There is a competition between uses for land and water resources that reactors require, this puts reactors side by side within interconnected reactor campuses, where the failure of one hazards the others.

Both the inevitability and consequences of reactor failure accompany the enterprise. Reactors become unaffordable as safety management reprices itself and tail risks emerge. When the consequences of reactor failure are greater than the value of the reactor's product the economic rationale for reactors to exist vanishes.

The capital (mis) investment represented by the reactors themselves is stranded. There are insufficient returns to afford safety management expenses that 'outlive' the industrial economies that created the reactors in the first place.

These safety management costs extend endlessly into the future. Keeping radioactive material out of the environment from the destroyed Chernobyl reactor is more costly than the Ukrainian government can afford on its own. Kiev must turn to international begging to find funds to keep the Chernobyl reactor covered. The begging takes place even as Chernobyl radiation in groundwater steadily creeps toward the water supply of Kiev.

Finance and politics have no particular time- frame and diffuse consequences for failure. Physics is relentless. Mother Nature runs a hard school: our energy constrained economic future is now. Reactors require profitable industrial societies to support them. Industrial profits requires cheap energy which excludes nuclear because of the safety management costs. TEPCO fails not only because of poor safety management but also because of knock- on effects of that failure upon the Japanese economy.

Japan is on the road to becoming the 'New Ukraine' only with many more reactors.

The consequences of current failures is multiplied by 500 times -- the number of operating power reactors worldwide. Assumptions about the profitability of industry of longer time- frames are just that. Japan could be wise to consider making the decommissioning of its 55 reactors and the removal of the resulting waste its primary industry.

Failure to do so leaves a future of 'boarded up' reactors melting down all over the a country too impoverished to do anything else ... with a hapless population lacking tools to do anything other than to flee. Where in the United States can we house 100 million Japanese nuclear refugees?

On whom do we offload our own unaffordable reactors?

Reactor cores follow no set rules but their own. Here is a chart of reactor unit 3 temperatures beginning with the earthquake to the present: (this graphic is from TEPCO, click on image for a larger version):

Figure 1: Each plot represents a sensor located within what remains of the pressure vessel and containment at Fukushima reactor unit 3. The pink high- lighted area indicates some kind of large energy release beginning May 1, perhaps re-criticality.

TEPCO prays the issue is decay heat and that the cores will cool steadily with time. This is what the 'Cold Shutdown in 90 days' remarks suggest. This is establishment 'hopium': what the cores contain and what the fuel mass will do is unpredictable. Because of instrument failures, no one is certain what is taking place inside reactor unit 3 and the others.

After the increase in temperatiure, TEPCO increased the water flood from 10 cubic meter to 15 per hour. A potential chain of events has water leaks getting worse exposing the core material or re-criticality taking place. Adding water will work for awhile but outflow will increase due to erosion. There is a limit to how much water can be pumped into this reactor. It must either be stored or it must flow into the ground.

Meanwhile, the amount of radiation outside the plant relentlessly increases. Cesium 137 is found in tea leaves in areas far from Fukushima Daiichi. Increased radiation is also being detected in the ocean.

Because TEPCO hasn't gotten around to changing water gauges in units 2 and 3 nobody 'knows' for absolute certain whether there is anything at all in the reactor pressure vessels. Since reactor units 1 and 3 both experienced powerful steam explosions (with hydrogen components), the meltdowns would put most of the cores and related 'melt' goods @ the bottoms of the respective reactors. The earthquake and the explosions would have left the reactors as sieves with core material under the sieves. Water runs out of the holes with a bit on top of the cores. Cut off the supply of water and the hot cores boil off the small amount of water remaining.

Keeping the water flowing allows some shielding of the cores. In this sense Fukushima is not Chernobyl. Without the water flow, it would be almost impossible for anyone to work @ the facility, being too radioactive for anyone to remain nearby for more than a few minutes.

The water flow also carries heat away from the cores: the ground around and under the plant has become the primary heat sink for the cores. This is in place of the ocean by way of condensers in the working configuration.

Water carries a huge burden of radioactive materials and gases which are released from and by the cores. This radiation is a form of energy that is removed from the cores along with the heat. The longer the water flows the more radiation enters the greater world. The reactor ruins are excellent examples of entropy. The total energy content of the reactor fuel tends to be dissipated evenly into the reactor surroundings. Water buys only a little time: water flow carries core energy wherever it can reach. Because of water- borne contamination, it will eventually be impossible for anyone to work @ the facility, being too radioactive for anyone to remain nearby for more than a few minutes.

Water flooding is the 'easy solution' because water is able to flow through any pipe. 'Easy' is proposed as a substitute for more costly 'permanent'. Pumping highly radioactive water into a building or a storage tank will soon have the storage almost as radioactive as the core.

Because of entropy, TEPCO is going to have to cut the amount of water flowing through the plants. The tendency for leaks is to increase over time. Continuing the water flood will require TEPCO to pump increasing quantities of water into the plants just to 'run in place'. TEPCO pretends it can 'fix' the leaks and recycle existing waste water but this is impossible.

Pipes have to be installed and repaired, connections made. Filters and pumps must be installed and connections made to heat exchangers. All of this must take place in hazardous environments. So far, changing a water gauge and installing some flex-duct in one reactor building appears to be the limit of what conditions allow work crews to accomplish.

Radiation within containments is fierce. There is controversy about how radioactive the containments are. Because of defective instruments it is impossible to tell, but the fact of non- entry by reactor crews speaks for itelf. The entire reactor complex underground is flooded. Just finding leaks under highly radioactive water in damaged buildings is hard to imagine.

TEPCO needs to rethink the entire water- entombment approach and develop a new plan.

There is no reason why TEPCO cannot insert monitoring equipment into the drywells, either by fishing through reactor plumbing or drilling through the concrete. Faulty instruments leaves TEPCO in the dark.

Instead of water, operators should pump sand, boron and lead as a slurry into the containments with concrete pumps. Any pipe that can carry water can also carry a slurry. Inserting a few tons of the sand mix per hour alongside the water would cut down the amount of water leakage. The sand mix is persistent: it stays put and does not flow away through cracks or holes. Enough sand and boron could be pumped into the containment to fill the drywell. Lead in the slurry would provide shielding for those conscripted to clear radioactive debris from the rest of the site.

The French nuclear company Areva has sent equipment to Japan to remove some kinds of radioisotopes from the waste- water to be recycled. Areva's 'secrecy' approach raises questions about the process (From the skeptical Ex- SKF):

TEPCO-AREVA Contract to Treat Contaminated Water at #Fukushima I Nuke Plant Is Shrouded in Secrecy

With TEPCO again running out of space to hide (aka move) the highly contaminated water from the Reactors 2 and 3 at Fukushima I Nuke Plant, the hope is that the water treatment facility being built by AREVA will be in operation in June.

I mentioned the "rumor" in my post yesterday that the cost to treat 1 tonne of contaminated water will cost TEPCO/Japanese taxpayers 200 million yen (US$2.44 million). In addition to the exorbitant cost, some people are asking, "What exactly will the facility do? What types of radioactive materials is it capable of removing from the water?"

After all, it will be the first even for AREVA to treat radioactive water of this level of contamination.

To my (feigned) surprise, no one in the Japanese government seems to know exactly what the facility is designed to do, and TEPCO is not saying anything, because it is under the "confidentiality [non-disclosure] clause" of the agreement with the French company.

Why any work related to Fukushima I Nuke Plant is still considered "private" is a mystery to me, when the entire world is being affected and the Japanese taxpayers will likely be required to pick up the tab.

What entities do rather than what they pitch is suggestive: the process is not going to work so Areva wants to gain its return up front, leaving the unhappy Japanese to their radioactive fate.

Extend and pretend junk strategy is illuminated as bankrupt by the actions of participants. The idea 'in the air' suggests that events on the ground are set to overrun TEPCO with another series of calamities. In this sense, there is no difference between the reactor establishment 'cashing out' and financiers around the world doing the same thing.

Let The Finger Pointing Begin ...

2011-05-23T20:58:00.003-07:00

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thanks, steve

"We are in the position of a man who has seized a wolf by the ears and dare not let him go."

Friedrich Mellenthin (1943)

Figure 1: radiation map of the region surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi power station. Cumulative exposure is presumed to be for the year ending 2012. 20km exclusion zone is noted. (Click on chart for a sharper image: Radiation Safety Philippines)

Two months ongoing at the Fukushima Daiichi running sore and the ossified and corrupt Japanese establishment no closer to any kind of remediation now than they were on the night of March 12. Meanwhile, the blame- game starts with the Japanese Prime Minister denying he ordered the halt to sea- water injections into reactor unit 1 on the 12th of March:

Kan denies ordering TEPCO to stop seawater injection at reactor

Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Monday denied having instructed Tokyo Electric Power Co to stop injecting seawater into the troubled No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, brushing aside criticism that an alleged suspension order from him may have worsened the situation.

At a Diet session, Kan said while he ordered the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan and TEPCO on March 12, a day after the mega earthquake and tsunami crippled the plant, to examine if the injection could rekindle a nuclear chain reaction in a state known as ‘‘recriticality,’’ he did not receive a report at that time that the injection had actually started.

‘‘I cannot have said ‘stop’ with regard to something that had not been reported to me,’’ the premier told the House of Representatives’ special committee on post-disaster reconstruction in response to Sadakazu Tanigaki, chief of the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party.

According to a document released by TEPCO, the injection started at 7:04 p.m. on March 12, stopped at 7:25 p.m. and resumed at 8:20 p.m., meaning that the operation had been suspended for 55 minutes.

On March 11, events instantly outran the Prime Minister- or anyone else's ability to effect outcomes. Like so much else in our modern life, that opportunity had come and gone years previously, when the Japanese establishment ignored safety reports illuminating the vulnerability of conventional reactors to earthquakes and tsunamis.

Meanwhile, the hunt for a friction- free scapegoat intensifies. Kan needs to stay away from hotel rooms:

Worker error may have led to meltdown

Minoru Matsutani and Masami Ito (Japan Times)

The emergency cooling system for reactor 1 at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant may have been shut down manually before the tsunami hit on March 11, according to a Tokyo Electric Power Co. spokesman and documents recently released by the utility.

A part of the cooling system known as the isolation condenser was down for about three hours, which could have contributed to the reactor core's meltdown.

The finding upends the government's previous conclusion that the condenser was functioning normally on March 11.

"I learned (of the shutdown) through media reports today," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a news conference Tuesday. "We have asked the Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency and other bodies to give detailed analyses and reports (on that matter)."

NISA, the government agency that oversees nuclear plant operators, urged Tepco on Tuesday to provide a detailed explanation by May 23.

Tepco, Japan's largest electricity supplier, disclosed internal documents and data Monday indicating the isolation condenser may have been manually shut down around 3 p.m. March 11 shortly after kicking in following the massive quake at 2:46 p.m. The plant was hit by tsunami around 3:30 p.m.

Pity the poor isolation condenser operator. He's on the hook for hundreds of trillions in yen in damages -- this on top of the lethal doses of radiation he very likely absorbed working in the reactor complex without proper safety equipment!

Neither TEPCO nor the Japanese government has a clue as to how to deal with these reactors. They wring their hands helplessly and spew bureaucratic 'papers' like the Federal Reserve.

Reprise: both entities have a clue but the price demanded is a 'full- court press' on the part of the entire nation along with a supporting international effort. This risks Japan's solvency along with what remains of the nuclear industry's credibility.

Japan's sense of itself as a participant in the modernity enterprise of is also challenged. The business of the post-modern world is leisure and finance swindles, not humping lead bricks in a radiation suit, engaged in an Manichean struggle with an invisible something that causes your skin to slough off. Better to pretend the irradiated school-kids are alright.

Some sense: the Chinese under similar circumstances would lose no time throwing millions of hapless farm workers into the fire 'for the good of the ~~country~~ Guangdong Nuclear Power Group. The progress narrative renders the Japanese establishment helpless. The strategy becomes for them to stick heads into the sand, punish a reactor underling and hope against all hope that pouring tens of thousands of tons of water into holes will 'fix' what is wrong.

Reports indicate a large release of radiation detected at the plant gate shortly before the tsunami struck. This means the reactor containment(s) were immediately compromised.

Radiation detected at the plant gate may have come from any reactor at the complex ... or all of them.

The immediate aftermath of the earthquake was chaos. Critical items were non- functional including important instruments and valves.

Managers at the plant did not have authority to vent the reactor, When the decision was made to vent, operators were challenged by extremely high levels of radiation inside the containment building.

Arriving at the decision to pump of seawater into the reactors was also halting: reactor operators did not begin until after the reactor unit 1 had already melted down.

TEPCO was concerned first and foremost about its 'investment' and managers on site did not have authority to address the core emergencies.

Reactor unit 1 probably melted down a few hours after cooling systems stopped working.

Presumably, the local fire department was able to bring pumper trucks to the plant shortly after the earthquake although mention of this arrival has not been noted.

TEPCO negligence: ten thousand tons of slightly radioactive demineralized water (primary turbine drive fluid) in the Central Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility was available to be pumped by firetruck into the feedwater lines to cool the cores/spent fuel pools after the battery power/RCIC failed. This is excess condenser water, removed from reactors during maintenance. Three of the six reactors were shut down for that reason.

During reactor operation this water is boiled in the core; steam drives turbines. It carries some radioactivity but all operating reactors contain water with the same levels of radioactivity. The water in the CRWDF would have been no more radioactive than the water already within the 3 reactors and spent fuel pools.

This water was later dumped into the sea.

Cooling water cycled through by the cores would have been drained by way of relief valves back into Central Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility. 10k tons/cubic meters of water which would have provided sufficient mass to cool the three cores plus spent fuel pools until power was restored. Worst case scenario would have been a dozen fire trucks and hose lines to be disposed of as low- level radioactive waste. Managers simply 'forgot' about the tons of fresh water in CRWDF available as emergency coolant that was sitting right under their noses.

The foregoing presumes that cores, containments, pressure vessels and related plumbing were in a condition to contain and circulate coolant. The earthquake may have fatally damaged the reactors so that they would have melted down anyway.

More TEPCO negligence: operators 'forgot' about spent fuel in unit 4 until water had boiled away. They relied on rate tables and did not account for leaks in spent the fuel pool or its plumbing.

TEPCO pours water not knowing the condition of the cores or where they might be within the buildings. Water shields what remains of the cores. If the flow is interrupted, there is nothing between the cores' radiation and the outside world. Overheating material can become critical and 'reposition' itself explosively. Core melt meeting water is the stuff of steam explosions. Water also morphs to hydrogen and oxygen, it boils away or leaks carrying radiation and a toxic stew of isotopes away from the corium into the water table and the ocean. Some of the water floods the basements of the reactor buildings.

Given enough time and water, all of the cores' energy will be carried to the outside world. No water and the outcome is the same. This is TEPCO's dilemma.

The water flow is not a panacea. Radiation levels within the lower level of reactor unit 1 have skyrocketed to a mind- boggling 200 Sv/hr. (Figure 2):

TEPCO plans to recirculate water from this area to a heat exchanger in order to 'cool' ... something or other. Good Grief!

Having escaped their pressure vessels, the cores are burning their way through the concrete foundations of the three reactor buildings.

Temperature sensors built into the pressure vessels indicate high- but not extreme temperatures. The utility hopes that fuel remains within the pressure vessels and that water is providing some cooling. It is more likely that the hot material is below the sensors which are measuring steam temperatures.

It's also likely that many sensors don't work.

All three plants were old, built in the 1970's. The large nuclear stations are worn by hard use: their large thermal and radiation loads. Stresses accumulate over time.

Figure 3: Arnie Gundersen explains how containment vents were added to the GE Mark 1 BWR as a "band aid" 20 years after the plants built in order to prevent an explosion of the notoriously weak Mark 1 containment system.

The entire nuclear industry in Japan has a history of safety issues, cutting maintenance corners and covering up hardware defects.

The General Electric design has characteristics that leaves it vulnerable to a loss of coolant or power: a 'station shutdown'.

The Fukushima/GE plants were at the end of a decades-long operating cycle meant that critical water and steam circulating systems were vulnerable to radiation stresses, corrosion, embrittlement and metal fatigue.

Critical safety systems were vulnerable, including the emergency generators and cables connecting these to pumps and valves. The systems represented complex chains of components: the failure of one component would compromise the entire chain.

The condition of the soil under the plant has not been revealed. It is likely that much if not all of the plant was built on fill or on unstable marine soils. It is possible that the containment structures are not fixed to the bedrock but on soil subject to liquefaction.

The earthquake shifted the land under the plant to the east and lowered it. It is reasonable that the concrete containment structures were cracked by the earthquake and that equipment was damaged.

Roads leading to the plant from the rest of the country were furrowed by the quake: nevertheless road transport of portable generators was possible within nine hours.

It's likely the earthquake damaged vital systems, caused critical pipe breakage and cracked the containments. Explosions taking place during meltdown events certainly did done more damage.

Fssion products are distributed by way of ground water to sewers, waste treatment facilities, incinerators and finally bricks and concrete in Tokyo and elsewhere which become the heat sinks -- along with the ocean -- for Fukushima Daiichi.

Short- lived isotopes continue to be detected in increasing amounts far downrange of the plant. This indicates continuing criticality taking place.

And so the TEPCO soap opera spirals endlessly out of control, a malevolent reality program that is the stuff of nightmares ...

...

Different This Time ...

2011-05-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Meredith Whitney: Next Financial Crisis To Come From Local Government Defaults

William Alden- The Huffington Post (2010)

The next major financial crisis could come from a crisis in local government budgets, according to a new report from analyst Meredith Whitney.

State budgets were over-extended in the years leading up to the recent financial crisis, Whitney says, as relayed by this Fortune piece. The situation is so bad that states are spending 27 percent more than they're earning in taxes.

The state fiscal situation may be dismal, but Whitney's thesis says that a future crisis won't be cause by states directly, since they have a safety net from the federal government. Instead, the local municipalities -- cities and towns -- which, as Felix Salmon points out, are financially dependent on the states, would default on their debt.

"The state situation reminded me so much of the banks pre-crisis," Whitney told CNBC's Maria Bartiromo Tuesday. In 2007, Whitney predicted doom for Citigroup and was immediately vindicated when the bank's stock price fell and the then-CEO Chuck Prince resigned.

"The similarities between the states and the banks are extreme, to the extent that states have been spending dramatically, growing leverage dramatically. Muni debt has doubled since 2000, but spending has also grown way faster than revenue," Whitney told CNBC.

States, most of which are constitutionally required to have balanced budgets, have paid for this spending by using money that would otherwise have gone to pension funds, Whitney, who is CEO of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, said. "You borrow from future dollars to benefit the present, basically generational robbery," she told CNBC.

The worst states, according to the 600-page report, are California, New Jersey, Illinois and Ohio. The best, with the most conservative fiscal policies, are Texas, Virginia and Washington.

Here's a current version of Whitney- Vision:

Whitney warns on US state pension schemes

Nicole Bullock (Financial Times)

Meredith Whitney, the outspoken Wall Street analyst, who predicted a wave of defaults by troubled US municipalities, has warned that the rising cost of states’ retirement schemes could redirect funds away from public services and ultimately hurt the US economy.

Ms Whitney, who shot to fame for spotting trouble at large Wall Street banks ahead of the financial crisis, forecast “state arbitrage” whereby the weakest states, namely California, Illinois, Ohio and New Jersey, face the risk of large emigration of their highest tax base – companies and high net worth individuals – to stronger states that have better managed their finances over the years.

“When states start to cut essential state services [corporations and individuals in high tax brackets] say, ‘I can take or leave it,’ and you are potentially left with a constituency that contributes less to the tax base and takes more from social services,” Ms Whitney told the Financial Times.

It isn't clear in her writing whether Meredith understands the nature of all debt as a call option on suburbia, on the growth of energy consumption (waste). I have never seen nor heard the words 'energy consumption' pass the bee- stung lips of Lovely (but Serious as a Heart Attack) Meredith. Nevertheless, the end game of municipal credit is grounded in the futility of further waste as a means to service rapidly increasing debts.

The stock 'n' bond hamsters are outraged by Whitney's truth to power. She's costing finance racketeers some serious money! They line up to pound nails into Whitney's skull: (Wall Street Journal)

Meredith Whitney Speaks, Muni Market Yawns

Professional scary person Meredith Whitney took to the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal this morning to sprinkle some more of her fear dust on the muni-bond market:

Municipal bond holders will experience their own form of contract renegotiation in the form of debt restructurings at the local level. These are just the facts.

She makes some good points, frankly, and offers some alarming numbers. State and local finances are plainly a mess, and off-balance sheet liabilities in the form of unfunded pension and other benefit obligations are a potential headache. That point is controversial, but it’s always important to listen to Cassandras like Ms. Whitney, who made her bones as a prognosticator before the financial crisis.

But, interestingly, muni-bond investors are not exactly heading for higher ground today on her words. Muni-bond ETFs such as the iShares S&P National AMT-Free Muni Bond fund, are basically unchanged on the day — at six-month highs.

You would think the Journal could come up with a more unflattering image? Below is more Meredith bashing from Bloomberg. If you take the time to look online you can find soothing bromides along side Whitney- bashing all over the place:

Meredith Whitney Trips Over Her Muni Default Tale: Joe Mysak

(Bloomberg)

It’s no wonder Meredith Whitney wants to distance herself from her prediction of the municipal market’s meltdown.

“I never said that there would be hundreds of billions of defaults. It was never a precise estimate over a specific period of time.” So said Whitney on Bloomberg Radio on Wednesday morning.

This is what she said on an episode of CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired on Dec. 19, 2010:

“You could see 50 sizeable defaults. Fifty to 100 sizeable defaults. More. This will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of defaults.”

As for timing, “It’ll be something to worry about within the next 12 months.”

What this sounds like is Meredith Whitney saying there will be hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of municipal bond defaults within the next 12 months. That sounds like a precise estimate over a specific period of time. And that’s how it has been reported and dissected in the press since then, with not a word of protest from Whitney.

Until this week. Whitney told Bloomberg Radio host Tom Keene that she thought “60 Minutes” did a “really good job” on the story. “But the risk is that they take bits and pieces of an hour-and-a-half interview and certain portions are more magnified than others.”

Whitney also later told Keene: “In the cycle of this municipal downturn, I stand by it. But we never had a specific estimate for that. That’s not the nature of our research.”

Our waste- based economy is a scaled-up version of a family that lives in a large house. They have been heating the house by burning the furniture and have started on burning the house. 'Industry' notices a problem exists and suggests more efficient furnaces so that the house can be burnt more completely. Salesmen insist that burning the rest of the house is the only way to 'prosperity'. Whitney notices the furniture is gone but hasn't made the 'furnace' connection, yet.

Keep in mind that debts are being incurred as a money- flow substitute for 'utility' received from furniture burning. Real returns from this nonsense does not exist so something has to be created to stand in returns' place. What economists consider to be 'margin' is really the difference between rates of burn. The 'economy' only grows when furniture -- or the house -- is burned faster than during previous times.

The world's economies burn furniture faster in 2011 than they did in 1911, this represents GDP growth and 'progress'. Furniture isn't burned faster now than in 2005 or in 2006 which puts the world at the edge of the pit. Meredith Whitney may not be able to articulate the entire process in detail but she is able to grasp the outline of the process's form.

"By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD." (JOE 2010)

Modernity's madness reaches escape velocity: things ARE different this time. Our house is our resource patrimony, a form of irreplaceable capital. To properly invest our capital the end must be to gain a return on its existence in a useful and enduring form not its destruction. It might have been excusable to immediately burn for heat the fuel we extracted in more benighted times, before the turn of the Twentieth Century. There is no reason why the oil extracted in 1950 is not in our world as capital now, either as a store of value like gold or performing some service, perhaps as a 100% recyclable lubricant or chemical feedstock or part of some process we cannot now imagine.

A businessman whose company made enduring use of the same oil for many decades or centuries -- as a conscientious farmer might husband his soil and water -- and improved its qualities in the process would be a wise businessman indeed!

The same businessman would also be exceedingly prosperous. His capital account would increase while those of his wasteful competitors would vanish taking their businesses with them ... the same way capital accounts and along with capital itself is vanishing around the world right this minute!

Humans constantly seek more to degrade, burn, waste or corrupt. We refuse to think of resources as capital. Beginning with this central and essential lie, all of economics is corrupted! Whether it is coal or water, farmland or natural gas, 'culture' or knowledge our attitude bends toward the 'consume' part without understanding. The refusal to understand is the inevitable outcome of the lies' corruption which spirals out from the center.

We haughtily pretend to dominate nature not accepting as first principle that nature is indomitable. We act as if our frauds or labels mean something to anyone or thing but ourselves.

The act of consumption revalues what is consumed.

Consumption requires the cheapest possible inputs so as to allow profits. Increased scarcity of inputs makes capital too expensive to waste. In this way waste- based economies are self- limiting. Recognizing how fuel resources or money reprice themselves by way of scarcity is more than a matter of making adjustments for scale.

Availability reprices the entire consumption dynamic into something that excludes consumption. Availability of a resource sets both the amount and the kind of the return on the resource's use. 'Kind' identifies the character of an asset to be traded, which changes as the asset becomes scarce. Scarcity morphs a cheap throwaway such as a bubble-gum card into a rare collectible to be put into a museum. Scarce oil ceases to be an loss- leader for the auto- and real estate industries and instead becomes an asset to be hoarded.

Meanwhile, the appearance of asset speculation in a 'use market' is a scarcity indicator. Exhaustion of resource capital amplifies speculation returns. These returns become greater than those from any of the other 'uses' which are driven from the market.

At that point Hotelling's Rule takes hold. Scarcity of return 're-proxies' money used to measure the return. What is taking place right now under the noses of economists is the titanic struggle between concepts: money as proxy for a good versus money as a proxy for the process that destroys the good. The struggle manifests itself as currency volatility and incipient inflation/deflation. When the perception shifts from input destruction to input hoarding the consumption process will be annihilated because inputs will be unaffordable.

The 'proxy dynamic' is the scaffold upon which the idea of hard currency is deployed. Anyone who does not believe that hard- currencies are central to the economic 'discussion' taking place right now is not paying attention. The only issue is whether the currency basis should/will be gold -- which is useless -- or oil, which is not. When the waste- based economy by way of its 'marketplace' elevates oil, that resource will morph from 'something to be wasted' to become a store of value. The industrial economy that prospers by burning its capital in a furnace will have nothing left to burn.

Few will be able to afford to buy oil other than wealthy speculators seeking to sell it to others for a gambler's profit. Like gold, oil would become 'useless' unless some non- destructive uses can be found for it. This in turn would support higher values still. John D. Rockefeller in the 19th century did not buy oil for himself. He marketed oil as a way to leverage investments in oil consuming industries. As a result, we have 'infrastructure' -- Whitney's muni world -- built for the 'masses' to waste fuel on an unimaginably colossal scale.

When only the Rockefellers of the world can afford oil, none will remain to pay for these 'infrastructure investments' ... or to service associated debts.

It is this 'perception of oil as an investment asset' dynamic rather than net- exports or simple oilfield exhaustion and depletion that hangs over the fuel- waste economy. Oil that is too valuable to waste strands the past 80 years of 'investment' by every nation on Earth. The pricing/value shifting process is visibly taking place right now. The stranding part is what Meredith Whitney observes: the fact that she is remarking about it speaks for itself!

The next rung on the ladder of understanding is whether the 'cease to exist' part takes place before the 'hard currency' part? The answer will be at what price level does the demand- side bid shift perception? At what price does oil become 'good as gold' and treated accordingly? Is the price $147? How about $130?

Diminishing return on waste is our economic crisis: we cannot profit by our counter-productive activities any more. At all levels, whether at the grocery store or the central bank, we are pricing ourselves out of business because we have wasted too much of our irreplaceable capital.

In this sense of the 'pricing out of business' part, Whitney is absolutely correct and her detractors are misleading. Our states and cities as they are currently constituted cannot afford themselves. The putative 'customers' of these entities cannot earn enough from wasting activities to pay for the accumulated debts incurred as substitutes for the past's non- earnings.

The idea of states or locale entities 'earning' or having a return over any period other than the short-term when all that is produced is waste- enablers is a fantasy. Hello! Germany!

Easy come- easy go: our remaining oil resources are difficult to exploit which makes them more valuable. Their 'asset' worth is greater than their 'consumption' worth. At some point oil becomes a treasure like this Leroy Nieman print of Roger Clemens:

Two grand! Are you going to burn this in a furnace?

We destroy our capital in the name of 'progress' and money capital is revalued as an integral part of the process. No wonder people are confused about inflation and deflation because the measurement is the two interconnected relative rates of capital destruction. It becomes impossible to determine what anything is worth.

We assume that the future will provide us with increasing benefits while our consumption devours what tools we need face this future.

Municipal Finance 101

In a fuel constrained environment, as prices rise choices must be made. Something must be cut in place of the fuel; the 'somethings' are revenues which decrease relative to expenditures. These in turn represent additional fuel waste by government which creates a vicious cycle. To make up the ongoing and expanding gap funds must be borrowed. Municipalities wind up chasing their tails, caught within incipient debt compounding spirals driven by embedded fuel costs. The only escape is to eliminate fuel waste which is impossible because the municipality is completely invested in it. American waste- based economy is structurally dependent upon fuel being wasted.

If fuel waste is eliminated, the governments lose revenue as this is a 'fee' enacted upon the rate of wastage. If waste continues the costs increase to stifle returns costing more revenue while stranding fuel- waste investments. There is no escape from the waste- based system without an overhaul or a breakdown.

Whitney suggests that state and local governments will reschedule debt payments. This is more can- kicking but what other choice to these entities have? Here is a sketch of state/local income and expenditures since 1990 to 2009 from the Census Bureau: (Please click on the chart for a large picture)

Notice the 1990s period had revenue surpluses; a period of cheap oil and economic 'growth'. This table -- which skips years -- indicates a widening gap between revenues (which includes funds transfers from the Federal government) and expenditures. Indeed, state and local tax revenues are increasing but other funds are diminished. Purchase of fuel requires other funding needs be neglected, with differences made up by borrowing.

Whitney cannot be faulted for not going far enough. The world's militaries can do so in the place of Whitney. Here is the Defense Department's think tank Joint Operating Environment 2010:

A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India. At best, it would lead to periods of harsh economic adjustment. To what extent conservation measures, investments in alternative energy production, and efforts to expand petroleum production from tar sands and shale would mitigate such a period of adjustment is difficult to predict.

This sort of thing is the 'container' within which municipal and state financing exists. Finance insists that 'growth' is a given, which is not true:

Energy Summary (JOE 2010)

To generate the energy required worldwide by the 2030s would require us to find an additional 1.4 MBD every year until then.

During the next twenty-five years, coal, oil, and natural gas will remain indispensable to meet energy requirements. The discovery rate for new petroleum and gas fields over the past two decades (with the possible exception of Brazil) provides little reason for optimism that future efforts will find major new fields.

At present, investment in oil production is only beginning to pick up, with the result that production could reach a prolonged plateau. By 2030, the world will require production of 118 MBD, but energy producers may only be producing 100 MBD unless there are major changes in current investment and drilling capacity.

By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD.

The Progress Pimps insist with increasing desperation that stocks are going to go up, bonds are going to go up, both residential and commercial real estate are going to go up, that commodities are going to go up -- with perhaps the dollar as the single financial asset that declines in value, also bullish.

How is an energy shortage -- that could begin as soon as next year -- be bullish for anything?

Energy prices are supported by economic activity. If activity declines due to a lack of return, what will drive prices?

If shortages result in fuel being so expensive that economic activity is thwarted, what funds can be had to afford anything else? A structural overhaul toward real sustainability falls out of reach. What we have invested so far in wasting activities leaves less capital remaining to fund replacement infrastructures.

Price constrained economies cannot spark-off enough cash flow to service debts. The issue becomes triage: which debts to service or pay off and which to repudiate.

Whitney accepts the obvious, that the revenue/expenditure gap is unlikely to be filled without the hard school of default imposing a new order. The dead must give way to the demands of the living ... It is different this time.

Un Black-Out Électrique.

2011-05-18T15:49:00.000-07:00

In a 1987 New Yorker article, which would later become a chapter in the book, "The Control of Nature," journalist John McPhee speculated about the severe impact of the loss of the Mississippi on New Orleans, a city in no desperate need of another disaster:

With its fresh water gone, its harbor a silt bar, its economy disconnected from inland commerce, New Orleans would turn into New Gomorrah.

So significant did the Army Corps of Engineers view the threat of such a course change to be, it produced an information video that bore the following message:

This nation has a large and powerful adversary. Our opponent could cause the United States to lose nearly all her seaborne commerce, to lose her standing as first among trading nations. . . We are fighting Mother Nature. . . .It’s a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory.

That in mind, Congress instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to design a mechanism for trapping the Mississippi River along its current path, without cutting off the Atchafalaya River by damming it up. (Doing so would dry up Louisiana's signature Cajun swamp lands and deprive a fair portion of the state of a major water source.) In 1963, the Corps completed the Old River Control Structure. The system shunts a strict 30 percent of the river flow down the Atchafalaya, coursing the remaining 70 percent through the Lower Mississippi.

It's hard to say whether Mother Nature is going to win this particular 'battle' next week or thirty years from now. It's possible the Corps and southern Louisiana will dodge the flood-bullet this time but the shift is inevitable.

The Mississippi River's course through Baton Rouge and New Orleans is twice the length of the Atchafalaya distributary which is 270km long. The steeper Atchafalaya course would capture the Mississippi's flow in a heartbeat if allowed.

A permanent shift will have profound effects on the energy business. Southern Louisiana is dotted with critical facilities and criss- crossed with pipelines, highways, railroads and canals. Currently, all of these facilities are oriented toward having the bulk of the water flow though the Mississippi channel. This is a map of the Atchafalaya basin with facilities noted: (Please click on chart for a larger image)

Figure 1: the light green area is the Atchafalaya River basin which is now carrying a large part of the Mississippi's flow. The control structures which are diverting this flow are at the top of the map.

A zoom- able version of this excellent map of Lousiana's energy facilities can be found at Map Search.

A Mississippi River re- direct down the Atchafalaya basin would put large numbers of docks, refineries, chemical plants, compressor stations and pipelines on the 'wrong' river. The 'Old Mississippi' would become a bayou. It would eventually silt up. New/replacement facilities would have to be built at enormous cost including new bridges, railroads and highways. An undetermined amount of Louisiana energy production would be shut in.

Oil Falls on Ebbing Concern the Mississippi to Flood Louisiana Refineries

Mark Shenk (First Enercast Financial)

Crude oil fell and gasoline slipped to a two-month low after the opening of spillways reduced concern that the Mississippi River will flood refineries.

Oil dropped 2.3 percent as Louisiana opened nine of the 125 gates at the Morganza floodway, allowing the Mississippi River to pour into the Atchafalaya River basin. The move was designed to save Baton Rouge and New Orleans from inundation. Louisiana refineries are the second-biggest fuel producers in the U.S., following Texas, according to the Energy Department.

“Worries about the Mississippi River overflowing and shutting a number of refineries have dissipated with the opening of the spillway,” said Carl Larry, director of energy derivatives and research at Blue Ocean Brokerage LLC in New York. “The biggest impact has been in the gasoline market, which is dragging the rest of the complex lower.”

Crude oil for June delivery fell $2.28 to $97.37 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the lowest settlement since May 6. Futures have risen 36 percent in the past year.

Gasoline for June delivery tumbled 14.33 cents, or 4.7 percent, to end the session at $2.9311 a gallon in New York. It was the lowest settlement since March 16.

Regular gasoline at the pump, averaged nationwide, slipped 0.9 cent to $3.961 a gallon yesterday, AAA said on its website. The price climbed to $3.985 on May 4, the highest level since July 24, 2008.

The Mississippi floodwaters threatened operations at 10 Louisiana refineries that account for about 14 percent of U.S. operating capacity, Anna Dearmon, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, said last week.

All important gas for the all- important carz.

Good news for Louisiana is the flow of silt will replenish wetlands starved of same since the Mississippi River flood- control efforts began in the 1950s. Toxic sludge from BP's Macondo well will also be silted over.

Meanwhile, Europe is in the grip of a fierce drought. A possible outcome in France, which gains almost 80% of its electricity by way of nuclear reactors is un black-out électrique!

Observatoire du nucléaire

Stéphane Lhomme

Sécheresse : fort risque de black-out nucléaire cet été

- La sécheresse exceptionnelle qui sévit déjà menace le
parc nucléaire français d'un véritable black-out cet été

- 44 des 58 réacteurs nucléaires français sont en bord
de rivières et risquent donc de devoir être arrêtés
Introduction

L'option nucléaire, imposée en France depuis 40 ans, est systématiquement présentée par les autorités françaises comme une véritable bénédiction mettant la France à l'abri des mauvaises
surprises concernant son approvisionnement électrique.

En réalité, le parc nucléaire français est un colosse aux pieds d'argile : non seulement il est vieillissant - fin 2011, 21 réacteurs sur 58 auront atteint 30 ans de fonctionnement - mais il est fortement menacé par la sécheresse. Il faut se rendre à l'évidence : contrairement à ce qui est souvent affirmé, c'est le changement climatique qui s'attaque au nucléaire et non l'inverse.

Alors que des tempêtes peuvent entraîner des accidents nucléaires (le drame a été frôlé à la centrale du Blayais pendant la tempête de décembre 1999), c'est actuellement la sécheresse qui sévit.

Comme démontré lors des étés 2003, 2005 et 2006, la sécheresse ou la canicule peut contraindre EDF à arrêter de nombreux réacteurs, avec un risque de un black-out électrique. Un accident nucléaire grave est aussi possible: même arrêté, un réacteur doit être refroidi et une fusion de coeur peut se produire si le débit d'une rivière est trop bas pour assurer ce refroidissement minimal.

OUCH!

We aren't just talking "Un blackout électrique' but 'Une fusion de coeur' ... a meltdown. Unlike the reactors lining the mighty Mississippi, 44 of France's 59 nukes are located alongside teensy- weensy creeks and rivulets. Even when shut down the nukes need cold-ish water to cool the cores! Right now the French are sweating bullets. Without some rain the mighty French reactor establishment will be in serious difficulties: (Google translation with some additions)

Nuclear Observatory - Record Thursday, May 12, 2011

Stephane Lhomme

Drought: high risk of Nuclear blackout this summer

- The exceptional drought threatens the French nuclear power industry with a real blackout this summer

- 44 of the 58 French nuclear reactors are on the edge rivers and may therefore need to be shut down.

The nuclear option, imposed in France for 40 years, is systematically presented by French authorities as a blessing preventing France from surprises on its electricity supply.

In reality, the French nuclear power is a colossus with feet of clay: not only is it older - late 2011, 21 out of 58 reactors will have reached 30 years of operation - but it is seriously threatened by drought.

We must face the facts: contrary to what is often said, is climate change that affects the nuclear and not the reverse.

While storms can lead to nuclear accidents (the drama which took place in the Central Blayais during the storm of December 1999) so can drought.

As shown in the summers of 2003, 2005 and 2006, drought or heat waves may force EDF to stop many reactors, with a risk of an electrical blackout.

A severe nuclear accident is also possible: the Order, a reactor must be cooled and a meltdown of the core can occur if the river flow is too low to ensure that minimum cooling.

The situation is even more critical since the closure of seven reactors in Germany following the Fukushima disaster. Contrary to what is often claimed, it is France which is a net importer of electricity from Germany, and it continuously since 2004.

One of the climate observations is that we industrial humans have enjoyed a long period of moderate weather within which to build our 'stuff'. Because of our use of 'stuff' this 'Great Moderation' appears to be drawing to a close.

Much of the world's troubles are the consequence of poor- quality development. An example is the ongoing breakdown of the poorly- designed and incompetently managed credit system. A new and expanding category of 'problem' is directly related to the increasingly baleful effects of natural disasters. The costs keep going up for these 'events'. A trillion here and a trillion there and soon you are talking real money!

Another outcome is less 'utility' just when more utility and productivity are needed to meet increasing population pressure. The world needs more fisheries, farmland and forests: our activities take these away. We now are constrained by lands and oceans that are unproductive, or toxic. The drumbeat of natural disasters and their consequences are cumulative.

When Japan has more nuclear 'difficulties' what will the people do? Where will the Japanese go?

Of course, the establishment is in denial. Industrialization rations its progress by way of tomorrows: Utopia is always right around the corner. Only a small step is required, then another and another. The future never arrives: now the process is unraveling by the same tomorrows. Nothing will be done until the next disaster, the next and the one after that: the next breakdown, the next black-outes Électrique.

Media Follies ...

2011-05-17T09:55:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone! Just a reminder, THIS blog -- Economic Undertow -- is moving.

The current URL is: http://economic-undertow.blogspot.com/.

The NEW URL is: http://www.economic-undertow.com/

I will keep this site running for a month or so until I have the new site doing exactly what I want it to, then this site will 'content freeze'.

Please make note and a new BOOKMARK, thanks!

Now that two months have passed since earthquake and explosions and world attention is riveted on the incredible and amazing peccadilloes of goofballs in high places involving hotel maids and housekeepers the Japanese government and its largest electric utility Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) feel safe to confess to multiple meltdowns at their Fukushima reactors.

Nobody is paying attention. It's a good strategy.

This is after months insisting that the reactor cores were intact and being cooled by the injection of hundreds of tons of water into each plant every day.

Where does this water go? What's in it?

(Silence ... )

What is taking place in Japan mirrors the flawed guarantee gesture made by the Irish government toward that country's melting banks:

The new enervated Tepco
(Sentaku)

Although the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), the operator of the ill-fated plant, have worked out plans to pay compensation to victims of the crisis, it appears they are interested less in protecting people from radiation than in preserving the existing semi-monopolistic system of the power industry and in enabling the government of Prime Minister Naoto Kan to survive.Japan has 10 electric power companies, each of which is given a monopoly of generating and distributing power within a designated region.

Some observers say the government and Tepco have sought to "trivialize" the effect of the Fukushima accidents by working out a scenario in which the power company, which should bear the total responsibility, survives with "public funding." The public at large ultimately picks up the whole bill.

Under that scenario, a new organization would be established to help Tepco oversee compensation payments to nuclear accident victims. The new body would guarantee the survival of Tepco. Not only would the government fund the new body but also the other regional power companies with nuclear plants — by chipping in their share as insurance premiums for future accidents.

Even by selling its assets and cutting executive and employee remuneration, Tepco would not be able to pay all compensation claims resulting from the Fukushima plant accidents. The eventual financial burden would be borne by people in the form of taxes and higher electricity rates.

One factor that has given rise to this haphazard scenario is the need to prevent feared chaos in the financial market if Tepco were to go under. Tepco's share plummeted from the pre-accident price of around ¥2,100 to a mere ¥292 at one point after March 11. Although it recovered to nearly ¥500 after the government's support program and Tepco's road map for bringing the Fukushima nuclear crisis under control were announced, further damage to the reactors or serious radioactive leaks could very well make Tepco shares worthless.

Tepco's interest-bearing liabilities, including corporate bonds, total more than ¥7.3 trillion, most of which is owed to insurance companies and financial institutions, both private and government-owned. The biggest lender is the Development Bank of Japan, which is 100 percent state-owned. It has lent more than ¥300 billion to Tepco.

Shortly after the Fukushima plant accidents, major banks committed another ¥2 trillion in credit lines to Tepco, including ¥600 billion from Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.

Should Tepco go bankrupt, not only would the Japanese financial market be thrown into an utter chaos, but international markets would lose their trust in Japanese banking institutions to the extent that the institutions would have to pay higher interest rates to secure funds.

If worse comes to worst, Tepco share certificates would become worthless sheets of paper for 600,000 shareholders as well as for many corporate pension funds that have included Tepco stock in their portfolios. The steep drop in Tepco's stock price has already dealt a blow to investment funds in the United States. Nearly 20 percent of its stock is held by non-Japanese investors. This has reportedly led the Obama administration to urge the Kan government to take steps to prevent a further decline in Tepco stock.

Priorities: who cares about the people or the countryside or the neighboring countries? "Get that stock price up there," the Obama administration commands! So far no suggestions to the Japanese about how to accomplish this.

Now that the meltdown cat is out of the bag, what happens next?

(Nothing ... )

TEPCO's resources to address the massive issues are very limited and shrinking. At the same time, there is no upper limit to the costs. A good- sized part of Fukushima prefecture will be uninhabitable for centuries. Agriculture in Japan will be constrained by 'radiation in the food' threats. It is possible that parts of Tokyo will become untenable due to radiation. Even if the city is nominally safe, radiation anxiety will not make it a pleasant place to live or work.

So far, the possibility of these costs have not been admitted, much less calculated against the availability of cheap electricity.

In Ireland, the Dublin government was not able to support its insolvent banks: Japan's energy insolvency is a far greater burden. Japan has made a fantastic investment in nuclear power, an investment which also must include the industry's capture of the Japanese government.

Events have stranded the entire industry and the government is in danger of being stranded as well.

Japan is having difficulty generating enough electricity to support its industries. The government demanded 25% reductions for the summer but protests from industry caused the reduction to be rolled back to 15%.

Radiation in Japanese products makes it difficult to market these outside the country even if a particular Japanese good is free of radiation. Nobody can look at a product and 'see' that it is radiation free. There is nothing 'Made in Japan' that cannot be obtained elsewhere.

Japanese emissions do not stop at the Japanese border. It is only a matter of time before Japan's neighbors begin to fret openly about the endless spewage of isotopes into the atmosphere and ocean waters ... and the Japanese establishment's handwringing.

Efforts are directed toward protecting the status of the government- industry hierarchies rather than protecting the public.

There is no 'Plan B'.

Nobody has any idea what is taking place within the reactors or what will happen with the passage of time. There is no sense of urgency on the part of the establishment.

Here is a chart of temperatures within reactor unit 3 from TEPCO: (Please click on the chart for a larger image)

Figure 1: Temperatures in the reactor rose sharply since the first of May. The energy increase does not correspond to decay heat, suggesting the nuclear fuel is undergoing fission. Since there is no effective containment the fuel is doing so out in the open, more or less. Reaction products are flowing into the buildings' basements and from there into the groundwater and ocean.

Nobody has any idea where the reactor cores are currently located! Since all the cores reached extreme temperatures and melted their way out of the pressure vessels they could be anywhere; inside the reactor buildings or boring into the ground beneath.

Use this schematic to see where on the pressure vessel and containment the temperature sensors are located. (TEPCO)

(Click on for a larger image)

Figure 2: A good guess would put the fuel load in reactor unit 3 on top of the concrete under the pressure vessel. High temperatures in the mass are reaching sensors in what is left of the reactor pressure vessel above the mass. Water is splashing down into the containment which holds some water in pockets as there is steam being emitted from within the reactor.

The water flooding is ineffective because piping within the containment is damaged or destroyed because of the explosion that took place on the 14th.

A re- criticality cannot be ruled out along with an explosive re- arrangement of the fuel within the reactor(s). In any case, there will be more radiation and an increase in hand-wringing on the part of those charged with solving the increasingly unsolvable problem.

Blogger Meltdown

2011-05-13T11:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry folks, Blogger melted down sometime yesterday afternoon and ate my last post and all comments since that time.

(Spam email has also dropped by 70%).

I don't know if yesterday's post will magically re- appear but it might.

At some point I will get another host.

Thanks for your patience and Understanding.

steve

Updates ...

2011-05-12T06:01:00.000-07:00

It turns out there is no water in reactor unit 1 and the operator TEPCO admits the core has melted down. This is from the Estimable Ex- SKF website:

From TEPCO Presser May 12 AM (Part 1): "We Have No Idea Where the Water Went" from Reactor 1 RPV/Containment Vessel

TEPCO's Matsumoto answering questions from the press, from TEPCO's press conference on May 12 morning recorded live (in Japanese).

Rough translation from the Question and Answer:

Regarding the water level in the Containment Vessel of the Reactor 1:
"The pressure gauge for the Containment Vessel is working, but we cannot properly measure the water level inside the Containment Vessel. Therefore, we do not know where the water level is."

About the water that's been poured:
"We are trying to figure that out. In the initial stage when the reactor core was still hot, the water might have been evaporated and escaped from the Containment Vessel. But now, the reactor temperature is between 100 to 120 degrees Celsius, so the water would remain water. We are assuming most of the water escaped the Containment Vessel into the surrounding reactor building. However, there is no water in the northwest corner of the basement of the reactor building, as far as we can see by the camera. We don't know where the water has gone. Possibly, it may have gone to the reactor building, the turbine building, or the waste disposal facility. But we haven't identify it yet."

This tepid revelation regards reactor unit 1 only. (NEW) TEPCO now admits the reactor units 2 and 3 also "may" have have also suffered total meltdowns. Both of these units are generating large amounts of steam and smoke. This indicates the reactor unit containment buildings are holding at least a little bit of water.

Where does the water go?

The containments were damaged by the earthquake on March 11 and subsequent aftershocks and cannot hold water.
The molten cores burned holes through the containment structures.
The water is leaking into the ground or into interconnected basements and sub- basements.
Some of the water is boiling off.
The flow of water through the buildings has created a channel underground that leads directly to the ocean.
The condition of the spent fuel pool atop reactor unit 1 is unknown. There are almost 200 tons of radioactive fuel rod assemblies in the spent fuel pool. The building roof collapsed directly on top of the containment. This roofing has not been dislodged, concealing conditions within the pool. Presumably, water has been pumped into it by way of a standpipe.

The failure of gauges and sensors in the reactor units after the earthquake and blackout have kept operators in the dark about conditions within. Operators believed the containment was bulging with water when in fact, the water was flowing from holes in the bottom as as fast as it could be pumped in @ the top. Water flows carrying radioactive material with it, contaminating what ... exactly?

TEPCO reassures us that everything is just fine:

(NHK News)

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters that the reactor appears to be stable because it's been steadily cooled for a long period. But he said the condition of the reactor must be reassessed as some figures from the gauge are contradictory.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said that if the latest data is accurate, it seems parts of the fuel rods have melted and accumulated at the bottom of the reactor. But it added that it believes the fuel rods are being cooled.

That's good to know, I really feel a whole lot better about the situation, now. After all, it's how I feel and those persons like me feel ... that matters. To hell with those pesky facts ...

Meanwhile the other three reactor units are boiling away with yet more radioactive releases into the air and water. Here is a still from Tokyo Broadcasting System by way of ENENews:

Figure 1: this is a screen shot from the video camera. The same photo is enhanced below:

Figure 2: This looks like a picture postcard: "Greetings from Hell!" Notice the tilt of the reactor building on the far right, this is reactor unit 4.

Here are temperature readings from reactor unit 3: (Please click on the images for a larger view)

Figure 3: the temperatures here are from sensors on the reactor pressure vessel. There is little to indicate whether these are working correctly. Temperatures rise steadily then fall, either as gauges are 'recalibrated' or sensors are covered with water.

Presumably, when the gauges/sensors are underwater the temperature will drop. If the water level drops and the sensors are exposed to steam the temps will increase. In any event, the temps have been rising continually. This is not a signature of decay heat, rather it indicates increasing reactivity taking place with the building.

It is likely the core of this reactor unit melted down completely on March 14th triggering the now- famous unit 3 explosion.

NHK indicates highly radioactive water is leaking out of reactor unit 3. Water pumped into the unit has to go somewhere.

New radioactive leak raises questions

Highly radioactive water was found leaking into the sea from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Wednesday. It's now been revealed that contaminated water levels in the No. 3 reactor's turbine building were already alarmingly high by Sunday.

Tokyo Electric Power Company plugged the leak with concrete after it found highly radioactive water flowing into the sea through a pit.

Radioactive cesium 620,000 times higher than the government-set safety limit was detected from the leaked water.

The contaminated water was streaming from the outlet of a pipe for electric cables.

The leak is thought to have stemmed from pooled water in the turbine building of the No. 3 reactor.

Highly radioactive water has also leaked out of reactor unit 2.

TEPCO has as much a clue about its own business @ Fukushima Daiichi as Bozo the Clown!.

The reactor units 1- 3 appear to have melted down completely within the first few days after the tsunami; these meltdowns were the cause of the various explosions. TEPCO has only grudgingly admitted the meltdowns.
The reactor containments were compromised along with essential plumbing by the earthquake and by subsequent explosions.
TEPCO has not been forthcoming about the nature of the reactor explosions.
TEPCO apparently 'forgot' about the spent fuel in reactor unit 4 allowing the water level in that spent fuel to drain out or boil away causing a large explosion that has compromised that building.
TEPCO has failed to grasp the implications of the information it has been able to obtain, such as the likely cause and effects of the four explosions at the reactor units. Instead, it has wasted valuable time pretending to produce 'solutions' that cannot possibly work such as reconstructing emergency cooling ... within leaking, heavily irradiated buildings for reactor cores that do not exist in forms that allow water cooling!
TEPCO has never 'prepared for the worst', instead has relied on ad- hoc measures which are clearly inadequate.
TEPCO's lackadaisical approach to safety and plant operation has reaped the outcome of multiple core meltdowns on a single site where increasing levels of radiation makes occupying the site less likely over time.
TEPCO evades the issue of ongoing criticality when comparative measurement of isotopes and rising temperatures -- along with obvious increases in steam production -- indicates criticality is taking place. The best outcome of increasing criticality is a large increase in radiation emissions. The worst outcome is a prompt- criticality event: an explosion and fire, with both outcomes requiring the abandonment of the Fukushima site for an extended period.
Rising temperatures in reactor unit 3 indicate the core material cannot be cooled despite the flood of water into the unit. As is the case with unit 1, the water may be flowing out of the containment as fast as it can be pumped in.

Observing the various meter-readings and revelations from TEPCO and the Japanese news media there is a lot more going on in these reactors than meets the Western eye.

TEPCO has proven completely incompetent. The situation at Fukushima is out of control. The reactors are not healing themselves. TEPCO is mired in a management culture that cannot give direction or adequately scale its response. TEPCO has acted on wishful thinking and self- deception. The reactor emergency management role must be given to the Self- Defense Forces while the Japanese government seeks resources from overseas. Someone who understands the physics must be put in control and an all- out effort launched to entomb the cores and stifle the outflow of radioactive material.

This is common sense.

There is no further update on conditions @ reactor unit 4 and its increasing lean. Some sort of 'stabilization efforts' -- whatever these might be -- are supposed to be taking place. What is the cause of the lean in the first place?

There is a large reactor vessel within the containment. It is difficult to imagine the building collapsing without severe damage to the reactor pressure vessel, which has concrete walls several meters thick.

It is possible the building foundations were undermined by soil liquifaction due to ongoing earthquakes shaking water-saturated ground under the reactors: (From the University of Washington)

Liquefaction is a phenomenon in which the strength and stiffness of a soil is reduced by earthquake shaking or other rapid loading. Liquefaction and related phenomena have been responsible for tremendous amounts of damage in historical earthquakes around the world.

Liquefaction occurs in saturated soils, that is, soils in which the space between individual particles is completely filled with water. This water exerts a pressure on the soil particles that influences how tightly the particles themselves are pressed together. Prior to an earthquake, the water pressure is relatively low. However, earthquake shaking can cause the water pressure to increase to the point where the soil particles can readily move with respect to each other.

Figure 4: this is the outcome of soil liquifaction under Nagoya after the 1964 earthquake. Nobody has any information whether the reactor complex was built on fill dirt or not. It is possible that the quakes have created many fissures in the soil as well as in the reactor buildings. There have been over 900 aftershocks to date after the March 11 super- quake.

It is also likely the explosion in the spent fuel pool(s) and the powerful explosion in the unit 3 building compromised unit 4. The spent fuel pool and its cargo of water makes the containment structure 'top heavy'. There are almost 1,500 fuel rod assemblies in the spent fuel pool: (from CWSX World energy information site)

Types and Amounts of Materials at the Site

There are five loaded reactor cores, six spent fuel storage pools and one large common fuel storage pool on site. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) stores 11,125 fuel rod assemblies in the pools, with each assembly holding either 64 or 81 fuel rods for a total of approximately 800,000 fuel rods. 1,479 assemblies are at the Unit 4 pool, of which 548 are from the 'core load' removed for maintenance in December. At Unit 3, 32 assemblies in the pool are made of mixed plutonium-uranium or MOX fuel, as is the entire core load.

The cores themselves contain various numbers of fuel assemblies depending on the size of the units. Units 2, 3 and 4 are each 784 MW in rated electrical capacity, and each holds 548 fuel rod assemblies. So for perspective, each spent fuel pool holds about two core loads' worth of fuel rods, while the common fuel pool on site holds about 1.5 times again as many as Units 1-6 combined.

Setting aside the common fuel pool, then, there are roughly 18 core loads in the reactor buildings, counting both the reactor cores and the spent fuel pools. If we assume that Units 5 and 6 are stable, we can deduct six loads and discuss 12 loads in the badly damaged Units 1-4. Note, however, that the common pool and Units 5 and 6 remain dependent on timely cooling, which could be in question if an event forces workers to evacuate again for an extended period.

We can be more precise about the nuclear materials in the reactor buildings for Units 1-4. According to TEPCO, the total number of fuel rods in those buildings' spent fuel pools is 2,060 plus the core load from Unit 4, or 2,508 assemblies, or roughly 180,000 rods.

At 0.127 tons per assembly, this implies 431 tons of uranium within the damaged buildings' pools. There should be another 534 assemblies in the cores of Units 2 and 3 which are the same size as Unit 4, and about half that number in Unit 1. Adding these 1,335 assemblies brings the total to 3,843 assemblies, 280,000 rods, and 488 tons of uranium in the damaged units. The MOX fuel rods are about 3% plutonium which does not materially alter the analysis of fission products, our main concern here.

There is 187 tons of reactor fuel in the spent fuel pool of unit 4 plus the weight or water and building debris atop the structure, which is of unknown integrity.

Without a realistic containment approach all the energy contained within the fuel on site will flow to the rest of the world. The Department of Energy and NNSA has released information on radiation effects: (Please click on image for a larger version)

Figure 5: A Japanese version of map showing radiation levels at distances from the reactor complex: (Japan Probe)

A joint survey conducted by the Japanese and U.S. governments has produced a detailed map of ground surface radioactive contamination within an 80-kilometer radius of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant:

After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, those living in areas with more than 555,000 becquerels of cesium-137 per square meter were forced to relocate. However, the latest map shows that accumulated radioactivity exceeded this level at some locations outside the official evacuation zones, including the village of Iitate and the town of Namie.

“I am surprised by the extent of the contamination and the vast area it covers,” said Tetsuji Imanaka, assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute. “This (map) will be useful in planning evacuation zones as well as the decontamination of roads and public facilities.”

The map confirms in greater detail what was already known: most of the leaked radioactive material went to the northwest, with relatively high amounts reaching areas slightly outside of the 30-kilometer evacuation zone. Iiitate, which is outside the original evacuation zone, yet is covered with a streak of red on the map, is in the process of being evacuated.

Contamination is being found at high levels in the Tokyo area:

Radiation Detected in Tea Leaves in Japan, (Wall Street Journal)

A prefecture just south of Tokyo said it had detected higher-than-permissible amounts of radioactive material in tea leaves, in a reminder that Japan’s radioactive-contamination problems are far from over. [...]

According to Kanagawa officials, a sample of tea leaves collected May 9 from the city of Minamiashigara, in the western part of the prefecture, was found to contain 550 becquerels of cesium per kilogram in the first test; the second test of the same sample detected 570 becquerels. [...]

Kanagawa tested tea leaves for the first time because local farmers were about to start shipping this year’s tea leaves they had just picked. [...]

As a consequence the Japanese nuclear industry is in the process of shutting down:

35 Japanese reactors are soon to be out of line

Japan is shutting down so many nuclear reactors because of the earthquake and other reasons that only about a third of its 54 reactors will be operating by late May.

The earthquake and tsunami on March 11th has led to the suspension of operations at 14 reactors, including those at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant. 19 other reactors are currently offline. They are currently undergoing regular inspections or plan to be inspected soon.

Later this week Chubu Electric Power Company will shut down 2 of its reactors at the Hamaoka plant. The move follows a government request to do so, due to concerns about the plant's earthquake readiness.

All told, 35, or about two-thirds, of Japan's commercial reactors will have been shut down by the end of May.

Watch this space because there will be more events to take place @ Fukushima Daiichi and a lot more radiation to come.

Coming soon: 'More on QE'

Be Very Afraid: Fukushima Endgame Shambles Into View ...

2011-05-10T10:05:00.000-07:00

From the 'Rains it Pours' department:

Information trickling out of Fukushima Daiichi makes this the data- dump that keeps on giving. Since the weekend news has not been good. The four reactors are a cauldron of 'broken' with hellish radiation and extreme temperatures. Evidence suggests that reactions taking place within the reactors are escaping operators' control:

Figure 1: this video shows significant steam emissions from reactor unit 3 along with what appears to be a fire, either in the adjoining turbine building or reactor 4.

Pressures within the reactor pressure vessels are atmospheric or less, there is no effective containment for any of the nuclear material on the site.

Here are some screenshots of the reactors, from a Japanese news feed:

Figure 2: The immediate environs of the reactors is truly the devil's playground. The emissions from these plants are intensely radioactive. The containments contains tens of thousands of cubic meters of water which is a witches' brew of radionuclides, dissolved gases and suspended particles. This so- called 'water' releases material onto everything within the containment, much of this material winds up in the atmosphere.

Here are a couple of charts from the Radiation Safety Philippines website: the origin is a German monitoring agency. Please click on both of the following charts for larger images:

Figure 3: The spike in the emissions of cesium 137 accompanied the smoke/steam in Figures 1 and 2. The dotted line in the chart is the highest level of Cesium 137 emitted from the Chernobyl 2 reactor.

Figure 4: Isotope Iodine 131 has a short half- life of 8.0197 days. The increase in this isotope indicates fission reactions are taking place somewhere inside the reactor buildings.

Keep in mind, TEPCO is pumping 7 or 8 tons of water into each reactor every hour, (Please click on chart for a larger image):

Figure 5: The upper band highlights the water flooding of the reactor containments. A cubic meter of water weights 1,000 kg. or approximately 2,200 lbs. This water has to go somewhere. Some is flooding the basements under the reactor auxiliary buildings and the turbine hall. The rest is leaking into the ground, contaminating groundwater and flowing into the Pacific Ocean.

Notice the bottom highlight indicates a negative pressure within the reactors 2 and 3. This means atmospheric oxygen can enter the containments and combine with any hydrogen being produced as a result of thermolysis or nuclear dissociation.

TEPCO during the first month of the emergency pumped several thousand tons of seawater into the reactors. As the water component boiled away the salt (NaCl) was left behind within the pressure vessels. Adding fresh water has not removed the salt as this has to 'flow' in solution to somewhere else. There is no indication that water leaking from the reactors is carrying any salt. This means it is still within the reactors, possibly insulating the reactive fuel from the cooling water.

Ominously, the temperature @ reactor 3 has been rising rapidly for the past week. It is now higher than the design temperature of the reactor and still rising. Unit 3 is the reactor containing the MOX fuel along with more MOX fuel in the building's spent fuel 'area'.

Reactor 3 is the source of much of the steam/smoke in the videos.

Here are some temperature and radiation readings from within the three reactor pressure vessels (NISA/Japanese government website. Please click on chart for a larger view:)

Figure 6: Note the high temperature highlighted in reactor 3. The feedwater nozzle is at the bottom of the dry- well, see Figure 7. Presumably, the sensor is several dozen meters higher than the heat source which would be the molten core @ the bottom of the suppression pool.

Here is an Wikipedia image of the identical Browns Ferry Reactor Number 1 under construction. Please click on image for a larger view:

Figure 7: The feedwater nozzle would be the bottom arrow of the core location (a), within the neck of the pressure vessel. The dry- well is the outside of the pressure vessel which is inside the containment. All of this is now presumably under water with the core molten at the very bottom of the reactor containment.

Make note of the intense radiation within the pressure vessels, particularly within the suppression pool (S/C) of reactor 1 and the dry- well (D/W) of reactor 3. The suppression pool is the donut- shaped item in the photo. The radiation monitor indicates a level of over 1 Sv/hr in reactor 1. The radiation level within the upper level of unit 3 pressure vessel is almost 10 Sv/hr. The range of 3-4 Sieverts per- hour is a lethal dose of radiation for half the humans exposed to it.

Here is another temperature chart for the different reactors. There are different monitoring devices in different locations within the reactor buildings. Readings differ depending upon where the sensors are located:

Notice how temperatures from this set of TEPCO sensors within unit 3 have jumped since the first of May, (Please click on chart for a larger version):

Figure 9: You can see that the temperatures measured by TEPCO are increasing in different parts of the unit 3 reactor. All of the reactors are being flooded by tons of water per hour. What is likely taking place is the core materials are liquid. They are reconfiguring into critical masses. Enough moderating material exists within the corium to increase neutron flux. This flux splits more fuel atoms and a chain reaction takes place.

The reactions are the source of both the short- lived Iodine 131 and the increase in reactor temperatures.

Considering the radiation loads and the exponential increase in temperatures within the buildings, TEPCO's 'scheme' to jury- rig replacement primary cooling systems out of items bought on Ebay within the three reactors and the multiple spent- fuel pools is an absolute farce.

At issue is when will the self- sustaining reactions begin to amplify themselves. The temperatures in the reactors are increasing exponentially. The reactivity coefficient of the core material is now positive. Reactivity depends on fuel density, temperature, flux and core configuration. As temperatures increase, the power emitted by the core materials also increases. Temperatures increase causing reactivity to increase in a positive feedback loop. The fuel becomes hotter, more dense and more reactive.

The outcome of self- amplification will be a prompt criticality event. This could take place next week or five minutes from now. This will take place alongside -- or in place of -- powerful steam explosions. The water pumped into the reactors currently does not cool the core material. This likely the result of pumping seawater into the containments: salt 'crust' is insulating the hot fuel from the water. At the same time, molten material from the core construction may be acting as a neutron moderator, increasing reactivity.

The hoped- for outcome would be for the reaction coefficient to spontaneously return to negative. There is little else reactor operators can do to reduce temperatures within the pressure vessels. They are currently injecting eight or nine tons of water into the buildings right now. Adding more water will not work.

The spent fuel pools that exist intact on top of the reactor buildings are hostage to the conditions that exist in the buildings' basements. Pressures within the reactor pressure vessels are atmospheric or less, there is no effective containment for any of the nuclear material on the site.

An outcome is that molten core material can explosively reconfigure itself. The hot dense fuel would blow itself apart blasting the pressure vessels out of the containments while spewing core remnants into the atmosphere. The water within the containments would be the 'fuel' for steam explosions.

Nuclear expert Arnold Gunderson suggested last month that a prompt criticality in the spent fuel pool was responsible for the explosion in unit 3 in March. While current information about the the unit 3 spent fuel pool questions a prompt criticality analysis, the explosive power of such an incident is considerable. The explosion and fire at Chernobyl nuclear plant was also a prompt criticality amplified by a steam explosion.

There are multiple cores within spent fuel pools at the top of the reactor. The the core material in reactor 3 contains both Uranium and Plutonium. If the core reconfigures explosively the complex will be unapproachable due to massive, intense radiation contamination in the area of the reactor.

There is possible criticality taking place within the fuel pools as well. Large amounts of Iodine 131 have been sampled in the pool of unit 3. The presence of radioisotopes during tests last month suggest damage to fuel and criticality in the pools of units 2 and 4 as well.

Considering the radiation loads and the exponential increase in temperatures within the buildings, TEPCO's 'scheme' to jury- rig replacement primary cooling systems out of items bought on Ebay within the three reactors and the multiple spent- fuel pools is an absolute farce.

Here is information that the building that contains unit 4 is leaning suggesting that it might collapse:

Figure 10: Unit 4 contains several cores in its damaged spent fuel pools. A building collapse would "scatter" radioactive material across the site. The containment is contaminated as well: should the building fail, the containment material would also spread far and wide. The Zircalloy fuel cladding on the fuel rods would burn. It is possible that some of this fuel rod cladding is already catching fire as water leaks out of the spent fuel pool.

Water leaking out of the pool has to go somewhere: the basements of unit 4 and associated buildings are being filled with contaminated water.

Any one or a combination of events taking place would require evacuation of the entire complex along with the surrounding countryside.

If reactor 3 is destroyed, there will be nothing to prevent core material within reactors 1 and 2 from also reconfiguring themselves explosively.

It is possible that the train of events leading to explosive prompt criticality is already underway @ the three reactors. The activity taking place within all of the reactors must be taken seriously by TEPCO operators as well as nuclear agencies worldwide. If steps are not taken the outcome is three or more Chernobyl- type eruptions of radioactive materials taking place at the same time!

Instead of water, sand and boron needs to be pumped into the containments. Whatever it costs to perform this step, it must be paid. Japan needs to realize there is no time to lose. At any exponential rate, the doubling time decreases: the temperature rise will not continue to increase to infinity, one or more reactors will blow up first.

Meanwhile, TEPCO's attempt to filter the air within unit 1 unsurprisingly failed. A few blowers and fans are not going to effect the overall radiation level of a containment building containing over a thousand tons of radioactive materials.

Opening the containment to install the ventilators and 'check' the radiation levels within the containment allowed more radiation to escape into the environment, for absolutely no gain.

Japan detects radiation up to 700 milliserverts at Fukushima nuke plant

(Xinhua)

TOKYO, May 9 (Xinhua) -- Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) on Monday detected radiation levels in the building housing the faltering No. 1 reactor that far exceeded expected levels reaching as high as 700 millisieverts per hour, the utility firm said.

The latest readings for the troubled reactor has lead Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency to embark on new radiation shielding measures so that work to bring the crisis under control can go ahead with risks of massive doses of deadly radiation poisoning hopefully being lessened for the TEPCO workers and their affiliates as they attempt to embark on a massive project to install a nuclear fuel cooling system.

TEPCO is currently mulling ideas to protect its workers -- some who have only had a single medical check since the March 11 triple disasters and many who have been exposed to levels of radiation far exceeded legal levels -- such as constructing a metal tunnel for people to walk through, or using lead sheeting to provide increased protection against radioactive substances and increase safer mobility for the workers moving around in high-radiation areas.

An area with a double-digit millisievert level, let alone three-digit figures, is quite tough as a working environment. So we have to do the work by using some shielding,'' Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told a press conference.

TEPCO and the Japanese government have been behind the curve since this accident took place. Both the company's- and government's approach have been nothing short of criminal. The establishment has embraced the concept that nuclear disasters can 'heal' themselves. Instead of an all- out assault on the reactors, there are media blackouts and public relations stunts. Instead of dropping everything else in the country except tsunami search and recovery and marshaling all resources the contain the radioactivity within the Fukushima complex there is hand wringing. The establishment has been toying with the reactors.

The reactors are making ready to punch Japan in the face as hard as physics makes possible.

The situation at the complex is spiraling out of control.A very large increase in the amounts of radiation released into the environment is going to take place. TEPCO's only tactic from the beginning of this disaster has been to inject water along with 'hopium' into the reactors. The time for a 'Plan B' has slipped away as a consequence.

The amount of radioactive material @ Fukushima Daiichi is several times the amount in Chernobyl unit 2 when it was destroyed. You can come to your own conclusions about the consequences.

It is time to start mentally preparing for the worst.

UPDATE:

Japanese physicist acknowledges criticality in reactor unit 1 post- tsunami.

TEPCO successfully 'recalibrated' its temperature gauge in reactor unit 3 as the temperature indicated has dropped sharply. Meanwhile, the temps in other gauges in reactor unit 3 are still climbing.

Temperatures in reactor unit 1 can be found here, unit 2 can be found here. I don't want to give the impression that all three reactors are overheating, only reactor unit 3. Temperatures are slowly falling in reactor units 1 and 2 ... as they should as decay heat diminishes. This does not mean that re- criticality is not or cannot take place within these reactor units. Criticality may also take place within the spent fuel pools.

A Lesson in Speculation ...

2011-05-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

Here's the weekly COMEX front- month silver chart from TFC Charts. Last week was pretty murderous for silver longs. The question is whether the decline was a 'flashy crash' correction from overbought conditions to a sea change in sentiment about ... everything or something else?

It seems that credit has dried up in the metals markets which might indicate speculators here are victims of their own success.

At the tops of bubbles, only buyers with credit remain, cash buyers have either already committed or have insufficient funds to move the markets. Since the metals markets 'sell' their own margin the price 'blast' indicates an excess of leverage in the market leading to a necessary clearing out of the marginally solvent.

This is a shift from 'weak hands to the strong' but if the weak hands are driving the bull, how is removing them going to drive the market further?

Taking place in the silver market is the business cycle in microcosm: an expansion of credit leading to high prices, excess credit, instability and ultimately unsupportable prices. What is left is the necessary deleveraging or contraction of credit by the repayment of margin -- by selling and closing out positions -- or being sold out at a loss by the brokers.

This deleveraging has been attempted continually since the first of the credit bubbles popped in commercial real estate and stock markets beginning in 1987 but has been thwarted by the establishment ever since. Bad credit is rolled over into new loans, lost value is swept off- balance sheet and the speculators rush out to borrow some more. One bubble is replaced by another in a naked effort to forestall reality which demands deleveraging.

Not only has modernity stuffed landfills with waste the world around, it has left a truly gigantic overhang of unpayable, unserviceable debts as bubble after bubble is replaced with newer, more toxic versions.

At bubble price levels, markets cease to work as intended. In addition to the buyers, organic sellers have also committed. This leaves the exchanges -- and their banks -- selling short as the only sellers. As the markets roll over, these large institutions become the only buyers. They can and will effect a squeeze.

I would look for silver price drops to be significant in the immediate future as stops are reached and the banks refuse to buy. I expect prices to drop to the 'cash level' of $15- $20 per oz. indicated on the chart.

The increased margins demanded by the markets remove the 'veneer' of respectability from the metal speculators' moral supremacy argument opposing paper currencies. It seems that the bottom line for the stodgy old bullion markets is that cash has greater value than anything else that can be posted as collateral. Liquidity matters!. Keep in mind, this revaluation of cash takes place within a market that exists to sell credit.

This repricing of utility creates certain 'discomforts' for other risk (margin) markets. The contradiction exists between the propaganda insisting the dollar is worthless garbage fit only for extinction and the actions of the propagandists themselves who either demand dollars or have it demanded of them. This is after they have -- presumably -- already traded what dollars they have for the risk assets. In other words, nothing is as valuable as cash except having an excess amount of cash!

... since the banks run 'the system' and have accumulated large amounts of cash reserves the whole sorry dynamic begins to heave into view ... the capitalists WILL rent you the rope you use to hang yourself!

What will determine the direction of the precious metal markets is the future availability of credit. Sentiment is irrelevant. Shrinking credit overall -- not just margin shrinkage resulting from an unbalanced market -- is what has been pushing back against asset prices. Sentiment has not changed. There are just as many today who believe that the fiat paper dollar is worthless as they were last week or last month. It is just that these believers cannot borrow money to buy because their precious metals have less collateral value than paper dollars.

Here's the gold chart, with the same bubble characteristics, it hasn't taken a dive yet. Perhaps a trade is to long silver and short gold. If the credit trend holds up the support for gold is $1,400 per ounce. Let's see what happens, right!

Why is credit tightening? This is the Brent Crude front month from TFC Charts:

Crude has been visited with a series of mini- spikes and crashes beginning in March of 2009. Crude traded in a range of $75 - $85 per barrel. Any surge above $80 was accompanied by an alarm from some vulnerable institutional 'weak link'. The credit failures in Dubai, Greece, inflation in China, difficulties in US states and cities all come to mind.

In June of last year, Brent crude traded @ $70 per barrel. Not a year later, crude traded @ $128 per barrel. Not just one or two barrels here and there but for most of the 80 million or so barrels that meet the market every single day.

How does an economy pay for this increase? Oil can be traded for cash (or gold) or swapped (barter) for food or technology ... or users must borrow.

The only countries that have cash 'savings' are mercantile exporters such as China who simply use dollars gained by way of foreign exchange or the dollar carry trade to pay for their oil imports.

The US must borrow dollars to pay its oil bill. Japan has a trade surplus: it can swap either yen it borrows into existence or dollars gained in mercantile trade. The big consumers also write contracts for cheaper fuels outside the Brent market but these must also be paid for either with earned income -- cash -- or loans.

The 'lesser' countries borrow and swap for reserve currencies in F/X or swaps markets. The lenders are the world's savers intermediated by the world's banks. Often, the lenders are the oil producers, themselves.

It's this marginal borrowing -- often on a large scale in derivatives -- that is causing the credit- market bends.

Credit pushes crude prices in asset markets that are already high due to constrained rates of extraction relative to consumption. Credit is the enabler of demand. Those who lack sufficient cash flow to successfully bid for energy supplies make use of whatever credit is available.

The dollar carry trade has China borrowing from dollar short- sellers in $600 billion increments. Dollar seigniorage expands the US national balance sheet at the same time. At this moment rate consequences are insignificant for giant borrowers such as the US. What matters is the overall demand for credit.

People blame central banks but these do not buy crude. The central banks are irrelevant.

Credit is finite: Irish developers, Icelandic banks, UK (Scottish) banks, Greece, American cities, credit card users, etc. end up starved of credit so that the remainder can be directed toward OPEC and other oil producers. Credit obtained to buy Chinese or Japanese goods is re- directed by China and Japan toward the same producers. Oil use subjects the consumers to an 'energy tax' that becomes increasingly difficult to pay. Credit makes it possible for an energy customer to afford both the energy and the means to make 'use' of it. The cost of the credit is added to the cost of the energy and the goods that make waste of it. The more borrowed, the higher the costs.

This is essentially the 'return on energy investment' argument. As more energy is brought to market, its use is productive to the degree where associated costs are payable out of cash (energy) flow. As the energy flows diminish more extraction must be 'borrowed' from the future so as to maintain 'productivity' which becomes illusory.

What is taking place within the economy is the inability of the production to allow additional borrowing as well as not allowing additional oil extraction.

Since crude is embedded in virtually all goods and services, it can be said that almost all borrowing is directed toward obtaining crude. Since bidding a price with borrowed funds has no nominal upper bound other than what other debtors are willing to risk in price competition for that marginal barrel, the effect of credit is for it to compete with itself. Credit enables a bid which causes a price increase that requires additional credit to meet. The added credit ratchets prices upward, until the credit itself becomes unsupportable by consumers' cash flow.

Once the cash flow shortfall is apparent to creditors, the creation of additional credit becomes unjustifiable.

There is that word 'cash' again! Cash matters in the real world because it reasonably represents productive returns already obtained, not the 'Pie in the Sky' promise associated with credit.

Credit is a way to buy time in order to obtain cash: it's the arbitrage of time: to obtain a good so that the good's use produces a cash return before the credit bill must be repaid. This is so old- fashioned: credit is now promoted as magic, a replacement for cash. Credit needs only to be rolled over indefinitely. This 'innovation' is required is because the use of the good(s) in question -- crude oil -- does not produce much in the way of direct return at all.

It's not just the US government that is monetizing its debts. The entire world is doing so!

How much does anyone earn watching a television or driving in circles? Answer, nothing. Both are hobbies that have been puffed up by 'culture' as 'economic necessities': part of a great flow of narrative history from 'backwardness' toward 'progress'. We moderns tout our narrative as something concrete and real, rather than the exponential requirement for increasing ruin that the narrative actually represents.

The establishment insists fantasy is fact as it stands on the corner waiting for the bus called 'Economic Recovery' which never arrives. That the fuel supply cannot support further 'growth' is reality: this is never mentioned by the anxiously waiting establishment.

In order to escape reality as long as possible, the prices of other goods are bid up alongside the price of crude: these other goods are simply hedges against rising fuel prices. If credit- driven silver or gold prices rise faster than credit- driven fuel prices then the profits from the metals will offset the cost of the oil. You can strike out the words 'silver or gold' and substitute 'housing' and see the bubble- hedging strategy.

The rising demand for credit makes it more expensive, even as monetary authorities do all they can to keep credit cheap. This is a contest that authorities cannot win. Rising credit demand shifts stresses to the weakest credit links, which is the consequence of increasing credit costs across the marketplace. Costs skyrocket for some borrowers but not all. What is created is the comforting illusion of creditworthiness.

Without the ability to service credit with fuel use the issue becomes academic. Arguments can be made about the market relationship with the 'creditworthy' US: the market that matters is the fuel market and the willingness of producers and their proxies to continue financing unproductive American fuel waste.

The rising crude price over the past twelve years indicates that demand side of the oil market equation has caught up with whatever the supply side can offer. In physical forms, this amounts to a squeeze in the ability of the economy both to provide fuel and to pay for it. Credit constraint becomes a form of energy conservation. The end of credit access ends the ability to bid for fuel.

In this way, lower fuel prices do not reflect either an increase in marginal supply as much as they represent the declining ability of the marginal customer to obtain credit.

Hello Greece, hello Ireland! (Hello USA?)

When entities lose access to credit the price of fuel declines along with the price of silver and other hedges. This is the same way house prices have been declining since 2007. What shortage exists is not people or even people who desire to waste fuel but people who desire with cold hard cash!

All of this credit maneuvering takes place against a backdrop of vanishing cheap oil reserves. As the cheap stuff is burned up, what remains is very expensive to extract and bring to market. More credit is needed to extract this expensive oil which is even more costly, too much so to allow profitable economic activity. Our economy has not been designed to accommodate expensive fuels the way it can accommodate expensive houses.

Saddled with a millstone economy which requires cheap fuels to turn a profit and an establishment bent on beating the square credit peg into the round energy hole the outcome is increasingly tepid credit bubbles followed by more devastating credit busts. We have collectively reached the point of diminished returns on bubbles.

Even if the market participants can re-inflate ongoing bubbles or puff up new ones, the ability of economies to finance themselves with cheap credit has reached its end, that is the lesson of speculation.

Oil Price Peak and New Dollar Run?

2011-05-05T12:39:00.000-07:00

Take a look @ Bloomberg's energy complex trading: The energy complex is getting hammered:

Energy

	PRICE*	CHANGE	% CHANGE	TIME
BRENT CRUDE FUTR (USD/bbl.)	109.350	-11.840	-9.77%	15:21
GAS OIL FUT (ICE) (USD/MT)	908.500	-93.250	-9.31%	15:19
HEATING OIL FUTR (USd/gal.)	286.420	-27.880	-8.87%	15:21
NATURAL GAS FUTR (USD/MMBtu)	4.260	-0.317	-6.93%	15:21
GASOLINE RBOB FUT (USd/gal.)	306.570	-25.680	-7.73%	15:21
WTI CRUDE FUTURE (USD/bbl.)	98.750	-10.490	-9.60%	15:20

Energy prices have been on a tear since last Fall with the Brent futures trading in the $130 range. This has indicated a dollar losing almost 40% of its value relative to crude since that time period along with much hand-wringing. Commodities are still in an uptrend but a lot of air has been let out of the complex starting with silver, beginning last week.

This is the daily front- month chart of West Texas Intermediate crude, courtesy TFC Charts. Note the sharp declines including today's drop. The current price is still somewhat above the trend line as the last few month's run have amounted to a 'Super- Bull' market. That the various moving averages have all been crossed. Market variability is reflected in the chart which indicates corrections taking place within the trend. It's important to watch and see if selling continues and the trend line/price support are taken out.

I updated the chart b/c the original was outdated before I finished the post!

The commodities are all overbought, over- bullish with few remaining with cash left in the market to buy. A liquidity shortage has been noticeable for the past few months and noted here @ Economic Undertow. What sells is credit and its cost is not known for the moment. It may be the cost for this last 'hurrah' of easy money and nominally cheap finance credit will be the collapse of one or more large banks, perhaps in Europe or Japan, then spreading to China and the US.

The issue for US banks is whether their immense positions (mostly short) in commodities are properly hedged. We are all going to find out the hard way.

If a single, large bank failure takes place, can others be far behind? If a failure occurs within the current tidal onrush of central bank credit, what more can central banks do? What more can the CB's provide in the face of desperate demand for liquidity but wring their hands? Is the Fed able to expand its balance sheet -- even temporarily -- to $20 or $30 trillion or more? What sort of collateral can it accept as good? What good collateral can be had that has not been posted elsewhere?

Is not the shortage of good collateral visible in the rising price of gold and silver?

The (foolish) assumption is that resource constraints will bring forth endless money/credit creation even as the constraints effect economic output at the same time. How can constrained economies afford to create credit? This is the question that few bother to answer: the assumption is that future economic growth will somehow magically appear to provide the means to service the debts.

What the central banks and finance have provided for the establishment has been trillion$ in bridge loans.

Triple- digit oil is somehow supposed to pay for itself, but how can it? As during the real estate bubble and collapse the rationalization is the same as for the current bubble(s): "they ('They') aren't making any more land/oil/gold/silver!" as if all that matters is a cycle of trades made between one speculator and another with actual use as an afterthought!

The final use of a good has to pay for it. The speculative cycle(s) have made the goods use unprofitable: now what?

No one is making any more people with money, either. Additional credit prices the goods remaining on the marketplace out of reach of ordinary use (waste) and economic activity grinds to a standstill as a consequence. This is what demand destruction actually represents.

If economic activity cannot profit by $75 oil, what can it do with $130 oil? Perhaps we shall see: this may be a correction in a longer- term trend toward retesting the 2008 crude oil price of $147. If the world's economies stagger under $130 oil the chance of the higher price slips out of reach.

The place to keep a focus is on precious metals which have been leading commodities since the surge in prices began. Unlike crude, PM's are more relevant to finance markets rather than economic markets and have not been subject to a bubble as was the crude market in 2008. While $200 or even $20,000 silver would be inconvenient to businesses that rely on it such as jewelry or electronics, $200 crude would cause a business coronary as business input costs would instantly price business' goods out of reach of cash- strapped customers. Right now, silver is getting hammered, down 7% @ $34/ oz. This appears to be speculators abandoning a ponzi like rats abandoning the sinking ship.

It's possible the commodities' bubble has more room to run. With the markets beginning to price in credit restraint and a possible slowdown in China, a 'greater bull' seems less and less likely.

With the crude/dollar trade being the 'monetary exchange measurement' that matters, the new strength to be found in the dollar will ricochet through markets that profit from a weak dollar such as the dollar/yuan carry, the dollar/euro F/X cross, most equities trades along with the constellation of derivatives that orbit these trades.

What is the trigger for the decline, other than input costs that have risen beyond affordability? A possible unraveling of the Great China Property Bubble is a good place to start.

Beijing March New House Prices Plunge 26.7% M/M:

BEIJING (MNI) - Prices of new homes in China's capital plunged 26.7% month-on-month in March, the Beijing News reported Tuesday, citing data from the city's Housing and Urban-Rural Development Commission.

Average prices of newly-built houses in March fell 10.9% over the same month last year to CNY19,679 per square meter, marking the first year-on-year decline since September 2009.

Home purchases fell 50.9% y/y and 41.5% m/m, the newspaper said, citing an unidentified official from the Housing Commission as saying the falls point to the government's crackdown on speculation in the real estate market.

Beijing property prices rose 0.4% m/m in February, 0.8% in January and 0.2% in December, according to National Bureau of Statistics data.
The central government has launched several rounds of measures since last year designed to cool the housing market, though local government reliance on land sales to plug fiscal holes mean enforcement hasn't been uniform.

This is one report and one market which does not a trend make, but the undertow can be felt. With the Chinese (pretending) to tighten and the flow of American and European cash to China slackening, the outcome could be the long- dreaded China slowdown or hard landing.

A slowing flow of carry- trade cash would be self- reinforcing. Potential gains from the carry would vanish parallel with greater foreign exchange risk. The China carry trade is yet another finance ponzi scheme: those who 'invested' in China early in the game have profited at the expense of latecomers. The smart money more than likely have already exited, pocking profits on investments priced in a gaining yuan. If the carry implodes, any F/X gains would be balanced by real losses on investments -- real estate and manufacturing enterprises -- 'Made in China'.

I personally think Chinese authorities will continue to try to support their bubble economy by increasing the money supply by any means available even if it means more hyperinflation. Unfortunately, China cannot escape the real world constraints imposed by higher energy costs which result from the same hyperinflation. If these are not imposed upon the Chinese themselves, they will be exacted from their overseas customers.

Pimp the Lies, Cut the Information

2011-05-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

Comes out this morning the Securities and Exchange Commission don't have enough cash to get its 'associates' from Washington DC to Wall Street without them taking the bus. Horrors! A bus, not a private jet?

U.S. Regulators Face Budget Pinch as Mandates Widen

BEN PROTESS (NY Times)

Government regulators on the Wall Street beat have long been outnumbered and outspent by the companies they are supposed to police. But even after receiving budget increases from Congress last month, regulators are still falling behind.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are struggling to fill crucial jobs, enforce new rules, upgrade market surveillance technology and pay for travel.

On a recent trip to New York to tour a trading floor, a group of employees from the commodities watchdog rode Mega Bus both ways, arriving late to their meeting despite a 5:30 a.m. departure. The bus, which cost $30 a person round trip, saved the agency roughly $1,000 over Amtrak.

“We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a hideous bailout, and now we’re not going to fund reforms to prevent another one,” said Bart Chilton, a commissioner with the agency.

The money squeeze comes as Wall Street regulators take on added responsibilities in the wake of the financial crisis, including monitoring hedge funds, overseeing the $600 trillion derivatives market and other tasks mandated by the Dodd-Frank law.

Their budgets may soon be even tighter, with Republicans looking to cut the regulators’ spending beginning Oct. 1, the start of the government’s fiscal year. Gary Gensler, the chairman of the commodities agency, and Mary L. Schapiro, the head of the S.E.C., will discuss their budgets for the 2012 fiscal year before a Senate committee on Wednesday.

It's hard to believe the United States government is being outspent on anything, but policing the Wall Street crooks costs how much, exactly?

Some Republicans argue that the regulators’ cries of poverty are overblown. The S.E.C.’s budget this year is $1.18 billion, up 6 percent over 2010 — and nearly triple what it was a decade ago.

“A dramatic spending increase to fund the S.E.C. and C.F.T.C., as envisioned by the authors of the Dodd-Frank legislation, would further the mind-set that our nation’s problems can be solved with more spending, not more efficiency,” Representative Scott Garrett, the New Jersey Republican who leads the House Financial Services Committee’s Capital Markets panel, said in a statement earlier this year.

While hiring bans and travel restrictions have been eased since the new budget, regulators say they are largely in a holding pattern as lawmakers debate the 2012 budget. Any further cuts, they say, could undermine their efforts to police Wall Street.

The commodities agency says the uncertainty has forced it to delay some investigations and forgo other potential cases altogether.

“We don’t have the sufficient number of bodies to pursue all relevant investigations and leads,” said Mr. Gensler, adding that his agency was short nearly 70 people in its enforcement division.

Robert S. Khuzami, the S.E.C.’s enforcement chief, has similar worries, noting that some Wall Street investigations have faced mounting delays. Recent departures of lawyers will only magnify the problem, he added.

Mr. Khuzami also said he faced a “significant backlog” of tips and referrals, including in the area of market manipulations and accounting irregularities. The tips, which come from whistle-blowers, law enforcement agencies and investors, often prompt S.E.C. investigations.

“The biggest concern is we’re not going to get to fraud and wrongdoing as early as we should,” he said. And if the agency’s budget is not increased in 2012, the S.E.C.’s enforcement division “won’t cast as wide a net,” he added.

Already, the S.E.C.’s enforcement division has adopted cutbacks. The division, for instance, has curbed its use of expert witnesses in some securities fraud trials, Mr. Khuzami said.

The division also started sending only one lawyer — sometimes a junior staff member — to conduct depositions and interview witnesses, according to defense lawyers and people close to the agency. Senior S.E.C. lawyers monitor the depositions via videoconference.

I somehow doubt Congressman Garrett has any plan to enhance the SEC's efficiency, but he has a point. Why is enforcement taking the brunt of the cuts?

Keep in mind that SEC costs are a fraction of what big- business spends on lobbyists.

It's not just the SEC. Data collection by the Energy Information Agency is being curtailed for budget reasons:

EIA budget cuts to curb some energy data gathering

David Bird (MarketWatch)

A 14% cut in the final 2011 fiscal year budget from the year earlier will force the Energy Information Administration to cut back some energy data and analysis, EIA Administrator Richard Newell said Thursday.

Widely followed weekly reports on oil and natural gas inventories aren't affected.

The budget provides $95.4 million for the EIA, the independent, analytical and statistical wing of the Department of Energy, a drop of $15.2 million from the fiscal year 2010 level.

"The lower FY 2011 funding level will require significant cuts in EIA's data, analysis, and forecasting activities," Newell said. "EIA had already taken a number of decisive steps in recent years to streamline operations and enhance overall efficiency, and we will continue to do so in order to minimize the impact of these cuts at a time when both policymaker and public interest in energy issues is high."

EIA said the budget cut means it will "cancel the planned increase in resources to be applied to petroleum data quality issues."

Initial moves including stopping preparation and publishing of the 2011 edition of the annual data release on U.S. proved oil and natural gas reserves and curtailing efforts to understand links between physical energy markets and financial trading.

EIA will also suspend reporting on the market impacts of planned refinery outages, halt collecting monthly state-level data on wholesale prices for petroleum products and suspend auditing of data submitted by major oil and natural gas companies reporting on their 2010 financial performance.

Collection of data from natural-gas market companies will be reduced, along with moves to collect data from smaller companies in EIA oil and natural gas surveys.

EIA said it will "terminate updates" to its international energy statistics, including halting preparation for the 2012 edition of the International Energy Outlook.

Annual published inventories of emissions of greenhouse gases in the U.S. won't be published, and EIA will be forced to "limit responses to requests from policymakers for special analyses."

Here's another example: the EPA is curtailing radiation monitoring across the US. It appears to believe that the Fukushima calamity is 'solved' by TEPCO's brilliance (from George Washington's Blog):

EPA Stops Daily Monitoring of Radioactivity ... When We Need It More Than Ever.

EPA writes today:

Due to the consistent decrease in radiation levels across the country associated with the Japanese nuclear incident, EPA will update the daily data summary page only when new data are posted.

After a thorough data review showing declining radiation levels related to the Japanese nuclear incident, EPA has returned to the routine RadNet sampling and analysis process for precipitation, drinking water and milk.
In fact, radiation levels are not decreasing, and top independent scientists are calling for increased monitoring.

Indeed, Marco Kaltofen - a well-known environmental engineer - stresses that more monitoring has to be done so that we can assess the risks, and take appropriate action:

It's hard not to be cynical about the intentions of the establishment. Data provision and enforcement activities send messages that run contra to the 'happy- happy news' emitted constantly by the establishment's over- funded public relations departments. The government cannot crack down on fraudulent practices it cannot see because it cannot hire enough lawyers. Denying the ability of citizens to come to their own conclusions about peak oil by cutting off the flow of data is of a piece.

The attempt to throttle outcomes implies that reality can be manipulated. It's another version of the 'Key Man' strategy which endeavors to prop up all systemically essential institutions at any cost. Systemically important now means organized thievery and misinformation: we seem to be scraping the bottom of the 'systemic' barrel.

Wall Street firms will break the law, the consequence will be another run out of Wall Street securities. Peak oil is in the past and world is living the consequences regardless of whether the establishment wishes to face the truth or not.

Meanwhile, the silver market has seen tremendous volatility over the past week:

Silver, Gold Futures Dropping as Soros Reported to Have Sold

Chanyaporn Chanjaroen (Bloomberg)

Silver futures fell, heading for the biggest three-day drop since 2008, and gold also retreated amid a report Soros Fund Management LLC sold precious-metal assets.

Soros Fund Management sold some holdings because of a reduced risk of deflation, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited unidentified people close to the matter. Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Soros, declined to comment. The fund held shares in the SPDR Gold Trust, the biggest exchange-traded product backed by gold, and the iShares Gold Trust (IAU) at the end of 2010, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings show.

Silver futures fell as much as 5 percent to $40.465 an ounce on the Comex exchange in New York. The contract was at $41.72 as of 6 a.m. local time, for a three-day decline of 14 percent. Margin requirements were raised 38 percent in since April 26. Gold futures retreated 0.2 percent to $1,537 an ounce.

“Some small, speculative players had to trim their silver positions as they couldn’t afford to pay for such margins,” said Jerome Berset, a portfolio manager at Palaedino Asset Management SA in Geneva, which has 1 billion euros ($1.49 billion) in assets and has maintained holdings in gold and silver. “For long-term players with fundamental views, this may be a good time to get in for both silver and gold.”

The decade-long bull market in gold and silver attracted fund managers from Soros to John Paulson and spurred central banks to add to their reserves for the first time in a generation. Investors in exchange-traded products backed by gold accumulated more metal than all but four central banks, while silver holdings are equal to more than eight months of global mine supply, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

I don't understand the 'reduced deflation risk' argument. There are no hedges against deflation. In deflation, silver loses value along with all other assets relative to currency. Granted, some assets lose less value than others, which is deflation's charm.

There is no doubt that Soros represents 'smart money', someone who knows when to cash out of a bubble.

Something that has to take place is for the paper and physical markets to be brought into balance. The metals futures markets have become mostly margin markets. The massive increase in leverage makes these markets useless for price discovery, even as the (paper) increase forces up the bubble price. I guess the CFTC's employees cannot afford to take the bus so as to monitor the exchanges ... or to properly set position limits.

These markets have large paper derivative overhangs. There are more contracts and options on contracts posted for delivery than there is the actual, physical good available. One consequence is that large positions are held by very few participants both long and short. These positions cannot possibly be hedged properly. It is hard to see how does this state of affairs benefits anyone, even the large position holders. If the market turns against them they will be subject to squeezes. Size itself is no defense when you need to sell and there are no buyers ... or vice- versa: see Floyd Norris' 'Porsche Reinvents the Short Squeeze'.

Bloomberg notes that central banks have switched from being net sellers to net buyers of precious metals. This switch by itself accounts for the increase in metals prices, the banks being inundated with all kinds of debt instruments and foreign exchange. The answer to why central banks hold gold and silver in reserve when all the world's currencies are based on national economies' borrowing ability, the answer is 'why not'?

Otherwise, it is hard to detect any special prescience on the part of central bankers who are unable to grasp simple concepts such as 'asset price bubbles' and 'peak oil'.

Here's a silver chart, from TFC Charts:

This is the front month, electronic session, which has been seeing the selling activity after- hours. The big drop a couple of days ago took place in about ten minutes, which should instruct everyone how dangerous all 'computerized' markets currently are. There simply is no to time to escape an adverse market or close out a losing position without experiencing devastating losses.

Unlike gold, which has limited industrial use, silver is a commercial metal used in engineering, electronics, photography, as a catalyst, as a disinfectant as well as for coins and jewelry. The ramp in price since the beginning of the year renders silver too valuable to use (waste) in ordinary commercial operations. One way to look at the demand for silver is that a significant group of market participants are measuring the commercial value of silver against its monetary value.

In a post- peak world monetary gold and silver is a component of de- industrialization.

As for the idea, "too valuable to waste" consider petroleum. Petroleum has little value if it cannot be wasted (used industrially). As the cost of petroleum rises -- measured against money/credit -- its monetary value increases. When it becomes too valuable to waste, industry becomes the 'loser'. The cost then falls due to demand destruction ... but the cost relative to what industry waste can service is still too high. What then?

The inflection point where industry cannot support the price of oil production is uncertain along with the price threshold. This would be a price too low to support the low energy- return on investment technologies such as shale- oil 'fracking', ultra- deep- water drilling or steam flooding of oil fields. It is possible that the costs are now rising faster than the market oil price rises to pay for them!

The outcome of this dynamic is a sharply contracting amount of oil available at any price.

No wonder the EIA is cutting off data. Soothing lies are so much more pleasant.

The Age of Fraud ...

2011-05-02T06:46:00.000-07:00

The headline says it all:

BIN LADEN IS DEAD

Body Buried At Sea After Raid in Pakistan

(New York Times)

The news touched off an extraordinary outpouring of emotion as crowds gathered outside the White House, in Times Square and at the Ground Zero site, waving American flags, cheering, shouting, laughing and chanting, “U.S.A., U.S.A.!” In New York City, crowds sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Throughout downtown Washington, drivers honked horns deep into the night.

“For over two decades, Bin Laden has been Al Qaeda’s leader and symbol,” the president said in a statement televised around the world. “The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that Al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad.”

Right! Here's another headline:

GOOD GRIEF! BURIED AT SEA? WHO ARE YOU TRYING TO CON?

Top Secret US Navy photograph of Osama bin Laden taken the instant before he was gunned down like the mad dog he was!

The same government that has been telling anyone who would listen that the recession is dead tells us now that ~~Elvis~~ the Pop Art caricature-of-evil, the 'Caliph of Terror' is also deceased.

Right on cue, normally cynical New Yorkers swallow this self- serving nonsense like candy, "waving American flags, cheering, shouting, laughing and chanting, 'U.S.A., U.S.A.!'”. This has to be bullish for commodities, with Brent crude marked @ $126 per barrel.

Establishment credibility was gunned down like a mad dog a long time ago. Who is Osama bin Laden? Who cares?

Osama is dead: was al Qaeda 'real' to begin with?
Osama is dead: what did he have to do with the attacks on 9/11?
Osama is dead, carrying his secrets to the grave: did some intelligence agency orchestrate the attacks on 9/11 as a 'false flag' incident?
Was Osama working for the CIA or some other US- intelligence agency?

Osama is conveniently dead just when the president is busy converting the repulsive Donald Trump, a hairpiece in search of a dead cat to have sex with into a respectable GOP presidential candidate.

Trump would be a president able to endow the truly departed Ferdinand Marcos with 'class'.

That Obama is Trump's enabler tells everyone anything they need to know about life in this Age of Fraud. The convenient decease of Osama and disappearance of a body into the ocean is of a piece with Obama's vanished 'statesmanship'. There will certainly be a stream of 'experts' and 'eyewitnesses' swearing on stacks of bibles that Osama is really, truly dead this time around. Without a body, who will ever know? This is another fraud: like all the others to date it goes down easy and has no substance. Like all the others opportunities do exist for those with the wit to take advantage of them.

The opportunity exists to declare victory over 'terror' and escape Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq. How much do you wanna bet the establishment lets this opportunity slip away? Americans will have to stay in the Middle East to combat Osama's lieutenants and adherents ...

Meanwhile, while the diversions take place, reality grinds on and on:

At Fukushima I Nuke Plant: Ishikawa of JNTI Talks about Reactor Core Conditions

(From Estimable Ex-SKF:)

More on 77-year-old Michio Ishikawa of the Japan Nuclear Technology Institute on the situation at Fukushima I Nuke Plant, as he appeared on Asahi TV on April 29.

As I watched the video, I started to like Mr. Ishikawa, who continues to believe in the safety of nuclear power generation. He didn't mince his words, and said what they are doing at Fukushima I Nuke Plant is not working. That surprised some, including the host of the show, as Ishikawa is known as a strong proponent for the nuclear power generation and the nuclear industry.

"I believe the fuel rods are completely melted. They may already have escaped the pressure vessel. Yes, they say 55% or 30%, but I believe they are all melted down. When the fuel rods melt, they melt from the middle part on down.

(Showing the diagram) "I think the temperature inside the melted core is 2000 degrees to 2000 and several hundred degrees Celsius. A crust has formed on the surface where the water hits. Decay heat is 2000 to 3000 kilowatts, and through the cracks on the crust the radioactive materials (mostly noble gas and iodine) are escaping into the air.

"Volatile gas has almost all escaped from the reactor by now.

"The water [inside the pressure vessel] is highly contaminated with uranium, plutonium, cesium, cobalt, in the concentration we've never seen before.

"My old colleague contacted me and shared his calculation with me. At the decay heat of 2000 kilowatt... There's a substance called cobalt 60. Highly radioactive, needs 1 to 1.5 meter thick shields. It kills people at 1000 curies. He calculated that there are 10 million curies of cobalt-60 in the reactor core. If 10% of cobalt-60 in the core dissolve into water, it's 1 million curies."

[He's an old-timer so he's used to curies instead of becquerel as a unit. 1 curie equals 3.7 x 10^10 becquerels (37,000,000,000 becquerels or 37 gigabecquerels).

10 million curies equals 370,000 terabecquerels, and 1 million curies equals 37,000 terabecquerels. I used this conversion table. Tell me I'm wrong! Cobalt-60 alone would make a Level 7 disaster...]

"They (TEPCO) want to circulate this highly contaminated water to cool the reactor core. Even if they are able to set up the circulation system, it will be a very difficult task to shield the radiation. It will be a very difficult work to build the system, but it has to be done.

"It is imperative to know the current condition of the reactor cores. It is my assumption [that the cores have melted], but wait one day, and we have water more contaminated with radioactive materials. This is a war, and we need to build a "bridgehead" at the reactor itself instead of fooling around with the turbine buildings or transporting contaminated water."

Ishikawa is saying the reactor cores all melted -- including the core(s) stored in spent fuel pools in reactor 4 -- and are now all uncontained. He did not say when the meltdowns took place, but likely during the first days, during the period of zero- cooling, the period of TEPCO head- scratching and reactor explosions.

He observes that water being used to submerge and cool the core material is absorbing radioactive isotopes and becoming more intensely radioactive in the process. This water is leaking into the ocean.

At the same time, TEPCO proposes to circulate this water as a coolant by way of hoses and stand-alone pumps, presumably rigged outside the reactor buildings. The water would instantly and cumulatively irradiate the hoses and pumps, rendering them too radioactive to approach. Cobalt- 60 is an intense gamma- ray emitter. Keep in min, EACH reactor can be presumed to contain 370,000 terabecquerels - or so of cobalt- 60. It is hard to see how a jury- rigged 'cooling system' could be approachable by human beings.

What happens if there is a water leak or a pump breaks down? What about the other heavy radionuclides in the water besides cobalt: uranium and plutonium?

The jury rigs would have to cool the cores for years, perhaps decades! Who or what is TEPCO trying to con?

Ishikawa's 'bridgehead' amounts to using 'bio-robots' working in five- minute shifts to clear working areas on plant grounds and within reactor buildings. These bridgeheads would be are lead- shielded from radiation as much as possible. Each worker would carry his lead brick and set it on top of bricks brought by others. Eventually enough lead bricks would amount to a lead wall, then other lead walls would be built the same way. This was done @ Three Mile Island to access controls that were located in high radiation areas.

Within these bridgeheads, the cores can be accessed and steps taken to entomb them. This would be accomplished by pumping sand, boron and lead into the containments with concrete pumps. The material would be in the form of a water slurry, pumped though holes core- drilled by robots into pressure vessels.

The sand/boron mix would displace the water in the containments. Water that remained would be 'cooked off' by the core heat, leaving behind the nuclides. Wells would be drilled around the reactors to allow radioactive groundwater to be pumped out and treated.

Meanwhile, a sheet- pile/slurry- wall cofferdam would be built around the reactor complex to prevent groundwater from seeping from higher ground into or under the reactors and to force it to flow around rather than though the plant complex. Water would carry less radioactivity over time. A shed roof of some kind would be erected over the reactors to keep rainwater out and radioactive dust damped down.

Waste and debris would be pushed or craned into pits excavated on the site. After debris removal the equipment can be driven into the pits along with the debris. The entire are can be paved with asphalt to keep out water that gets past the roof. After twenty years of cooling the recovery can begin with heavy equipment.

To do this job would probably require a half- million 'volunteers' sent into the four reactors: to build lead bridgeheads, to remove waste and debris unrecoverable by machine and to access the cores and fuel pools.

About "war" at Fukushima I Nuke Plant:

"Take the debris clean-up job for example. They are picking up the debris and putting them in containers, as if this is the peacetime normal operation. This is a war. They should dig a hole somewhere and bury the radioactive debris and clean up later. What's important is to clear the site, using the emergency measures. Build a bridgehead to the reactor.
"The line of command is not clear, whether it is the government, TEPCO, or Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

"Look squarely at the reactors and find out the true situation. [Trying to do something with] the turbine buildings is nothing but a caricature [a joke, a manga, a diversion]."

The show's host says:

"But wait a minute, Mr. Ishikawa, you are a proponent of nuclear power and we expected to hear from you that everything is going well at Fukushima..."

Mr. Ishikawa answers,

"Well, if I'm allowed to tell a lie..."

Now, Mr. Tetsunari Iida speaks, agreeing to Mr. Ishikawa's "war" analogy:

"I totally agree with Mr. Ishikawa's assessment of the plant, and that this is a war. The government simply orders TEPCO to "do it". But it is like the Imperial General Headquarters (大本営) on the eve of the Sea of Japan Naval Battle during the Russo-Japanese War [in 1905] ordering merchant ship TEPCO to attack [the imperial Russian navy].

"The government should appoint a commander. TEPCO has a limit as a private business. No one knows what to do. We have to seek the advice from the best and the brightest in the world."

They don't have to do that, just look @ YouTube videos about Chernobyl or read articles about TMI.

Bitz and Pieces Part Two ...

2011-04-30T16:01:00.000-07:00

After that long and rambling collection of musings about inflation went over like a lead balloon, time for something completely different!

First of all, let me stick my neck out:

There is no inflation in the US, stop worrying about it.

Look carefully @ the inflationists' critiques: inflation is an event that will take place starting tomorrow ... What is happening now is the modest increase in the cost of some goods and services, not others.

Critics insist the dollar is GOING to die, the price of gold is GOING to explode, the price of gasoline is GOING to reach $10 per gallon ... soon. When is 'soon' going to arrive?

It's not just the inflationists! Over @ The Automatic Earth those impatient for immolation demand of Ilargi and the ever-charming Stoneleigh: "When is the deflation you promised us going to arrive, you two bums?" Kunstler gets the same treatment as well: with some people Armageddon is a relief!

Tomorrow ... it's always tomorrow. In the meantime, the daily dose is the same 'blecchh': the rich get richer, etc.

As a character in industrialization's 'Pimp-o-rama', utopia's kissing- cousin dystopia is always right around the corner. Establishment concern about inflation/deflation in the US is of a marketing piece with the rest of consumer culture: it's the 'fad of the moment'.

Nobody can predict the future, not even brilliant geniuses like Stoneleigh. Most analysts have problems describing the present: what is taking place under their feet.

Analysis is mired in modernity. Modernity is entirely self- contained, self- rationalizing and self- referential. Modernity includes all of its necessary enabling components including 'monetary' gold, silver, crude oil, dollars ... everything. Whatever modernity fails to absorb or conquer, it counterfeits. All of modernity's components contain within themselves a crude oil 'liability' as a sub-component.

Inflationists implicate assets as assets and nothing more. Self- created paper is both internally interchangeable with other forms of paper and all is declining in value ... at some arbitrary rate relative to the crude liability. This decline in value is what inflation is.

The surrounding argument is that value relationship dynamic is permanent ... when it cannot possibly be so! The implied value of assets may decrease or not ... there is no way to predict.

There are two kinds of assets: those that are readily exchangeable for the crude liability (extinguishing it) and everything else! Swappable assets have value. All the other assets are worthless trash even if it's hard to tell @ the moment which assets are which.

Okay ... if you just have the liability and nothing else ... on the corporeal balance sheet, you have no economy! Congratulations! You've burned through your oil and 'bounced the rubble' out of frustration! The liability is represented by the abandoned 'ghost suburbs' that rot from sea to fetid, stinking, radioactive sea!

If you still have an economy (which we do to a point) assets exist which are equal to the liability ... that's just the way it is!

Then ... there are the superfluous rest. These so- called assets are worthless regardless of whatever claims anyone makes for them. 'Inflation' as it exists today is the spread between the 'hope value' attached to the excess assets and the underlying reality.

In a world with a semi- functioning economy and an obscure crude oil liability worthless assets can gain (large) nominal value when- and wherever believable- appearing lies can be spread about them. Inflationists insist that 'money' in all forms is freely interchangeable: that simple quantity of of money will bid the price of all that is worthless.

Perhaps the intent of the central banks is to do just this but it is self- defeating. Stranded goods are unable to service their own costs: increasing costs by whatever means is not going to 'un-strand' them?

All forms of money are not interchangeable. Credit is a form of money that is bought with other forms. How can credit avoid being stranded like gas-guzzling SUVs if it cannot 'pay for itself'? Mr Bernanke, brilliant as he is did not take the opportunity of his press conference to address this central question.

Asset market mechanisms also conspire to push up prices. This is taking place right underfoot in the precious metals exchanges where dubious paper assets are unredeemable for anything but more paper. There is an excess of assets -- EFT shares, futures contracts and options on futures --against precious metal liabilities, represented by the actual amount of metals available in the markets.

The 'paper gold' and 'paper silver' are the inflationary equivalent of QE2 or whatever. Some small part of the paper will be traded for real gold or silver. The rest is in the hands of market fools who will wind up with nothing.

During the Great Oil Spike of 2008 assets purporting to represent crude were created far in excess of the actual black goo available in the market. The paper excess did indeed drive up the price ... to the point where economic activity could not support it. The asset bubble mimicked inflation that ended with a lopsided sell side market and long- speculators being annihilated.

The fuel- dependent world will be forced to recalibrate its crude liability after the buy- side games have fatally undermined fuel- dependent economies. The undermining process is visible but only just, behind a scree of propaganda, asset creation and pseudo- inflation.

Not only is there a fuel shortage but a corresponding cash- money shortage. Some inflation: who has all the cash? Rich people, of course ...

There is another intertwined self- amplifying issue: modernity is useless without oil, remove the modernity and oil becomes worthless as well. Nicole Foss makes this point repeatedly: oil scarcity demands increasingly efficient extraction/consumption 'innovations'. These innovation are in turn stranded by the increased costs and shrinking margins. Which assets will escape stranding? A complex and counterintuitive calculus hangs over how to transition away from oil dependency.

Transition to what, exactly? Electric carz? Solar panels? Thorium reactors and business as usual or a return to small farms and agrarianism? All are assets, some of these will wind up marooned along with the giant pickup trucks, jet airliners and factory chickens.

Meanwhile, the ever-insightful John Michael Greer suggests that 'economically developed' humanoids are mired in guilt for what will happen in the future:

Alternatives to Nihilism, Part Three: Remember Your Name

During the Seventies, a great many Americans came face to face with the hard fact that they could have the comfortable and privileged lifestyles they were used to having, or they could guarantee a livable world for their grandchildren, but they couldn’t do both. The vast majority of them – or, more precisely, of us – chose the first option and closed their eyes to the consequences. That mistake was made for understandable and profoundly human reasons, but it was still a mistake, and it haunts the American imagination to this day.

The impact of that choice is perhaps easier to trace on the conservative end of America’s social and political spectrum. Forty years ago, the Republicans had at least as good a record on environmental issues as the Democrats, and the idolatry of the unrestrained free market that pervades the American right these days was a fringe ideology widely, and rightly, considered suspect by most conservatives. For that matter, creationism and speculations about the imminence of the End Times were consigned to the fringes by most American Christians, who by and large considered them irrelevant to the task of living a life centered on the teachings of the Christian gospel.

All these things changed in a hurry at the end of the Seventies. Why? Because the attitudes that replaced them – the shrill insistence that the environment doesn’t matter, that the free market will solve every problem, that the world was created in 4004 BCE with as much oil, coal, and gas as God wants us to have, and that the world will end in our lifetimes so our grandchildren won’t have to deal with the mess we’d otherwise be leaving them – are all attempts to brush aside the ugly fact that the choices made at the end of the Seventies, and repeated by most Americans at every decision point since then, have cashed in the chance of a better future for our grandchildren, and spent the proceeds on an orgy of consumption in the present.

Take that future generations, you undeserving scum! By the way, do you think you can lend us ... twenty trillion bucks? How about thirty?

Far more important is whom to blame. Greer fixes on so-called 'conservatives' (conserving what, exactly?). Better to blame the Fab Four and the bleary, paisley nonsense that drifted along like flotsam in their wake.

If you remember the sixties you weren't really there ... irresponsibility became acceptable, institutionalized. After Ringo, Richard Nixon was inevitable. Greer's implication is the transition to our current state from our current perspective represents a 'Hyper- wicked problem'.

What is a hyper-wicked problem, you ask?

I'm really glad you asked! Let's look @ wicked problems:

Jeff Conklin

Seeking to generalize the concept of problem wickedness to areas other than planning and policy, Conklin identifies the following as defining characteristics of wicked problems:

The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation'
Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

Problem examples

Classic examples of wicked problems include economic, environmental, and political issues. A problem whose solution requires a great number of people to change their mindsets and behavior is likely to be a wicked problem. Therefore, many standard examples of wicked problems come from the areas of public planning and policy. These include global climate change, natural hazards, healthcare, the AIDS epidemic, pandemic influenza, international drug trafficking, homeland security, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy and waste.

In recent years, problems in many areas have been identified as exhibiting elements of wickedness - examples range from aspects of design decision making and knowledge management to business strategy.

A wicked problem has solutions that are themselves problems, which may be of greater consequence than the original problem ... and there is no way to know if this is so until the solution is attempted. Of course, there may be no solution at all rather an expansion or amplification of the original problem or a cascade of successive unsolvable problems.

A hyper-wicked problem is not a large wicked problem but rather one whose existence is not perceived until it is too late for any possible solution to be attempted. Few outside the Club of Rome in 1970 could have articulated Greer's 'hard fact'. The concept of Americans having to confront some kind of choice existing outside the boundaries of privilege was invisible at the time. It's largely invisible now, which directs a great deal of credit to the observation by Greer:

Americans ... face to face with the hard fact that they could have the comfortable and privileged lifestyles they were used to having, or they could guarantee a livable world for their grandchildren, but they couldn’t do both.

The observation of Greer's insight within our shared present is not a critique of Greer. He brilliantly rearranges the inscrutable past coherently and by doing so exhumes the hyper- wicked in its frightening dimensions. Unfortunately, the dim light of realization has not penetrated much farther than Greer's circle of readers and hard- core anti- establishment cynics like myself.

Americans -- and 'American wannabes' worldwide -- are still reaching for the Kool-aid.

When reality strikes it will be massive ... and far too late to contemplate solutions outside those the problem itself has already begun to impose. This has to be John Lennon's fault ...

Meanwhile, if you haven't already shoot over to The Oil Drum are read Jeremy Grantham's 'Inflection Point' article. Grantham is a trend- follower who sees that the road has forked and that the 'old rules' of industrialization do not apply. It IS different this time ...

Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever

The purpose of this, my second (and much longer) piece on resource limitations, is to persuade investors with an interest in the long term to change their whole frame of reference: to recognize that we now live in a different, more constrained, world in which prices of raw materials will rise and shortages will be common. (Previously, I had promised to update you when we had new data. Well, after a lot of grinding, this is our first comprehensive look at some of this data.)

It's a grim article. Grantham boots mathematicians, I'm not sure why. Any decent mathematician would understand that 3000 years of 4% annual compounded growth of anything would pretty much fill a large part of the observable universe. Keep in mind that Grantham's insistence on higher prices does not mean inflation. What matters is the cost of fuel versus the return on its use.

Speaking of mathematicians: here's the Taylor Rule (from Zero Hedge):

For The First Time Since The Great Financial Crash, Taylor Rule Implies A Federal Funds Rate Higher Than Actual ...

Submitted by Tyler Durden

Following yesterday's release of advance Q1 GDP and deflator data,for the first time since the full unwind of the Great Financial Crisis in late 2008, early 2009, the Taylor rule is not only positive (it hit 0.1% in Q4 2010, in line with the federal fund's rate) but has now jumped substantially above the prevailing interest rate, hitting +0.4% in Q1 2011.

The Taylor Rule is math formula that relates the nominal primary interest rate with actual inflation and a target rate:

A rate is change over time: I need a tool that re-states the change in energy cost over time as an interest rate change. In other words, a rise of 'X' in fuel costs is equal to a '??' rise in money cost. Any math peeps out there?

The Economy is Like a Chicken

2011-04-29T07:08:00.000-07:00

Buck buck buck!

Writing about economics or finance means flogging the same article over and over again. One either goes broke or not. There is only so much that can be said about the subject of going broke!

Here is Steve's First Law of Economics: the costs of managing any surplus increase along with the surplus to the point where costs ultimately exceed the value of the thing itself.

More stuff makes you broke!

This is pretty much self- explanatory. The more 'stuff' you have the more you have to spend to keep it together. At some point costs explode and it's impossible to predict what form the costs are going to take! It's here today, gone tomorrow or you hope: (Click on any chart for a bigger, better image!)

China's Forex Cache: Too Much of a Good Thing

The nation's central bank is exploring new ways to manage and invest US$ 3 trillion in foreign reserves.

The People's Bank of China is mulling a new strategy for managing – through diversified investment – its enormous cache of foreign currency and bonds, whose total value exceeded an all-time record US$ 3 trillion in late March.

The amount of U.S. Treasury bonds, dollars, euros and other currency held by the Chinese government is "really too much," said the bank's governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, at an April 18 financial forum at Tsinghua University.

Zhou's comments at least in part reflected international market pressure on the U.S. dollar, which analysts say may comprise 70 percent of the China's foreign holdings. Euros, pounds and yen are also mixed into the reserves, details of which have never been publicized by Beijing.

The same day Zhou spoke, the ratings agency Standard & Poor's frowned on the U.S. government's debt position, raising the possibility of a lower debt rating in the future. China this year has maintained its position as the world's largest holder of U.S. government bonds, with US$ 1.15 trillion in U.S. Treasuries as of February.

And for months, international prices for dollar-based commodities including gold have steadily risen. Global crude oil prices recently neared three-year highs.

Zhou suggested the central bank might react to these tumultuous conditions by changing its approach to strategic investments that rely on foreign currency held in reserves.

Basically, the Chinese surplus of cash is worth less than what it costs China to manage it. The costs include inflation and an excess of capital investment. F/X cash generates inflation in China because the establishment insists that it be spent on something that represents 'value'. There might be more value gained from gambling junkets to Las Vegas. China and her businesses swap dollars and euros for commodities, store the commodities at further cost and bid the commodity prices up to the stratosphere @ the same time.

The excess investment appears as ghost cities, excess manufacturing capacity and a massive property bubble getting ready to explode!

What passes for US inflation is the result of China spending its dollars on fuel. What does China have to show for its waste of dollars on fuel?

Nothing ...

It goes from there, the Chinese have so much cash that anything they do with it bounces back to kick the Chinese economy in the balls. They have so much cash that doing enough with it to make a difference in the size of the hoard would spoil the value of what remains. The cash hoard is bankrupting China and this is the first acknowledgement by the establishment the surplus is a problem.

It's also a huge problem for the US and the dollar. What does the US have to show for shipping a large part of its output to China?

Nothing ...

Hilarious/stupid to watch the president go on television the other day and drop his pants like some ordinary street negro being rousted by the cops: "Hey boah, git yo ass ovah heah and showmee yo ah- dee!"

Geez ... the president of the United States of America, spreadeagled on the hood of a squad car by the World's biggest phony. What a country, what leadership! No wonder the dollar is getting hammered!

Why did it take two years for the Prez to release the certificate? It must have taken that long for the hot shots @ the CIA to forge one and for these same hot shots to be killed.

So they can't be outed on Wikileaks ...

Obama should have just ordered a new certificate from the Pyongyang outfit that makes all the $100 bills ...

One problem for the dollar is the endlessly expanding US Defense Department budget. There is less and less bang for the military's dollar. A solution would be to eliminate the Pentagon, fire all the generals and soldiers, ground all the US' aircraft and mothball the entire US Navy.

Hire the Taliban.

The defense budget would shrink to about $50 plus all the Red Bull jihadi recruits can guzzle. They don't need anything in the way of supplies or support, not even razor blades. Get that Koran- burning bigot in Florida to toss in a few spares for 'motivational purposes'.

They are kicking our ass, why not turn them around to kick others' ass for a change?

One of the Twitter remarks during Fed Chairman Bernanke's (non)news conference yesterday was from ZeroHedge: "Every word out of his mouth is ten cents added to the price of gold."

Every word is a nail in the coffin of the dollar which is on its 'death ride':

Not really, but people have a right to be concerned. The dollar's value priced in other currencies is the little arrow on the right. It's so stinky that even professional dollar traders are giving it a wide berth. Thanks to reader Josh for this chart.

The current data does not support deflation arguments. Priced in crude oil, the dollar has lost about 40% of its value over the past nine months. Within the all- important crude/dollar relationship there is almost 100% annual inflation, no wonder people are howling!

They will howl until something starts breaking, likely the weakest link: will it be the dollar?

Probably not ... a big reason is what would folks use to buy fuel in place of dollar? This presumes that all else remains the same, which is a completely false presumption! If the dollar falls in value oil prices rise 'too high' and the economy crashes because people stop buying 'other stuff'.

There are really no alternatives to the dollar 'out there'. All the other major currencies are emitted from countries with the same problems the US has or worse.

The dollar in this chart is priced against a 'basket' of 'Various Brand X' currencies. Who swaps dollars for a basket? People don't use other currencies in America. Dollars can already purchase the goods of any country in the world. There is no demand on the street for other currencies in this country and the dollar has not lost enough value for people to call for alternatives. For better or worse, America is a dollar desert.

Some of the proposed alternatives to dollars such as IMF 'SDRs' or gold and silver are not currencies. Realistically, no one is going to trade gold or silver for a tank of gasoline so they can 'drive around'. Hard currencies and currency black markets are incompatible with advertising- based consumer economies which rely on electronic money and credit.

The country can and probably will get to that point but would require a severe bout of deflation first. This is because a black- market currency trade is a requirement for hyperinflation. Such a trade cannot be caused by the current round of price increases which involve all the major currencies swapped for crude. This is what is meant by 'Share the same problems': oil prices are high in all the currencies. If you want fuel in Indonesia you have to fork over the rupiahs. It's not just 'Scapegoat Bennie's fault but that of lazy gas users all over the world!

Right now, the only dollars swappers able to take large enough positions to change the relative values of one currency vis-a-vis any other(s) are are traders on F/X markets. These include the big banks like JP Morgan- Chase or Goldman- Sachs.

Hmmmm ...

Look carefully @ the chart and you can see the long or short positions are concurrent with trend changes. The big traders don't telegraph or lead the market but their actions signify the trend.

Will traders buy the dollar any time soon? I don't know. They will eventually, there is too much easy money out there right now to ignore the long- dollar trade. Add a short- squeeze and buying dollars might be the trade of the decade. Just sayin' ...

People are panicking about the dollar right now, generally when panic is taking place that is the time to buy: when there is "Blood on the streets!" You can look @ some of the dollar action in commodities like silver and the response of some of the analysts as a signal for a trend change.

Meanwhile, high oil prices damage the world's economies but where will the damage manifest itself? The weakest links are Ireland, Portugal and Greece. Spain and Italy aren't much stronger. All are 'too big to bail' yet failure is pretty much unavoidable at this point.

Look @ Greek debt and the unwillingness of anyone to lend to her even at the offer of twenty cents annual return on every dollar lent! Greece represents the endgame of austerity whereby borrowing costs increase while the ability to meet those costs is diminished.

Nobody in charge figured this out when Greece & Co. got into trouble a year and a half ago ...

Almost all of Europe is on the same road to insolvency as Greece. The Europeans are energy debtors. Only Norway, Switzerland and Iceland have energy surpluses that aren't existentially threatening. France is another nuclear time bomb like Japan. Both Greece and Germany burn lignite as a thermal fuel. For all the yakking about 'efficiency' and 'alternatives' the Eurozone is where car manufacturing is king and there are no speed limits on the various autobahnen.

Hard earned European foreign exchange flows outward toward Middle East oil producers, what returns is burned up for nothing. What can possibly be wrong with this program?

Once Greece or Ireland default the world's interconnected banks will begin hemorrhaging again. Like the sovereigns, the EU banks are insolvent. The interesting question is whether the EU central bank itself is solvent or is willing to risk its own solvency by expanding its balance sheet.

The IMF does not have enough cash to bail out the entire Eurozone. When it totters the euro will be on the gallows. Who will guarantee the ECB if there is a significant run out of euro- denominated assets? Can Bernanke?

The issue with monetary policy easing is that it also follows Steve's First Law. There are diminishing returns/increased costs associated with the surplus of easy credit. Adding to the surplus pushes costs even as added funds cannot substitute for value.

Value is something which cannot be printed or ginned up on a laptop. Fed Chair Bernanke touched on this during his epochal press conference Tuesday. I watched hoping the Fed chief's pants would fall down. Instead, Bernanke admitted the Fed cannot print more oil. What the world needs in its hours of despair is some value.

We have a problem because we have burned up so much of our value with nothing to show for it besides a fake birth certificate that sez the President was born in Honolululu, Kenya.

Good grief!

Japan is a country with debt and spending characteristics similar to the US and is also experiencing deflation. This is not to say that inflation is impossible in Japan but 20 years of deflation in the face of massive establishment efforts to generates some inflation leads one to believe that crafting even the smallest amount of inflation is much more difficult than is commonly believed.

Japan's industrial production slumps record 15.3% in March

TOKYO, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Japan's industrial production plummeted a record 15.3 percent from the previous month in March on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry said in a preliminary report on Thursday.

The record decline in the recording period was due to the March 11 twin disasters that destroyed infrastructures, damaged production facilities and severely disrupted key supply chains, the government said.

March's figure far exceeded median economists' expectations for an 11.4 percent drop and the index stood at 82.9 against the base of 100 for 2005.

Industrial shipments plummeted 14.3 percent to 85.3 and industrial inventories dropped 4.3 percent to 97.6, the government data showed.

Japan's middleman economy arbitrages the difference between what it pays for energy and what it receives for that energy in the form of finished industrial goods. With the costs of Fukushima added to increasing crude costs, the ability of Japan to continue with the arbitrage is falling into doubt.

Now that China is a net energy importer, China's energy arbitrage trade is also looking dicey. They can build an enormous F/X surplus by swapping cheap coal for cash but what happens when they have to buy expensive coal ... or their cheaply- made nuke plants start to blow up?

China shares a lot of Japan's mercantile and manufacturing characteristics. China's inflation appears to be rampaging out of control with both rising prices AND rising wages. Why does China experience inflation and Japan deflation? There are no easy answers. It's possible that next year China's property bubble will collapse like Japan's did in 1990 with China falling into a severe deflation or even depression. At the same time, Japan might convince its remaining savers that there is nothing for them to gain by their holding on to their money. Once all of Japan's cash is turned out onto the markets there would be inflation.

The earthquake and tsunami would appear be a reason for Japan to call out all of its spare change. The public has so- far not responded: inflation in Japan appears to be unlikely, at least for the present.

The bottom line of this analysis is what the public does on its own in the various countries which determines whether there is inflation or deflation. All the motorists in the world buying fuel pushes up fuel costs. This is not inflation but supply and demand falling out of balance. The same motorists swapping one particular currency for others is inflation! That is not happening, the context for such a swap does not exist and neither do the required pre- conditions such as a non- dollar currency black market in the US.

Currency traders are swapping out of dollars. They do so for short- term market- related purposes, which is their jobs. These same markets (which aren't really markets), politicians and economists cannot control currency outcomes because these agents cannot take large enough market positions to have any long term effect. Only the public(s) can do this.

The establishment cannot control, only cajole by way of spamming.

For the Fed to take a large enough currency position (short) to effect the value of the dollar its loss of (asset) value on the trade would render the Fed insolvent. (Maybe it is already!) This is the problem with central bank balance sheet expansions. As with the natural world there are limits to what even powerful agencies can do.

The currency and interest rate derivatives markets have as much influence on the value of the dollar as does the Fed and other central banks, the F/X traders or all of them together. The currency/rate swaps markets have their own dynamic(s), everyone goes along for the ride. Can the derivatives markets 'kill' the dollar? Yes and no: the public is more powerful than even these derivatives markets.

The public holding dollars or other currencies (such as the Japanese yen) gives the currency value. This is how the value process works ... not the other way around. If the people choose to hold dollars (saving them) the outcome is the bankruptcy of the establishment, regardless of what the establishment does. This is the lesson of the Great Depression. This is also of a piece with Max Keiser's silver buying siege of JP Morgan- Chase. The concept is holding a good to add value: it is Keynes' famous 'Paradox of thrift'.

The situation is a bit different in the US. The establishment thinks it can separate cash from savers' hands but the joke is on the establishment. There are few savers in the US, most Americans are broke with zero liquid net worth. This is because Americans have been living with inflation their entire lives! Loading up on debt is the rational strategy in an inflationary environment!

The great bulk of Americans' wealth lies in their houses and other real property. Removing more of the citizens' net worth would be accomplished not by cost- push inflation aimed at non- existent savers but by settling the robo- signing debacle and ramping up foreclosures.

Even that won't work! The primary reason for fewer foreclosures is the loss- recognition that would accompany any foreclosure increase. This in turn would render the banks who hold the trillion$ in bad loans ... insolvent. Homeowners are broke and so are the banks that lent to them.

Underwater homeowners, the unemployed, the destitute or those on government life support cannot push prices. This is the obvious flaw in any inflation argument. High prices caused by supply- demand imbalances (such as Peak Oil) are not -- by themselves -- inflationary.

The governments and banking establishments are impotent. Bernanke is a dude w/ a witch doctor mask who jumps around and waves his arms until his pants fall down. Bernanke cannot create value only the markers for value that does not exist in the real world. If there was value in the real world Bernanke would not have to expand the Fed's balance sheet!

Meanwhile, another argument concerning inflation regards the 'persistence of money' that is, once currency is created it doesn't die even as the output it represents vanishes. There is an increasing imbalance as there is more money relative to goods and services leading mechanistically to more inflation.

Money is indeed persistent (which is what Modern Monetary Theory or 'MMT' is all about). Persistent money finds itself on different places on various balance sheets over time. The question unanswered is what happens when the balance sheets themselves are destroyed?

Depending where a bookkeeping entry (YOUR cash) is to be found on a particular balance sheet, its destruction will also destroy YOUR cash. It will be marked as an asset against some liability and the loan explicit in YOUR cash's creation will be 'paid off'. This destruction OF balance sheets rather than BY them happens all the time, particularly in deflationary periods. It's called 'bankruptcy'.

Keep in mind, one of the things that the USA Waste- based economy does best is destroy capital. It (de)values capital to near zero and burns it up with a big shit- eating grin on its face. If your asset is assigned as 'capital' onto some business entity's balance sheet you can kiss your cash goodbye.

Meanwhile, there is another tricky supposition that manifests itself as inflation which involves the amount or quantity of credit embedded in the price of a good. This will be in Part Two.

Gunderson Speculation on Fukushima Number 3

2011-04-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

The explosions @ the Japanese reactors have been subject to an increasing amount of analysis. Here's Arnie Gunderson at Fairewinds Associates:

Gunderson suggests that a hydrogen explosion in the service area of unit 3 distorted fuel stored in the spent fuel pool to such a degree that a prompt criticality took place.

What is a prompt criticality, you ask?

I am glad you asked because here is an answer:

The SL-1, or Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, was a United States Army experimental nuclear power reactor which underwent a steam explosion and meltdown on January 3, 1961, killing its three operators. The direct cause was the improper withdrawal of the central control rod, responsible for absorbing neutrons in the poorly-designed reactor core. The event is the only known fatal reactor accident in the United States. The accident released about 80 curies (3.0 TBq) of I-131, which was not considered significant due to its location in a remote desert of Idaho. About 1,100 curies (41 TBq) of fission products were released into the atmosphere.

Fissioning Uranium 235 releases neutrons instantly when atoms divide, these 'prompt' neutrons cause knock-on reactions that are amplified by the accompanying increase in heat generated by the reactions. The positive feedback loop can cause an explosion.

When the central control rod in SL-1 was removed, fission reactions took place much faster than the heat generated by the fission could be removed by water boiling within the reactor core. The reactor ran away and the core blew up, scattering bits of itself everywhere and shutting down the reactions. All of this took place within a small fraction of a second.

The three operators were killed by the blast.

A similar criticality took place @ Chernobyl reactor unit 4. Both criticality incidents involved large steam explosions and fuel melting.

Did a criticality incident take place in the fuel pool (or in the core or below the core?) Nobody knows for sure but the release of more information regarding isotopes found on the reactor site will be revealing.

Meanwhile, TEPCO is trying to decide whether unit one containment is leaking:

TEPCO checks to see if water is leaking from No. 1 reactor container

The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex on Tuesday started checking to see if water is leaking from the No. 1 reactor container ahead of work to flood the vessel with water as a step to stably cool the troubled reactor.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said that remote-controlled robots did not find ''notable water leakage'' during Tuesday's observation at the No. 1 reactor building, and it plans to continue checking by increasing the amount of water currently being injected into the reactor and measuring the change of reactor pressure and other factors.

Of course it's leaking, all the reactors @ Fukushima Dai- ichi are leaking. The entire site is a mess that gets worse with every passing day. The more the reactors leak the more water must be pumped into them, the more radiation carried by the leaks, the increased difficulty in doing 'repairs' in areas flooded by water.

The water becomes more radioactive with more water added daily. The water storage areas become too full to hold any more so 'mildly contaminated' water is then pumped into the ocean so that even more contaminated water can take its place. 'Round and 'round the nonsense goes, a point is reached where the water is too radioactive to approach with more and more being pumped into the leaking reactors.

Then what, sports fans?

No more water and the cores start melting and more 'prompt criticality' incidents.

Good grief!

Dollar Dynamics and Crude Oil ...

2011-04-24T15:48:00.000-07:00

The dollar's obituary has been posted far and wide it's apropos to prepare an eulogy so its tattered fragments can be swept away and us Americans -- and the rest of the world -- can prepare for the end of the dollar as the world reserve currency and the embrace of Mexican pesos or yens or something else as the new national currency!

Right?

Here is the cumulative euro front month futures contract priced in dollars from Estimable TFC Charts. (Click on any of these charts to get a larger, clearer version.)

Hmmm, not so fast ... people are proclaiming dollar death and the indeed the buck sucks today, almost as badly as the buck sucked during the finance crisis. Nevertheless, we have a ways to go in order for the dollar to be as worthless in euros as it was a couple of years ago.

The short term trend appears ready to take us there. This is probably not the week to be a dollar bull. Nevertheless, currencies fluctuate. Best not to be caught up 'in the moment' unless there is nothing better to do and you have lots of worthless dollars you can afford to lose!

The dollar has fallen in value since last summer and there are reasons for this. The conventional wisdom is that Federal Reserve easing policies such as zero- percent interest rates (ZIRP) have weakened the dollar which is carry- traded for 'risk' in equities and commodities. Other analysts finger a deliberate strategy to depreciate the dollar. Keep in mind, currency 'value' is ordinarily measured relative to other currencies. This may not necessarily be the most accurate measurement, particularly when other currencies suck almost as bad or worse than the buck:

Currency 'value' is an abstraction. There is no such thing as a currency 'store of value' since value is arbitrary/subjective and cannot exist outside of the context which enables it. Longer- term (over years) the dollar is worthless. It is a fetish- proxy for American 'production'. What does America or other industrial countries produce besides waste?

The Federal Reserve and other central banks are seeking relevance during a period when monetary policy revolves around the crude oil/dollar trade. The result has central bankers pulling whatever rabbits they can out of hats in order to pimp borrowing. To the extent that Bernanke can encourage folks to borrow, his antics effect demand and prices ... and in turn, dollar value.

The establishment in the US is clearly befuddled by ongoing scarcity events and is incapable of acting intelligently. The rationale given for economics is the allocation of scarcity: this is completely wrong. Economics exists only to manage the costs associated with increasing surpluses: in its current form it is useless the face of onrushing scarcity.

The low demand for credit allows traders to 'sell dollars' and 'buy risk' in different markets which in turn allows a greater return from carry- trade speculation than there is in holding cash. The outcome is a depreciating dollar.

There is a competition by exporters to devalue for competitive advantage and the US is a commodity exporter, particularly of food. Commodities markets are credit markets in drag; the 'margin for sale' inflates commodity prices, devaluing the dollars @ the same time.

There is a strategy by US interests to take dollars out of circulation overseas by loudly and publicly damning the dollar and swapping it for (even more worthless) non- dollar assets.

There are reasons why the current dollar weakness is likely to be short- lived. Keep in mind, for every dollar seller there is a dollar buyer who happens to be somebody like Bill Gross:

Nominal crude prices can only increase to a level where businesses that require fuel fail because they cannot afford an amount that keeps the doors open. Once another failure round begins, more deleveraging will take place as the fuel- dependent will be unable to service the massive Ponzi- debt overhang. Those in the cross- hairs look to be auto companies, restaurateurs and retailers in the US, entire countries such as Spain or Japan along with real estate speculators (the Communist Party) and exporters in China.

Central bankers and policy makers tend to make the wrong moves particularly during times of stress.

The dollar is ubiquitous within the underworld.

The strong export economies cannot provide a currency substitute for the dollar (and the importing countries are not solvent enough to provide one, either).

It's an ugly contest out there! Japan is bankrupt due to the Fukushima debacle but does not acknowledge it. The EU is bankrupt due to being held hostage by euro- denominated debts to and from different parts of itself. China is bankrupt due to over- investment in industrial capacity and 'luxury' even as it's mercantile trade ruins its customers. Blessed by still- adequate resources and no nuke meltdowns taking place right this moment, the USA is slightly less repulsive than its trading partners.

The easy thing to do is blame dollar weakness on the Fed and turn the Chairman into a piñata. "This is your personal fault Bernanke, you bearded bag of shit, you are single handedly ruining the American Dream of endless personal success."

Sez Dian Chu:

The Fed Must End QE2 on April 27th

The Federal Reserve has lost all credibility on Wall Street, and most of the American public with the absolute refusal to recognize the dire effects on asset prices that QE2 has created. But the refusal is part of the problem. It reinforces the wide spread belief of investors that the Fed is out of touch with reality, and that they sit in their Ivory Tower implementing an exceedingly loose monetary policy, with the stated goal of inflating asset prices

Like this asset?

Stimulus by Fed Is Disappointing, Economists Say

Binyamin Appelbaum (NY Times)

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve’s experimental effort to spur a recovery by purchasing vast quantities of federal debt has pumped up the stock market, reduced the cost of American exports and allowed companies to borrow money at lower interest rates.

But most Americans are not feeling the difference, in part because those benefits have been surprisingly small. The latest estimates from economists, in fact, suggest that the pace of recovery from the global financial crisis has flagged since November, when the Fed started buying $600 billion in Treasury securities to push private dollars into investments that create jobs.

As the Fed’s policy-making board prepares to meet Tuesday and Wednesday — after which the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, will hold a news conference for the first time to explain its decisions to the public — a broad range of economists say that the disappointing results show the limits of the central bank’s ability to lift the nation from its economic malaise.

“It’s good for stopping the fall, but for actually turning things around and driving the recovery, I just don’t think monetary policy has that power,” said Mark Thoma, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon, referring specifically to the bond-buying program.

What's it going to be, children? Please make up your minds!

As pointed out here repeatedly, the latest round of quantitative easing has been a public relations stunt. The Fed cannot print 'value' or crude oil or jobs, it doesn't add anything except 'reserves' to accounts held by banks at the Fed. 'Reserves' are an abstraction; they appear when the availability of credit is greater than demand for it ... like now.

Modernity runs on crude oil, money and credit are used to keep score. Credit can be substituted for 'other things' so an appearance of output can be maintained when facts suggest otherwise. As in bowling, this is called 'cheating'. Real output is required to bring more crude, gold, silver, corn, etc. out of the ground. Credit is for those who have little output but are glib enough to convince producers that they can use it to steal output from somebody else.

The ability of America to steal -- as priced in dollars -- is being depreciated against the abilities of other countries who appear able to do a better job!

Goldman- Sachs and other finance 'players' can kite each other checks (with the blessing of regulators). All that is required is sufficient physical goods in hand to maintain margin. This is in the unlikely event the markets must endure a short- term reversal and there is demand for collateral. Priced in dollars, the ability of financiers to kite checks to each other appears to be waning.

The outcome of this is that oil producers/terminals can be flooded with oil while prices for the same oil are increasing in apparent violation of the laws of supply and demand. What is being priced is not only the oil available but also the cost of margin in the fuel markets ... which is conveniently set by the traders themselves by their use of the exact same margin!

Happy, happy, joy- joy! The traders have their hands on another perpetual motion machine! They can bid prices higher which increases their leverage on the sell- side which increases the amount of credit available which is then used to bid prices higher still. They can 'flip' their goods to some strapped- out sucker and pocket the leverage- amplified profits. Steadily increasing prices means ever- more leverage is needed by the Ordinary Joes to access the markets at all. The cost of leverage is constantly 'bidded onto' the goods- price. The result is rationing by access to credit and price: no credit, no oil.

Priced in dollars, the ability of the US to pay for fuel out of cash flow is diminishing ...

Commodities markets are pricing margin availability along with that of that of the commodities themselves. If there was a lot of crude on the markets the need for leverage would not exist. The fact of increasing crude price alongside 'well- supplied' markets indicates the crude market has become a credit market.

It also indicates that crude is hard to come by.

It's not the Fed or its proxies that are effecting prices but those with the goods and the willingness to leverage their own market- making power. The producers can hold goods off the markets: the Saudis say they have oil that nobody wants to buy. What does this really mean? It means perhaps that Saudia has oil that nobody wants to buy @ $500 per barrel.

Tomorrow?

The market- making dynamic triggers self- amplifying vicious cycles which cause prices to 'run away'. The escape of the crude price in dollars would be the end of the US as a going industrial concern. We import two- thirds of the oil that is consumed in this country, The establishment has not thought through the hazards of its finance nonchalance. Farmers would lack the fuel to plant their crops, the auto and airline industries would collapse. There would be a tremendous panic ...

... which would be excellent for the dollar.

A bubble is when a self- generating increase in margin amplifies the increase in price of the good being leveraged. There is more dollar- credit available now for gold than there was ten years ago, more dollar- credit for silver, certainly, almost but not quite as much credit available for crude as their was in 2008. Given enough 'confidence' (that the participants will be bailed out when the bubble breaks), the credit mechanism becomes self- actuating the same way it was during the mortgage lending bubble.

Demand for yield on the 'sell side' of the mortgage derivative industry allowed the creation of credit far in excess of what ordinary supply and demand fundamentals would have permitted. The credit allowed house buyers to bid up prices to levels unsupportable by cash flows. The 'sell- side' of commodity finance is generating lots of yield which in turn is feeding more credit into commodities.

We just don't see the sell side except its effects on rapidly increasing prices.

Finance's credit machine bids up fuel and other commodity prices to levels that Main Street business cannot support. A credit bubble can be blamed on the Fed, it can also be blamed on phases of the Moon or itchy feet. Finance/business lends into existence what credit it requires to do business -- regardless of the nature of that business. Remember, the dollar is ubiquitous in the underworld and finance is an integrated part of it. 'Bidness' is only required to provide returns sufficient to service the loans, which a bubble can do ... for a little while.

Long before the end of the bubble, the bad- guys will have taken the (dollar) loot and have left the building ..

Restraining the Fed is unlikely to effect bubble prices in commodities unless interest rates rise making margin too expensive.

A bubble is simply a Ponzi scheme. All end the same way, with bubble- death and deflation. Credit Ponzis are particularly pernicious as the debts taken on to inflate them far exceeds what could be inflated by cold, hard cash. Credit bubble debts cannot be supported by cash flows. This is why the first credit bubble has to be superseded by others. Only additional rounds of credit can replace/service legacy bubble credit. The row of successive bubble ends up with a cumulative 'hyper- bubble' which is what the developed world is trying to support this minute ... by pumping up yet another Ponzi scheme!

This is not so good for the dollar which is seen -- rightly -- as a Ponzi enabler. Our Ponzis aren't magic anymore. Tragically, our current commodity- credit bubble cannot possible roll over the gigantic bubbles inflated since the end of Bretton- Woods. It's 'returns' are counter- productive, crippling the output the bubble needs to support itself. We have collectively reached the end of the bubble gang- plank.

Once the bubble explodes, leverage will collapse in the 'Mother of All Margin Calls'. The dollar will be 'chastened' and in tremendous demand. Finance in extremis will suck dollars out of circulation. For a time, the dollar will rule ... and everyone will regret it!

Meanwhile, there is little in the way of velocity, the sign of a liquidity trap:

Monetary easing/tightening has had little effect on gasoline prices:

There is no relationship whatsoever between Fed easing and gasoline prices. Prices were rising when the Fed was putting capital into the system and rose when the Fed tightened. Gas prices are driven by endogenous factors. Monetary policy is more or less irrelevant.

Here's Comex silver, inflated by commodity credit:

Here are the Brent Crude futures:

The increase in credit made available to finance fuel purchases and thereby bid up prices is suggestive. If 'alternative' forms of energy or even crude were on the market, the credit- carry trade would not be profitable. The reason such a carry trade exists in the first place is because fuel supplies are limited to those who can leverage themselves.

Monetary policy in the US is made in Riyadh -- and at the gas pump -- rather than Señor Piñata's office:

Bankrupt American Exceptionalism ...

2011-04-20T19:51:00.000-07:00

Biggest event taking place right this instant isn't any of the world's melt-downs but rather the theatrical release of Ayn Rand's stupefying bore- fest ... what is the name of that movie again?

Hmmm ... spending hard- earned real money to watch a movie about well- dressed jackasses pretending to obtain industrial societies' fetish objects is as interesting as watching a movie about somebody mowing grass. A bizarre form of desperate self- loathing -- voyeurism -- is required in order to accept the undertaking on its own terms. It's after- the- fact propaganda of a fabulist sort. You'd see the English making this kind of movie: Miss Marple would be drinking tea, ferreting out the corpse in a drawing room in a chintz- filled manor house populated with dithering, yet endearing eccentrics.

In America the corpse is on a bloody rampage. Here is the vision of decadent American Exceptionalism rotting before the viewers' eyes. Rand's conceit is that society is obligated to the baronesque 'Uberman' parasites who feed off of it. Rationalizations never had it so good: the 'Niewe Corruption' which pretends it isn't requires people to rip off others so as to afford seeing a movie about ripping people off. Who is John Galt, again?

Does anyone care?

The production company cut half of the film: here are some bits of the other half on YouTube:

The viewers can come to their own conclusions about which version of Exceptionalism is more representative of reality. Both have their merits, one seamlessly integrates with the other. Both orbit around a fantasy of capitalism: the wanderer appears to be the mute and mysterious Galt, stopping at a vending machine in order to purchase a flamethrower, presumably with The American Express Gold Card.

Doctor Challes Mercer's 'creation' is an indestructible humoresque which -- unlike Mimi in La Boheme -- reconstitutes itself after dismemberment over and over. It's not hard to make the connection between this Rand alter- ego and Exxon or Monsanto or any/all other zombie- corporations that are to be found nowhere in particular. What's missing is the purchase of Washington, DC 'power factors' by this entity with bags of dirty money exchanged under the table(s). Meanwhile, Galt's 'lifestyle' is to endure as a rat in a dystopic automobile habitat confronted with those who desire nothing but to make him one of 'them'.

The only thing missing from the clip is the traffic jam at the beginning and end as Galt commutes to and from his baleful 'office'.

The message that our entertainment provides for us with upturned hearts and hopeful minds is conflicted. 'Atlas Shrugs' suggests that workmanlike virtues such as ability, skill, mastery are irrelevancies left to the pathetic, fucked- over 'little people': what matters is the broad- shouldered 'attitude' on the part of the deserving.

'Shrugs Part Two' suggests a machine gun and good reflexes are indispensable. It's tough when a video game starring a wanderer in a giant space ship is more 'real' than reality itself. When in doubt, whip it out: the country along with the rest of developed world has never left the second grade!

Meredith Whitney whips it out while kicking the US municipal bond market in the balls on national television. The response by the broad- shouldered, business- suited crowd is Randian outrage! The muni interloper Whitney has some nerve: after all, municipal bond issuers have rarely defaulted. Because municipalities have not defaulted in the past they certainly won't default in the future! Right?

Keep in mind municipal bonds are bets on the viability of sprawl in the age of rapidly diminishing expectations ... er, fuel supplies.

Rand acolyte Chris Cristie who is the putative governor of New Jersey whips it out in the same clip and whales teachers and firefighters over the head in the hunt for easy answers. While the problem with the US economy is the exceptionalism parked at the end of folks' driveways, it feels good to whip out sixteen inches or so of Randistic gristle and bash those not responsible for the fallout. Key to the Ayn Rand philosophy is the identification of scapegoats!

In a ground-breaking statement last week, the IMF says oil has entered, "a period of increased scarcity."

Energy constraints turn our atavistic economic Darwinism inside out. Any 'growth' or 'progress' or buzzword larded bubble- creation on the parts of the Ayn Rand crowd is accompanied by its profit- killing oil- price doppelganger, which replicates itself along- and across supply chains. Prices become serial killers stalking the barren economic landscape like vampires. Tom Whipple whips it out and flogs the denial crowd with Peak Oil Reality:

Unlike the price spike of three years ago, when oil prices climbed from $70 a barrel in late 2007 to a peak of $147 in July 2008 and then collapsed to less than $60 a barrel by the end of the year, this time prices have been moving steadily higher since March of 2010. Much has happened since the 2008 oil price spike that has left the U.S. and global economies different places than they were three years ago.

The bursting of the housing and financial bubbles and the subsequent government bailouts in many OECD countries left most governments at all levels in dire straits. Unemployment rates in many OECD countries have risen and for many incomes have fallen considerably as workers have been forced into lower paying jobs. Polls suggest that as many as 50 percent of American families have had some sort of financial setback in recent years.

Into this milieu we now have added higher oil prices. Moreover, given the increasing unrest in many Middle Eastern states, continued robust economic growth in China and India, and despite the deterioration of Japan's economy in the midst of its tsunami/nuclear radiation crisis, it seems the balance of forces driving the oil markets will result in still higher prices before the year is out.

Now this is a message that the world's financial markets and chambers of commerce simply do not want to hear, for it implies that in the not too distant future there will be another economic downturn. In recent days there has been a spate of stories in the financial press trying to make the case that all is not lost and that economic recovery will continue despite increasing energy costs.

The presumably Rand-u-esque Standard and Poors Rating Agency whipped it out recently and announced US credit is not up to S&P's exceedingly high standards.

U.S. Credit Rating May Be Cut by S&P Unless Lawmakers Agree to Reduce Debt

Standard & Poor’s put the U.S. government on notice that it risks losing its AAA credit rating unless policy makers agree on a plan by 2013 to reduce budget deficits and the national debt.

“If an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation does not begin by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns,” New York-based S&P said today in a report that maintained its top rating on U.S. long-term debt while lowering the outlook to “negative” for the first time.

The rating agencies have zero- credibility. S&P gave its benedictions to Enron and then to CDO's backed by unserviceable mortgages during the credit bubble. "J-accuse!" howl the Rand- tagonists: Here's Dave Lindorff (HT Jesse's Cafe Americain)

An 'Oh Please!' Moment: Is S&P Running Interference for the Right to Help Crush Social Security and Medicare?

Today’s breathless, anxiety-inducing headline was that Standard and Poors, the rating agency, has issued a “negative outlook” warning on US sovereign debt, claiming that the US, in comparison with other countries with a top AAA credit rating, has "very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us". S&P warned that there was a “a one in three chance that the US could lose its AAA rating in two years because of its mounting debt.”

The ratings firm--one of three global companies that Wall Street relies upon to establish the credit ratings of companies and nations around the world--said its analysts had “little confidence” that the Obama administration and the divided Congress would reach any agreement on a deficit-reduction plan before the next national election in the fall of 2012, and that they doubted that any such plan would be adopted until after 2014, two whole Congressional elections away.

So far, the other two ratings agencies, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings, have not followed suit. Moody’s issued a statement saying, ““Moody’s rating for the US is Aaa and remains stable,” though the company warns that “an upward debt trajectory and increasing fiscal pressures could increase the likelihood of an “outlook change” within “the next two years.”

At least one economist burst out laughing on hearing about the S&P announcement. “They did what?” exclaimed James Galbraith, a professor of economics at he University of Texas in Austin, who formerly served as executive director of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. “This is remarkable! It certainly will confirm the suspicions of those who have questioned S&P’s competence after its performance on the mortgage debacle.”

Warning, Jesse is a dollar bear. As for Galbraith, he points out the Fed can simply write a check to pay off the obligation. This is indeed true, but there are consequences to the US writing lots of checks to pay off all the obligations which is what Galbraith dares not mention.

It is different this time: we are on the energy downslope and the output necessary to retire our massive debts simply does not exist.

“Political shenanigans cannot be ruled out,” says Galbraith. “That’s what lawyers would call the ‘rebuttable presumption.’ After all, who benefits? The Republicans and perhaps the banks. But of course the other possibility is that S&P doesn’t know what it’s talking about, and after their disastrous missing of the mortgage bubble, that’s quite possibly what it is.”

The Obama administration, for its part, has reacted with surprising restraint to the S&P bombshell, saying only that the administration expects to reach an agreement with Congress over how to reduce the nation’s debt. Mary Miller, assistant treasury secretary for financial markets, for her part said that S&P "underestimates the ability of America's leaders to come together to address the difficult fiscal challenges facing the nation."

How pathetic is that? How about a call for the SEC, or the Federal Reserve or the Attorney General to investigate whether S&P was improperly pressured to issue its absurd “negative warning”? How about a call in the Senate for hearings to look into any such possible improper political pressure?

I’m not suggesting that there are no consequences for the failure of the US political system to pay for the nation’s trillions of dollars in wars, or for its craven preference over the last 30 years to hand tax cuts to corporations and the rich while continuing to encourage corporations to shift their investments abroad, taking the nation’s jobs with them. There will surely come a reckoning. But it won’t be in the form of default.

High fuel costs and high credit/money costs feed back into each other but the issue is not the feedback but the costs themselves. The robber barons look to shift these to 'others' by any means available: with little concern whether these others can bear the costs being shifted. Like it or not, the default is there: what is missing is any reality behind the assumption of resumed 'growth' which is required to service and retire extraordinary debts.

The post- modern finance crisis: our shit costs more than it's worth. Simple, right? Tom Engelhardt whips it out and bashes the policy side of shifting costs overseas by way of the Pentagon:

Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark

What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks

This can’t end well.

But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose.

Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there’s something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It’s quite another thing to take it in when you’re part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you’re in the belly of the beast.

I don’t know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this -- truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad.

The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn’t sense that the sun is now setting on us?

Not so many years ago, we were proud enough of our global strength to regularly refer to ourselves as the Earth’s “sole superpower.” In those years, our president and his top officials dreamed of establishing a worldwide Pax Americana, while making speeches and issuing official documents proclaiming that the United States would be militarily “beyond challenge” by any and all powers for eons to come. So little time has passed and yet who speaks like that today? Who could?

Fukushima's nuclear debacle is the consequence of shifting costs from oil fields to reactors. The risk curves are different, but making the shift did not eliminate either the costs or the risks.

What we are left with is an establishment stumbling along like Mercer's humoresque, groping for easy answers. The same broad- shouldered, sneering 'Greed is Good' 'tude' which has worked so well in the past is now useless. Some suggest a gold standard, or firing union workers or getting rid of the Fed, more stimulus/pump- priming, whatever ... None of these quick fixes are going to accomplish anything without $20 per barrel crude which is lost and gone forever! There are no more easy answers, no 'Triumph of the Will', no Ubermanner or comic book heroes to fill up the starship gas tank. 'Honest' and 'Money' are simply two meaningless words, that money itself is a store of 'nothing' because industrialization's fetishes are worthless out of industry's 'Superman' context.

That context being mindless waste for the 'fun' and tailfins and car- hop stupidity of it all. With the context evaporated, exceptionalism is sound and fury signifying nothing performed on the corroded deck of a ghost (space) ship vanishing into a storm.

The Big Lying TEPCO Machine ...

2011-04-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

View of the reactor 4 fuel- handling machine at Fukushima Daiichi power station. This device ordinarily hangs from the ceiling within the service area of the reactor. It is used to shift fuel from storage or transport to the core, or from the core elsewhere. The machine now is on top of the reactor spent- fuel pool, 8 meters below where it ought to be. Smoke is presumably from overheating fuel rods within the pool. The photograph was taken by a remote- controlled helicopter within the past week, (Kyodo News).

The soothing continues non- stop:

High levels of radiation at 2 reactors

Yomiuri Shimbun

High levels of radiation were measured Sunday by remote-controlled robots inside the buildings that house reactors Nos. 1 and 3 of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant--levels that would need to be lowered for workers to work inside the buildings, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Monday.

The agency said radiation levels were measured from 10 to 49 millisieverts per hour for the No. 1 reactor and from 28 to 57 millisieverts per hour for the No. 3 reactor.

"As things stand now, it would be difficult to send workers inside them to work. We need to lower the radiation levels or block them somehow," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokeman for the agency.

It marked the first time that radiation levels have been measured inside the buildings housing reactors Nos. 1 and 3 since hydrogen explosions occurred in these two units in the wake of the massive quake and tsunami on March 11.

----

Inside the building housing reactor No. 3, the interior of which was also photographed by a robot Sunday, there was a large amount of debris found, making it impossible for the robot to advance further.

Where in the reactor 'buildings' did the robots go? One would think they were confined to office areas where there are no pressure control doors that would require human hands to open. What would the radiation levels be within the actual containments? Probably lethal within minutes: this would explain the gibberish about the "difficulty to send workers inside".

Inside where, exactly?

Here's more:

Challenges abound to control crippled reactors

Yomiuri Shimbun

Can Tokyo Electric Power Co. bring the four troubled reactors at its Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant under control within six to nine months as it announced Sunday? What challenges must it overcome before achieving its avowed goals?

Under the announced timetable, TEPCO aims to bring the crippled reactors to a stable condition known as a "cold shutdown"--a situation in which water temperatures inside the reactors are stabilized below 100 C--within six to nine months.

It will take this amount of time to achieve cold shutdown because the reactors, fuel rods and containment vessels are all in terrible conditions, experts said.

In the aftermath of a series of accidents at the Fukushima Prefecture power plant that was triggered by the March 11 earthquake and a massive tsunami, TEPCO studied measures such as purifying ever-increasing amounts of contaminated water and using it to cool the reactors and cooling water inside the reactors through heat exchangers by running seawater through narrow pipes.

But under its new timetable, the utility decided to give precedence to a method of pouring water to fill reactor containment vessels to cool pressure vessels as suggested by U.S. nuclear experts.

The problem here is what does TEPCO mean by 'containment'? Does containment mean the pressure vessel(s) or does it mean the concrete buildings within which the pressure vessels are located? Presumably, the pressure vessels are already being flooded with water leaking out almost as fast as it can be pumped in.

Likewise, the containments are also compromised, with water carrying intensely radioactive isotopes flowing into basements under the turbine hall(s). Filling the containment(s) is an idea without legs due to earthquake and explosion damage to the brittle concrete structures. Pouring in the water will indeed cool what is left of the reactors' fuel and fuel waste. The ground will become the sink for heat created by decay heat and criticality but the fuel will release massive amounts of radioactivity which will flow into the Pacific Ocean.

Meanwhile, radioactive particles on the ground or volatile gases will continue to be lofted into the air. Over time, the plant grounds will become too lethal for anyone to stand for more than a few minutes. Farms, towns and homes close to the plant will become uninhabitable. Once that point is reached the reactor complex will have to be abandoned, if only until a larger- Chernobyl scale approach is mustered.

Once that approach takes form the 'techy' idea of 'cheap' meltdowns will be replaced by reality: nuclear power is a modernity- canceling force. Technology insists problems can be solved by 'software' or 'robots'. Robots cannot climb stairs, move debris or handle water. Only humans willing to gain a lifetime of radiation exposure in a few seconds while wearing lead underwear and socks can do this. Modernity is rendered non- relevant to the problems modernity itself creates.

Right now, the water is the carrier of radioactivity: it is the source of the 57 or whatever mSv per hour detected within the buildings along with the much higher readings taken in the basements. TEPCO presumes to be able to recycle this intensely radioactive water -- outside the containments -- and use it for cooling:

New water treatment facilities

As for the handling of contaminated water, there are plans to establish new water treatment facilities and create new reservoirs, according to TEPCO's timetable.

However, TEPCO has admitted the risk of possible delays in establishing such facilities and that they may not work as planned.

When transferring high-level contaminated water, careful handling is required to prevent the water from leaking from hose joints.

Meanwhile, it is highly likely that contaminated water is leaking from the No. 2 reactor, where a pressure suppression chamber is feared to have been damaged. Radiation levels around the reactor are too high for workers to approach and "seal" the reactor building.

At the No. 4 reactor, it is necessary to reinforce the structure below the temporary storage pool for spent nuclear fuel rods to prevent any possible spillage. However, this task is also expected to be fraught with difficulty.

Hose joints: TEPCO has the same credibility as Curly, Larry and Moe. TEPCO insinuates it can cycle thousands of tons of water per day through a leaky Rube Goldberg array of hoses, pumps and heat exchangers. Who the fuck are these idiots trying to kid? The water would carry both radioactive particles and toxic residues but also salt from seawater flooding. Heat, salinity and corrosive radiation would accelerate failures, the high levels of radiation would make repairs hazardous. Radiation would accumulate within the equipment: the passage of time (and successful use) would render it too radioactive to approach.

Keep in mind:

Water in a reactor is a fission moderator. Reactor flooding is allowing some criticality to take place even as it allows the resulting heat to be dissipated. Criticality is creating short- lived gaseous isotopes such as iodine 131 which are dissolved in the water. Since the condition of the cores is unknown, the possibility exists for a criticality runaway and more steam explosions and/or fires.

Managers are already injecting nitrogen in an attempt to suppress hydrogen/oxygen recombination. This suggests that fuel is 'hot' enough to cause radiation dissociation of water.

Radiation is cumulative. Particles are trapped within the structures designed to contain them.

TEPCO is in a race against time. The ongoing emissions of radiation from the reactors will continue to accumulate. At the end of the six- month suggested period to reach 'cold shut down' radiation from the plant will be more than 75% of Chernobyl's. In a month, Fukushima has emitted 10% of the radionuclides emitted by Chernobyl. The calculus of radiation is relentless.

Events will overtake TEPCO along with the Japanese government. The country will have no choice but to marshal its resources and launch an all- out assault on the plants' nuclear cores. This assault will includes thousands of tons of lead and boron, millions of tons of sand, hundreds of thousands of 'volunteers', equipment to build a massive concrete cofferdam between the plants and the sea, millions of tons of concrete along with the dissolution of TEPCO and the restructuring of the Japanese government.

This isn't speculation, it is inevitable. Like the ongoing thermodynamic crisis that is unwinding on Wall Street and in the West's capitals, the emergence of physics in day to day life will represent a tax against modernity that cannot be evaded.

Meanwhile, Sally Williams @ Intelligent Life Magazine by way of the Economist describes the art of giving survivors the ultimate bad news, that a loved one is fatally ill or deceased:

“We find it really difficult telling people really difficult things,” Dr Leonard tells me later. And she is experienced—in her clinic at the Whittington Hospital in north London, she has to tell two to three patients a week that they are coming to the end of their lives. Even a decade after the Cancer Plan, “we’re not trained to deal with the emotional fallout.”

The immediate fallout tends to be tears, shock, numbness or a sense of unreality. Some people are unnaturally calm, which may not help: “It presents a challenge for working out if they’ve understood what you’ve said,” says one consultant. Models such as spikes, a six-step protocol for breaking bad news, have caught on quickly in medical schools because they provide a framework and make a messy situation easier to manage (“set up an interview...assess the patient’s perception”). But in the end the consultation comes down to two people: doctor and patient. And when they sit facing each other in the consulting room, patients can be very influenced by the doctor’s manner. In 1991 the British Medical Journal published a study called “Your Child is Dead” by Ilora Finlay and Doris Dallimore. It asked the parents of children killed in car accidents to comment on the way three groups—the police, nurses and doctors—had delivered the bad news. The police were rated the most sympathetic because it looked as if it mattered to them. “He cared so much he had tears in his eyes,” was one parent’s comment on one officer.

The lesson, says Dr Leonard, is that showing emotion is OK. She recently examined some junior doctors and found them skilled at adopting the bad-news framework, but it failed to benefit the patients, because they were terse and curt. “Of course, don’t reach for the tissues first and start crying. But in medicine we’re trained to be so professional and we come across as cold and actually, if you are a bit choked and you are sad, patients don’t mind, because they see it hurts you too.”

Let me try this out:

"Guess what, Americans, Europeans, Chinese and other wannabes? Yr waste- based economy with all the crap you truly love such as automobiles, big houses and luxury are dead, dead dead!

Hoo fucking Ray!

(I have to work on my bedside manner, you think?)

UPDATE:

Arnie Gunderson looks @ reactor temps and pressures along with measuring iodine isotopes in reactor 4 spent fuel pool.

Radioactive Bits and Pieces ...

2011-04-17T06:13:00.000-07:00

Unknown Photographer 'I. G. Farbin Buna Plant at Monowitz'

From the 'Soothing Bromides Department', the Japanese reactor operator TEPCO demonstrates press agentry and the balm of official pronouncements are substitutes for reality as it announces a 'Nine Month Program' to control radiation @ the Fukushima Daiichi reactor site:

TEPCO aims to achieve 'cold shutdown' for reactors in 6-9 months

(Kyodo News)

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Sunday that it aims to bring the damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to a stable condition known as a ''cold shutdown'' in about six to nine months, while trying to achieve a ''steady reduction'' in levels of radiation leaks in about three months.

As the plant continues to leak radioactivity into the air and sea more than a month after the earthquake and tsunami crippled its cooling systems, the company began using two remotely controlled U.S. robots the same day at one of the reactors to take various readings inside.

''We will do our utmost to curb the release of radioactive materials by achieving a stable cooling state at the reactors and spent fuel pools,'' TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata told a press conference at its headquarters in Tokyo in announcing the schedule for bringing the plant under control.

The utility also said it will work on restoring stable cooling to the reactors and spent fuel pools in about three months.

The problems are beyond the operator's grasp: in order to cool fuel which now resides @ the bottoms of the pressure vessels or basements of the containments, hundreds of tons of water must be continually pumped into the reactors. This water leaks out of the containments and flows into the ocean carrying with it large amounts of radioactive elements.

The water flow provides the cooling (the ground under the reactors is the heat sink) but also is a barrier against workers attempting to fix leaks. As soon as water is pumped out of reactor basements, more water floods back. The earthquake and subsequent explosions made sieves of the reactor containments.

Water is a shield against particulate and gamma radiation. According the the TEPCO plan, the same or increasing amounts of water must flow through the plant for the next nine months until a 'replacement' cooling system is installed. As the water flows, the radiation accumulates.

Meanwhile, fires continue to break out and more leaks are discovered.

Levels of Radioactive Materials Rise Near Japanese Plant
(Associated Press - NY Times)

TOKYO (AP) — Levels of radioactive materials have risen sharply again in seawater near the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan, raising the possibility of new leaks at the complex, the government said Saturday.

Workers have been struggling to deal with contaminated runoff at the plant that resulted from makeshift efforts to cool reactors and spent fuel rod pools after a huge earthquake and tsunami knocked out regular cooling systems.

Much of the tons of water that has been sprayed on the reactors and pools has been stored, but the company that operates the plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, recently discovered and eventually plugged a leak that could have been gushing for days. The levels of radioactive materials in the ocean near the plant dropped after that.

But the government said Saturday that levels of radioactive materials in the seawater have risen again in recent days. The level of radioactive iodine 131 jumped to 6,500 times the legal limit, according to samples taken Friday, up from 1,100 times the limit in samples taken the day before. Levels of cesium 134 and cesium 137 rose nearly fourfold. The increased levels are still far below those recorded earlier this month before the initial leak was plugged.

It's a standoff: as long as TEPCO can continue to pump water through the plant, the reactors deterioration will be slow. Keep in mind that emissions of iodine 131 also indicate reactivity is taking place within the some or all of the fuel.

TEPCO has been 'editing' reports on radionuclides detected @ the site and elsewhere.

'Cold Shutdown' presupposes a functioning cooling system. It does not mean that the reactor is in a state where it can be left on its own. It means the cooling system of the reactor can remove the heat generated by the cores at a level below what the plant produces while operating. It is to some degree an arbitrary state.

Cold shutdown means one thing for a fully functioning reactor with an intact core, intact cooling systems and intact spent fuel pools. It means something different when cores are molten ruins @ the bottom of reactor containment buildings, when cooling is earthquake/explosion shattered and spent fuel rods and pellets are scattered all over the campus among thousands of tons of intensely radioactive debris.

A functioning cooling system is not something jury- rigged out of fire hoses or plastic pipe. As water cycles through any system, radiation within components increases. At some point the cooling cannot be approached because it is too radioactive.

Increased amounts of radioactive water will have to be released into the ocean because there is no place to store it. There is also no way to treat the amounts of water flowing through the plants: there is simply too much water and too much radiation. What this means is 'low- level radioactive water' will be pumped into the ocean, the radiation level of each batch much higher than the preceding batches. Again, water handling equipment will become accumulators for radioactive materials so that @ some point it will all become too radioactive to approach or make use of.

More to come ...

Too Stupid to Know It's Dead ...

2011-04-12T01:32:00.000-07:00

Our economy has become a tragedy mired within a farce, so sez the befuddled New York Times:

Gas Prices Rise, and Economists Seek Tipping Point

CHRISTINE HAUSER

Gas prices are approaching record highs, but so far most Americans do not appear to be drastically cutting back their driving or even their spending as they did in 2008.

The question, economists agreed, is what happens if prices continue to go up and remain high.

Prices for a gallon of regular unleaded gas are topping $4 at more service stations nationwide, revisiting the bleak territory of three years ago, when the average price for a gallon of regular gas reached a peak of $4.11 on July 17, 2008, according to the Oil Price Information Service.

The survey of about 100,000 stations showed gas prices were now averaging $3.77 a gallon nationwide. The average is already more than $4 in California, Hawaii and Alaska, and analysts at the oil information service said drivers were paying more than $4 at some stations in at least three other states — Illinois, Connecticut and New York.

The government's Energy Information Administration on Monday put the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline slightly higher at $3.79, up 10.7 cents from the previous week and nearly a dollar higher than the same time last year.

How precious! It's hard to know where to begin with this article which implies that driving for its own sake along with all the other pointlessnesses of our consumer economy is an unabashed good thing; that the high enough prices are a tragic impediment to 'growth' due to their effects on 'discretionary spending'. Perhaps the first thing to do is for all the analysts to get on the 'same page':

S&P 500 earnings are poised to surpass the 2007 peak of $90 a share in the third quarter after surging from $7 in March 2009, the quickest recovery since at least 1900, according to data from S&P and Yale University’s Robert Shiller compiled by Bloomberg. The gap between projected 12-month profits and average earnings over the last 10 years is set to widen the most since 1951, the data show.

PNC Wealth Management, Federated Investors Inc. and ING Investment Management, which together oversee about $1 trillion, say consumer spending will sustain the recovery after government stimulus helped lift profits from the lowest level since the Great Depression. While earnings will slow in the second half, stock purchases by investors who missed the S&P 500’s advance will fuel gains, according to Leuthold Group LLC.

The analysts over @ the Times are busy telling all of us that there is nothing to worry about energy supplies. The price sez something else. What's up, Times?

We are all sinners in the hands of an angry discretionary spender! Economists wring their hands and hope that 'this, too ... will pass', opining that prices are in 'a sweet spot'. What matters above all else is the ongoing adherence to a set of business practices that long- ago outlived their usefulness but are still good for a few advertising dollars. The USA- waste- based economy inches toward the end of the energy supply gang plank. Here's James Howard Kunstler speaking about the President's non- leadership and the media attending:

... we are ignoring the most obvious intelligent responses to this (our energy) predicament, namely, shifting our focus to walkable communities and public transit, especially rebuilding the American passenger railroad system - without which, I assure you, we will be most regrettably screwed ten years from now. Mr. Obama had one throwaway line in his speech about public transit and nothing whatever about walkable neighborhoods.

The reason for this obvious idiocy is that it's all about the cars. That's all we care about in the USA, the cars. We can't get over the cars. We can't talk about anything except how we'll find magical new ways to run all the cars. This is a very tragic sort of stupidity and if we don't change our thinking about it, from the highest level on down, history is going to treat us very cruelly.

A special shout-out here to The New York Times, whose abysmal reporting on these issues, once again, is due to their reliance on a single source: the IHS-CERA group, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the paid public relations auxiliary of the oil industry, led by that mendacious sack of shit Daniel Yergin, whore-in-chief.

How absurd. Our 'Night of the Living Undead' economy is 'surviving' the credit- collapse of the Eurozone, the immolation of Japan in a sea of Cesium radiation, the triumph of villainy on Wall Street and in Washington over the Constitution, the rise of more petroleum demand in the Middle East and Northern Africa, hyperinflation within China and other developing nations ... what harm is there to four dollar gas?

It's all a shell game. Everyone loses! Nobody is willing to face reality that the money party is finished, that financialism is also finished, that money making money is kaput, that character cannot be bought in a store.

America desperately pines for the return of the 'Discretionary Spending Fairy' who along with Utopia is sure to come any second now. More money to afford more gas is right around the corner. Unfortunately, the analysis is faulty not the price which is probably too low in real terms.

America uses its archipelago of military bases, its propensity toward endless warz, its only manufactured good, the 'dollar' as bludgeons to separate resources from their owners. These options long ago reached the point of diminishing returns.

The 'proper' price for crude is where the market clears at any given time. Right now, that is approximately $122 per barrel. That there is a difference or 'spread' of ten dollars between the USA West Texas Intermediate market and the Brent standard used by the rest of the world, suggests the market- clearing limit has not been reached.

It is possible that the 2008 high of $147 will be retested. Increasing high prices over time is suggestive of an ominous trend of continually higher prices. This is not inflation per- se but rather a reallocation of increasingly greater economic returns toward fuel acquisition away from other uses. It would be the death knell of energy productivity. Without that, the competitive advantage of industrial production disappears.

This might be happening @ the lower price levels. The possibility exists that the $122 price is so high that the fuel- using 'system' is bankrupted by it.

$122 crude is about five times higher than the system that uses it is designed to afford. Crude is a form of capital: our moronic economy burns through valuable capital as an operating expense. Capital vanishes: all forms of it become more expensive as a consequence.

Finance shenanigans have permitted an increase in credit which in turn allows fuel users to bid fuel prices higher increasing the demand for more credit in a vicious cycle. The outcome of the higher bid price for fuel is a further worldwide credit demand which makes credit more expensive in turn. No wonder the Fed is 'worried', the outcome is higher and increasing interest rates which are jumping all over the world.

The effect of higher credit costs is the economy's bankruptcy which cannot endure them. Any base rate higher than near- zero puts finance underwater and the deflationary deleveraging commences.

It is this increased demand across credit markets which is fatal, not the pump price. The same capital input/credit repricing phenomenon took place during the runup to the price spike in 2008.

There is nothing to this price increase that can be 'fixed': inputs long- neglected are being repriced to levels that more accurately represent their worth. This calls the system that makes use of the inputs into question. Our crisis exists where the high input costs make the USA- style waste- based economy unprofitable. Reality is papered over with soothing bromides from the establishment which hopes magic takes place and that nobody will notice in the meantime.

Magic and 'hope' are what pass for policy in these benighted times: our economy is like a dinosaur with its head cut off, it's too stupid to know its dead.

Meanwhile, our analytic brethren have problems seeing the deflationary forest for the inflationary trees. The inflationistas insist any day now, the dollar is going to vanish into history's rathole, leaving behind what, exactly?

How will peeps buy gas without dollars, bro?

Keep in mind that Fed Chairman Bernanke must continue to pump a trillion or so dollars into the economy every single year, without end. Without this infusion, the deleveraging commences, instantly and relentlessly. At the same time, cash infusions like injections of morphine lose their effect over time. What output a trillion dollars in Fed reserves can buy today requires $2 trillion next, then four trillion then eight. Adding the trillion$ has also reached the point of diminishing returns. Where do we go from here? This is 'efficacy of credit' is another gang plank that our waste- based economy has reached the end of.

Meanwhile, the Japanese authorities have decided that the nuclear debacle @ Fukushima is worthy of notice, raising the so- called 'crisis level' to Seven':

Japan ups Fukushima nuke crisis severity to 7, same as Chernobyl

TOKYO, April 12, Kyodo

Japan raised the severity level of the ongoing emergency at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Tuesday from level 5 to the maximum 7 on an international scale, recognizing that the tsunami-caused accident matches the world's worst nuclear catastrophe in 1986 at Chernobyl.

The government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency upgraded its provisional evaluation based on an estimate that radioactive materials far exceeding the criteria for level 7 have so far been released into the external environment, but added the release from the Fukushima plant is about 10 percent of that from the former Soviet nuclear plant.

The nuclear regulatory agency under the industry ministry and the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, a government panel, said that between 370,000 and 630,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials have been emitted into the air from the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors of the plant.

Level 7 accidents on the International Nuclear Event Scale correspond to the release into the external environment of radioactive materials equal to more than tens of thousands of terabecquerels of radioactive iodine 131. One terabecquerel equals 1 trillion becquerels.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the government is "sorry to Fukushima residents, the Japanese people and the international community" over the nuclear disaster caused by the massive March 11 quake and tsunami.

The plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. also offered an apology to the public for being still unable to stop the radiation leakage, pointing to the possibility that the total emission of radioactive substances could eventually surpass that of the Chernobyl incident.

A considerable amount of the radioactive materials emitted is believed to originate from the plant's No. 2 reactor, whose containment vessel's pressure suppression chamber was damaged by an explosion on March 15, said Kenkichi Hirose, a Cabinet Office adviser serving for the safety commission, at a news conference.

''Our estimates suggest the amount of radioactive materials released into the air sharply rose on March 15 and 16 after abnormalities were detected at the No. 2 reactor,'' Hirose said. ''The cumulative amount of leaked radiation has been gradually on the rise, but we believe the current emission level is significantly low.''

The safety commission said it estimates the release has come down to under 1 terabecquerel per hour.

How reassuring is the Nuclear Fallout Fairy! 'Seven' is just a number, right? Here is the discussion about Reactor 2 from last week:

The operating pressure for this kind of reactor when making steam and electricity is approximately 1000 psi. Ordinarily, water and steam are circulated around the core with the reactor 'throttled' or 'accelerated' by inserting or withdrawing control rods along with increasing/decreasing the flow of feedwater. Excess steam is vented into the suppression pool where it is condensed. The power cycle has steam flowing from the fuel elements through the power turbine to a condenser which is the heat exchanger for the reactor. Condensate is pumped back into the core. Work is a flow of heat from the fuel toward the ocean by way of the turbine and condenser.

Important feedwater pumps along with control rod drive mechanisms are located within the pressure vessel under the core. This core is the metal can that contains the fuel- and control rods. It sits high inside the pressure vessel dry well which is within the throat of the pressure vessel. The core is where the boiling takes place. Vents equalize the pressure so that it is the same within the core as well as within the rest of pressure vessel.

The obvious weak point of the design is where the pressure balance tubes (parts 'e' in Figure 1) connect to the suppression pool. There are eight of these radiating like spokes from the central flask of the pressure vessel. Where the tubes join the suppression pool are elaborate welded and mechanical joints that cannot accept stresses that more regular shapes such as the sphere and torus can.

Other weak areas are where tubular sections of the suppression pool are welded together, where pipes and valves are attached to the suppression pool and where conduits and ducts such as control rod hydraulic lines penetrate the pressure vessel.

Most of the non- welded pipe joints are conventional flange fittings with gaskets. The amount of pipe and fittings within the containment is significant. It is likely that much of the piping in all the Fukushima reactors was severely damaged by the earthquake, before cooling problems emerged.

It is likely that all three reactor explosions originated in the suppression pools and specifically in areas of the pools that were unable to contain an instant increase in steam pressure. Steam pressure would flash when fuel melted and flowed through core fittings and pipes into the bottom of the pressure vessel and from there into the suppression pools.

Since all the reactors are of more or less identical design, shared identical vulnerabilities and were subject to the same cooling abuses it is likely that all met the same explosive fate in the same place, within the suppression pool area.

Severe fuel meltdowns caused powerful steam explosions that damaged the suppression pools and compromised the containments. The simple explanation for the flows of radioactive water and isotopes in the plant area seen today is the multiple explosive failures of reactor containments.

With all the fuel @ the plant complex open to the environment, radioactive isotopes continue to escape. Meanwhile, the operator continues to employ more vaporware such as having minimum- wage contract laborers attempting to 'turn on' the 'reactor cooling systems' which are becoming ever- more radioactive piles of useless junk. Here's what the NRC said about Reactor 1:

Core Status:

Core is contained in the reactor pressure vessel, reactor water level is unknown.
The volume of seawater injected to cool the core has left enough salt to fill the
lower plenum to the core plate.(GEH,INPO,Bettis,KAPL).

It's assumed the salt clogs the bottom of the pressure vessel. Of course, nobody knows where the reactor fuel is. It is possible that all of it in all the different reactors is lurking @ the bottoms of the various containments, itching for trouble ...

Turning on the cooling systems is the 'Panacea of the Moment' to be replaced in good time by the next Panacea of the Moment: the abandonment of a large part of Japan. Sez Estimable Ellen Canterow @ Tom Dispatch as she lances President Obama's non- energy policy:

Ongoing events. It was a curious and entirely disingenuous way to describe the ever-worsening disaster at Fukushima when, just the day before, Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, told his Parliament, “The earthquake, tsunami and the ensuing nuclear accident may be Japan’s largest-ever crisis.” He said this, it’s worth reminding ourselves, about a country that, within living memory, saw more than 60 of its cities reduced to ashes through systematic firebombing and two metropolises obliterated by atomic bombs, losing hundreds of thousands of its citizens in one of the most devastating wars of a conflict-filled century. In fact, the very morning that Obama gave his speech, the New York Times quoted Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University, about a subject that only a few outside observers had dared to previously broach: the prospect of a swath of Japan becoming an irradiated dead zone. “The worst-case scenario is that a meltdown makes the plant’s site a permanent grave,” Iguchi said.

At least the Soviets had the sense to corral the manpower needed to put the nuclear demon into some kind of bottle. It appears that TEPCO's management is waiting for the Nuclear Containment Fairy or Optimus Prime and the rest of the Transformers to show up and do the heavy lifting for them.

More Broken ...

2011-04-09T20:38:00.000-07:00

'Thoroughly Modern Miffy'

Let's take a look @ the petroleum markets:

Energy

	PRICE	CHANGE	% CHANGE	TIME
BRENT CRUDE FUTR (USD/bbl.)	126.650	3.980	3.24%	04/08
GAS OIL FUT (ICE) (USD/MT)	1,048.250	27.500	2.69%	04/08
HEATING OIL FUTR (USd/gal.)	331.970	11.370	3.55%	04/08
NATURAL GAS FUTR (USD/MMBtu)	4.041	-0.016	-0.39%	04/08
GASOLINE RBOB FUT (USd/gal.)	326.070	7.420	2.33%	04/08
WTI CRUDE FUTURE (USD/bbl.)	112.790	2.490	2.26%	04/08

Looks like crude markets are bubbles in the process of 'blowing off', just like the reactors @ Fukushima. Time to hit the relief valves as the skyrocketing price aims to disrupt credit, politics ... everything.

Here's a weekly chart of the Brent front months from Estimable TFC Chartsss:

It's hard to see how this price level for the most vital of resources can be good for the world's economies. This high price feeds through industrial agriculture to effect the price of food on folks' tables. It also makes business more expensive without increasing output.

Here's the monthly CBOT corn chart. Aside from on spike month in 2008, the price of corn today is much higher than it was during that year with much higher open interest.

Corn is really a derivative of crude oil, partly due to the increase in biofuel/ethanol production, part of the incredible American Establishment's 'Food for Carz' program! Another reason is because so much crude is required to grow and process the corn. The crude- driven price spike is going to ripple outward into all categories: higher prices for food and food products (that have corn as an ingredient), higher ethanol prices and higher amounts of subsidy (larger Federal deficits), higher prices for corn substitutes such as cane sugar and more pressure on soil, water and farmland prices.

Keep in mind, the corn price can actually go much higher before it crashes. People need to eat, want to drive. At some point the want/need inflection point will be reached but probably not until more destabilizing food riots begin ...

Meanwhile, here is a Comex weekly gold chart:

On one hand, this has the look of an unstoppable bull market. At the same time, the long- side speculators seem to be taking profits and exiting as open interest isn't following the price trend. I think the gold market is leading the crude market right now; if and when gold breaks down, the energy and food complex will follow. Gold is a pure sentiment play with a small supply component. Nobody needs gold any more than anyone needs a Cadillac. This leaves the gold bulls vulnerable to a change in sentiment that doesn't exist in the food markets. People have very strong sentiments about eating, much less so about speculating in gold.

Gold also lacks institutional support as do the stock plungers who have the Fed supplying POMO on an almost daily basis.

One reason for the big jump in gold prices is that the central banks have stopped selling which they were doing on a continuing basis for approximately 20 years. Complicated analysis is not needed; when hundreds of tons of gold are taken off the market, continuing buying pressure will force up prices on supply issues alone.

Meanwhile, not much has been spoken of about Fukushima Follies of late. I guess this means the problems have been solved and everyone can go back to sleep/innovating/selling drugs/lying to themselves. Even Arne Gunderson @ Fairewinds Associates has little to say.

One reason for this is because the utility seems to have clamped down on information releases. Here's the stifled Gunderson:

The NRC, the Nuclear Industry, and TEPCo are Limiting the Flow of Information from Fairewinds Associates.

Another set of ???? has to do with reactor 4. First of all there is no decent video of the explosion which took place on the 15th. Here's a crappy time- lapse vid from a news photographer on the scene;

This was reported by phone by Hitoshi Katanoda, a photographer on the scene, who minutes ago called Forbes contributor Yas Idei in Tokyo. Here is Idei's description of the conversation:

"Hitoshi of Polaris who is near the plant just called me. It is a panic there. No way to escape as gas station are closed and rescuers are all gone."

In another message, Idei says: The level of radiation is three times higher than normal in Tokyo.

Those were indeed the good ol' days, my friends. Back when radiation was 'only' three- times higher! What will it be tomorrow?

The 'official story' is that the spent fuel pool @ the top of the reactor containment lost water due to a crack or because of reactor core being stored within boiled the water off. The fuel rods became exposed, overheated, generated hydrogen leading to an explosion and fire in the service area.

What seems more likely is that the plant management simply forgot the spent fuel in all the rooftop pools and neglected to send workers to check the water levels after the quake. In all the confusion, the reactor Dirty Harrys lost track themselves leaving the water to either drain or boil to the point of meltdowns and fires within the pools. In the reactor 4 fuel pool, the consequence was a steam- plus hydrogen explosion followed with a fuel cladding fire accompanying a stream of radiation out of the blasted reactor building.

How embarrassing!

This should look familiar to readers of this blog:

This image is from unknown Japanese media company. Note the brief but effective explosion analysis ...

Here is something else to look at: (please click on image for a large view)

The line represents the upper levels of the two reactor containments of units 3 and 4 (on the right). Above the lines are the reactor service areas. These are basically large, empty rooms that are not strongly constructed. The containments themselves on the other hand are very heavily built of steel- reinforced concrete.

As you can see, the holes in the wall of unit 4 are within the containment, in addition to the damage done to the service area. The force of the explosion blew out the wall of the containment, possibly contributing more to the leak of cooling water from the spent fuel pools in reactor 4.

There was several tons of spent fuel within the reactor 4 spent fuel pool in addition to the core of the reactor, removed for storage during maintenance. It is likely that this load of radioactive goo is now in the basement of the plant, quietly glowing ...

At the top of the page, Dick Bruna's 1950's brainstorm Miffy the now- altered little girl bunny who has millions of Japanese fans ...

Working ...

2011-04-08T05:46:00.001-07:00

Family business is eating into my posting time.

More later (I promise) ...

More Meltdown Mania ...

2011-04-05T05:23:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to watch how pop culture deals with problems like the Fukushima Fiasco: it can't and it doesn't. The establishment soothes while coming up with idiotic 'solutions' such as putting shredded newspapers into a 'crack' in concrete leaking 7 tons of intensely radioactive water per hour onto the highly manicured 'grounds' of the reactor complex and thence into the Pacific.

You know ... 'That' Pacific Ocean, where all those buff dudes go to surf ...

"No more surfing for you!" No walking on the beach either, unless you want to get what is becoming known in Japan as a 'Ground Tan'.

Meanwhile the Fossil Fuel Fiasco takes place under everyone's noses:

Energy

	PRICE*	CHANGE	% CHANGE	TIME
BRENT CRUDE FUTR (USD/bbl.)	120.230	1.530	1.29%	13:52
GAS OIL FUT (ICE) (USD/MT)	1,006.000	9.000	0.90%	13:53
HEATING OIL FUTR (USd/gal.)	315.310	1.860	0.59%	13:52
NATURAL GAS FUTR (USD/MMBtu)	4.317	-0.045	-1.03%	13:53
GASOLINE RBOB FUT (USd/gal.)	314.580	-0.550	-0.17%	13:52
WTI CRUDE FUTURE (USD/bbl.)	108.070	0.130	0.12%	13:53

Yowzah! $120 per barrel is a bludgeon to the head of the waste- based economy. How are the precious SUV's and giant pickup trucks going to cope?

Here's what's happening with three- month average US gas prices from estimable Gasbuddy:

How about that for a bull market? Gas prices are not the determinant whether our sorry excuse for an economy takes a dump or not but they are a good 'pain indicator'. They measure the level of wishful thinking about how our machines interfere with reality ...

Reality sez there are limits, Fantasy sez some wads of newspaper and 'polymers' will make them go away. If not, skip the pesky reactors and welcome 'profits'!

Here is the party line from Bloomberg:

S&P 500 earnings are poised to surpass the 2007 peak of $90 a share in the third quarter after surging from $7 in March 2009, the quickest recovery since at least 1900, according to data from S&P and Yale University’s Robert Shiller compiled by Bloomberg. The gap between projected 12-month profits and average earnings over the last 10 years is set to widen the most since 1951, the data show.

PNC Wealth Management, Federated Investors Inc. and ING Investment Management, which together oversee about $1 trillion, say consumer spending will sustain the recovery after government stimulus helped lift profits from the lowest level since the Great Depression. While earnings will slow in the second half, stock purchases by investors who missed the S&P 500’s advance will fuel gains, according to Leuthold Group LLC.

Somehow, all those hapless unemployed on food stamps are going to spend money they don't have in stores that are now boarded up ... If they spend all their cash on gas what is left to push up 'profits'? The best answer is pesky customers and 'salez' are unnecessary. What is required is corporate 'self dealing' and finance 'investments' in other companies just like themselves. It's hard to think of a US company that is makes something useful other than GE, which brings 'Good Things' like ground tans to light.

Those pimping vapor profits have an agenda: anyone willing to take some time and think for themselves can come to the conclusion: what used to be progress is now naked self interest. There are the privileged and there are the damned. At some point you start asking yourself whose side are you going to be on when the shooting starts?

Reactor Number 2 did not provide a visible explosion to analyze. It's primary and secondary pumps failed after the flood and like the others was dependent upon fire engines for cooling injections of seawater. The reactor 3 blast on Monday the 14th rendered 4 of the 5 fire trucks servicing unit 2 DOA: the survivor ran out of fuel and was then unable to overcome reactor pressures due to a stuck valve. Operators said fuel rods were out of water for an extended period. The consequent blast took place within the suppression pool in the early morning of the 15th.

Here is an Wikipedia image of the identical Browns Ferry Reactor Number 1 under construction. Please click on image for a larger view:

Figure 1

This is the pressure vessel before it is surrounded or clad with reinforced concrete. The central 'flask' or lightbulb- shaped fixture is the inner mold for a ten- foot thick concrete shell that is an integral part of the overall containment structure. Below the lightbulb is the torus- shaped suppression pool which is also within the containment.

While everything you can see here is very robust and oversized, this is not nearly so as much as the pressure vessel and containment of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) which operates at pressures approximately 2,000 psi. The PWR has the familiar dome structure(s) which rise above the rest of the facility.

The operating pressure for this kind of reactor when making steam and electricity is approximately 1000 psi. Ordinarily, water and steam are circulated around the core with the reactor 'throttled' or 'accelerated' by inserting or withdrawing control rods along with increasing/decreasing the flow of feedwater. Excess steam is vented into the suppression pool where it is condensed. The power cycle has steam flowing from the fuel elements through the power turbine to a condenser which is the heat exchanger for the reactor. Condensate is pumped back into the core. Work is a flow of heat from the fuel toward the ocean by way of the turbine and condenser.

Important feedwater pumps along with control rod drive mechanisms are located within the pressure vessel under the core. This core is the metal can that contains the fuel- and control rods. It sits high inside the pressure vessel dry well which is within the throat of the pressure vessel. The core is where the boiling takes place. Vents equalize the pressure so that it is the same within the core as well as within the rest of pressure vessel.

The obvious weak point of the design is where the pressure balance tubes (parts 'e' in Figure 1) connect to the suppression pool. There are eight of these radiating like spokes from the central flask of the pressure vessel. Where the tubes join the suppression pool are elaborate welded and mechanical joints that cannot accept stresses that more regular shapes such as the sphere and torus can.

Other weak areas are where tubular sections of the suppression pool are welded together, where pipes and valves are attached to the suppression pool and where conduits and ducts such as control rod hydraulic lines penetrate the pressure vessel.

Most of the non- welded pipe joints are conventional flange fittings with gaskets. The amount of pipe and fittings within the containment is significant. It is likely that much of the piping in all the Fukushima reactors was severely damaged by the earthquake, before cooling problems emerged.

It is likely that all three reactor explosions originated in the suppression pools and specifically in areas of the pools that were unable to contain an instant increase in steam pressure. Steam pressure would flash when fuel melted and flowed through core fittings and pipes into the bottom of the pressure vessel and from there into the suppression pools.

Since all the reactors are of more or less identical design, shared identical vulnerabilities and were subject to the same cooling abuses it is likely that all met the same explosive fate in the same place, within the suppression pool area.

Severe fuel meltdowns caused powerful steam explosions that damaged the suppression pools and compromised the containments. The simple explanation for the flows of radioactive water and isotopes in the plant area seen today is the multiple explosive failures of reactor containments.

When the fuel rods are exposed above cooling water, the zircalloy cladding oxidizes producing hydrogen and zirconium oxide. There is no free oxygen in the pressure vessels under working conditions as these are charged with nitrogen. When the pressure vessels in the other reactors were vented, the nitrogen and hydrogen flowed into the service areas above the containment buildings. The nitrogen was of little significance in the service areas' vast spaces. The vented hydrogen mixed with oxygen in the air within the service areas: steam explosions, when they occurred, triggered nearly simultaneous hydrogen blasts in the service areas.

In the suppression pool area of unit 2, there was little free oxygen to mix with hydrogen being produced by the zircalloy oxidation. Hydrogen was due to be vented into the service area as was the case with the other reactors but this venting could not take place due to the stuck valve. As was the case with the other reactors, when the fuel rods within the core were exposed for long enough period, the cladding failed and fuel pellets aggregated within the core. At that point, the cooling water had been pushed by steam pressure into the suppression pool. Enough fuel melted together then flowed from the waterless core into the suppression pool where the melt caused the steam explosion.

This wasn't a total meltdown and the result was not a massive explosion as was the case in unit 3 but it was sufficient to blow a hole in the suppression pool area of the pressure vessel with steam under extraordinary force blasting away internal parts of the containment.

Here is reactor 2 with its ominous trail of steam emitting from its bowels:

Figure 2

After the explosion, all but 50 of the workers at the four- reactor site were removed due to increases in radiation.

Further examination showed high levels of radiation in water in buildings connected to reactor 2 along with many short- lived isotopes indicating ongoing criticality taking place within the destroyed core.

As has been noticed by others, the means the plants' operators have been attempting to stanch the flow of radioactive water out of these reactors has been pathetic. Water flows create a dilemma: water flow is needed to cool what remains of the cores while water acts as a moderator for reactor fuel, triggering chain reactions. Heat is removed from the cores to the ocean but moderating water causes the ruined cores to emit more heat in a vicious cycle.

The operators are left with nonsense cures while the radiation loads from all four reactors increases exponentially.

Newly released TEPCO data provides evidence of periodic chain reaction at Fukushima Unit 1 from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

With all four reactors fatally compromised, the outcome is a reactor complex that is steadily becoming too 'hot' for anyone to approach even with protective gear. Once that point is reached the remaining core structures will fail and even more radiation and radioactive particles will be emitted.

The Japanese have to get serious and marshal vast forces to battle these reactors. Every Japanese citizen will need to do his duty, to take lead brick in hand and gain not a Warholian fifteen minutes of fame but a three minute tour of hell.

Japan also needs to make a plan to decommission all of its reactors. They are all ticking time bombs, Japan is broke and the 'financial' outcome is more and more meltdowns.

The 'mass attack' is rejected is that it is too 'old school'. It defies modernity and the fantasy of mechanical advantage, advertising- directed self- actualization and increasing luxury. Modernity's leverage is to waste fuel and have the illusion of doing something useful by the process.

It's that or nothing with the Japanese tempting an avoidable fate. Then again, there is no such thing as leadership, only soothing.

Meltdown Mania Part Deux ...

2011-03-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

People wonder what's wrong with the world and the answer can be seen in Japan: the people in charge cannot do anything to solve problems because they are actors or figureheads given scripts to read while the issues are left to 'fix themselves'.

.Japan Tries to Stem Leak of Radioactive Water

David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

TOKYO — Workers at Japan’s crippled nuclear plant piled up sandbags and readied emergency storage tanks on Tuesday to stop a fresh leak of highly contaminated water from reaching the ocean, opening up another front in the battle to contain the world’s worst nuclear accident in decades.

As fears of further contamination grew, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said his government was in a state of maximum alert over the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

The Japanese government said the discovery of plutonium in the soil near the plant provided new evidence that the fuel in at least one of the plant’s reactors had experienced a partial meltdown. A full meltdown of the fuel rods could release huge amounts of radiation into the environment.

Here is the explosion in reactor Number 3. Keep in mind, the appearance of 'reactor' and 'explosion' in one sentence is never good, (Sky TV):

Video 1

Watch this video a few times and look @ the stills: you can come to your own conclusions. This camera is staged at a similar vantage point to the first seen a couple of days ago: about a kilometer away on a clear day with very little wind.

The reactors can be seen in a row with the damaged reactor 1 on the left and unit 4 on the right. Unit 1 is north and the rest are south, the camera faces east toward the ocean.

Unlike unit 1 which had a service area built out of steel framing with metal/composite panels, the service areas atop the other three reactors is made from reinforced concrete with some steel structural members and roof trusses. It is unknown what sort of roof is on these buildings but a non- flammable 'pavement'- type roof rather than a conventional built-up, slag or metallic commercial roof.

This video has a sound- track. There are five loud sounds in the track: the first is a sound like a metal object being hit @ the extreme beginning of the video, then three explosive bangs, then a sound like gravel being dropped onto a piece of sheet metal.

One interpretation of the track is that three explosions took place in series, leaving out the other sounds. Another explanation is that two of the explosive bangs were echoes of one explosive report, which is unlikely but not impossible. The listening point of the viewer is inland with the camera pointed toward the ocean. There is nothing to the ocean that would cause an echo.

Another possibility is an explosion in stages with different parts of the reactor being effected in turn. The banging sounds are almost identical which would suggest that whatever took place inside the reactor building was repeated over and over.
At the point of this video four days after the earthquake, reactors 2 and 3 have had cooling losses and have overheated like unit 1. An explosion was expected @ unit 3.

Figure 1

The beginning of the video recorded an 'industrial' sound of a large, ringing metallic object being struck a heavy blow or dragged. It is possible that this was 'ambient' noise from a vehicle or device nearby the camera. It could have been a reactor noise, from equipment or fixtures failing under stress.

Figure 2

Figure 2 Note the fireball shooting out to the side of the roof area of reactor 3.

The fireball could be hydrogen tinctured with some other hydrocarbon such as trace methane from steam effecting the boron carbide control rods. Methane is highly reactive, particularly to iodine so the fiery gas may have been some other hydrocarbon such as fumes from oxidizing paint or vaporized lubricant.

The fireball is gone in an instant the way of a gas/hydrogen explosion.

Figure 3

A closer look of the fireball shows that it is very large, about half the size of the reactor building next to it. The fireball looks to be about 1,200 m3. Whatever caused it involved a fairly large quantity of gas, perhaps several hundred cubic meters.

This was a larger reactor with a larger fuel load. It ran longer without coolant. The outcome would have been higher temperatures, more steam oxidation of the fuel rod cladding and more hydrogen produced within the core.

Figure 4

The fireball has vanished and a column of dust and debris is shooting straight up from the roof of the reactor. At the same time a lighter- colored cloud is expanding rapidly from the sides of the roof area. Both clouds are likely steam but the vertical cloud is carrying more dust and debris, probably from the damaged reactor structure. The horizontal vapors are from the roof/service area blasting out the sides.

Figure 5

This is the time of the first loud 'bang'.

Figure 6

This is the time of the second bang: it both looks and sounds as if there are two different explosions taking place simultaneously. One is a steam/hydrogen explosion centered within the service area atop the reactor containment expanding sideways while a second explosion is expanding from the center of the reactor shooting upward. This explosion is taking with it a lot of dust and debris indicating a lot of structural damage.

Figure 7

This is the third bang. There are large pieces of heavy debris falling out of the cloud along with trailing and falling dust. It looks like the vertical explosion is also primarily a steam explosion from the same suppression pool area as the first but much more energetic. Instead of venting upward into the service area from the basements and blowing the service area apart, this expansion is much more violent, with lower levels of the reactor acting as projectiles to blast higher levels of the containment upward and out of the way.

Figure 8

This is the maximum extent of the vertical explosion with what looks to be the traveling crane falling to earth out of the cloud. The crane is used to move the reactor lid(s) and fuel bundles, it spans the entire service area and weighs several tons. It appears to have been blasted vertically as much as 300m (1000 feet) into the air.

Figure 9

Notice the large steam cloud has completely obscured the vent stack tower behind units 1 and 2. It is likely the cloud has expanded in all directions.

Here is a comparison of this explosion with that in unit 1:

The power of the explosion here is much greater.
There is a large fireball which was not seen in unit 1
Like unit 1, there is a steam component to the explosion or complex of explosions.
There is more structural damage indicated by the flying and falling debris and dust.
The center of this explosion is low and the axis of the blast vertical. Its source is within the reactor containment. The explosion in unit 1 was similar but lacked the force of this explosion..

There is a 'secondary' explosive component in the service area involving hydrogen.

I believe it is likely that this reactor suffered a complete meltdown of the fuel into the pressure vessel with molten fuel coming into contact with water at the bottom of the vessel or in the suppression pool. This meeting would instantly generate a flash of live steam with explosive power equal to the amount of energy the fuel has available to transfer to the water. If the core is critical -- that is, making chain reactions -- the energy available could be several megawatts.

Here is a schematic of the meltdown (without the steam explosion) from Ferenc. Dalnoki-Veress:

Figure 10

Prof. Dalnoki-Veress arrives at a meltdown conclusion from a different analytical starting point. He wants to find out if a full meltdown would explain the quantity of 38Cl radiation reported by TEPCO at a water discharge tunnel (it doesn't, more reactions are needed). His premise indicates fuel burning through the bottom of the core would reach water in the bottom of the pressure vessel or suppression pool.

Figure 11

The size and power of the blast indicates a meltdown/steam explosion did indeed take place in the suppression area with a secondary hydrogen explosion taking place in the service area.

A steam explosion in the pressure vessel would either blast through the wall of the suppression pool or straight up past the various lids on top of the reactor as indicated in Figure 11. The suppression pool and related plumbing is an obvious weak area of the pressure vessel complex. The service lids, plugs and gates around the reactor top are the obvious weak areas of the containment.

The meltdown steam explosion would simply have blasted open the suppression pool and smashed aside the different floors between the pool and the top of the reactor containment. Breaching the suppression would be the first blast heard on the video. The steam explosion from containment would be the second blast. The steam- triggered hydrogen fireball would be the third. Because of the source of the first and second blasts there would be large amounts of concrete dust entrained with the steam.

Hydrogen is lighter than air and would collect under the roof of the reactor building. A hydrogen explosion would also tend to propagate in a horizontal direction the same a thermobaric bomb does. The least resistance to this kind of explosion is provided by the service area walls which are much thinner than the containment walls.

A thermobaric explosion is a 'fuel- air' type which would cause severe damage if there is sufficient fuel and air mixing. Since the atmosphere within the pressure vessel is steam and nitrogen (within the suppression pool) with little oxygen, the explosive component within the containment would be steam and the component in the service area hydrogen mixed with atmospheric air/oxygen.

Here's a thermobaric experiment:

Video 2

Here are the thermobaric bombs in action:

Video 3

Note the horizontal propagation of the thermobaric explosion and compare to the steam outflows in the stills and in the unit 1 explosion.

Damage to both service areas would be amplified by hydrogen- air explosions. The combination of explosion stresses from different directions could have caused enough structural damage to allow water to leak out of the spent fuel pools atop the containment. Heat from the thermobaric explosion could also have instantly flashed away some of the water in the pools as more steam. It is not likely that the hydrogen explosion did any damage to the core because of the amount of concrete between the service area and the pressure vessel. The service deck would have been a 'reflector' for the force of the thermobaric blast.

Figure 12 (Photo Reuters)

Note the massive amount of damage done to the reactor service area. Lazy steam emerges from parts unknown.. One fume is likely from a spent fuel pool one of which is located on the north side of the building. The fireball emerged @ the southeast corner. The core explosion may have blasted from underneath the spent fuel area or through the zone between the spent fuel pool and the core. This area includes a service gate which is removed to allow fuel components to be shifted between the two areas while keeping them underwater at all times.

There is also stacks of concrete plugs both atop the core and around the drywell area which are removed to allow service to the core itself. Any non- monolithic structure would be vulnerable to explosive forces from below as there is nothing to hold them in place besides their weight.

Here is a take on the radiation: ( from Arms Control Wonk, HT Glen):

WHAT WAS THE CAUSE OF THE HIGH Cl-38 RADIOACTIVITY IN THE FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI REACTOR #1

F. Dalnoki-Veress

March 28 2011

I have been totally consumed the last few weeks by one thing, day and night, and those are the events unfolding in Japan. I keep on alternating between complete disbelief and acceptance of the gravity of the situation, but mostly disbelief. And I am not the only one. Most of the nuclear physicists and engineers with whom I have spoken since the incident cannot - will not - believe that it is possible that some of the fuel that is melting could somehow produce little pockets that could go critical. I believed them for the longest time until the following came on the Kyodo news website (relevant text italicized below for emphasis) and I did the following analysis.

“Neutron beam observed 13 times at crippled Fukushima nuke plant

TOKYO, March 23, Kyodo

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday it has observed a neutron beam, a kind of radioactive ray, 13 times on the premises of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after it was crippled by the massive March 11 quake-tsunami disaster.
TEPCO, the operator of the nuclear plant, said the neutron beam measured about 1.5 kilometers southwest of the plant's No. 1 and 2 reactors over three days from March 13 and is equivalent to 0.01 to 0.02 microsieverts per hour and that this is not a dangerous level.

The utility firm said it will measure uranium and plutonium, which could emit a neutron beam, as well.

In the 1999 criticality accident at a nuclear fuel processing plant run by JCO Co. in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, uranium broke apart continually in nuclear fission, causing a massive amount of neutron beams.
In the latest case at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, such a criticality accident has yet to happen.

But the measured neutron beam may be evidence that uranium and plutonium leaked from the plant's nuclear reactors and spent nuclear fuels have discharged a small amount of neutron beams through nuclear fission.”

==Kyodo News, http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/80539.html

This entire article is worth reading because Prof. Dalnoki-Veress uses the measurements given @ the plant outflow and calculates whether a meltdown of the core would produce the indicated radiation. His conclusion is that it wouldn't by itself, that there was some other criticality taking place within the core, in his case reactor 1.

With a larger explosion in reactor 3 it is hardly surprising to find more reactivity and and more energetic isotopes hard by the reactors.

This is Meltdown Mania Part Two.

Here is Meltdown Mania Part One.

In Meltdown Mania Part Three, we will take a look at stricken deadboy number 2.

Meltdown Mania: Have the Reactors Melted Down Already?

2011-03-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

Since the days of the earthquake, tsunami and reactor 'troubles' of the March 11- 15 period, the world has moved on to 'important' questions such as those surrounding Charlie Sheen's marketability.

Here are some 'frame by frame' looks at last week's reactor explosion. Here's one that needs no introduction, we'll call this item the 'Mel Gibson':

Video 1

This is the Stratfor version which gives the time of the explosion -- 3:30 pm Japan time on Saturday, March 12th -- and shows about ten seconds of the aftermath.

The following time series made from the videos breaks down frames of the explosion, to get some idea as to what took place inside these reactor buildings.

Figure 1

This was seconds before the blast in unit 1. The camera is about a kilometer away facing east toward the ocean. It's absolutely clear but humid due to the ocean's proximity along with the waterlogging effect of the previous day's tsunami. If you look carefully you can see a fog or haze bank in the video about 7/8th distance above the tops of the venting stack towers. The sun is illuminating the west sides of the reactor buildings with the turbine hall behind. The three towers are between the reactor buildings and the video camera.

Unit 1 blew up less than 24 hours after the tsunami struck. The reactor core was being cooled with chemically pure water at the time of the explosion.

Figure 2

You can see in the video an instant flash of white steam blasting upward. In Figure 2 the white steam or vapor bubble is rising from the roof of reactor 1, probably through a tear in the roof or where it had been blasted apart. This is the hydrogen explosion: the recombination of that gas and the oxygen in the air within the containment. When hydrogen 'burns' it turns to water in the form of very energetic steam.

Underneath the light- colored bubble is the cloud of dust or steam vapor following the explosion shock wave. A hydrogen explosion is indicated by the lack of a fireball and an instantly vanishing bubble of steam vapor as seen in the video and in figures 2 and 5.

Whether the cloud is steam or dust is ambiguous at the beginning of the video. Dust has to come from somewhere: in a conventional building its materials would include acoustical ceiling tile, drywall, carpeting, plaster and cementous spray- on fireproofing, none of which would be present in any part of the reactor building outside of the control room.

It is possible that enough force brought to bear on the concrete reactor structure, some of this concrete might be reduced to dust. The metal shed atop this reactor's service deck has very little that would emit or turn to dust. At the same time, the video cloud is darker than the steam cloud. It is possible that some dust from crumbling concrete from within the containment building was mixed with the steam.

Figure 3 is a diagram of an identical reactor located in the US. Please click on this or any other image to get a full- sized version (from Physics Forums):

Figure 3

Figure 4 is a cross- section diagram from jlduh @ Physics Forums:

Figure 4

After the tsunami hit, the power was disabled to emergency pumps used to cool the reactor after shutdown These pumps are located outside the reactor containment in the turbine building. Without heat transfer mechanism provided by the emergency pumps and condensors or heat exchangers the temperatures and pressures within the cores and pressure vessels continued to increase. This is identical of the operational cycle where boiling water is directed past a turbine to a condenser which removes core heat.

Unlike a coal or gas- powered plant, when a nuclear plant is shut down the fuel continues to release massive amounts of heat. This is from the decay of 'daughter' isotopes within the fuel splitting and becoming stable. The reactor is shut down by inserting control rods into the core which absorb neutrons and 'poison' the chain reactions. Control rods do not effect decay heat. When the reactor is shut down, this heat must be removed from the core or the temperature will build, damaging the reactor and melting the fuel.

In the post- tsunami shutdown the steam produced by decay heat was vented by a pipe from the top of the core area into the wetwell or suppression pool (No. 38 in figure 3, the 'Torus' in Figure 4). During ordinary operation, the suppression pool helps to control reactor pressure: here was a very- short- term sink for core decay heat. In the suppression pool steam condensed in the cooler water. The tsunami left the reactor operators without a way to remove heat from the core. As time passed without heat transfer the core, the suppression pool and the connecting plumbing became hotter and more pressurized.

Rising steam temperatures in the core acted to shift water from the core to the suppression pool. The declining water level exposed fuel rods. Steam under intense pressure interacted with the zircaloy cladding surrounding the uranium fuel pellets, oxidizing the metal and producing hydrogen. Some of the hydrogen remained @ the top of the pressure vessel while the rest was vented into the suppression pool along with steam to be absorbed by the increasingly hot water.

Where did the oxygen come from to allow our Mel Gibson hyper- blast to take place? Here is the reaction between zirconium and steam @ high temperature:

Zr + 2 H2O → ZrO2 + 2 H2

With this reaction, there is no oxygen produced. It is likely hydrogen combined with air within the containment or inside the shed over the service deck atop the containment. Steam and gas were vented under the roof but inside the building so as to allow some time for radiation in the steam and hydrogen to decrease. It appears there was enough oxygen in the air and sufficient mixing to allow an explosive ratio to form inside the service area.

Figure 5

In figure 5 you can see the rapidly vanishing vapor bubble rising vertically. The rest of the explosive force is directed in all directions. The cloud close to the reactor is darker, either it is cooler or is not purely steam but includes dust from the reactor.

The clear 'air' under the bubble of steam is what a hydrogen explosion looks like! The explosive combination of hydrogen and oxygen results in water vapor which has no color. There is no fireball associated with a hydrogen explosion.

Other than the steam bubble, the rapidly expanding cloud atop reactor 1 is ambiguous as to whether it is dust or steam. It is hard to tell by looking at the video to this point:

Figure 6

Figure 6 shows some large pieces of building material flying out roughly parallel to the ground. In addition to the expanding cloud or light gray steam or dust, there is a 'mystery' cloud that is much darker than the rest. Because it is higher than the rest of the cloud, there is nothing to cast a shadow onto it. It is possible this was the roof bouncing in the air before it fell back onto the deck. It may also have been concrete bits and dust from the service deck itself.

The explosion is expanding outward, horizontally with little upward force. There is no black smoke from this explosion and nothing to suggest any source of an explosion other than steam and hydrogen.

Figure 7

The cloud of steam expands more or less horizontally from the reactor building in figure 7. There is no sign of a fire. The edit versions of the blast video tend to end at this point. The composition of the cloud is unclear. In the longer version it is more obvious the cloud is water vapor rather than dust.

Figure 8

After approximately five seconds post- explosion the cloud is rising; the wind from the south- east is carrying the cloud inland. Because it continues to rise, it becomes more likely that the cloud is largely steam rather than dust or smoke. The cloud looks like a puffy, gray ... cloud!

Figure 9

Figure 9, a few seconds later, the cloud has begun to drift to the north- west. Note the arrow which indicates the south- east corner of the reactor 1 building which is hidden behind the unit 2 building. Wind from the sea blows the cloud from right to left. If you watch the video carefully you can see the cloud evaporating at the top of the frame near the 'Stratfor' label. There is also a new cloud is forming from a spot where no reactor building would be.

Without a fire there can be no smoke. Dust does not evaporate, nor does new dust rise into the atmosphere without some force to push it. Here's an 'enhanced' blow- up:

Figure 10

Figure 10 is a Photoshopped version of the reactor buildings. From the viewpoint of the camera. Reactor 2 is slightly in front and to the right of reactor 1. A vapor cloud could only originate from the blown up reactor building: if the steam explosion emerged from an area under the spent fuel gate (adjacent to item 14 on Figure 3), water in the spent fuel pools could have been blown onto the roof of the adjacent turbine building where it would then boil into steam vapor before it evaporated completely.

Dust or fumes from the reactor explosion would emerge from the reactor itself, not from the adjacent building. To me, the cloud is clearly a water- vapor/steam cloud.

The appearance taken by the cloud five seconds after the explosion indicates a steam explosion along with a nearly simultaneous hydrogen explosion. The presence of the both indicates a serious meltdown of the core.

Hydrogen was created by oxidation of the zirconium fuel rod cladding mixing with oxygen in the air of the containment.

Steam was created by the decay heat from the rods leading to excess pressures within the pressure vessel and suppression pool. Fuel overheated and melted into what water remained in the core causing an internal steam explosion. Steam blew through the pressure vessel's weak spots, probably in the suppression pool area (Figure 4).

The incident @ Three Mile Island had a 1000 mw core emit 1000 cubic feet of hydrogen in a bubble that formed in that reactor pressure vessel. It was calculated at the time that the particular bubble contained explosive force equal to 3 tons of TNT. There is no doubt that reactor 1 could have produced enough hydrogen to cause the explosion at that reactor.

The creation of large amounts of hydrogen by zirconium reactions suggests the core of reactor 1 melted down to the same or greater degree than did the core @ TMI.

As steam blew out of the pressure vessel's weak points, gases saturating the water in the suppression pool bubbled out. The effect would have been identical to the natural gas saturating the crude oil in the Deepwater Horizon well. As pressure was relieved, the gas bubbled out of the oil and the bubble expanded massively, blowing out the well.

The expanding hydrogen, oxygen and flashing steam bubbled out of the pressure vessel into the containment and thence to the service deck. Resulting explosive forces 'blew out' the flimsy steel walls and roof of the service deck shed.

The suppression pool is vulnerable to breakdown and is likely the weak link in the pressure vessel 'complex'. It is a large, overwrought concrete and steel circular tube filled with mazes of plumbing. It was subjected to shaking in the earthquake as well as to stresses associated with core overheating. It is likely that all the explosions in all three reactors originated within or near the suppression pools.

The service deck itself appears to be intact with the reactor service plugs in place under the remains of the roof. The explosion's horizontal axis suggests that explosive forces vented into the service area then expanded outward in all direction from the service area. There was insufficient force to blow the roof off from the building.

Figure 11

Figure 11 is a still image of the top of unit 1. You can see the roof of the service deck shed has fallen back onto the service deck, blocking the spend fuel pools.

Since the explosion the temperature within the pressure vessel has been variable, increasing on occasion to extreme 400° C for short periods. At the same time, the vessel does not hold pressure. The heat indicates that fuel is disordered and that criticality has taken place within what remains of the core.

The establishment suggests that "some partial fuel meltdowns" have taken place. I suggest that this reactor has suffered a fairly severe core meltdown which took place on the 12th of March.

Part II will examine the explosion in Reactor 3.

Firetrucks and Lies

2011-03-26T18:17:00.000-07:00

The Great Reactor Fiasco is bringing in all the couch potatoes and Monday Morning Quarterbacks such as this dude:

U.N.’s Nuclear Chief Says Japan Is ‘Far From the End of the Accident’

The world’s chief nuclear inspector said Saturday that Japan was “still far from the end of the accident” that has stricken its Fukushima nuclear complex and continues to spew radiation into the atmosphere and the sea, and acknowledged that the authorities were still unsure about whether the nuclear cores and spent fuel were covered with the water needed to cool them and end the crisis.

Yukiya Amano, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he saw a few “positive signs” with the restoration of some outside electric power to the plant. But taking care to say he was not criticizing Japan’s response under extraordinary circumstances, he said “more efforts should be done to put an end to the accident.”

Meanwhile, seawater in the immediate vicinity of the reactors becomes increasingly radioactive:

Level of iodine-131 in seawater off chart
Contamination 1,250 times above maximum limit

The level of radioactive iodine detected in seawater near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was 1,250 times above the maximum level allowable, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Saturday, in a development that indicates contamination from the ruined reactors is spreading.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. meanwhile admitted it neglected to alert workers when it detected high radiation in a reactor building nine days ago.

The iodine-131 in the seawater was detected at 8:30 a.m. Friday, about 330 meters south of the plant's drain outlets. Previously, the highest amount recorded was about 100 times above the permitted level.

If a person drank 500 ml of water containing the newly detected level of contamination, it would be the equivalent of 1 millisievert of radiation, or the average dosage one is exposed to annually, the NISA said.

TEPCO won't say or cannot how much radiation was in the water the injured workers were standing in other than to say that the, "Three employees working near the No. 3 reactor Thursday stepped into water that had 10,000 times the amount of radiation typical for a nuclear plant,"

Whatever amount that is ...

The two employees received radiation doses in excess of 150 millisieverts. The 'old' yearly total exposure before the fiasco was 100 millisieverts per year.

Tepco also revealed that it had detected a radiation reading of 200 millisieverts per hour in a pool of water in the No. 1 reactor's turbine building on March 18, but failed to notify workers.

"If we had warned them, we may have been able to avoid having workers (at the No. 3 reactor) exposed to radiation," a Tepco official told a separate news conference.

There is almost as much radiation on the ground in Fukushima approaches that from the Chernobyl reactor:

Radiation from Fukushima exceeds Three Mile Island

Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, crippled by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, has discharged more radiation than the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the United States, according to calculations by the central government.

It has already reached a level 6 serious accident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES).

Separately, calculations made by experts place the level of soil contamination in some locations at levels comparable to those found after the Chernobyl accident in 1986.

The ad hoc approaches to these reactors are starting to fall apart. TEPCO cannot pump water into the reactors with fire trucks and concrete pumps forever. At some point, people will have to go into the buildings, decontaminate them, handle large, bulky and highly radioactive items such as roof trusses and concrete slabs. Humans will have to retrieve the scattered spent fuel rods. Chunks of goo will have to be put into lead- lined trash cans and the entire mess shipped to a repository for radioactive waste. All of this will take armies of people working in shifts and heavy equipment.

What are these people waiting for? Someone to ring a bell?

While everyone is distracted with Libya, the 'action' is taking place in Syria and Jordan:

In Syria, Tension and Grief After Protests and Official Retaliation

The sun rose over a landscape of grief as mourners set out for funerals in the southern towns of Sanamayn and Dara’a; in Latakia (Syria); in the central city of Homs; and in the suburbs of Damascus. In each place, demonstrators had been killed hours earlier, shot by government forces in the most violent government oppression since 1982, when the leadership killed at least 10,000 people in Hama, a city in the north.

Exact numbers of the dead are hard to determine, as the official government news service denied the authorities’ culpability in new reports blaming criminal gangs.

“In some villages there were 10 or 15; in some villages there were around 20 or more than 20,” the religious leader said.

While in Jordan:

Jordan opposition demands PM's ouster after unrest

AMMAN — Jordan's Islamist opposition, leftists and trade unions on Saturday demanded the ouster of Prime Minister Maaruf Bakhit, blaming him for violence that has killed one person and injured 130.

"The Islamist movement demands the resignation, or the sacking, of the government and the formation of a national unity and reformist government that would win the people's trust and protect their lives," Hamzah Mansur, chief of the powerful Islamic Action Front (IAF), said.

"Any government that kills citizens loses legitimacy," he told a news conference.

Youth movements backed the call.

"We demand the prime minister and intelligence chief (Mohammed Raqqad) quit," Firas Mahadin of the March 24 youth group told reporters. "We have reached a point of no return."

Radiation kills you but bullets kill you faster ...

Libya: what is taking place there is all- out warfare with the West's cynical 'failed state' tactic proceeding as planned:

Libyan rebels take Ajdabiya after allied airstrikes

Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi's troops flee the strategic crossroads city of Ajdabiya after a series of attacks by international coalition forces. Rebel fighters entering the city celebrate amid destroyed government tanks and rocket systems.

Reporting from Ajdabiya and Tripoli, Libya— After seven days of punishing allied airstrikes, Libyan government forces fled the strategic crossroads city of Ajdabiya early Saturday, leaving behind a charred trail of smoking tanks and rocket systems destroyed by warplanes.

Rebel fighters in gun trucks raced into the nearly deserted city, firing their weapons into the air and clamoring over burning tanks in a daylong celebration of horn-honking and flag-waving.

The overnight airstrikes ended a 10-day siege by forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, which bombarded the city of 120,000 with tank and rocket barrages. Government troops retreated south and west, exposing more armor to allied warplanes.

The so- called 'Rebels' captured Ajdabiya weeks ago and Qaddafi's goons recaptured it a couple of weeks later. Back and forth, too bad NATO can't figure out a way to bomb the Japanese reactors.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are quiescent right now but tomorrow?

While all this is taking place, the EU is falling apart:

Portugal 'headed towards a default'

European Union leaders meeting in Brussels have warned that Portugal still needs to make big cuts in spending and reduce its debts. Earlier this week, the Portuguese government collapsed, increasing fears that the country will follow Greece and Ireland in seeking a multi-billion euro bailout.

Wolfgang Munchau, correspondent at the Financial Times, believes that serious political opposition to bailouts is growing in creditor countries like Germany, France, Finland and the Netherlands.

"The the minute a country pays for another country there will be so much hostility in the creditor country that the politics of this will become impossible...

"This leads me to believe that we are headed towards a default."

Add to this stew the funding straitjackets that the PIIGS find themselves in:

Spain Takes Turn in Debt Spotlight
Portugal's admission that it will probably need a financial bailout raises a question that will shape the outcome of the euro zone's debt crisis: Is Spain next?

The cost of saving Spain, a €1.1 trillion ($1.56 trillion) economy, would dwarf previous bailouts and could test the financial strength of Europe as a whole.

But if Spain can continue to repair investors' trust, as in recent weeks, then Europe stands a chance of containing the debt crisis to three countries, Greece, Ireland and Portugal, whose combined economies are half the size of Spain's.

Debt? What debt? Greece @ 10%: (Bloomberg)

Ireland @ 10%

Portugal @ 10%:

OUCH! There is no way these countries are going to escape debt- deflation as they cannot earn enough to service the debts they carry now along with the additional 'bailout' debts.

Here is Fuckyoushima in reflection: the same lies, the same false promises, the same half- assed approaches that include bailing out the bosses while the same pressure builds up to massive explosions. The little dudes and dudettes get to clean up the mess ... if they can.

It's all of a piece: everyone who can has been living beyond their means, to grab while the grabbing was good. You note I said 'was'. This is the time when accounts start to settle. What cannot be sustained will not be. What cannot be paid won't.

Right now it's becoming clear the energy deficit in Japan is too large to service with some fire trucks and lies about radiation just like the euro deficit in Spain cannot be serviced with the same firetrucks and lies. Something has to give and it is ...