4th reactor now on fire at nuke plant in Japan; situation sounds out of control at the moment

UPDATE: From Kyodo News:

NEWS ADVISORY: Radiation of up to 9 times normal level briefly detected in Kanagawa
11:37 15 March

BREAKING NEWS: Radiation 400 times annual legal limit measured near No. 3 reactor

More from Kyodo News

Radiation is feared to have leaked after the container vessel suffered damage at the No. 2 reactor of the quake-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant Tuesday morning, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

The utility also admitted that a critical situation called ''meltdown'' in which fuel rods melt and are destroyed is possible at the plant where three reactor cores are believed to have partially melted following Friday's magnitude 9.0 earthquake that hit northeastern and eastern Japan.

An explosion was heard early Tuesday morning at the reactor and the radiation level temporarily shot up later, the firm said as it continued efforts to prevent overheating of exposed fuel rods.

Shortly after the apparent blast at 6:10 a.m., which appears to have damaged the reactor's pressure-suppression system, the radiation level exceeded the legal limit to reach 965.5 micro sievert per hour before jumping to 8,217 micro sievert at 8:31 p.m., it said.

The maximum level is more than eight times the 1,000 micro sievert level to which people can be exposed in one year.

Top story on the NYT site:


Jesus. Read the NYT article we linked to earlier this evening - it's a mess, and sounds out of control. Read the rest of this post...

Bachamnn refuses to say Obama is a citizen, says she'll produce her birth certificate if she runs for prez

Possible 2012 GOP presidential candidate and Tea Party head Michele Bachman via Mediaite:

“I’ll tell you one thing, if I was ever to run for President of the United States, I think the first thing I would do in the first debate is offer my birth certificate, so we can get that off the table.”

I understand she's spent $1m trying to hide the fact she's not human. Read the rest of this post...

New explosion at Japanese nuke plant heightens concerns

This is just the first paragraph, but read the full NYT story. It sounds quite bad.

Japan faced the likelihood of a catastrophic nuclear accident Tuesday morning, as an explosion at the most crippled of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station damaged its crucial steel containment structure, emergency workers were withdrawn from the plant, and much larger emissions of radioactive materials appeared immiment, according to official statements and industry executives informed about the developments.

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Foolish consistency: the hobgoblin of little minds

If elected Democrats in DC had any spine or principles, or if they had a leader in the White House -- and given the evidence, I'm not optimistic that they have any of those things -- they would take a cue from this Rachel Maddow segment (thanks for the link, Gaius Publius) and ban forever from their lexicon the term "tax cuts" when discussing Republican tax proposals. Instead, the Dems should refer only to "tax shifts" from the working and middle classes to the rich. Make Republicans defend "tax shifts" from working people to the wealthy, then sit back and watch the fun!

In a similar vein, after reading this post from ThinkProgress today, I wondered: Republicans rail against government intervention in the marketplace (requiring people to buy health insurance or mandating more fuel-efficient cars, for example), but they have no qualms about taking taxpayers' money and handing it over to businesses that have not otherwise earned it. If a business cannot provide quality goods or services that attract customers, then why should government force those same consumer-taxpayers to subsidize such businesses? If Dems would persistently pose the question, it would be fun to watch Republicans make a case FOR government intervention in business.

These are just two more examples of many messages that the Dems might use to good result if they could just maintain more discipline than a herd of cats.

But recall what Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

In our current political climate, the quote applies to both parties, but for different reasons. Republicans maintain the foolish consistency -- or better, the fraudulent one -- that they favor small government, low taxes and free enterprise. But the only reason the GOPers succeed in this delusion is because most Dems maintain a foolishly consistent faith in bipartisanship and a similar unwillingness to play hardball. And finally, the mainstream media contributes its own foolish consistency to the train wreck this nation has become: it enables the little minds of both parties by fawning over and identifying with the establishment even as it fails utterly to pursue its principle mission: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Read the rest of this post...

Police think more than 10,000 dead in one Japanese town alone

NYT:

The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the country’s crippled nuclear power grid, announced a series of rotating blackouts to conserve electricity — the first controlled power cuts in Japan in 60 years.

The death toll was certain to climb as searchers began to reach coastal villages that essentially vanished under the first muddy surge of the tsunami, which struck the nation’s northern Pacific coast near the port city of Sendai. In one town alone, the port of Minamisanriku, a senior police official said the number of dead would “certainly be more than 10,000.” That is more than half the town’s population of 17,000.

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Why does the US (and Japan) refuse to build true fail-safe nuke plants?

A knowledgeable reader writes:

Looks to me like the nuclear industry is set for another 25 year set back. The fundamental problem here is not the technology, its the lying.

All told I spent six years in nuclear physics and high energy physics labs, and discussed nuclear power with many of the physicists.

As for the current situation in Japan, depending on who you believe there is no problem or we are on the verge of a meltdown. The fundamental problem is that the Japanese nuclear authorities have lied in the past (as have the UK authorities).

So it comes down to what the source of the hydrogen that was vented is. Whether it is the water molecules disassociating or the zirconium casing round the rods reducing the water. In other words a metal fire. They burn under water as most metals are above hydrogen in the reactivity series.

That in turn will depend on whether they have managed to fully insert the control rods or not. That should be easy in normal operation, but what if the earthquake damaged the core?

As an engineer I know that the Japanese designs are not 'fail safe' as the term is understood outside the nuclear field. If the designs were in fact fail safe the loss of the cooling system would not cause a safety problem. What they have is a fundamentally unsafe designs with a series of safety controls intended to allow a shutdown. Despite redundancy, the controls have a common failure mode (vulnerable to earthquake) so there is a major crisis.

There are nuclear designs that are genuinely fail safe. The Canadian CANDU system that uses a heavy water moderator is fail safe, If the reactor overheats, the glass tubes containing the moderator crack and the moderator drains away - failsafe.

Unfortunately and rather predictably, the designs being proposed for new nuclear stations are more of the same, the light water designs that the US power companies know how to build and operate. These are described as failsafe to gain approval, but like the Japanese system this is a convenient lie.

20% of US power comes from nuclear. The plants are old and dilapidated. The choices on offer now are to continue to operate unsafe plants, to build new unsafe plants or to stop using nuclear and burn more carbon fuels.

Wouldn't it make more sense to build some prototype reactors of genuinely failsafe designs?

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Bachmann tells NH crowd how proud she is battles of Lexington and Concord took place in NH, even though they took place in Massachusetts

It's amazing how much GOP 2012 presidential hopeful and Tea Party leader Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin, love a country they seem to know very little about. Makes you wonder if they're in love the wrong country. Read the rest of this post...

Republicans want to destroy NPR for the same reason dictators murder intellectuals

IRA Glass on NPR:

"I feel like public radio should address this directly, because I think anybody who listens to our stations understands that what they're hearing is mainstream media reporting," Glass said. "We have nothing to fear from a discussion of what is the news coverage we're doing. As somebody who works in public radio, it is killing me that people on the right are going around trying to basically rebrand us, saying that it's biased news, it's left wing news, when I feel like anybody who listens to the shows knows that it's not. And we are not fighting back, we are not saying anything back. I find it completely annoying, and I don't understand it."

Let me explain it.

NPR is being attacked by Republicans because NPR is objective news. Republicans know that extremist policy based on lies can't survive for long in a society in which a free media holds public officials of each party equally accountable. Thus, the Republicans have spent the good part of two decades trying to play the media refs, and if that doesn't work, destroy the mainstream media and replace it with their own propaganda org, aka Fox News.

It's the same reason dictators loathe intellectuals. Intellectuals see, and tell, the truth. The media are the intellectuals to the Republicans' dictatorship of ignorance. And time after time, the GOP has found that they can't control the media, so they simply destroy it and replace it with something, someone, they can control.

That's why the GOP doesn't like NPR. Read the rest of this post...

Stunning before and after images of Japan post quake/tsunami

Go to this page and move your mouse over the photos from right to left. It's simply breathtaking the amount of damage. Read the rest of this post...

Haley Barbour's office jokes about Japanese tsunami, Janet Reno's gender

Acting like trash is considered a virtue in the Republican party. It ranks up there with fetishizing ignorance. From Ben Smith:

In Friday's email, for instance, press secretary Dan Turner emailed that on that day in 1968:

Otis Redding posthumously received a gold record for his single, "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay". (Not a big hit in Japan right now.)

In 1993: Janet Reno was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate to become the first female attorney general. (It took longer to confirm her gender than to confirm her law license.)

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Is daylight savings time costing more energy, not less?

I do enjoy the later evenings. But maybe we could just leave the clock ahead an hour permanently. That might mean more A/C in the summer (since you're home an hour earlier and it's warmer), but it also means more heat usage in the winter since we get home an hour later (and it's colder as the evening goes on). Or do we switch the time change for summer and winter - spring behind and fall ahead?

WSJ:

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

The energy-savings numbers often cited by lawmakers and others come from research conducted in the 1970s. Yet a key difference between now and the '70s -- or, for that matter, Ben Franklin's time -- is the prevalence of air conditioning.

There may also be social benefits to daylight-saving time that weren't covered in the research. When the extension of daylight-saving time was proposed by Mr. Markey, he cited studies that noted "less crime, fewer traffic fatalities, more recreation time and increased economic activity" with the extra sunlight in the evening.

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Only one of five emergency coolant pumps working at Japanese nuke reactor following earthquake

Kyodo News:

The seawater injection operation started at 4:34 p.m., but water levels in the No. 2 reactor have since fallen sharply with only one out of five fire pumps working. The other four were feared to have been damaged by a blast that occurred in the morning at the nearby No. 3 reactor.

To prevent a possible hydrogen explosion at the No. 2 reactor, TEPCO said it will look into opening a hole in the wall of the building that houses the reactor to release hydrogen.

The company has also begun work to depressurize the containment vessel of the No. 2 reactor by releasing radioactive steam, the government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said. Such a step is necessary to prevent the vessel from sustaining damage and losing its critical containment function.

With only one fire pump working, TEPCO is placing priority on injecting water into the No. 2 reactor, although both the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors still need coolant water injections, according to the agency.

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Obama: Treatment of alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning is 'appropriate and meeting our basic standards'

So much for that pesky torture thing; Obama says we're not doing it.

For me, that's the story. The story that prompted the story is this (h/t John Cole):

P.J. Crowley, the state department spokesman, stepped down Sunday after saying publicly that treatment of Wikileaks suspect Pfc. Bradley Manning in military detention has been “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”

In a statement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote that she accepted his resignation with regret. ...

The remark by Mr. Crowley last week to a small audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first reported by the blogger Philippa Thomas, was rejected by none other than President Obama at a press conference on Friday. Mr. Obama said that he had been assured the treatment of Private Manning was “appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.”

Amnesty International begs to differ:

[T]he conditions inflicted on Bradley Manning . . . amount to inhumane treatment by the US authorities [and] appear to breach the USA’s human rights obligations.

Did you notice the weasel by Obama? Go back to the last sentence in the first quote and read carefully.

Yep — "Obama said that he had been assured ..." As in, "Well, shucks, I don't personally know, you understand; but what I hear is, it's all good. And me, just passing that on."

I won't dignify the weasel by the Times writer, who "under-characterizes" Manning's condition, with a quote. Feel free to find it yourself. The writer is Michael D. Shear, and he probably needed to get his Access Pass re-stamped.

Obama's weasel is the tell — he knows. To which I say, one of us has a conscience, sir, and a line in the sand. See you in ... you know.

GP Read the rest of this post...

What Republicans are doing in the states is 'a massive reallocation of resources to corporations'

The Rachel Maddow Show recently did something I've rarely seen — an episodic news show (a news show divided into episodes, like Countdown) in which the episodes formed a single structure. About all the messy Republican mayhem happening in the states, Maddow concludes:

"This is about a massive reallocation of resources held in common by the citizens to corporations for their private gain. And it is about a tactical kneecapping of the political force that might resist that — a tactical kneecapping of the Democratic party and its union base."

Each "chapter" in this essay develops an aspect of this idea, brilliantly.

Here's Episode 1, Connecting the dots. It's about what's happening — not just in Wisconsin, but in all of the Teapartied, mainly northern states. Wisconsin in just the tip of the spear. Watch:



It's the South come to conquer the North in so many ways, including the export of "right to work" laws. Yes, Virginia; that war isn't over. (This is my thought, not hers, yet.)

Some of her gory state-by-state details:

▪ Indiana — Stripping unions of rights, privatizing public school resources
▪ Wisconsin — Stripping unions of rights
▪ Idaho — Stripping unions of rights
▪ Ohio — Stripping unions of rights
▪ Michigan — $1.7 billion tax hikes on the old and poor, $1.8 billion in corporate tax cuts
▪ Florida — $1.75 billion in spending cuts to schools, $1.6 billion cuts to corporate and property taxes

And all financed and promoted by Karl Rove and his closet coterie of millionaires (aka Crossroads GPS); the not-so-secret Koch Brothers and their back-pocket front group, Americans for Prosperity; plus others we know not of. The Billionaires' Coup in action.

This is the Republican (or Movement Conservative) agenda. Episode 1 identifies it clearly. Later segments in this show-long essay take on the methods and implications:

Ep. 2: You can't vote them out if you can't vote (keeping voters from voting)
Ep. 3: That not-so-democratic feeling (a great intro to Episode 4)
Ep. 4: Handing the environmental hen to the foxes (a must-watch; rule by fiat from Republican governors)
Ep. 5: Interview with AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka

This is far-forward thinking; big picture stuff. Ignore Trumka's bridge-maintenance with Obama; that may not last, depending on Team Change, their ham-handedness, and you. Take Maddow's larger point instead; she's right. And take heart that this larger point has a voice.

This isn't pretty, but it's (ahem) the elephant in the room. (We'll deal with the donkey later; trust me.)

Our Contribute to the Wisconsin Recall link is above. Thank you.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Top recipient of privatized airport security claims TSA 'cooked' data on costs

To repeat, Rep. Mica is bathing in campaign contributions from organizations that want to privatize the TSA services. It's the loony newspaper from the Moonies but they're not alone in ignoring this fact as we've pointed out a few times. Of all people, I'm not sure Rep. Mica should be talking about cooking the books with his financial links to the privatizing companies. The issue for most has consistently been about the TSA policies, not private or public. The private security companies still need to follow the same rules and regulations as the TSA.

The bigger picture here though is the GOP once again attacking public service workers. They won't stop until they destroy every union and have workers struggling to live on minimum wage salaries. Wisconsin was just the starting point. Read the rest of this post...

Elderly and gun owners exempt from Texas voter ID law

Next up, all Republicans are exempt from Texas voter ID. It's already more than half way there. It's possible that some Democrats were trying to help elderly voters who may not have a photo ID but senior citizens in Texas heavily break for the GOP during the elections. Slate:

I'll stress it again: These were bipartisan changes to the law. They are also going to help Republican voters. In 2008, a decent year for Texas Democrats but the last one for which exit polls are available, John McCain beat Barack Obama by 34 points among voters who were 65 and older; McCain had only won statewide by 10 points. We don't have a clean poll like this that tells us how gun owners voted in 2008, but the data is clear; gun owners favor Republicans.

Read the rest of this post...

Former FDIC Chairman: Wall Street won

Washington still thinks they did a great job following the crisis, but these are also the same people who think it makes sense to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq. The sad excuse that some think was Wall Street reform failed to go far enough. As Bill Isaac says, the problems that created the meltdown are still there so there's no reason to think that Dodd-Frank will do anything to prevent the next bank problem. Yahoo!

The Dodd-Frank reform bill--the one major piece of legislation to emerge since the financial crisis--is mostly meaningless, says Isaac, who is also the chairman of regional bank Fifth Third. Dodd-Frank does nothing to address the root causes of the financial crisis, Isaac says, and it won't prevent the next one.

Specifically, Dodd-Frank will just create more bureaucracy and red tape. Meanwhile, our biggest banks are still "Too Big To Fail." Our commercial banks are still allowed to take way too much risk. Our regulators are still balkanized and political. And we still haven't addressed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

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