News from #Fukushima is a slow drip of terror. Recently there have been several releases concerning the failure of TEPCO to create and sustain the ice-wall. A big failure that has very little coverage. And this week the report that the ground water will be filtered then dumped into the Pacific. #FAIL #ChrisBohjalian . . . → Read More: Close your eyes, hold hands
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With so many slow motion disasters coming at us sometimes it is hard not to despair. And then someone will say the most absurd thing and I have to laugh, ruefully, sadly at the profound depths of human folly. TEPCO, that fount of acumen and honesty has come out with a press release in which they thank the fishing industr . . . → Read More: So long and thanks for all the fish The Guardian has a new piece on “Behind the rise of Boko Haram – ecological disaster, oil crisis, spy games” which highlights the social disruption that I foresee and links it to degradation of the environment due to climate change: The kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian school girls, and the massacre of as many as 300 civilians in the town of Gamboru Ngala, . . . → Read More: Nigerian instability and climate change It is well known (everywhere but in the Climate Denier’s Homeland) that burning fossil fuels causes atmospheric CO² to increase, causes man-made global climate change. It is also clear that the carbon industry has a interest in burning more fuel, each company seeks to maxmise it’s own return by increasing its revenue and reserves. They also fund lavishly the climate deniers and skeptics as well as corrupting the governments that might putatively seek to limit their earth destroying short term profits. . . . → Read More: Burning the midnight oil That bastion of eco-terrorism the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has updated it’s thinking on the true costs of nuclear decommissioning: The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it. And decommissioning the plant—constructed early in the 1960s for $39 million—cost $608 million. The plant’s spent fuel rods are still stored . . . → Read More: Nuclear Decommissioning True Costs New article by Elizabeth Douglas at InsideClimate News interviews Peter Lam who has an impressive background as a Nuclear Industry regulator. Lam changed his mind on the use of probability statistics in nuclear disaster preparations. He says: One can plan for a lot of things, but things don’t always happen according to what you plan for. … Sure, I think everybody’s doing the . . . → Read More: Nuclear power is an unforgiving technology Fukushima is still in the news. Reuters reports today that the initial estimates of the amount of radiation released are now known to have been 2 and a half times too low. Tepco will be nationalized due to the exceptionally large losses after the accident. Reuters also reports what we first surmised the clean up will probably take 30 years. In the meantime . . . → Read More: Fukushima Mon Amour Bill Black has continually been on the watch for what he calls “control-frauds” which are just frauds by management of a company to hide illegal and/or greedy behavior. In a new article Anti-Employee Control Fraud in New Economic perspectives he departs from his usual target of banking to look at the recent news about Apple’s supply chain. Businesses that pursue anti-employee behavior in . . . → Read More: Anit-Employee Control Fraud I have heard it said by my friends that the mortgage crisis was caused by individuals taking on more mortgage than they could pay for, then refusing to pay up when the music stopped. In Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale Matt Taibbi nails this, this way: At one point during these deals, Verschleiser reamed out his . . . → Read More: Bad loans made boldly Bloomberg continues reporting into Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13B. THe FOIA information that Bloomberg has acquired shows that the Fed gave the banks lines of credit, loans and access to the discount window to the tune of $7.7 trillion, yes that’s trillion. In their own calculation Bloomberg thinks that the banks netted profit of $13 billion on this largesse from the . . . → Read More: Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13B – Bloomberg |
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