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Quote of the day from the piece From Hiroshima to Fukushima.
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“The problem is not that another backup generator is needed, or that the safety rules aren’t tight enough, or that the pit for the nuclear waste is in the wrong geological location, or that controls on proliferation are lax.

It is that a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom.”

-Jonathon Schell

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NYT/The Nation, March 16, 2011

Overnight, the Nikkei started to bounce off its lows just 17 minutes into their day (still closed lower by 1.4%) and as it steadily recovered most of its losses, the S&P futures rallied too. The yen continues to rip higher vs the US$ as the repatriation process continues but is 2 yen off its overnight highs. Let’s hope we get facts from authorities today on what is going on rather than opinions of nuclear chief’s outside of Japan. India didn’t let the Japanese disaster and threat to global growth hinder their inflation fighting as they raised interest rates 25 bps and said “the underlying inflationary pressures have accentuated, even as risks to growth are emerging.” In Europe, Spain sold 10 and 30 yr debt at yields slightly below that of similar maturities sold last month. The Euro is rallying back to 1.40 and it’s sending the $ index down to just shy of its lowest level since Dec ’09.

Feb CPI both headline and core were .1% above expectations up by .5% and .2% respectively. The .2% core gain is for the 2nd straight month for the 1st time since Sept/Oct ’09. The y/o/y headline gain is now 2.1%, the highest since April ’10 and the core y/o/y rise is 1.1%, the most since March ’10. The absolute cost of living is at a new record high. Owners Equivalent Rent, 25% of CPI, rose a still benign .1% but apartment vacancy rates are falling and rents are moving higher so this trend bears watching in terms of impacting core CPI. Commodities, which make up 40% of CPI, rose 1% and is up 3.1% y/o/y. After a 1% rise in Jan, apparel prices fell .9%. Vehicle prices rose .5%. Bottom line, statistically the Fed will read the data as being subdued but the trend is clearly higher and the 2.1% y/o/y gain is back to the Fed’s implied inflation target at the same time REAL interest rates remain firmly negative.

Another good interactive graphic from the WSJ:

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click for interactive graphic

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If you cannot access this directly, go to the article “A Long, Painful Reckoning” and click on the interactive feature marked “Inside the Reactors.”  (Clicking on the Interactive Tab won’t get you there).

Washington’s Blog strives to provide real-time, well-researched and actionable information.  George – the head writer at Washington’s Blog – is a busy professional and a former adjunct professor.

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The New York Times notes:

A United Nations forecast of the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors shows it churning across the Pacific and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday.

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The projection, by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, an arm of the United Nations in Vienna, gives no information about actual radiation levels but only shows how a radioactive plume would probably move and disperse.

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The forecast, calculated Tuesday, is based on patterns of Pacific winds at that time and the predicted path is likely to change as weather patterns shift.

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The Japan forecast shows that the radioactive plume will probably miss the agency’s monitoring stations at Midway and in the Hawaiian Islands but is likely to be detected in the Aleutians and at a monitoring station in Sacramento.The forecast assumes that radioactivity in Japan is released continuously and forms a rising plume. It ends with the plume heading into Southern California and the American Southwest, including Nevada, Utah and Arizona. The plume would have continued eastward if the United Nations scientists had run the projection forward.

The Times provides a series of images to illustrate the projected path of radiation, ending with this one:

(click here for a moving graphic timeline.)

Similarly, Yoichi Shimatsu – former editor of the Japan Times Weekly, who led the field research for an architectural report on structural design flaws that led to the tsunami death toll in Thailand – wrote a couple of days ago:

The Pacific jetstream is currently flowing due east directly toward the United States. In the event of a major meltdown and continuous large-volume radioactive release, airborne particles will be carried across the ocean in bands that will cross over the southern halves of Oregon, Montana and Idaho, all of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, the Dakotas, northern Nebraska and Iowa and ending in Wisconsin and Illinois, with possible further eastward drift depending on surface wind direction.

The timeline of the UN’s forecast is suprising, given that the earthquake hit on March 11th, and Accuweather formerly estimated the following times for radiation – in a worst-case scenario – to reach the West Coast:

Calculated time for radioactive particles to cross the Pacific from the power plants in Japan to big West Coast cities if the particles take a direct path and move at a speed of 20 mph:

Cities	Est. Distance (miles)	Est. Time to Cross Pacific (days)
Anchorage	3,457	7
Honolulu	3,847	8
Seattle	4,792	10
Los Angeles	5,477	11

But it is vital to note that many experts are saying that only extremely low levels of radiation will hit Americans. As the New York Times reports:

Health and nuclear experts emphasize that radiation in the plume will be diluted as it travels and, at worst, would have extremely minor health consequences in the United States, even if hints of it are ultimately detectable. In a similar way, radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 spread around the globe and reached the West Coast of the United States in 10 days, its levels measurable but minuscule.

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On Sunday, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it expected that no “harmful levels of radioactivity” would travel from Japan to the United States “given the thousands of miles between the two countries.”

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On Wednesday, the agency declined to release its Japanese forecast, which The New York Times obtained from other sources. The forecast was distributed widely to the agency’s member states.

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The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko, said Monday that the plume posed no danger to the United States. “You just aren’t going to have any radiological material that, by the time it traveled those large distances, could present any risk to the American public,” he said in a White House briefing.

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In Germany on Wednesday, the Federal Office for Radiation Protection held a news conference that described the threat from the Japanese plume as trifling and said there was no need for people to take iodine tablets.

It is also important to remember that this is likely not just a one-day freak-out kind of event. As the Times previously noted:

Experts in Japan and the United States say the country is now facing a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months.

And keep in mind that iodide only protects against one particular radioactive element: radioactive iodine, technically known as iodine-131. Iodine-131 has a half life of only 8.02 days. That means that the iodine loses half of its radioactivity within 8 days.

In contrast, plutonium has a half life of up to 80 million years, and is one of the most hazardous substances in the world. Fukushima reactor number 3 burned a plutonium-uranium mix, and has lost containment.

However, as NPR points out:

Although plutonium is a long-lived emitter of radiation, it is also quite heavy, so it is not likely to move very far downwind from its source.

Therefore, Americans will likely not be exposed to any plutonium.

Other possible radioactive elements from Japan include some elements – like radioactive nitrogen (with a half life of seven seconds) – decay so quickly that they could not possibly make it to the U.S. in radioactive form.

The New York Times noted last week that – in addition to iodine-131, the big danger is cesium:

Over the long term, the big threat to human health is cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years.

At that rate of disintegration, John Emsley wrote in “Nature’s Building Blocks” (Oxford, 2001), “it takes over 200 years to reduce it to 1 percent of its former level.”

It is cesium-137 that still contaminates much of the land in Ukraine around the Chernobyl reactor.

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Cesium-137 mixes easily with water and is chemically similar to potassium. It thus mimics how potassium gets metabolized in the body and can enter through many foods, including milk.

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The Environmental Protection Agency says that … once dispersed in the environment … cesium-137 “is impossible to avoid.”

Cesium-137 is light enough to be carried by the wind a substantial distance.

But this is still largely conjecture, as neither the government or private sector scientists have yet publicly disclosed the exact radioactive elements headed towards the U.S.

Again, the important thing is whether a little or a lot of radiation makes it to America. If only a little bit, it’s no big deal. We’ve all had x-rays, eaten bananas (which – believe it or not – contain radioactive potassium-40), and been exposed to other forms of low=level radiation. Indeed, the Times notes we’ve all been exposed to some cesium-137 our whole lives:

The Environmental Protection Agency says that everyone in the United States is exposed to very small amounts of cesium-137 in soil and water because of atmospheric fallout from the nuclear detonations of the cold war.

click for updated futures

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Futures are appreciably higher today as a the markets try to bounce off of the recent lows.

Today is St. Patrick’s day, which means a huge parade — right in front of my office on 5th Avenue — lots of crowds, police and excess drinking.

If you need to come in NYC today, I urge you to take mass transit.

The following was written by Plain English Nuclear (originally posted to Facebook at about 12:30am PDT on Wednesday, March 16, 2011).

Subsequent to that post, many people clamored for me to share it publicly.  I have now done so.

From the author: I have a PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. I am currently employed as a nuclear engineer. I do not work on nuclear power plants; I work on other facilities. But I did study this stuff in school, and I am told I am good at explaining things. (I also have lots of friends who are experts in the nuclear field, and I hope they will correct me when I am wrong.)

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[Fairly current as of about noonish Pacific time March 15; events since then are sort of haphazardly incorporated.  I'll update as I get the chance, but right now it's bedtime.]

Okay, kids.

This post is open to friends-of-friends.  Feel free to repost if needed, but I don’t really want to open myself up to a wave of comments by strangers alleging this was payback for Pearl Harbor.  (SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE.)

If you don’t know me or my background, here you go:  I’m a nuclear engineer.  I don’t do any work with power plants – I work with other facilities.  But I did study this stuff in school, and I can try to explain it.  If you want an expert, you need to be talking to someone who worked on safety systems for BWRs (boiling water reactors).  (I have lots of friends who are experts like that and I hope they will correct me if I am wrong here.)

This post is written for people who don’t know anything about nuclear reactors.  I have sacrificed detail to provide simple explanations! Not everything here is accurate to the last inch, because I wanted you to be able to actually read the thing.  It’s accurate enough for understanding, I think.  I’m happy to hear suggestions for how to make it better.

The post is also long.  Sorry.

For those of you with short attention spans, I’m gonna get the FAQ stuff out up front, and then provide the long meaty detail stuff down below.

1. I live on the West Coast.  Am I in danger?

No.  Absolutely not.

You won’t even notice except that everyone will keep talking about it for ages, and it’ll take us even longer to get off coal and oil and natural gas because people will be afraid of nuclear power again.  Go outside, get some sunshine (or rain, depending), be grateful for the fact that your city isn’t completely destroyed in an earthquake or a tsunami, hug your loved ones, and then find a way to donate to the relief efforts.

You might get cancer years from now, but it won’t be from this.  It’ll be from smoking or sun damage or plastics or those horrible processed foods with the carcinogens you keep eating.

2. But I saw a fallout map on the internet, labeled “Australian Radiation Services” or “U.S. NRC”!

It’s a hoax.  A really, really mean one.  See http://www.blogotariat.com/node/211958 for one of the best summaries I’ve found.

3. Even if the reactor has a meltdown?  The media keeps saying we’re headed for a meltdown.  Isn’t that a very very bad thing?

Not necessarily.  “Meltdown” is a very broad term – it applies to a range of conditions.  “Meltdown” is basically any time that the fuel gets hot enough that the cladding (the metal wrapper that holds the fuel in place) gets holes in it.  But “meltdown” could mean just one teeny spot on one single fuel pin (the cladding starts to fail at about 2200 degrees F) all the way up to the entire reactor core in a liquid pool on the bottom of the pressure vessel (the fuel itself melts at about 5000 degrees F).  The media seems to think it’s that whole-core thing.  But that isn’t going to happen.

So far they’ve had a partial failure of some of the fuel pins in two of the reactor units, and that’s about where it’s expected to stay.  It may turn out that a third reactor unit also had a partial failure of fuel pins.  This is a sad situation – we try not to have fuel failures, because it’s a giant hassle – but it’s not by itself a dangerous one.  It’s very important to remember that these fuel pins are sealed inside a giant steel pressure vessel, which itself is sealed inside a giant concrete containment structure (you may also hear this called the “drywell”).  Even if the core *did* melt all the way down, either one of those two things on its own would keep the radiation from the melted fuel from getting to the public.

4. But Chernobyl released lots of radiation!

This isn’t like Chernobyl.  You can read why here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110312/sc_livescience/chernobylscaledisasterveryunlikelyinjapanexpertssay
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576198421680697248.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2011/0313/Japan-s-nuclear-crisis-and-Chernobyl-key-differences

Short version:
-         Chernobyl used a different kind of fuel, and its fuel caught on fire and the ash went everywhere in a great cloud that lasted for months in affected areas.  That can’t happen here; for one the fuel can’t catch on fire, so no ash, and for two, any radiation release would be in gaseous form and the cloud would pass over affected areas in hours.
-         Chernobyl didn’t have a containment structure.  These reactors do.

This is more like Three Mile Island, if you insist on picking an accident for comparison.

5. But Three Mile Island was terrible!

Three Mile Island a) didn’t kill anyone, b) didn’t injure anyone, and c) only released a very small amount of radioactive material, mostly gases that went harmlessly into the atmosphere.  (Seriously!  Read about it!)  [1]

During Three Mile Island about half of the core (including fuel) melted and fell to the bottom of the pressure vessel [1].  But it didn’t melt through the steel pressure vessel – in fact it only melted about 5/8 of an inch through the wall.[2]  (A typical pressure vessel is ~6 inches thick.)  And even if it had, it would have had to get through like 6 feet of concrete after that.  (We design it that way.)

Right now our best evidence indicates that yes, a small portion of the cores in Fukishima One Unit 1 and Unit 3 have failed (although we don’t think the fuel has melted, just the cladding), and maybe Unit 2 also.  But it’s thought that the majority of the fuel didn’t melt, and that the cleanup will probably be less difficult than Three Mile Island.

6. But the media says they released radiation, and there’s all these numbers floating about radiation levels, and they evacuated everyone who lives near the reactor.  Can you put this in context?

There were several small, planned releases of slightly radioactive gases.  Each of these radioactivity releases to the environment at Fukushima so far has produced about the level of one dental X-ray if you were standing right over the release and breathing in really hard.  If you weren’t standing right over the release, the particular kind of radioactivity released would have nearly all gone away before the vented gases reached you on the ground.  Even the people on the ship that sailed right into the plume only got a maximum dose about equal to a month of background radiation [6] – that is, the natural radiation you get from living on Earth.

The most recent explosion at Fukushima One Unit 2 and near-simultaneous fire and Fukushima One Unit 4 (about 6 am and 9 am Japan time March 15) did release a one-time gust of radioactive gases that was larger.  Radiation levels at the edge of the nuclear plant briefly spiked to 8217 microSieverts per hour. [10]  How bad is this?  8217 microSieverts is about six times the allowable annual exposure for a member of the public in the U.S.  It would take standing in this kind of radiation for 24 hours before you would be considered to have radiation sickness (with a total dose of 200 milliSievert). [9]  But 8217 microSieverts was the peak of the spike, the total spike lasted less than three hours, and dose rates at the edge of the plant were at 489.8 microSieverts/hr as of 4:30pm Japan time March 15.  (This means you would get your annual dose if you stood there for an hour.  Perspective: This is about the same as smoking 350 packs of cigarettes in a year [12], or living in Denver for a year [15].)

They evacuated people because it was safer that way – just like we evacuate people during tornado and hurricane warnings.  No exposure to the public was expected, but better safe than sorry!

Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing to see here, move along, nothing to worry about:

• NHK Live Video Feed (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)

• More Workers Join Race to Prevent Meltdown at Nuclear Plant (Bloomberg)

More than 300 workers are racing to prevent a meltdown and spread of radiation at the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station today, an increase from a group of 50 engineers yesterday.

• U.S. Calls Radiation ‘Extremely High,’ Sees Japan Nuclear Crisis Worsening (NYT)

The chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave a far bleaker appraisal on Wednesday of the threat posed by Japan’s nuclear crisis than the Japanese government had offered. He said American officials believed that the damage to at least one crippled reactor was much more serious than Tokyo had acknowledged, and he advised Americans to stay much farther away from the plant than the perimeter established by Japanese authorities.

• (Strange) Mizuho Bank says its ATMs in Japan stopped working (Reuters)
Mizuho Bank said on Thursday that all of its automatic teller machines (ATM) throughout Japan have stopped working. The bank did not immediately give a reason for the outage.

• Why Japan embraced nuclear power after suffering the atomic bomb (Globe and Mail)

Japan’s 55 reactors produce nearly 30 per cent of the country’s electricity, and the long-term strategy before the Fukushima disaster was to push that figure to 50 per cent by 2030. Almost alone among its political allies, whose ambitions were reined in by the catastrophes at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the land that experienced the atomic bomb has chosen to expand its network of nuclear plants, many of them knowingly built in seismic zones.

• How safe is nuclear power? (LA Times)

Elmer E. Lewis, professor emeritus at Northwestern University and author of two textbooks on nuclear power, took questions about the effort to contain reactors damaged by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Lewis’ research has focused on the broad problems of dealing with the physics, safety and reliability of nuclear systems.

• On Northeast Coast, Portraits Of Japanese Resilience (NPR Radio)

• U.S. Tells Nationals to Consider Leaving Quake-Hit Japan (Bloomberg)

The U.S. plans to evacuate citizens wanting to leave Japan along with military and diplomatic families, as concerns grow that authorities are failing to contain leaks from a quake-stricken nuclear plant.

The U.S. also advised citizens to keep 50 miles (80 kilometers) away from the Dai-Ichi plant in Fukushima, about 135 miles north of Tokyo, while the U.K. said people should consider leaving the capital.

• Lessons for Japan from the Chernobyl catastrophe (The Guardian)

The Fukushima nuclear plant crisis appears less dangerous than the 1986 Chernobyl disaster – but the risk of radiation spreading wide remains

• Helicopters Drop Water On Stricken Plant (WSJ)

In the latest attempt to cool down reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, helicopters from Japan’s Self-Defense Force started dropping ocean water on top of the overheated units.The measure, announced by the Japan Nuclear Agency, is seen as a highly unusual step and has never been tried before in Japan. The agency also said that power cables from an outside source would be available at Fukushima as early as this afternoon.

• Asian Stocks Drop on Worsening Crisis at Japan Nuclear Reactor (Bloomberg)

Asian stocks fell, leading a regional benchmark index lower for the third time this week, on renewed concern that a worsening nuclear crisis in Japan may cripple the world’s third-largest economy.

• U.S. Sounds Alarm on Radiation (WSJ)

Fear about radiation dangers posed by Japan’s nuclear crisis spiked as the U.S. instructed its troops and citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the crippled reactors.

The U.S. “no-go” zone is far wider than the buffer established by the Japanese government itself. The top U.S. nuclear regulator, Gregory Jaczko, on Wednesday called radiation levels at one of the units at the plant “extremely high,” adding that, “for a comparable situation in the United States we would recommend an evacuation for a much larger radius than is currently being provided in Japan.”

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain . . .

artofthetitle.com

Editor: Ian Albinson
Music: RJD2 “Ghostwriter”

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With the markets down another 2%, and now negative YTD, let’s see what there is that is worth reading:

• In Proposed Mortgage Fraud Settlement, a Gift to Big Banks (Dealbook)

• Just How Black is the Japanese Nuclear Black Swan? (Automatic Earth) see also Experts Long Criticized Weakness in Design of Stricken Reactor (NYT)

• Michael Lewis: 1989: How a Tokyo Earthquake Could Devastate Wall Street & World Economy (Scribd)

• Yen Hits Highest Against Dollar Since 1995 on Radiation Concern  (Bloomberg)

• China suspends approval of nuclear plants (FT.com)

• Major report debunks alleged link between piracy and terrorism    (Ars Technica)

• A Declaration of Cyber-War (Vanity Fair)

• An Accelerated Grimace: On Cyber-Utopianism (The Nation)

• Can Google Save Itself From Google? (GigaOm)

• Fewer Are Angry at Government, But Discontent Remains High  (Pew Research)