So what’s happened at Fukushima in the month since the 2 year anniversary?

Well, the cooling system has broken down at least once-

Fukushima Blackout Hints at Plant’s Vulnerability

By MARTIN FACKLER, The New York Times

Published: March 19, 2013

This week’s partial blackout, which started Monday, halted crucial cooling systems for as long as about 30 hours at four pools where used fuel rods are stored.

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The four pools affected by the latest blackout contain more than 8,800 highly radioactive fuel rods, Tepco said, enough to cause a release much larger than the original accident, which forced the evacuation of some 160,000 residents in northeastern Japan.

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With the company as the only source of information, it was impossible this week to independently assess the conditions at the plant, which sits in a contaminated zone that is closed to the public. On Tuesday, the company was criticized for waiting three hours before revealing the power failure to the public.

Tepco said a faulty switchboard might have been to blame in the latest power failure. Though the company has backup generators at the site, it appeared to have been unprepared for a switchboard failure.

There was a conference-

Fukushima Two Years Later: Many Questions, One Clear Answer

By: Gregg Levine, Firedog Lake

Monday April 8, 2013 7:30 am

A distinguished list of epidemiologists, oncologists, nuclear engineers, former government officials, Fukushima survivors, anti-nuclear activists and public health advocates gathered at the invitation of The Helen Caldicott Foundation and Physicians for Social Responsibility to, if not answer all these question, at least make sure they got asked. Over two long days, it was clear there is much still to be learned, but it was equally clear that we already know that the downsides of nuclear power are real, and what’s more, the risks are unnecessary. Relying on this dirty, dangerous and expensive technology is not mandatory-it’s a choice. And when cleaner, safer, and more affordable options are available, the one answer we already have is that nuclear is a choice we should stop making and a risk we should stop taking.

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The boiling water reactors (BWRs) that failed so catastrophically at Fukushima Daiichi were designed and sold by General Electric in the 1960s; the general contractor on the project was Ebasco, a US engineering company that, back then, was still tied to GE. General Electric had bet heavily on nuclear and worked hand-in-hand with the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC-the precursor to the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) to promote civilian nuclear plants at home and abroad. According to nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, GE told US regulators in 1965 that without quick approval of multiple BWR projects, the giant energy conglomerate would go out of business.

It was under the guidance of GE and Ebasco that the rocky bluffs where Daiichi would be built were actually trimmed by 10 meters to bring the power plant closer to the sea, the water source for the reactors’ cooling systems-but it was under Japanese government supervision that serious and repeated warnings about the environmental and technological threats to Fukushima were ignored for another generation.

Failures at Daiichi were completely predictable, observed David Lochbaum, the director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and numerous upgrades were recommended over the years by scientists and engineers. “The only surprising thing about Fukushima,” said Lochbaum, “is that no steps were taken.”

The surprise, it seems, should cross the Pacific. Twenty-two US plants mirror the design of Fukushima Daiichi, and many stand where they could be subject to earthquakes or tsunamis. Even without those seismic events, some US plants are still at risk of Fukushima-like catastrophic flooding. Prior to the start of the current Japanese crisis, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission learned that the Oconee Nuclear Plant in Seneca, South Carolina, was at risk of a major flood from a dam failure upstream. In the event of a dam breach-an event the NRC deems more likely than the odds that were given for the 2011 tsunami-the flood at Oconee would trigger failures at all four reactors. Beyond hiding its own report, the NRC has taken no action-not before Fukushima, not since.

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If nuclear reactors were the only way to generate electricity, would 500 excess cancer deaths be acceptable? How about 5,000? How about 50,000? If nuclear’s projected mortality rate comes in under coal’s, does that make the deaths-or the high energy bills, for that matter-more palatable?

Well?  Are they?

Nuclear Industry Withers in U.S. as Wind Pummels Prices

By Julie Johnsson & Naureen S. Malik, Bloomberg News

Mar 11, 2013 4:13 PM ET

“Right now, natural gas and wind power are more economic than nuclear power in the Midwestern electricity market,” Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, a Chicago-based advocate of cleaner energy, said in a phone interview. “It’s a matter of economic competitiveness.”

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Meanwhile, nuclear and coal plants must continue running even as this “negative pricing” dynamic forces them to pay grid operators to take the power they produce.

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“We can’t find enough demand for the amount of energy created by Mother Nature,” said Doug Johnson, spokesman for the Bonneville Power Administration, which manages the grid in the Pacific Northwest. The transmission operator, based in Portland, Oregon, paid wind operators $2.7 million last year to stay off line so it could make room for the power from hydroelectric generators handling the runoff from melting mountain snows.

Now just this week we find out that the switchboard blackout was caused by a rat chewing through power lines and TEPCO’s ‘high tech’ response is to install anti-rat netting across all the holes they can.

I’ll bet those of you who’ve had rat problems can predict just how well that will work in an environment with thousands of shrapnel holes from the blasts and where even robots can’t work because the radiation fries their electronics.

Oh, and 3 of the 7 big radioactive water containment pools have been leaking.

Mishaps Underscore Weaknesses of Japanese Nuclear Plant

By HIROKO TABUCHI, The New York Times

Published: April 10, 2013

The biggest scare at the plant in recent days has been the discovery that at least three of seven underground storage pools are seeping thousands of gallons of radioactive water into the soil. On Wednesday, Tepco acknowledged that the lack of adequate storage space for contaminated water had become a “crisis,” and said it would begin emptying the pools. But the company said that the leaks will continue over the several weeks that it will likely take to transfer the water to other containers.

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Tepco stores more than a quarter-million tons of radioactive water at the site and says the amount could double within three years.

But as outside experts have discovered with horror, the company had lined the pits for the underground pools with only two layers of plastic each 1.5 millimeters thick, and a third, clay-based layer just 6.5 millimeters thick. And because the pools require many sheets hemmed together, leaks could be springing at the seams, Tepco has said.

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But Muneo Morokuzu, a nuclear safety expert at the Tokyo University Graduate School of Public Policy, said that the plant required a more permanent solution that would reduce the flood of contaminated water into the plant in the first place, and that Tepco was simply unable to manage the situation. “It’s become obvious that Tepco is not at all capable of leading the cleanup,” he said. “It just doesn’t have the expertise, and because Fukushima Daiichi is never going to generate electricity again, every yen it spends on the decommissioning is thrown away.”

Our regular featured content-

• On This Day In History April 11 by TheMomCat
• Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat

And these featured articles-

• Say No to Cuts to Social Security by: TheMomCat
• Fukushima: A Month Of Disasters by: ek hornbeck
• Influential Women by: ek hornbeck

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

Parts 2 – 4 below fold.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

On policy Barack Obama’s proposed budget is just massively bad.  Everyone admits that it is huge cut in benefits for our oldest, poorest, and sickest Seniors.  What you don’t hear so much is that it is also a substantial slash to Veterans, you know, those guys who risked their lives and lost limbs defending our country.  Finally, it is an enormous middle class tax increase falling most hard on annual incomes between $30 – $50,000, the people who actually represent the median instead of Boyars with 6 figure salaries who merely imagine they’re poor because they can’t afford their McMansion, their winter cruise to Aruba, private school, AND a new Mercedes every year.

More than that it’s a complete and utter failure in terms of reducing the deficit, as even Peter Orzag admits–

Consider what future projections look like if we instead assume that the chained index will grow just 10 basis points a year more slowly than the current indexes. In that case, the deficit reduction from switching to the chained index would be less than $150 billion over 10 years, rather than $340 billion. And the reduction in the long-term Social Security deficit would be about 7 percent, rather than 20 percent.

This would make a pretty big difference in the effect on Social Security benefits. For an 85-year-old who began receiving checks at 65, checks would be about 2 percent less, rather than 6 percent if the chained index were to grow 25 to 30 basis points more slowly than the standard index.

…

(I)f switching to the chained index reduces the 10-year deficit by less than $150 billion and the 75-year Social Security actuarial gap by less than 10 percent, can a “grand bargain” built around it really be all that grand?

So even if deficits were a problem (and they’re not as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has repeatedly pointed out), the measures in Obama’s budget are utterly ineffective at reducing them.  What does work?  Economic growth and even the pitiful little we’ve been able to achieve has succeeded in reducing the deficit to virtually nothing if you look at percentages instead of scary big numbers.

So why then?  As this Politico article points out, Barack Obama and his Administration think it will somehow get the Republicans to agree to new taxes.

For the past two years, Obama has championed what he calls “a balanced approach” to debt and deficit reduction, demanding $700 billion in high-earner tax hikes from Republicans earlier this year as a prerequisite to budget cuts and reform of runaway Social Security and Medicare costs.

The time to pay up is now, Obama’s aides say, and the White House needed to offer something to bring Republicans back to the bargaining table. They insist that he’s opposed to deeply cutting entitlements and is willing to do only the bare minimum needed to get a deal done.

A senior Democratic strategist close to the White House said Obama “didn’t have to put the chained CPI in the budget” but chose to do so as a “gesture of goodwill” to Senate Republicans, who have emerged as a recent bargaining partner.

Well, forget that $700 Billion.  Now the number is $580 Billion.

Mr. President- no amount of revenue is enough for selling out the elderly, poor and disabled; our Veterans who offered their lives; the broad middle class.

No amount of revenue is enough for you to break your promises to the millions who voted for you.

No amount of revenue is enough for you to ensure the Democratic Party faces a toxic electoral climate in 2014 and for the foreseeable future.

Who will ever trust you, or them again?

Well, but if we don’t do it now, just wait for those evil Republicans to get in.

“We’re not going to have the White House forever, folks. If he doesn’t do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years,” said a longtime Obama aide, referring to the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate who proposed a sweeping overhaul of Medicare that would replace some benefits with vouchers.

What’s to stop them from doing it anyway?  Congress is not bound by the actions of a previous Congress.

But they are men of honor.

How did that Filibuster deal work out for you?

And it has always been so effective in the past.  Republicans are already backing away from this one.  From another Politico piece.

House Speaker John Boehner hit President Obama’s budget for failing to cut enough spending while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed it as “just another left-wing wish list.”

“It’s mostly the same old thing we’ve seen year after year,” McConnell said. “And that’s really too bad, because it’s not like we don’t know the kinds of things that need to be done to get our budget back to balance and Americans back to work.”

The president’s 3.77 trillion budget includes $580 billion in new tax revenue, while reducing deficits by $1.8 trillion over 10 years, White House officials contend. It does not balance the nation’s budget within the next decade, something Boehner pointed out while touting Republican budgets.

And then there’s this-

Transcript

Again Politico–

House Republican leaders did give Obama credit for including something known as “chained CPI” in the spending plan, which would slow the rate of growth for Social Security benefits. They were on message in calling for Obama to help them enact policies they agree on, without coming to terms on a large-scale deficit busting package.

“He does deserve some credit for some incremental entitlement reforms he has outlined in his budget. I would hope that he would not hold hostage these modest reforms for his demand for bigger tax hikes. Why don’t we do what we agree to do? Why don’t [we] find the common ground that we do have and move on that?,” Boehner asked, while accusing Obama of “backtracking” on other entitlement reforms the two had discussed in negotiations last year.

…

Added House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.): “Finally the president has offered his budget to the American people. And what we see inside the document is more of the same: more spending, higher taxes, more debt.”

“The speaker talked about the fact there are some things besides the tax increases that frankly we can find some agreement on,” he said. “I share the sentiment that if we ought to see if we can set aside the divisiveness and come together to produce some results for the people who sent us here.

If the president believes, as we do, that programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are on the path to bankruptcy and we can actually do some things to put them on the right course and save them, to protect the beneficiaries of these programs we ought to do so. We ought to do so without holding them hostage for more tax hikes.”

So Mr. President, you got nothing.  Nothing at all.  A fail on policy.  A fail on politics.

A fail on every level.

Results

Matchup

Peter Orszag is among tne most despicable Clinton/Rubinite neoliberal Obamabot supporters.

What does he think about “superlative” CPI?

Why, it doesn’t go far enough.

Chained CPI’s Diminishing Returns for U.S. Budget

By Peter Orszag, Bloomberg News

Apr 7, 2013 6:30 PM ET

(T)he chained consumer price index, would lower the annual payment increases for Social Security beneficiaries, saving the government money as it lowers the future monthly income of retirees and disabled Americans. The change would also raise revenue over time because it would cause more taxpayers to wind up in higher marginal brackets.

What neither side seems to have noticed, however, is that the difference between the chained CPI and the standard CPI has been diminishing. That means the impact of switching indexes may not be as great as many assume. The change may still be a good idea, but it probably won’t matter as much as expected.

A decent guess is that, over the next decade, the effect on the deficit of adopting the chained index would be less than $150 billion. Social Security benefits even 20 years after retirement would be reduced by less than 2 percent. This does not amount to bold long-term deficit reduction.

…

Consider what future projections look like if we instead assume that the chained index will grow just 10 basis points a year more slowly than the current indexes. In that case, the deficit reduction from switching to the chained index would be less than $150 billion over 10 years, rather than $340 billion. And the reduction in the long-term Social Security deficit would be about 7 percent, rather than 20 percent.

This would make a pretty big difference in the effect on Social Security benefits. For an 85-year-old who began receiving checks at 65, checks would be about 2 percent less, rather than 6 percent if the chained index were to grow 25 to 30 basis points more slowly than the standard index.

…

President Barack Obama deserves credit for political courage in being willing to adopt the chained CPI — in the face of strong opposition from members of his party. But if switching to the chained index reduces the 10-year deficit by less than $150 billion and the 75-year Social Security actuarial gap by less than 10 percent, can a “grand bargain” built around it really be all that grand?

(Peter Orszag is vice chairman of corporate and investment banking and chairman of the financial strategy and solutions group at Citigroup Inc. and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration.)

Results

Matchup