[Biofuel] Fukushima - Real cause of nuclear crisis
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20111213a1.html Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011 SENTAKU MAGAZINE Real cause of nuclear crisis Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), the operator of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Station, has been insisting that the culprit that caused the nuclear crisis was the huge tsunami that hit the plant after the March 11 earthquake. But evidence is mounting that the meltdown at the nuclear power plant was actually caused by the earthquake itself. According to a science journalist well versed in the matter, Tepco is afraid that if the earthquake were to be determined as the direct cause of the accident, the government would have to review its quake-resistance standards completely, which in turn would delay by years the resumption of the operation of existing nuclear power stations that are suspended currently due to regular inspections. The journalist is Mitsuhiko Tanaka, formerly with Babcock-Hitachi K.K. as an engineer responsible for designing the pressure vessel for the No. 4 reactor at the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant. He says if the earthquake caused the damage to the plumbing, leading to a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) in which vaporized coolant gushed into the containment building from the damaged piping, an entirely new problem - vulnerability to earthquake resistance of the nuclear reactor's core structure - would surface and that this will require a total review of the government's safety standards for nuclear power plants in Japan, which is quite frequently hit by earthquakes. Such a review will require a number of years of study, making it impossible to restart the now suspended nuclear power stations next year as Tepco hopes. What puzzles Tanaka most is why the emergency condensers, which turn vaporized coolant (steam) into water and are supposed to lower both the pressure and temperature of the reactor, were not operating at the time of the accident although the condensers have the capability of functioning even when electricity becomes unavailable. It is highly probable, he says, that the plumbing linked with the condensers was damaged by the earthquake, causing water or vapor to leak out, thus leading to the nonfunctioning of the condensers. In a report released on May 23, Tepco said it stopped the emergency condensers after the quake occurred but before the tsunami hit the plant so that the temperature of the pressure vessel would not change by more than 55 degrees Celsius per hour. This, it said, was strictly in accordance with the instructions contained in the operating manual. When a Diet committee looking into the incident asked Tepco to submit a copy of the manual, most pages of the documents so submitted were blacked out, as the company alleged they contained trade secrets which it did not want to go into the public domain. Totally dissatisfied, the committee issued another order to Tepco to submit the whole manual in its original form, to which the company complied on Oct. 24. This led journalist Tanaka to come to the conclusion that the utility was not telling the truth. He said the 55-C-per-hour is a figure used in ordinary plants in a non-emergency situation to keep piping in a good condition and that the figure should not be used in an emergency. He pointed out that the manual says that the figure is something that should be followed in operations just prior to a cold shutdown of a reactor, not immediately after a problem has arisen. At a news conference on May 15, Tepco said that according to its simulation, the meltdown at the No. 1 reactor of the nuclear power plant happened about 15 hours after the earthquake because the tsunami destroyed all electricity supply sources and the water level in the reactor lowered rapidly. But Tanaka says that the simulation is far different from the actually measured water level and pressure. A rapid increase in the pressure inside the containment vessel is especially unnatural. Although the simulation report says that the pressure inside the containment vessel shot up to more than seven times standard atmospheric pressure around 5:40 a.m. on March 12, or about 15 hours after the quake, the fact is that the pressure had already risen to six times the standard at 12:12 a.m. on March 12 - five to six hours before the time given by the simulation report. Simulation data calculated by a computer can be manipulated easily depending on the types of input. Tanaka suspects that Tepco cooked up simulation results to suit its own purposes in an attempt to deceive the public. Atsuo Watanabe, former designer of containment vessels at Toshiba Corp., said on Oct. 26 that the most fundamental cause of the Fukushima plant fiasco probably lay in the blind acceptance of the safety standards adopted in the United States, which did not take into consideration all potential consequences from earthquakes. The reactors damaged at Fukushima were of the GE
Re: [Biofuel] Capitalism vs. the Climate - Naomi Klein
Hi Dawie Thankyou, some good points, but overall I think Robert gets closer to it, as does Naomi Klein. First, though I do like the anarchist view that the only good government is a dead government, anything and everything that comes from government isn't necessarily authoritarian. You're not saying, are you, that government has no positive role to play? Coercion is sometimes required in this perfect/less-than-perfect world. For instance, as in recent discussions, there's another 1% (also less than 1% I think), comprising the sociopathic element, a tiny minority that's capable of wreaking great harm, if allowed to. There's also the troubling matter of what happens at the interface between the haves and have-nots in a world which (a) is richer than ever before, with more than enough money and food for everyone, and (b) has arguably never before been so grossly inequitable, with at least 1 in 3 humans living in poverty, and one child dying of hunger every three seconds. It's troubling, apart from all that, because if for instance you've just been mugged it's a little difficult to regard the mugger as the victim, and because the law (government coercion) deals with it by simply adding one wrong to another and dressing it up as a right. And so on. But what's the alternative, short of the systemic change we all know is required? And that change too will probably require government coercion. Vee haf our vays to force you to be free. :-) Re this: Absent from the usual debate is two very important elements: the cultivation of needs through systemic manipulation; I don't think it's absent, certainly not here, and, as I said: ... its grip isn't as deep and total as they like to think it is, or how would you explain Occupy Wall Street, for instance. It's not as invisible as they like to think it is either. and the need, in mass-production-based systems, to repeat every little spark of creativity millions of times. These, and nothing like individual greed, are the drivers of overproduction. I fully agree. And conventional environmental regulatory responses reinforce these factors very effectively. How so? Would you propose they be scrapped? To be replaced by what? All best Keith Robert, I disagree with you. While I certainly don't see a solution in a continuation of the status quo, I do not believe that a solution that is based on authoritarian austerity is sustainable. I do not believe that it ought to be sustainable: I do not believe the human spirit ought to be that fragile. I lament that it very often is. My entire engagement with the environmental movement is to find a solution that will if anything expand our personal liberty. I began with a vague sense of contradiction in many environmental regulatory practices, and that has led to a thoroughgoing analysis over many years. Now I sit with the result, and it alienates elements of both sides of the debate. But I cannot deny that my primary interest is anti-authoritarian. I believe that we were created to exercise creative liberty (any artist will have an inkling, however hazy, how that makes utter sense of Divine Creation). In those terms, by stripping life of the potential of fulfilling its ultimate purpose coercion is nothing less than murder. When coercion is the norm the only creative opportunities lie in dissent; and where that is not allowed they lie, paradoxically, in violence. But I do not believe that that is where we are. I believe there are other solutions. I hope, for the sake of those dear to me, that I never stop believing that there are other solutions. The alternative is Samson's, in the palace. Absent from the usual debate is two very important elements: the cultivation of needs through systemic manipulation; and the need, in mass-production-based systems, to repeat every little spark of creativity millions of times. These, and nothing like individual greed, are the drivers of overproduction. And conventional environmental regulatory responses reinforce these factors very effectively. The scale of the thing isn't clear. The proportional disposition between what people do out of heart's desire and what people do out of artificially-induced contingent need is mind-boggling. It makes no sense at all to disallow the former, as it doesn't even begin to be enough to compensate for the latter. It does not scratch the surface. All such a prohibition would do is make unhappy people unhappier (I use the term in the proper sense, i.e. in an unfortunate situation.) And it does. Likewise, the amount of production in response to artificial measures to create demand, or even despite a lack of demand, simply to meet threshold volumes is out of all proportion to anything people make because they want to see the thing made. Do we disallow the individual effort, directly or through tangles of red tape, so that the mass-producer might produce EVEN MORE? We are doing exactly that.
Re: [Biofuel] Capitalism vs. the Climate - Naomi Klein
The Heartland Institute is a loud proud sponsor at various conferences (EUEC in Phoenix) news aggregators (epOverviews) ... Wish Stewart @ the Daily Show would make them a weekly feature. On Dec 11, 2011, at 1:01 PM, Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Heartland Institute - SourceWatch http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute -- http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate Capitalism vs. the Climate Naomi Klein November 9, 2011 There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row. He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland's Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually an attack on middle-class American capitalism. His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine? Here at the Heartland Institute's Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren't going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. You can believe this is about the climate, he says darkly, and many people do, but it's not a reasonable belief. Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: The issue isn't the issue. The issue, apparently, is that no free society would do to itself what this agenda requiresŠ. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way. Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama's campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about green communitarianism, akin to the Maoist scheme to put a pig iron furnace in everybody's backyard (the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels). That climate change is a stalking horse for National Socialism (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists' go-to website, ClimateDepot.com). Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution. Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates' rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering Restoring the Scientific Method and even adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one letter off from the world's leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the scientific theories presented here are old and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict the next. (Is there no warming, or is there warming but it's not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what's all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?) In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to life only when the rock stars of the movement take the stage-not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come. The talking points first tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase climate change or global warming. They
[Biofuel] Fwd: World Carfree News #91 December 2011
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:41:17 +0100 From: World Carfree Monthly News [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] VIEW IT IN YOUR BROWSER http://worldcarfree.net/bulletin/archives/dec_11.html World Carfree News #91 - December 2011 - English Version WCN facebook http://www.facebook.com/worldcarfreenetwork WCN youtube http://www.youtube.com/user/WorldCarfreeNetwork QUOTATION OF THE MONTH No one's advocating for putting [the freeway] back. Thus spoke John Norquist, who as mayor of Milwaukee, WI, USA, presided over the demolition of the Park East Freeway in 2002. This comes at a time when many other freeways are under consideration for a similar fate. Read more http://www.salon.com/2011/12/01/are_freeways_doomed/singleton/. WORLD CARFREE NETWORK ANNOUNCEMENTS LOTS TO READ ON CARBUSTERS! Looking for hard-hitting inspiration? Do you want to catch up any recent articles or check out some of the quality writing that has been a part of the Carbusters movement for the last 13 years? Don't forget to browse the website or download the back issues. Many of the articles found there are as valid now as when they were first written! Read more http://carbusters.org/ SEND US YOUR NEWS! A lot of the news featured in World Carfree Monthly News is sent by our readers - people who enjoy the news service and contribute valuable news items every month. Please consider regularly contributing worthwhile news items that you think would be of interest to others. The concept of carfree is what makes this a unique newsletter, but any news related to sustainable transport and affiliated subjects is welcome. Note that we also welcome pictures. Keep an eye on the call for submissions roughly a week before publication. Get in touch at [EMAIL PROTECTED] NOTE ON THIS ISSUE We have been working on ironing out some of the design issues, so the format is slightly different. In case everything doesn't look quite perfect, please excuse us! That is also the reason this issue has come out a few days later. We plan to keep refining it. You may see the version on the website also looks slightly different from the email version. Feedback is always welcome! GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS CARFREE VILLAGE PROPOSAL There is a proposal to create a compact, carfree, 125 acre village, on a site totaling 500 acres in southern Piscataquis County, Maine, USA. Currently investors have already made commitments that amount to 1/8 of the total amount needed. Anyone interested in this project is requested to get in touch with the initiators. Watch a slide show https://docs.google.com/a/worldcarfree.net/present/view?id=dfxsxhdw_251f75rgsg4pli=1ncl=true. Connect on facebook http://www.facebook.com/villageproject. Write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. SAFE STREETS CHALLENGE World Streets is opening the Safe Streets Challenge, to run between 2012 and 2015. An introduction and a description of what is to come are already available on a dedicated website as well as facebook page. Read more http://safestreetstrategies.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/the-safe-streets-challenge-2012-2015/#more-6 ROAD DEATHS MAP An interactive Road deaths map is available that shows all of the deaths that occurred on US and UK streets in the first decade of the 21st Century. The zoomable map breaks down data by specific location, year of crash, age of deceased, and mode of transport. The organisation RoadPeace has also created a video commemorating cyclists killed in London in 2011. Watch it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8UC4BcZrOcfeature=youtu.be Read more US http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/nov/22/us-road-accident-casualties UK http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/nov/18/road-casualty-uk-map CARFREE TIMES - FRESH ISSUE Carfree Times #64 has just been released. It is the last Carfree Times issue this year, and according to author Joel Crawford, Carfree.com as a whole will have served about 1.2 million pages and 95 GB of files in 2011. Read more http://www.carfree.com/cft/i064.html ACTION No horns! ELIMINATE HORN HONKING! Horn honking is a nuisance to many people. Horns going off at night disturbs everyone. A New York resident decided she would take it no more and has launched a petition to get this technology eliminated and bring about saner air waves for everyone. There are alternative technologies that are already available. So please take a moment to go to the petition and sign it. Pass it onto your friends who would also like to put a end to useless noise pollution.
Re: [Biofuel] Capitalism vs. the Climate - Naomi Klein
Hello Christian The Heartland Institute is a loud proud sponsor at various conferences (EUEC in Phoenix) news aggregators (epOverviews) ... Wish Stewart @ the Daily Show would make them a weekly feature. Why? Best Keith On Dec 11, 2011, at 1:01 PM, Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Heartland Institute - SourceWatch http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute -- http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate Capitalism vs. the Climate Naomi Klein November 9, 2011 There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row. He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland's Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually an attack on middle-class American capitalism. His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine? Here at the Heartland Institute's Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren't going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. You can believe this is about the climate, he says darkly, and many people do, but it's not a reasonable belief. Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: The issue isn't the issue. The issue, apparently, is that no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires·. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way. Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama's campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about green communitarianism, akin to the Maoist scheme to put a pig iron furnace in everybody's backyard (the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels). That climate change is a stalking horse for National Socialism (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists' go-to website, ClimateDepot.com). Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution. Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates' rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering Restoring the Scientific Method and even adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one letter off from the world's leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the scientific theories presented here are old and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict the next. (Is there no warming, or is there warming but it's not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what's all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?) In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to life only when the rock stars of the movement take the stage-not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come. The talking points first tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase
[Biofuel] The New Chicken Littles
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:47:13 -0500 (EST) From: John Feffer, Institute for Policy Studies Subject: [World Beat] The New Chicken Littles World Beat Vol. 6, No. 48 December 13, 2011 The New Chicken Littles By John Feffer I decided to wait a couple weeks just to make sure. So far, so good. Citizens went to the polls in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt. A plurality of voters threw their support behind Islamist parties. I take a look outside. The sky is still intact. Still, there is no shortage of Chicken Littles. After Islamist parties won three elections in a row, columnists and pundits in the West threw up their hands in horror. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Israeli neo-con Barry Rubin compared the Islamists to communists and 2011 to 1917. He expressed in print the fears that so many others keep under wraps for fear of offending liberal pieties. Soon, he wrote, the majority of Muslims in the Middle East will be governed by radical Islamist regimes that believe in waging jihad on Israel and America, wiping Israel off the map, suppressing Christians, reducing the status of women to even lower than it is now, and in their right as the true interpreters of God's will to govern as dictators. Seems like Barry Rubin is nostalgic for the old days of anti-communist hysteria. A closer look at the election results in these three key North African countries reveals a very different picture of the democratic aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings. The first election took place in Tunisia in late October. After an extraordinary turnout of more than 90 percent of registered voters, the previously banned Islamist party Ennahda took 41 percent of the total, with the secular Congress for the Republic coming in a distant second at 14 percent and the leftist Ettakatol party in third place. The three parties subsequently formed a coalition government. The leader of the Congress party, Moncef Marzouki, became the interim president, while the leader of the leftist party Mustapha Ben Jaafar became the head of the newly elected Constituent Assembly. Frankly, the Tunisian Islamists could teach America a thing or two about democracy, and not just because of all the people who endured long lines at the polling stations to vote. For instance, 24 percent of the new legislators are women. That compares to less than 17 percent here in the U.S. Congress. Then there's the greater commitment to bipartisanship. We have declared since before the elections that we would opt for a coalition government even if al-Nahda achieves an absolute majority, explains the party's founder Rached Ghannouchi, because we don't want the people to perceive that they have moved from a single party dominant in the political life to another single party dominating the political life. Finally, there's the approach to campaigning. As one American with campaign experience writes from Tunisia, Ennahda didn't win just because Tunisia is 98 percent Muslim: Ennahda mobilized youth and spoke to the interior of the country where the revolution started, utilized the press, understood and explained the new electoral system, communicated their message/brand, and stood out from all the other parties. Still, even on the left there is unease. In certain sectors it is more like a wave of panic, writes the distinguished French journalist Jean Daniel about Ennahda's electoral victory, while in others it's a general sense of confusion. Why? Because the prospect of a Western-style democracy and complete freedom of religion seems nothing but a fleeting memory. I'm not sure how Daniel would distinguish between a Western-style democracy and what Tunisians are currently constructing, though it would be nice if Tunisia managed to leave out Western-style corruption and influence-peddling. As for the complete freedom of religion, I suspect that Daniel is speaking of the French approach of laïcité, which would get limited support in Tunisia and, frankly, in our faith-based United States as well. The next election to fall to the Islamists was in Morocco at the end of November, when the Justice and Development Party (PJD) picked up nearly one-third of the seats in parliament. The Moroccan king, who instituted political reforms to stave off Arab Spring protests, has chosen PJD leader Abdelilah Benkirane as prime minister. As in Tunisia, the PJD has gone to great lengths to reassure outsiders that it will not turn the country into Saudi Arabia. I will never be interested in the private life of people, the popular Benkirane told reporters. Allah created mankind free. I will never ask if a woman is wearing a short skirt or a long skirt. Unlike in Tunisia, however, the PJD has to navigate within a monarchy that is not completely committed to democracy. Of all the parties participating in the election, the PJD seemed most willing to challenge the king and thus attracted support from some secular quarters. Battling
