GE no longer owns NBC. Comcast does.

GE owns 49% of NBCUniversal. Comcast owns 51%. GE designed all 6 reactors at Fukishima plant and built reactors 1, 2 & 6. So why did FoxNews hang up on a guy who suggests talking to GE?

idunno why they ended the call, but I saw that story yesterday.


reuters:


remainder:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/ ... H420110315

It was earlier independently reported that GE had implemented some changes at the Fukushima plants it had built. Apparently those changes did not satisfy OECD in the warning it issued in 2009.

Too bad they have to die for the crimes and lies of the Japanese government and nuclear industry.

I'm not normally a paranoid person, but between TEPCO, the Japanese government's reluctance to be absolutely forthcoming to its citizens from the beginning and this little gemwhich has only been common knowledge for about 5 years, I hear all the official pronouncements about how safe we are here on the west coast, in Alaska and Hawaii as though under a pile of salt. I hate it.

Can someone make me feel better?

The lat 1990s the government was getting 'really concerned' with the nuclear thread from the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant to the east coast of Ireland. Ther response? Send everyone in the country one iodine tablet. With no instructions for use. End of response.

That kind of coloured my own response on all this.

The thing is that, if you want to feel a little better, is that the really nasty nuclear shit is very heavy. It will fall to earth very fast, and its the lower level stuff that will reach Hawaii, and it will have dispersed very widely in that time. If you want to use the past as a guide for what will happen with Japan, only the edges of the Chernobyl nuclear cloud that reached Ireland.

My advice would be to dig up maps of the Cernobyl nuclear cloud and compare with the situation in japan. Look up prevailing winds as well, and draw your own conclusions.

Hawaii is included in the president's reassurance...

If the worst case happens, and multiple reactors there catastrophically explode, breaching the core and containment, the physics of the situation say that HI and AK are fine. That doesn't change even if every last thing TEPCO is saying about the current situation is a lie.

The physics of the reactor design also say that even a worst-case explosion will not spread contamination as far as Chernobyl did. That prediction is also based as much on our understanding of physics as anything else. It would be extremely bad for the local area - possibly worse than Chernobyl in some ways - but much less severe beyond the immediate vicinity of the plant.

However, even if all of that is wrong, the distance is still so great that areas as far away as Hawaii and Alaska are unlikely to be severely affected.

Physicists have been wrong before, and often, and often spectacularly. But they'd have to be wrong in a lot of different ways simultaneously for the US to see a significant impact from this.

If some of these spent rods (with plutonium) catch fire, the local contamination will be significant. Some die-hard pro-nuclear scientists even claim plutonium does not disperse at all (at a given moment someone even tried to put that in the Wikipedia article on the Fukushima disaster), but that is probably a myth - how far it dispers while burning with other stuff (excluding graphite, excluding graphite ...) seems to be a matter for educated guessing at the moment. Judging from discussions (eg at the Guardian forum, where mathematicaians and meteorologists have tried to stop the pro-nuclear lobby from dominating the scientific debate) an educated guess would be no more than 15% of the Chernobel dispersion rate. Anything further away than 300 miles should be OK.

Note that breathing radioactivity and consuming radioactive particles is not at all the same thing. Someone should tell Ann Coulter before she volunteers to be one of the "firefighters" dousing the reactors and the pools.

Any alarms going off beyond 300 miles now must certainly be due to people (and luggage) that have recently been too close to the plant. Give it another week and food from Japan's central island will start doing that too, but the risk of actual particles getting outside the zone this way is very, very small.

Any comparison to Chernobyl is obviously irrelevant now. The worst case scenario is for horrible contamination locally, significantly worse than the local contamination near Chernobyl - but no clouds that could contaminate Hawaii or Alaska if their passing coincides with rain (or snow), fixing radioactive particles in the soil for thousands of years.

They will have to invent another scale for measuring nuclear catastrophes disasters accidents incidents - overhere in Western Europe but outside the UK, Fukushima has been considered a six for four days already.

A good summary of what is now known about errors and lies surrounding the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Bloomberg March 18, 2001 "Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Caps Decades of Faked Safety Reports, Accidents"

I don't see anything in this article that could be "the smoking gun," although putting the diesel generators in the basement comes pretty close. What the article makes clear is the willingness among Japanese nuclear power companies to conceal and to lie and the complicity of a long succession of Japanese governments -- Japan Inc.


Our Federal Aviation Administration has the same fundamental design flaw: two missions that can come into conflict.

Thanks Paul, Mikedunford and Suranis. I will confine my mourning to the Japanese people.

I had the naive impression that the earthquake uniformly caused a tsunami of 10 meters or, in rough American calculation, 30 feet. Some parts of the tsunami were probably exactly 10 meters high, but Ofunato City and some other areas experienced a tsunami of 23 meters or 75.5 feet. Japan had experienced an even higher tsunami, 38 meters or 124.7 feet, caused by an 8.5 earthquake in 1896. The 1896 tsunami killed 22,000 people in a less densely populated Japan. Without the breakwaters built since then, the 2011 tsunami could have been higher than the 1896 tsunami.



A curiosity is that media were earlier reporting a tsunami of 23 feet. This appears not to be misreporting of 23 meters as 23 feet, because the new estimate, based upon GPS data, was released Friday, March 18.

Yeah, the size of a tsunami when it reaches land has a great deal to do with the local geography. There are some areas that are very good at capturing tsunami energy, and as a result they consistently see much higher water and much more damage than other places.

Put simply (and I only know the basics) a Tzunami is like a circular wave of water. In the open sea it will cause little or no damage as it will generally pass under the water and not really effect shipping at all. When it hits land though the wave is squashed upwards by the land under the sea, and then it rolls onto the land. The height of the wave is caused by several factors, most of which I don't really understand, but really its the land with the energy of the wave that determines the wave height.

by determining the amount of water expressed, I take it?

An article says that GPS signals (on buoys?) were used for these calculations:

CNN "U.S. military considers mandatory evacuations in Yokosuka, Japan"

Note that the current contingency plan involves a single base. There are thousands of U.S. troops at other bases in Japan.

Benjamin Fulford tells a different story:


Fulford's fantasy is very dramatic:

A viral video from Kazuhiko Hachiya is a cartoon in which a father explains Japan's nuclear crisis to his child. Being scatological, it probably has enormous appeal to young kids. Its science may be weak.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110323/ap_ ... spent_fuel


I saw a graph that shows wind power plants have stalled. I didn't see any explanation as to why>?

There's got to be something better than nuclear. and how can they even consider building more nuclear power plants when the storage issues haven't been solved?

There is something better than nuclear.

¿Naranjas?

Exactamento. Sunfruit.

The DailyMail (UK) has photos of "The Fukushima Fifty" today.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... plant.html