"Most of the world’s citizens are not just broke but negatively wealthy – under water. Those who aren’t may as well be, they won’t spend. The problem is that the private sector loans to fund fuel waste cannot provide a return so that additional lending is necessary. Finance clients burn capital and go into debt in order to do so. As finance extends new loans they are extending new bad loans. None of the loans can be repaid and the disappearance of capital insures there will be less credit available for any purpose in the future (including to fund conservation).
It is important not only to be aware of events taking place in the Eurozone but also to watch Japan. The costs of fuel have been supported in Japan by its industrialists’ ability to transform some of Japan’s fuel imports into exportable high-worth goods such as automobiles and personal electronics. Unfortunately, Japan’s establishment has painted itself into a corner as the auto business works at cross-purposes to push its own real energy costs past the point of affordability. Meanwhile, the personal electronics train has left the one-time Japanese giants behind. For instance, legacy ‘innovator’ Sony has surrendered its once-lucrative Walkman franchise to Apple. Post-Fukushima, the timing is terrible for Japan which needs some sort of export surplus to afford to remediate its reactor problems.
Unfortunately, Japan is condemned by conventional analysis. If it continues to gain an export surplus Japan will use it to subsidize more counterproductive ‘growth’ and leave the reactors to tend to themselves. "
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"– An incestuous financial and regulatory relationship between the reactor operator Tepco and the Japanese government,
– A fundamentally unsafe reactor design,
– Cheaply built reactors too near the sea level so as to save relatively small amounts of money,
– Crews made up largely of poorly trained, poorly paid ‘contract’ workers often press-ganged into reactor service by Japanese Yakuza gangsters,
– No operating manual on site, no rigorous emergency training for critical staff,
– Inadequate safety equipment: missing or non-existent dosimeters, hazmat suits, respirators, even flashlights at site,
– Insufficient battery backup for emergency cooling systems,
– staff who ‘forgot’ spent fuel pool in reactor building number four, who ‘forgot’ 10,000+ tons of lightly radioactive water in waste-handling building that could have been used to cool the reactors rather than seawater,
– Unclear chain of command and confusion over roles immediately after the earthquake,
– Inoperable reactor vents which resulted in no cooling for reactor cores for extended periods (and probably resulted in steam pressure pushing water out of the cores). The result of these little failures — add a massive earthquake and tsunami — is the ongoing calamity at Fukushima. "
http://www.economic-undertow.com/
