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We’ve previously noted that General Electric should be held partially responsible for the Fukushima reactor because General Electric knew that its reactors were unsafe:

5 of the 6 nuclear reactors at Fukushima are General Electric Mark 1 reactors.

 

GE knew decades ago that the design was faulty.

 

ABC News reported in 2011:

Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing — the Mark 1 — was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.

 

Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power, and today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday’s earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark 1s.

 

“The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant,” Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. “The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release.”

 

***

 

Still, concerns about the Mark 1 design have resurfaced occasionally in the years since Bridenbaugh came forward. In 1986, for instance, Harold Denton, then the director of NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, spoke critically about the design during an industry conference.

 

“I don’t have the same warm feeling about GE containment that I do about the larger dry containments,” he said, according to a report at the time that was referenced Tuesday in The Washington Post.

 

“There is a wide spectrum of ability to cope with severe accidents at GE plants,” Denton said. “And I urge you to think seriously about the ability to cope with such an event if it occurred at your plant.”

 

***

 

When asked if [the remedial measures performed on the Fukushima reactors by GE before 2011] was sufficient, he paused. “What I would say is, the Mark 1 is still a little more susceptible to an accident that would result in a loss of containment.”

The New York Times reported that other government officials warned about the dangers inherent in GE’s Mark 1 design:

In 1972, Stephen H. Hanauer, then a safety official with the Atomic Energy Commission, recommended that the Mark 1 system be discontinued because it presented unacceptable safety risks. Among the concerns cited was the smaller containment design, which was more susceptible to explosion and rupture from a buildup in hydrogen — a situation that may have unfolded at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Later that same year, Joseph Hendrie, who would later become chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a successor agency to the atomic commission, said the idea of a ban on such systems was attractive. But the technology had been so widely accepted by the industry and regulatory officials, he said, that “reversal of this hallowed policy, particularly at this time, could well be the end of nuclear power.”

This faulty design has made the Fukushima disaster much worse.

 

Specifically, the several reactors exploded … scattering clumps of radioactive fuel far and wide.

 

In addition, the Mark 1 included an absolutely insane design element: storing huge quantities of radioactive fuel rods 100 feet up in the air.

 

The Christian Science Monitor noted:

A particular feature of the 40-year old General Electric Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor model – such as the six reactors at the Fukushima site – is that each reactor has a separate spent-fuel pool. These sit near the top of each reactor and adjacent to it ….

Indeed, the fuel pools have caught fires several times, and now constitute an enormous danger. [More.]

 

***

 

Heck of a job, GE …

 

Unfortunately, there are 23 virtually-identical GE Mark 1 reactors in the U.S.

 

This is not to say that Tepco and the Japanese government are not to blame also.  They are.

 

But GE and the American government are largely responsible as well.

A 1,400-person lawsuit has just been filed to hold GE – as well as 2 other companies responsible for Fukushima reactor construction, Toshiba and Hitachi – responsible.

AP reports:

About 1,400 people filed a joint lawsuit Thursday against three companies that manufactured reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant ….

 

The 1,415 plaintiffs, including 38 Fukushima residents and 357 people from outside Japan, said the manufacturers — Toshiba, GE and Hitachi — failed to make needed safety improvements to the four decade-old reactors at the Fukushima plant ….

Are they doing it for the money?

Nope:

They are seeking compensation of 100 yen ($1) each, saying their main goal is to raise awareness of the problem.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1knZWTO George Washington

Despite every talking head having written off the miners, they were the best performer across US equity sub-indices. In the US equity markets Biotech and REITs also performed well. On the other hand,  Nasdaq Insurance and NYSE Arca Oil ETF were the worst…along with the NYSE Composite Index (which represents 61% of all global market capitalization).

 

 

And for those dip-buyers proclaiming this is simply an EM crisis that will blow over… the US retailer ETF XRT is down 9.4% in January whereas EEM (the EM ETF) is down 8.6% – foreign crisis or domestic? And – it would appear – that the trades starting the 2nd half of 2013 have been unwound as oddly – Retailers, Emerging Markets, and Junior Gold Miners are all up around 2% from July 4th?!

 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1iVS6Df Tyler Durden

For years, Bloomberg Businessweek notes, the American residential dream went something like this: Move to a city, work hard, and eventually you’ll make enough to move out. So perhaps it’s not surprising that today many of America’s largest metropolitan areas house their highest earners on the outskirts of town. Exactly where they live varies from city to city — or rather, from suburb to suburb. Perhaps this is what they mean by 'rotten to the core'?

An analysis by Bloomberg Businessweek of data recently compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau offers a new level of detail in describing how far away — and in what direction — the nation’s top-earning suburbanites live, relative the local urban center.

 

In the New York metropolitan area, the greatest concentration of top earners live in New Jersey. In Bergen County, for example, the median household income was $84,255 in 2012.

 

Top earners have vacated Downtown L.A. and the area south of the Civic Center in favor of wide-open spaces closer to the beach.

 

Here, the highest earners populate Chicago’s North Shore suburbs, including Glencoe, Winnetka, and Highland Park. A commuter rail system leaves Cubs games an hour away.

 

Here, the wealthiest residents have congregated just west of the city center in the well-to-do River Oaks area and a bit further out in Memorial.

 

Center City in Philadelphia is surrounded by a local ring of lower-income housing. High-crime areas such as the city’s Kensington neighborhood and Camden, N.J., remain unattractive to the wealthy.

 

The top earners tend to live outside the city in suburbs to the north and east, such as Glendale and Scottsdale.

 

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1iVS6D6 Tyler Durden

For years, Bloomberg Businessweek notes, the American residential dream went something like this: Move to a city, work hard, and eventually you’ll make enough to move out. So perhaps it’s not surprising that today many of America’s largest metropolitan areas house their highest earners on the outskirts of town. Exactly where they live varies from city to city — or rather, from suburb to suburb. Perhaps this is what they mean by 'rotten to the core'?

An analysis by Bloomberg Businessweek of data recently compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau offers a new level of detail in describing how far away — and in what direction — the nation’s top-earning suburbanites live, relative the local urban center.

 

In the New York metropolitan area, the greatest concentration of top earners live in New Jersey. In Bergen County, for example, the median household income was $84,255 in 2012.

 

Top earners have vacated Downtown L.A. and the area south of the Civic Center in favor of wide-open spaces closer to the beach.

 

Here, the highest earners populate Chicago’s North Shore suburbs, including Glencoe, Winnetka, and Highland Park. A commuter rail system leaves Cubs games an hour away.

 

Here, the wealthiest residents have congregated just west of the city center in the well-to-do River Oaks area and a bit further out in Memorial.

 

Center City in Philadelphia is surrounded by a local ring of lower-income housing. High-crime areas such as the city’s Kensington neighborhood and Camden, N.J., remain unattractive to the wealthy.

 

The top earners tend to live outside the city in suburbs to the north and east, such as Glendale and Scottsdale.

 

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1iVS6D6 Tyler Durden

Who says Amazon is only good for putting other retailers out of business with its 1% margins: in the aftermath of Jeff Bezos’ announcement that the online retailer is considering launching drone delivery, one company took the concept from merely the theoretical stage to practical implication. The company in question is a Minnesota Micro Brewery called Lakemaid Brewery and the product it had hoped to deliver by remote control airplane to ice fishermen is beer. However, before beer fans around the country rejoice at the prospect of having a buzzing airborne beer delivery, we have some sad news: less than a week after the company posted a promotional YouTube video showcasing the first test flights across mid-sized lakes, the Federal Aviation Administration called Lakemaid Beer to immediately pull the unmanned beer from the skies.

ABC explains why the FAA took the proposed novel form of delivery as an affront to more traditional forms of alocohol intoxication, and why the bartender lobby may or may not have been behind this move:

“As much as they thought it was a funny idea, it was a violation of all sorts of codes,” Lakemaid Beer Company President Jack Supple told ABC News, adding he’s determined to keep pushing to get his idea off the ground.

 

“I understand why they had to shut it down, but I would like to do it for our fishermen,” said Supple, lamenting the missed opportunities that the coming Super Bowl weekend could have brought for the business. “The fishermen are going to sit there from Friday 5 p.m. all the way through Sunday. That’s a long time to be out there on a frozen lake.” 

 

This is “barley news,” FAA spokesman Les Door joked this morning to ABC News when asked to comment on why the FAA shut down Lakemaid’s operation. “The media just hops on it. I hope things finally have come to a head.”

 

Despite the jovial tone, the illegal use of drones for commercial purposes is a serious matter, Door said.

 

“The FAA’s prime directive is safety and while we are evaluating a lot of different potential uses of unmanned aircraft as we’re moving toward safely integrating them into the national airspace, commercial operations of unmanned aircraft is not allowed,” Door said.

Here one wonders why Amazon which until recently was dazzling investors with one ridiculous idea after another, would get the FAA’s blessing for drone delivery in far more congested and risky environments, if smaller companies, arguably those that can’t afford to bribe the FAA, are denied. So does Lakemaid’s CEO.

Supple concedes the FAA has its work cut out for it, as “there’s going to be a million ideas and I don’t want to get hit in the head with a pair of dress shoes ordered from Amazon.”

 

But in contrast to Amazon’s proposed drone package delivery operation announced late last year, Supple said Lakemaid’s drones will face less obstacles — namely of the skyscraper and billboard kind.

 

“Dense urban locations present a host of problems to drone delivery,” Supple said in an earlier statement. But our tests are on vast, wide-open frozen lakes free of trees and power lines.”

 

His drones would instead be able to “fly as the crow flies, straight to our target based on GPS coordinates. Fish houses are very uniform in height, so we can fly lower than FAA limits, too,” he said.

Of course, there is Jeff Bezos, where the more ridiculous the idea, the higher the PE multiple, and then there is everyone else, even if “everyone else” would still have to figure out how drone deliveries avoid breaking the law by sending booze straight into the hands of a minor.Then again, in Obama’s America where one controlled substance after another is being legalized, perhaps to make the pain more bearable, it is only a matter of time before toddlers are allowed to chug Vodka.

See more US News from ABC|ABC World News

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/LjbFGp Tyler Durden

It would seem, after 8 years at the helm of the Federal Reserve, that Ben Bernanke’s colleagues were a little too busy fielding calls from Emerging Market bankers to wish him good bye. Just out from the Federal Reserve:

 

As Ben rides off into the sunset, one wonders whether if the now former Chairsatan at least got a parting watch for his epic effort at making the rich richer beyond their wildest dreams, while dooming the rest of the population to a lifetime of pain and suffering. A gold watch that is…

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1hZJO9C Tyler Durden