Japan hit by 8.9 quake and following tsunami

[Pedrito]

Heh, I wonder where the cars pouring over the seawall in the first pic came from.

There was a road running along the side of the seawall in front of the sea, the cars and trucks were lifted from that road and poured over the seawall. The footage from which the caption is taken comes from the town of Miyako.

L.

[The Minsky Moment]

Re Krugman, I wouldn't phrase the problem as "excess desired savings" so much as a shortage of perceived useful investment options for the private business sector.  It is true that the net effect is the same -- companies retain excess earnings and do not reinvest in new projects, and the surfeit of retained funds suppresses market interest rates.  But the nature of the problem has implications for the likely impact of government financed reconstruction efforts.  Admitting the chutzpah of taking on a Nobel economist, those implications cause me to differ from Krugman's optimism.  The prospect is that the government will take additional debt to fund construction work.  Assuming local companies are the prime contractors, this means government funds will flow through the private sectors.  However, assuming the disaster is treated as a one-off catastrophe, there is no reason to believe that it will fundamentally alter the long-term investment expectations of the private business sector (beyond the need to ramp up capacity to perform the contracted reconstruction work).  One can expect a short-term employment boost, but not necessarily any sustained increased in investment rates - and because the debt-financed reconstruction will increase income flows to the corporations performing the work, the problem of excess earnings over investment may be exacerbated.

Krugman doesn't really address this; his point is just that more borrowing will not increase interest rates via crowding out.  He is probably correct on that narrow point.  But at some point, the ability of the government to repay its obligations has to be questioned: debt/GDP is already at 200%.  The primarily domestic character of that debt does not change its nature as an obligation.  And because of Japan's unique macro-economic situation, even if it were desirable to inflate out of the indebtedness, it may not be feasible.  That would leave two options: (1) huge increases in taxation - which would have the virtue of helping resolve the investment-savings balance but only at the ruinous cost of destroying private incomes; or (2) some kind of default.

[MadImmortalMan]

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power

Japan's disaster would weigh more heavily if there were less harmful alternatives. Atomic power is part of the mix

George Monbiot


You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It's not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren't popular, either.

The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50% or 70%, perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nuclear, while beyond that point, nuclear has smaller impacts than renewables.

Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impact on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion.

But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week in which I argued that nuclear remains safer than coal. What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.

At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources. It's hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism. Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales, but it's not much use in Birmingham.

And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.

Some greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution.

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.

Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.

Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.

Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima

[The Brain]

No time to read, stockpiling iodine and foil hats.

[katmai]

No time to read, stockpiling iodine and foil hats.

Don't lie, you only need to stock up on the iodine.

[jimmy olsen]

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power

Japan's disaster would weigh more heavily if there were less harmful alternatives. Atomic power is part of the mix

George Monbiot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima

Logic! What the hell is this?

[lustindarkness]

Makes sense to me.

[jimmy olsen]

Isn't that what everyone says about Americans?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42221279/ns/world_news-asiapacific/

US relief effort rebuilds lives, ties to Japan
'They are like gods descending from the sky,' says tearful school worker

[Slargos]

Angry, insane gods with a lust for blood and oil.

[Josquius]

Planning your next holiday to take advantage of the love Tim?

[MadImmortalMan]

Planning your next holiday to take advantage of the love Tim?

And to soak up some rays. 

[Malthus]

Isn't that what everyone says about Americans?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42221279/ns/world_news-asiapacific/

US relief effort rebuilds lives, ties to Japan
'They are like gods descending from the sky,' says tearful school worker

The school worker was dyslexic. 

[The Brain]

Angry, insane gods with a lust for blood and oil.

[MadImmortalMan]

uh oh

Toyota tells U.S. plants 'prepare to shut down'
cnnmoney


Peter Valdes-Dapena, senior writer, On Wednesday March 23, 2011, 9:05 pm EDT

Toyota's U.S. manufacturing arm is preparing for a possible shutdown because of parts shortages from Japan, a Toyota spokesman said. Word has gone out to all 13 of Toyota's factories in the United States, Canada and Mexico. This does not mean that the plants will stop working, Toyota spokesman Mike Goss said, but that they should be ready in case the need arises.

"We expect some kind of interruptions," he said.

While Toyota's car factories in Japan have stopped working since the March 11 earthquake in Japan, the automaker was able to resume production of some auto parts on March 17.

Toyota employs 25,000 manufacturing and R&D workers in North America.

Toyota has a long-standing policy of continuing to pay its employees while finding other work for them -- either within Toyota or even in the communities where they are located doing volunteer work -- during production shut-downs.

But Toyota's plans signal that this parts issue could be just the beginning of an industry-wide problem.

"They did resume parts production for overseas and for replacement parts," Goss said, "but that was just the suppliers that were capable of doing it."

Toyota is still in the process of assessing which suppliers are capable of full operation at this time, Goss said.

"We're not talking about just a few companies," he said.

Even suppliers based in North America may not be able to provide components for cars because they, in turn, rely on parts suppliers in Japan with crippled factories.

"All automakers are just now figuring out who supplies every little part." Said Edmunds.com senior analyst Michelle Krebs. "The shortage of any one could shut down an assembly line. Toyota isn't the only one vulnerable; virtually all major automakers have some risks."

Spokespeople for Nissan, Honda and Ford all said those automakers are making no plans to shut down their plants at this time.

U.S. automaker General Motors has already had to stop production of a truck plant in Shreveport, La. and a related engine plant in New York State due to shortages of parts from Japan.

[Savonarola]

Democratic Republic of North Korea gives massive moneys to stricken Japan!  Workers brigades stand in glorious solidarity with downtrodden Japanese proletariat!

N.Korea Kim Jong-il sends $500,000 to quake-hit Japan
REUTERS

2011/03/25

SEOUL--North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has sent half a million dollars to aid Korean expatriates in Japan after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, Pyongyang's official news agency said on Thursday.

Decades of tightly controlled economic policy that has seen North Korea channel much of its scarce resources to arms development has left the country acutely short of cash although its leaders continue to live lavishly, according to South Korean news reports. Food is also reportedly scarce.

Japan, formerly Korea's colonial master, is frequently lambasted as a "war monger" in North Korea's state-controlled media along with South Korea and the United States.

"Leader Kim Jong-il sent (a) relief fund of 500,000 U.S. dollars to Korean residents in Japan who suffered from the killer quake and tsunami happened there," KCNA news agency said.

Half a million U.S. dollars is equivalent to the annual average income earned by 520 North Koreans in all of 2009, according to Bank of Korea data.

U.N. sanctions in 2009 imposed for its nuclear and missile tests that defied international warnings have further cut into North Korea's finances, choking off much of its lucrative arms trade.

The North's Red Cross has separately sent $100,000 in disaster relief to Japan, KCNA said.

Long Live Juche!