Wow! Reuter reporting

Yeah. Doesn't cost much and makes them look good.

Why not send cargo planes and get as many people out of there as humanly possible?

UK urging people to leave Tokyo too

Yeah, but also sends grave message about expected conditions in Japan.

Chris Martenson is convinced the global economy is officially at the tipping point, and Japan is what will break its back.

Here's his take on the five stages, and I'll guess he has us currently on 2 and gripping for 3. To me, if the specifics in stage 3 start happening in the coming days/weeks, we can be fairly confident that "it's on":

The threat I see goes like this:
http://www.chrismartenson.com/

Stage 1: The world watches, riveted, as Japan suffers a tragic and horrible earthquake and tsunami, but as horrifying as these are, they are localized phenomenon affecting a relatively small percentage of the country. The real trouble lurks within damaged nuclear plants, which are now ruined and will never again produce electricity for Japan, creating instant shortages that will take years to remedy. Worse, a dangerous plume of radioactivity is carried south by winds. Tokyo partially empties and shuts down for all practical purposes.

Stage 2: The abrupt slow down of the world's third largest economy alters the smooth flow of cash around the globe, and even causes reversals of some other long-standing flows. Chaotic eddies emerge in a decades-old pattern of ever-increasing flows of money into and out of the money centers, and various carry-trade and other interest-rate-sensitive strategies blow up. Manufacturing in Japan screeches to a halt, disrupting just-in-time manufacturing strategies both internally and across the globe.

Stage 3: In order to fund the rebuilding effort, Japan has to buy a lot of items from foreign suppliers at the same time that its exports plunge precipitously. At first Japan simply does not participate in US Treasury auctions, leading to a shortage of buyers. But eventually Japan has to sell some of its vast hoard of US bonds in order to pay for external items needed for its reconstruction. Further, insurance companies, huge holders of US bonds, face stiff liability claims in the wake of the worst natural disaster to hit a heavily industrialized center and are forced to redeem enormous amounts of Treasury paper. US Treasury yields begin to climb.

Stage 4: Continuing unrest in the MENA region serves to keep oil elevated and local funding needs high, while Europe's weaker players (the PIIGS) continue to slip under the waves. Money continues to ebb away from the US Treasury market. Forced by circumstance, the Federal Reserve reverses its linguistic course and opens the monetary floodgates once again. There's nothing like a crisis to justify more money printing, especially to a one-trick pony (the Fed) that only knows how to stamp its hoof on the 'print' button.

Stage 5: An increasingly chaotic monetary and fiscal situation spills over into the derivatives arena, creating a number of financial accidents. Stressed governments find themselves in more of an arguing mood than a pull-together-and-sing-Kumbaya mood, and agreements are hard to come by. Banks begin to fail again, global trade falls off, unrest continues to build, and then it happens - a currency crisis.

Stage 6: Everything changes. Faster than you think.

The level of redundancy planning for the pools just seems really slack.

If they have the potential to go catastrophic why are they not sealed and surrounded by numerous back up water delivery systems?

Well the problem is that they are not being used as they were envisioned by their designers. They were supposed to be at most like a reactor's worth of spent fuel in the pool at one time. The fuel was to be racked in a configuration such that the steady state temperature of the uncovered fuel would be lower than the combustion point of the cladding, making a catastrophe in a dry pool very unlikely or perhaps impossible short of sabotage.

However the operators of some plants began to use the pools for longer-term storage and switched to higher density racks. In these racks there is less air circulation so the dry rods have a much higher steady state temperature, and it sounds like for rods out of the reactor for less than two years or so combustion is possible or even probable if the tank runs dry for a long period. So it is possible that the tanks would have been safe if used as intended but not with current use.

Although I don't think it is clear that this plant is using the newer high density racks, so the risk might not be high if the tanks run dry.

Wishful thinking?

http://in.news.yahoo.com/fukushima-a...medium=twitter

It's complicated to move humans around. And dangerous. As the Daily Yomiuri reports:

http://twitter.com/DailyYomiuri

I mean LDO I think it's safer to evacuate than not, at least from the immediate vicinity of 60km or whatever, despite the deaths.

But this is where being human gets awfully tricky. Japanese officials are in a REALLY TOUGH spot, although I'm sure that goes without saying. Japan has a population of 127 mil. Trying to evacuate 127 million people (or whatever the number is that truly need to be safely evacuated from a wide radius, not nearly 127 mil of course) in an orderly fashion presents some huge risks too, especially in a country that is already close to FUBAR due a tremendous earthquake less than a week ago. Deciding to evacuate just Tokyo (13 mil in the city, 35 mil in the metro region) would be a Herculean task. I can't imagine that would take. Especially given the existing stresses on the civil system.

When all is said and done, and if it turns out the situation was worse than the Japanese officials predicted, you'll likely hear a lot of post-hoc rationalizations that they were trying desperately not to induce panic in a disaster-torn country already stressed on resources. This, while perhaps not defensible depending on what they do or don't know right now, is an understandable sentiment. Especially if they truly don't know what's going on at Fukushima. Which is what I'm guessing is really happening.

Consequently, it's tough to say what the best play is. I just can't say if "everyone GTFO" message that loading up cargo planes ala Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War would send is riskier than whatever is going on at Fukushima. And I say that as the guy who thinks the risks at Fukushima are ldo being drastically undersold by the Japanese government.

I'm also not a logistics experts, I have no idea if such a plan would even work, if it's feasible, a good idea, as opposed to just evacuating people to other points in Japan. I'm just saying that even the image of like a handful of literal cargo planes furiously shuttling people out of Japan would likely make **** just totally hit the fan, and it's tough to say what the risks of that are. But there's some.

They've been saying its a 4 for like 2 days now.

If the Japanese authorities are saying 4, based on my perception of their handling of this so far (maybe not handling but their reporting) , then I'll go ahead and say it's probably an 8 even if the scale only goes to 7.

The rest of the world would certainly not be telling everybody to gtfo Japan (Japan!) if **** was a 4.,

2 questions i wonder:

- is the No. 3 economy in the world now doomed?

- should other major manufacturers shut down production entirely, like Toyota has, what effect will that soon have on the technology sector of the global markets?

Pretty sure its a logarithmic scale, so it'll go as high as you like.

There was this thing called World War II which idk was just a lil bit worse, so no.

It is supposed to be logarithmis, but it's not really a scale at all in the sense that there is some unit of measurement that gives you a direct correlation to a level on the INES.

The levels are basically defined by verbal desriptions that are supposed to be "ten times worse" than the one below. I think the IAEA then decides what level this they ascribe to a certain event.

edit:

It's like OOT rating women.

this is the most confusing disaster ever for sure. one minute the nuclear situation is a dire, unimaginable catastrophe possibly as bad as chernobyl; and then the next person says it isn't going to be a big deal. and both of these opinions are from numerous experts. starting to think nobody has a clue and just guessing.

I mean I know they need to be high up, but that doesn't look very effective for cooling much

top kill

Bingo, imo.

But I mean circumstantially it's not good. Things we know which speak to desperation:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...on-limits.html

- drafting more workers
- changing the law to allow them to stay longer
- using the helicopters
- abandoning the central control room for any period of time

That doesn't mean they won't get it under control, though. But the non-rumor/hypothetical stuff you can look at speaks to the fact that it's closer to "dire" than "no big deal."

Why are the not designed with backup remote control rooms?

I'm leaning towards "things are really bad" based on this stuff and others but the experts who say not a major problem are generally persuasive too. In a way I just believe what the last expert talking head said lol, but if I were within 100 miles of ground zero I'd leave either way.

"Doomed" was hyperbolic, but Jiggs' second question is very, very important. This will have unbelievable global economic consequences. They've already begun. Yesterday the Yen carry trade essentially completely unwound in a few hours. Japan switched in a few hours from the worlds largest supplier of cheap funding to one of the largest consumers of funding. Forex desks all over the world got monkeyhammered yesterday. Today will be the margin liquidations. BoJ has already intervened to the tune of $500B of funny money to halt the collapse of equities markets.

Japan lost probably 10% of it's capital stock in an hour. It is an export dependent economy that is completely dependent on commodities imports, since it has very limited mineral resources compared to what it's industrial economy requires. It has no oil and not much coal if any. Their nuclear plants provided 30% of their energy, the rest imported, but thats up in the air now.

So they were already going to get wafflecrushed by flagging foreign demand for their exports and skyrocketing input prices for commodities and oil. Now they will need to import that much more in inputs, but it won't go to exports, it will go to rebuilding, ie just trying to fill the hole back in.

This all has enormous implications for the global economy, financial markets, etc. With a big chunk of their capital stock wiped out and a huge fraction of their GDP in suspended animation (rolling blackouts have shut down manufacturing across the country) people will start tapping their savings, govt revenues plummet just as govt spending will have to skyrocket. Japan could have an internal funding crisis. They will almost certainly halt US Treasury purchases. Ben Bernanke will have to make up that demand. They will almost almost certainly have to start selling UST to fund rebuilding. Ben will have to buy those, too. That will put huge pressure on the $.

Nevermind the growing instability in the middle east, the fact that there is now no possible way that Bernanke can stop QE, so the sell off in commodities will likely be short lived and inflation will accelerate (largest monthly increase in US food prices in 37 years last month, btw). Nevermind the European periphery is about to collapse. Nevermind the ongoing housing market collapse. Necermind the $180T in exposure to interest rate swaps that the top 5 TBTF banks have. Etc, etc, etc.

There is a flock of black swans in the air. Their leader is circling to make a landing, and he is Japanese.

So... GG human civilization you say?
Sure, why not, we had a nice run, time to pay the bill now and it looks like nature is sending it.