Week 4: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week

Post by Sunday at midnight.

Fukushima video from helicopter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_T0M5nz_tg&feature=player_embedded


more update: "occupancy rates at Ritz-Carlton Tokyo had plunged from 80 to 15 percent since the Japan nuclear crisis began but he expected it to have little impact on the Hong Kong hotel."


1. Mark Whitaker

2. Primary Scenario: Abandoning Tokyo, 160 km away, what what it may do to Japan and the world

3. This is someone's scenario of several factors/trends that will escalate the disaster in Japan. I have put the main points in boldface. It's a good example of a primary scenario. A secondary scenario would be "what do we learn from this bad outcome and how do we avoid it in the future by taking action now?"

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Sayonara, Tokyo

And so begins the radioactive ruination of Japan, and much of the rest of the world, at the hands of the nuclear demons unleashed in Fukushima by General Electric and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). The harsh reality, the cruel truth of the matter, is that this ghastly crisis is going to last months or maybe years, and maybe even a very, very long lot of years, given that the half-life of plutonium 239 is twenty-four thousand years.

But don't take my word for it. Here it is straight from the horse's mouth, a bit evasive, but nevertheless a tolerable admission of the truth:

“'Regrettably, we don't have a concrete schedule at the moment to enable us to say in how many months or years (the crisis will be over),' TEPCO vice-president Sakae Muto said ...” (1)

Months or years, the man says. Meanwhile, by the day, the crisis spirals more and more out of control and radiation levels are soaring to their highest levels since the reactors first began melting down and exploding. (2,3,4)

Tokyo is only about 160 miles from the site of the reactors that are melting down. As radiation levels rise in the region it is a firm guarantee that more and more radioactivity will fall out on Tokyo.

No doubt about it.

The inevitable consequence of that will be a dramatic withering of the cultural, social, commercial and economic life of the huge Tokyo megalopolis. As more and more people abandon Tokyo it will become a radioactive shadow of its former self. Of course the economic implications of that for global finance and commerce are immense, Tokyo is one of the three major centers of high finance in the world, along with London and New York, so its abandonment therefore has ineluctable repercussions that will rock the modern, global civilization to its core.

Do you think I'm full of it? That I don't know what I'm talking about?

Tell that to the 25 foreign governments that have already either closed their embassies in Tokyo, or have evacuated Tokyo and moved their embassies to Osaka. (5)

Tell that to the international bankers who are now fleeing Tokyo and Japan in droves. (6)

Tell that to the U.S. Navy which announced on March 17th that it was prepared to evacuate as many as 87,000 personnel if necessary. (7)

Tell that to the USO that announced two days later on March 19th that the U.S. Military has begun a voluntary evacuation of up to 200,000 military personnel and their dependents from Japan. (8, 9)

While all of this has been going on the Japanese government has also urged more evacuations and quietly widened the evacuation zone around the melting down Fukushima reactors. (10, 11)

The plain English translation of all of this activity is that the evacuation of Fukushima, of Japan, and of Tokyo, has already begun. Large numbers of people are already “voluntarily” on the move and fleeing from harm's way. The longer the crisis grinds on, the greater the numbers of people who will leave.

The impact on Japan, Tokyo and the world is incalculable. The dominoes are just beginning to topple and where this concatenation of catastrophic events will finally end, no one can say with certainty just yet.

But I can promise you this much: The Mother Of All Radioactive Roller Coaster Rides has left the starting gate and life will never again be the same for any of us. These weeks, thus, effectively mark the end of one era, and implicitly herald the beginning of another.

We are in new territory now, uncharted, radioactive territory and as this crisis grinds on, one of its initial big victims will assuredly be the city of Tokyo. If these reactors cannot be brought under control then its fate is all but sealed.

Like swarming rats fleeing a sinking ship, the mass exodus of “international bankers” from Tokyo and Japan over the past two weeks has a transparently plain meaning: it's finished, it's over.

So, sayonara, Tokyo. What comes next will not be pleasant.

---
http://eventhorizonchronicle.blogspot.com/2011/03/sayonara-tokyo.html


This is an editorial that the Korea Times didn't want to publish:


Korean Green Future Options
by Mark D. Whitaker


Korea requires a well-planned energy future, and President Lee claims to be going full speed ahead--though to nowhere or oblivion? Korea has great, clean, green technologies that have been abandoned and ignored over the past ten years.

First, national policy should openly oppose oil or nuclear expansion because it’s easy: other native-Korean options exist. Second, oil and nuclear expansion should be resisted because expansion of such dirty industries is a form of extortion on the future. Once started, oil or nuclear are hard to keep from locking in their own extortive infrastructures and externalities for a suboptimal future. Once started, it is hard to keep their politics from locking out clean market options.

Dirty energy has a bad long-term politics, with catastrophically understated disasters as short-term construction interests get rich. Instead, construction industries should be getting rich expanding a clean, green infrastructure. If finance is the art of creating a preferred future, where are Korean finance and thus Korea’s future going?

What’s the Korean, clean, green option? There are two domestic ones to think about and two others to worry about internationally. First, there are completely clean and green Korean techniques to generate energy for transportation instead of a requirement of hybrid cars. Several Korean corporations have completely electric cars. Already many electric cars go just as fast (or faster) than expensive, polluting oil cars. Energy refills are much cheaper: electricity, solar or otherwise.

Second, it may be mind bending to understand that water fuel solutions have existed for over a decade domestically. Korean corporation Best Korea won the 2001 Prime Minister's award for their green, clean technology of water fuel: hydrogen on demand stored as water. They won another award from the Korean government for the best patented invention in 2000. The future is here. In fact, the future went by you ten years ago, Korea, and few noticed. Why? (“A Korean Manufacturer of Brown's Gas Generators,” youtube.com/watch?v=0ItyiJ1uBUY (8 min).)

Third, Koreans should worry about foreign green futures outclassing polluting Korean ones. Japanese company Genepac has an entirely water based car. (Reuters. “Genepac’s Water Powered Car,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrxfMz2eDME; 1:22 min.) It goes 300 kilometers on a liter of water--even tea works. Fourth, Indian (Tata Motors) and French (MDI) manufacturers have an entirely air based car: no pollution in or out, with an onboard air compressor/recharger. They call it a half oil and air “hybrid,” though the oil can be switched off to run on air as original models intended. These air cars have been mass manufactured for several years in India. Korean chaebol like Hyundai should wake up and smell the clean air: hybrid cars a dead end with these options around. Instead, Korean chaebol can invest in any of these corporations to expand businesses in Korea to manufacture air and water-based transportation futures or for other applications. (For instance, Taiwan’s water fuel manufacturers have great water-fuel based home appliances like stoves.) Moreover, Korean fully electric cars should get a boost, instead of the boot, from the Lee administration. China already has fully electric car manufacturing.

Nuclear or oil has no part in a Green New Deal. It is a Gray Old Scam of extortion on the future painted green. Don’t wait until the (nuclear) wind changes, literally, or the next oil slick on the soon canalized Korean rivers. Think about a native technological future within 30 years that is electrical, water, and air based without pollution. It’s doable. Does Korea have a positive image of the future, or does it only have a passive drift despite a wealth of options trod underfoot so carelessly?