WINOs

Protecting their President
by mcjoan
Wed Jul 18, 2007 at 08:41:10 AM PDT
Standing firmly in the slow quicksand of public disapproval and impending electoral defeat, the WINOs, the Waverers in Name Only, voted with their president this morning, blocking passage of the Levin/Reed amendment to the Defense Authorization.

By a vote of 52-47, with 60 "yea" votes required, Republicans filibustered the Levin-Reed amendment to the Defense Authorization bill, thus keeping it from going to an up-or-down vote and effectively killing the measure. Republicans Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Gordon Smith (R-OR) and Susan Collins (R-ME) voted with the Democrats.

Lugar and Domenici knew well before the night of debate started that they would oppose any serious effort to change course in Iraq. And Voinovich who got all that great press a few days ago for telling CNN that Bush had screwed up the war?

Meanwhile, Voinovich -- another allegedly "wavering" Senator -- had this to say about Democratic efforts to vote on Reed-Levin: "You wonder if they are more interested in politics than dealing with the substance of this."

No, the politics on this one was all on the side of the WINOs, who are doing their best to strike the posture of being mavericks on Iraq, of breaking with an unpopular president and forcing him to change. They got a whole lot of free press out of the deal, with the media just eating up the idea of Republicans abandoning the president. Of course, the traditional media is pretty easy to fool. We'll probably continue to see stories highlighting the tough talk of the WINOs. Will we see stories about how they're action belie their "tough" talk, how they have obstructed any real change of policy in Iraq?

Seeing their intransigence in supporting their president over supporting the troops, can anyone really believe that something so magical will have happened by September to change their minds? No, they'll just kick that can a little further down the road. But they have done one critical thing in their actions during this debate. They have fully taken on the mantle of responsibility for the Iraq debacle. It now belongs entirely to them. Duct knocked out of place in major vent; possible leak of radioactive cobalt-60 and chromium-51 from five of the plant's reactors.
Water leak inside buildings housing all seven reactors.
Malfunctioning of water intake screening pump at two reactors.
Blowout panel knocked down at turbine buildings at two reactors.
Oil leak from low-activation transformer waste oil pipes at two reactors.
Loss in water-tight seal at reactor core cooling system.
Water leaks from diesel generator facility, burst extinguisher pipe, burst condenser valve and filtration tank.
Broken connections and broken bolt at electric transformer.
Loss of power at control center for liquid waste disposal facility.
Oil leaks from damaged transformer and magnetic transformer facility.
Oil leak at reactor water supply pump facility.
Disrupted electrical connection at magnetic transformer facility.
Cracks in embankment of water intake facility.
Air and oil leaks at switching stations.
Land under parts of plant turned to mud in quake-caused process known as liquefaction.
Information is still sketchy, but the presence of water leaks inside the reactor buildings and at the diesel generator facility (which presumably supplies backup power for pumping), and the failure of a "water-tight seal at the reactor core cooling system" are worrisome signs.

The difficulty of working with malfunctioning equipment can lead to errors, such as operators experienced at Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania (USA), where a partial meltdown occurred on March 28, 1979. But, a meltdown at the Japanese nuclear plant would have a far greater impact because the Kashiwazaki plant dwarfs any in the United States.

The incident in Japan is sufficiently serious that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is on emergency standby.

As of late on Monday, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it had not received any official request for aid from Japan, but stood ready to weigh such request if one was made.

As NRC officials wait, they should reconsider their basis for licensing plants in California and other seismically active areas. The AP reports that "the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires that nuclear plants be built with the capacity to withstand the strongest earthquake to hit its site within 100 years." But, 100 years, the approximate span of recordkeeping on earthquakes, is a very misleading measure of earthquake risk. Earthquakes of great size may occur several centuries or hundreds of centuries apart. Geologists can identify fault lines and make estimates of the frequency and timing of movements on the faults. That is a very rough guide, but more reasonable and cautious than the NRC standard.

Like U.S. authorities, the Chairman of the board of the The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan (FEPC)last year spoke reassuringly about the earthquake resistance of Japanese nuclear reactors. But, his speech also included hints of problems.

With respect to existing nuclear power plants, we have until now designed such plants with a sufficient margin of earthquake resistance, and have assessed earthquake-resistance safety in the light of appropriate recent information. When the current guidelines are revised, we will of course reassess earthquake-resistance safety in light of the new guidelines.

It must be noted, however, that assessment of earthquake-resistance safety will require geological surveys and other measures that are expected to take considerable time to complete. As such, we plan to have each electric power supplier undertake voluntary measures to ensure an improved margin of earthquake-resistance safety in advance of the new guidelines� implementation.

Monday's earthquake should put pressure on authorities to speed up those investigations. Very likely, too, there will be additional investigations into TEPCO's management, similar to this February 2007 report about falsification of plant inspection data, which you won't read about in the pro-nuclear mainstream press.

(February 01, 2007) The government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency on Thursday requested Tokyo Electric Power Co. to report full details of its newly unearthed false data on power plant inspections and devise measures to prevent data falsification.

Nobuaki Terasaka, the agency's director-general for nuclear and industrial safety policy, summoned Tokyo Electric Vice President Katsutoshi Chikudate and instructed the power company to submit the report by March 1.

On Wednesday, Tokyo Electric said it had fabricated the results of legally required inspections of nuclear and other power plants to conceal breakdowns and problems seen in equipment at the plants.

Lest readers think that the Japanese are less conscientious than other countries with nuclear power plants, reports of cover-ups from Germany, Sweden, Canada, Scotland, and the USA show that failing to report safety problems is common practice at nuclear plants around the world. Nevertheless, the Bush administration wants to increase the number of nuclear plants in the United States without answering a critical question: Why so many lies?