Japanese Company Responsible for Nuclear Catastrophe Is Slated to Build Plants in Texas

Japanese Company Responsible for Nuclear Catastrophe Is Slated to Build Plants in Texas
Obama recently asked Congress for a $4 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors on the Gulf Coast of Texas -- involving Tokyo Electric Power.
March 14, 2011 |



I need to speak to you, not as a reporter, but in my former capacity as lead investigator in several government nuclear plant fraud and racketeering investigations.

I don't know the law in Japan, so I can't tell you if Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) can plead insanity to the homicides about to happen.

But what will Obama plead? The Administration, just months ago, asked Congress to provide a $4 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors to be built and operated on the Gulf Coast of Texas -- by Tokyo Electric Power and local partners. As if the Gulf hasn't suffered enough.

http://www.alternet.org/world/150245/japanese_company_responsible_for_nuclear_catastrophe_is_slated_to_build_plants_in_texas/

roofs?

Definitely worth a read. Here are the permitted four snips/paragraphs:

"Now be afraid. Obama's $4 billion bail-out-in-the-making is called the South Texas Project. It's been sold as a red-white-and-blue way to make power domestically with a reactor from Westinghouse, a great American brand. However, the reactor will be made substantially in Japan by the company that bought the US brand name, Westinghouse -- Toshiba.
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"I get lots of confidential notes from nuclear industry insiders. One engineer, a big name in the field, is especially concerned that Obama waved the come-hither check to Toshiba and Tokyo Electric to lure them to America. The US has a long history of whistleblowers willing to put themselves on the line to save the public. In our racketeering case in New York, the government only found out about the seismic test fraud because two courageous engineers, Gordon Dick and John Daly, gave our team the documentary evidence.

"In Japan, it's simply not done. The culture does not allow the salary-men, who work all their their lives for one company, to drop the dime.
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"After Texas, you're next. The Obama Administration is planning a total of $56 billion in loans for nuclear reactors all over America.

"Last night I heard CNN reporters repeat the official line that the tsunami disabled the pumps needed to cool the reactors, implying that water unexpectedly got into the diesel generators that run the pumps.

These safety back-up systems are the 'EDGs' in nuke-speak: Emergency Diesel Generators. That they didn't work in an emergency is like a fire department telling us they couldn't save a building because "it was on fire."

nuclear catastrophe. An earthquake and tsumami are. I have not heard of any recent tsunamis in Texas, but I'm always open to being corrected.

Including this info. There is still more in the article necessary to get a complete understanding, but it can't be put into this reply because of copyright restrictions.

"The failure of emergency systems at Japan's nuclear plants comes as no surprise to those of us who have worked in the field.

Nuclear plants the world over must be certified for what is called "SQ" or "Seismic Qualification." That is, the owners swear that all components are designed for the maximum conceivable shaking event, be it from an earthquake or an exploding Christmas card from Al Qaeda.

The most inexpensive way to meet your SQ is to lie. The industry does it all the time. The government team I worked with caught them once, in 1988, at the Shoreham plant in New York. Correcting the SQ problem at Shoreham would have cost a cool billion, so engineers were told to change the tests from 'failed' to 'passed.'

The company that put in the false safety report? Stone & Webster, now the nuclear unit of Shaw Construction which will work with Tokyo Electric to build the Texas plant, Lord help us.

We need more of them. Hell, they can put it in my backyard if they pay me. Might mean lower electric costs and some good paying jobs.

And I can think of no company I would rather have consruct the thing.

Oh crap, you were most likely being sarcastic!

They call it "stranded costs" and we in Pennsylvania saw our electricity rates jump dramatically for construction costs/cost overrides of nuclear plants, YEARS before the plants even went on line to start delivering power.

I want to be absolutely clear about this. Duquesne Light's (a for profit corporation) customers were forced to pay for outrageous cost overrides, but Duquesne Electric executives and stock holders were not. Dividends continued to be paid as per usual. This is what we progressives call Corporate Welfare. Google stranded costs to see what I'm talking about. The links below also spell out in detail why the sweetheart deals of tax subsidies, tax credits, loan guarantees, procedural simplifications and institutional support as demanded by the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, translate into all risk, no reward for taxpayers and ratepayers, . The NYT article quotes a Forbes magazine article labeling the construction of the first round of US nuclear plants "the largest managerial disaster in business history."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/business/global/27iht-renuke.html?_r=3&src=busln

"Identifying the real costs of competing energy technologies is complicated by the wide range of subsidies and tax breaks involved. As a result, U.S. taxpayers and utility users could end up spending hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars more than necessary to achieve an ample low-carbon energy supply, if legislative proposals before the U.S. Congress lead to adoption of an ambitious nuclear development program, Mr. Cooper said in a report last November.


"At the state level, the industry has also pressed the case for “construction work in progress,” a financing system that requires electricity users to pay for the cost of new reactors during their construction and sometimes before construction starts. With long construction periods and frequent delays, this can mean that electricity users start to pay higher prices as much as 12 years before the plants produce electricity.


“The utilities insist that the construction work in progress charged to ratepayers also include the return on equity that the utilities normally earn by taking the risk of building the plant — even though they have shifted the risk to the ratepayers,” Mr. Cooper said. “If the plant is not built or suffers cost overruns, the ratepayers will bear the burden.”

"The first round of plants resulted in write-offs through bankruptcies and “stranded costs” — investments in existing power plants made uncompetitive by deregulation — which essentially transferred nearly $100 billion in liabilities to electricity users, said Doug Koplow, an economist and founder of Earth Track, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which campaigns against subsidies it considers environmentally harmful. “Although the industry frequently points to its low operating costs as evidence of its market competitiveness, this economic structure is an artifact of large subsidies to capital, historical write-offs of capital, and ongoing subsidies to operating costs,” Mr. Koplow said.