The Non-Life Insurance Rating Organization of Japan said insurance companies gained more than 2.51 million new earthquake contracts, since the 11 March 2011 megadisaster.
Not surprisingly the biggest gains were in the areas hardest hit: Fukushima Prefecture saw a 49.6% increase. Iwate Prefecture 26.4% increase. Miyagi Prefecture up 22.3%.
The Japanese government is about to vote on a standardized decontamination plan.
Here’s a list of suggested decontamination procedures for cities and towns:
High pressure washing of homes and buildings, including rain gutters.
Trimming of outer leaves and branches on bushes and trees.
Pulling up smaller plants and removal of top soil.
Washing roads, including flushing joints on asphalt and concrete roads, removing mud and dirt along roadsides.
All removed soil and plant material must be treated as nuclear waste.
The Japanese government will vote on a standardized plan on 26 August 2011. The amazing thing is that it’s been more than five months since the start of the ongoing nuclear disaster, and they’re just now coming up with a standardized national government decontamination plan.
The North Anna nuclear power plant, outside Richmond, Virginia, has shut down.
The plant is on the coastline, just seven miles from the epicenter of the 5.9 quake (earlier reports said it was 5.8).
Diesel generators are supplying power to basic systems at the plant.
Nine nuke plants from New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania to Maryland have declared unusual events. They have not shut down.
When orders were finally given to evacuate areas around Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, government officials led people to believe it would only be a few months.
It’s more than five months, and now the government realizes the level of contamination is so bad that it will be “…a long, long time…” before some city and towns can be considered safe for people to live in.
A meeting is being arraigned with local officials to explain the severity of the situation, and to better explain to evacuees why they might never be able to return home.
The day after the Japanese government announced it was lifting the contaminated cattle ban on Fukushima cows, four cows tested for cesium levels above safe limits.
Then, the very next day five more cows showed up with cesium contamination.
The contaminated cows had already been shipped to a slaughter house in Yokohama. It was there that the beef was found to be highly contaminated.
To make matters worse, the cow farmers swear they were not feeding the cows local rice hay, but more expensive imported hay. The imported hay had been stored indoors.
This means that the cows could be getting contaminated on their way to the slaughter house. Officials are trying to figure it out.
And yes, the Japanese government suspended the lifting of the contaminated cattle ban.
Afghan officials have told British media that the U.S. and Afghanistan have agreed to keep thousands of U.S. troops in country until 2024!
The deal would allow U.S. forces to use Afghan military bases, provide facilities to store massive numbers of U.S. military equipment, and allow thousands of military personnel to stay, including special forces.
Russian officials pointed out that the deal doesn’t make sense: “If the job is done, if terrorism is defeated and peace and stability is brought back, then why would you need bases? If the job is not done, then several thousand troops, even special forces, will not be able to do the job that 150,000 troops couldn’t do. It is not possible.”-Andrey Avetisyan, Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan
The Russians should know, they got their butts kicked by the Afghans back when Russia was part of the Soviet Union. They did exactly what the U.S. is doing now, trying to train up the Afghan government to take on the “terrorists”. The Soviet Union left Afghanistan in 1989, but continued to supply weapons and trainers to the Afghan government. The Afghan government lasted until 1992, brought down by a civil war that lasted until 1996. The civil war ended in 1996 when the Taliban took control of the country.
In a case of hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil, a Japanese government investigation into the corporate mind of Tokyo Electric Power Company revealed that officials just couldn’t believe the worse case scenario could happen at Fukushima Daiichi.
TEPCo officials admitted that they discussed the possibility of explosions inside the reactor buildings, but dismissed the possibility as unlikely.
Then, just one day after the 11 March 2011 quake/tsunami, Reactor 1 exploded. TEPCo officials were focused so much on other concerns, that it took the second explosion, in Reactor 3 on 14 March, to wake them up.
Some government officials conclude that Tokyo Electric officials don’t realize just how dangerous a nuclear reactor can be.
Many workers who were at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant the day of the 11 March 2011 quake and tsunami, say reactor 1 was already in trouble and possibly melting down, immediately after the 9.0 quake.
“There’s certainly a great deal of evidence that appears to suggest that the first reactor, reactor number one, was melting down by the time the tsunami hit. So, if that’s the case that the reactor was melting down as a result of the earthquake, and not as a result of the tsunami, a nine-point earthquake is something that has the potential to happen throughout Japan, and that would put the reliability and the design safety of all of these reactors in question.”-Robert Jacobs, Hiroshima Peace Institute
Also, Tokyo Electric Power Company has been reporting decreasing radiation levels coming from Pacific Ocean water inlets and outlets. It’s not a sign they have things under control, because they certainly don’t. Rather, after 5 months of ongoing nuclear disaster, what’s happened is that the remains of nuclear fuel rods have been washed out into the Pacific Ocean by TEPCo’s continued water injection.
“When you have a fragile structure that’s already suffered a great deal of damage and when you have continual aftershocks at the level of six-point, or there’s been some even higher, what we have now is we have the radioactive core that has melted down into the basement, into the bottom of the containment vessel of these reactors, and if the radiation level is going down, where it’s been monitored inside the buildings, and if the water pressure is going down, and the temperature is going down, it’s not that the radiation is just suddenly going away, it means that the radioactive material, the melted core, is simply moving further away from where it’s been measured.”-Robert Jacobs
August 16, WalMart reporting their sales have dropped for the 9th straight quarter! And that’s with higher sales than the same time last year!
WalMart blames us shoppers! Just like most of Corporte America, WalMart says we shoppers aren’t doing our job spending money we don’t have!
To be fair, WalMart execs realize the bad economy has something to do with us shoppers not spending money: “We remain concerned about the economic pressure on our customers and the uncertain impact it can have on their shopping behavior.”-Bill Simon, CEO
Bill Simon’s statement also shows ignorance when he says a bad economy has an “uncertain impact” on shopping. Hello, mister Simon, bad economy means no money, no money means a no shoppin’ ina you store!
This past quarter includes the coveted Back to School sales. Back to School sales are the second most important for retailers, after the November/December holiday season. Guess what, their Back to School sales sucked!
The Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission deliberately erased all the data collected regarding the radiation contamination of children in Fukushima Prefecture!
Officials claim that since the date was public it threatened the privacy of the families!
Since the nuclear disaster following the 11 March 2011 quake and tsunami, more than 1,000 children, aged 15 or younger, were being monitored for the effects of radiation on their thyroid.
The problem is that no one else was keeping such data, and now it’s gone! The decision to delete the data is only justifying the growing lack of trust the Japanese have in their government.