The BBC reports that the Japan nuclear crisis ‘over in nine months’

The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has said it expects to bring the crisis under control by the end of the year.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) aims to reduce radiation leaks in three months and to cool the reactors within nine months.

The utility said it also plans to cover the reactor building, which was hit by a huge quake and tsunami on 11 March.
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Radiation levels in the sea near reactor 2 rose to 6,500 times the legal limit on Friday, up from 1,100 times a day earlier, Tepco has said, raising fears of fresh radiation leaks.

Tsunehisa Katsumata, the chairman of Tepco, Asia’s largest utility, told a news conference in Tokyo on Sunday they would need up to nine months to bring the power plant to “cold shutdown”.
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Japan’s government had ordered Tepco to come up with a timetable to end the crisis, now rated on a par with the world’s worst nuclear accident, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

But the BBC’s Roland Buerk in Tokyo says it is still not certain that the nine-month deadline can be achieved.

They were required to produce a timetable and they have. They probably had it printed up in color and handed copies out at the press conference.

It’s a bit mean-spirited for Roland Buerk to point out that there is no indication as to how they are actually going to accomplish any of the activities mentioned in the timetable. The requirement was to produce the timetable and they have accomplished that task. Actually doing anything meaningful about the disaster at Fukushima is a separate task and not part of this press event.

Note: There will be no discussion of Underwear Gnomes. I mean it.

Spring has sprung, and it is extremely nasty.

CNN reports that U.S. storms kill more than 40

Among the worst-hit places was Bertie County, North Carolina, a rural area in the northeast part of the state. The weather service reported 14 deaths in the county. Zee Lamb, county manager, said there were 11 fatalities.
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The death toll across six states includes another nine in other parts of North Carolina; four in Virginia; seven in Alabama, two in Oklahoma, seven in Arkansas and one in Mississippi.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center said it received reports of at least 230 tornadoes across the region during the past three days, though some of those reports were likely sightings of the same twister.

I was watching the system on the weather radars and you can see the super-cells explode and throw off the vortexes that can become tornadoes. We were under watches most of yesterday, but the worst stayed inland to the north.

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Those were the days back under the Hedgemony when St Alan of Greenspan, a Very Serious Person, warned about the danger of paying off the National debt with budget surpluses on January 25, 2001. Needless to say the Shrubbery averted that “disaster”.

Now I read that the IMF warns US to make a ‘down payment’ on deficit. Well, we could invest the $100+ billion line of credit that we extend to the IMF in a passbook savings account, if it would make them happier.

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