(CNN) — Japan has restarted its second nuclear reactor since the Fukushima disaster in 2011 shut down the country’s nuclear energy program.

The Kyushu Electric Power Company told CNN that it restarted the Dai-ni reactor at Sendai Nuclear Power Plant Thursday morning as planned and the reactor is scheduled to be fully operational and producing power by October 21.

The move comes despite widespread opposition to the use of nuclear energy in Japan.

Japan today restarted the second nuclear power plant since the crisis in 2011. Abe’s push continues; albeit severely constrained by the blind opposition of dumb animals that make up environmentalist ranks.

Abe understands that Japan needs these reactors up and running. It’s not a matter of wanting; they have to have the long term sustained power generation of a nuclear fleet or China will suffocate their civilization through superior positioning and blockades. The US is growing weak and Japan can’t count on us anymore – the wavering of the Obama Administration has made that much clear to our allies. Japan can’t gamble its future on one segment of the US political class not retaining power.

His goal is to get 20-22% of Japans power supply from nuclear again. And he’ll have it too. The restarts have been opposed so the restart timeline has basically doubled…but it proceeds ahead nonetheless.

Nuclear power will eventually catch a big rebound. Even in the US, where panicking over little is something of a past time, opposition to nuclear power never quite took off the way anti-nuclear activists would have hoped; considering how the Fukushima crisis was the second worst disaster since Chernobyl.

At least one bright side of the Climate Change movement is that they are too wedded to an inexplicable fear of entropy to worry about last century’s boogey man anymore.

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On Thursday evening, EMES withdrew distribution guidance. On Friday, shareholders were treated to a one day ~30% drawdown. HCLP and SLCA fell ~10% each, in sympathy pains. The whole sector was flayed.

The weekend has offered no respite, as HCLP and SLCA are both down another ~8% and EMES is off another ~12% on Monday.

Here’s a preview of what’s to come.

All three are going to slash their distributions. Of course they are…they’re yielding like 20% and it’s an industry freeze. They’ll walk it back to ~10% yield, those of us who’ve been here from the start will be back to what we were making two or three years ago, and all three companies will be better off for it.

Now things are getting out of hand. I cannot speak for SLCA or EMES, because I don’t own either. I never wanted to own either. But I do speak for HCLP when I say a great company is going for peanuts.

Now, I am not adding to my position. I restructured back in December, I ended up with about 1/2 my account in cash (after factoring in losses into this year) and it has been single handedly responsible for keeping me alive. My losses have been horrific; without that restructuring they would have ended me (and that is not an exaggeration).

So I’m not buying until the recovery is already well underway. If I had been so fortunate to be outside this fire, looking in, then I would be nibbling incrementally, every couple of weeks. But that is not a luxury I personally get to enjoy.

So far for the year, I’m down about 15% – that’s about 40% peak to trough if I’m counting from when this process all started a little over 12 months ago. I guess if I’m looking big picture, I’m fortunate that’s all that’s happened. There are people out there who have lost 70% because of this oil catastrophe.

For the moment, I am more than content to sit on lots of cash and wait this thing out. I’ve dug into my companies and am very confident they’re going to make it. But not everyone gets to say that.

There are vast expanses of the oil and gas industry that are about to be swallowed whole. We have a backwater culture that still crucifies people to thank for this.

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2014 began with an intense implosion of overpriced tech stocks that destabilized players and set us up for nasty knock off effects. Months afterwards, energy names began to turn downward and started an at first slow descent; a black omen for anyone looking for a forward indicator.

Saudi Arabia decided to play the world’s worst move (effectively maiming OPEC), spiked the oil markets when they could least handle it, and sent oil into the abyss touching off a second massive sector implosion in oil and gas names. But not just oil & gas, as the market became terrified of economic stagnation led by fears out of Europe and Asia, and the entire energy sector followed oil down the hole.

We are now experiencing what I view as the third wave of the same phenomenon that began in early 2014, more than a year later, as the entire stock market collapses 10% in a short span of time, led by China’s markets and the intensely poor decision making of a command/control economy trying to have their cake and eat it too.

That being said, I haven’t yet seen any indication that the real economy is retracting.

Job growth seems present and in my own local markets where I have a good ear to the ground concerning hiring and pay policies, I am actually hearing talk of wage hikes. The last five years, our local job market at least was terrified of the HR monsters that were federal regulations (chiefly PPACA), not to mention we are still reeling from 2009 in some respects. But I think as we clear away from the implementation of these federal regulations, especially with rigid conservatives now holding fast against, we are going to start to see some wage growth. Employees are actually demanding it now, voting with their feet when they can.

This should do wonders for the economy.

With regards to oil specifically (which is chiefest of my concerns) the EIA is suggesting that the current imbalance between consumption and production of oil is 2 million barrels per day. This is the cause of our stockpiling and the foremost reason oil has sunk so far. Saudi Arabia’s move to curtail US production has been a failure and so far the long feared wave of insolvencies has held to a slow drip, even from the most precarious of businesses.

A 2 million barrel imbalance is not all that bad and I believe that, barring some sort of real demand destruction, we’ll just float along at these levels until the market becomes more comfortable with oversupply. I don’t think oversupply necessarily will force pricing lower as it would take a very specific set of circumstances which include not having a merger & acquisition brokerage occur. Yet we see M&A activity is very healthy in this current time period and I have to believe that if oil goes much lower you would see US markets consolidate aggressively.

Besides this, the global imbalance is equivalent to about one major oil producer globally. And in this current environment, we also should be aware that civil unrest is a powerful destabilizer of oil production (via civil war) with positive likelihood.

Sources of new supply are questionable. New well development at these oil prices are unprofitable and only large state sponsored development is probable. Yet, economic weakness is harming state budgets and may make it difficult to attain approval for unprofitable ventures. The largest foreign state controlled sources of oil are also some of the most sensitive to this oil price shock.

Altogether, I continue to believe that the most likely outcome in oil markets is unknowable yet still predictable production locations going offline from internal unrest. Venezuela is pegged as the most likely location for such an event, do to the extreme nature of their current state of affairs, and because their leadership is proven incapable of handling the situation. But Venezuela is hardly the only candidate; just the best.

Outside of that, the economic uncertainty that hit everyone’s radar earlier this summer is now coming back under control. Bond yields continue to subside across all major foreign issuers, and I would not be surprised if the EU crisis in particular remains hidden from view for another full two years.

Domestically, I expect monetary policy to remain accommodating, but would not be surprised if Yellen raises interest rates some token amount, to try and claim some victory for the Federal Reserve. I cannot expect how the market will react to his, but believe the raise will be mostly symbolic anyway, so any effects should be temporary in nature.

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Another disappointing inventory report sent oil down about 1% over the past 24 hours. Despite this, the oil names are holding up okay. BAS, HCLP, and VOC were all up today, and ALDW was down if you can imagine.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings. The oil and energy patch is down from the recent top, but this is a process we are working through.

See you tomorrow.

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I have a working theory that the EURUSD move precipitated the collapse of oil prices (and the strength of the dollar against other currencies more generally), with the currency move starting at the beginning of 2014 and finally being brought to a head in oil prices in the second half of the year.

It is difficult to fully disentangle the parts because everything is so complex and we cannot fully rule out that oil demand is or would have been soft without the dollar strength. Perhaps it would have been regardless.

But seeing the EURUSD fall while oil bids hold up is encouraging, as it at least breaks the conventional trends that have held so well for nine months.

One thing that does strike me; if currency exchanges were the primary cause of the disruption, then you can expect the pricing swing to correct itself abruptly either when those exchange moves halt or, possibly, just because a majority of the damage escalating from the move has been absorbed or priced in and so the continuation of the cause has a diminutive effect going forward.

For the moment, euro-dollar parity feels like a forgone conclusion and it also seems that oil traders have made their peace with that. But maybe it is too soon to tell.

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The inventory build in oil was about three times greater than what the market was expecting. Oil prices slid fast throughout the day and the sector by and large reversed the recent move. But going into the final hour of trading, there does seem to be some minor strength ticking up. BAS notably was flat just about an hour ago and could tread water some more.

My guess: oil returns sub $50 for a spell and weak players get slapped around some more until someone finally closes shop. The inventory builds are big but the overall market imbalance is much less so, in the grand scheme of things. US inventory is building rapidly but only partially due to overproduction. Recent currency moves have contributed to the problem by trapping US crude with uncompetitive manufacturing and refinery businesses behind an export barrier, which is why oil companies are banging the drum so loudly on crude export rules. My guess is that at least half the build is probably from dollar strength pricing US competition out of foreign goods markets.

There is no reason to think the Fed will just sit by while the US economy slides into a recession. They’ll have to defend the dollar at some point (or what do you call intentionally making it weaker anyway?). But in the meantime, things could get rough. Oil majors are only halfheartedly looking to fix the problem; they’d really like to gobble up all the small competition for pennies on the dollar first to keep their proven reserves stacked. So yeah this could get worse before it gets better.

Still, I’m thinking now is a perfectly good time to start building positions in known survivors. The majors themselves are cheap, given how huge they are and that they aren’t going anywhere. Everything that made oil majors a crappy investment when they had a premium attached makes them the perfect choice now that they’re going for no premium. If you pick the right foreign oil major, you can even get paid in non-dollars and – God help us when the Fed finally delivers a weaker dollar – make a second strong killing on the exchange back into the US.

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