BREAKING: Ill. Nuclear Reactor Loses Power, Venting Steam

BYRON, Ill. (AP) — A nuclear reactor at a northern Illinois plant shut down Monday after losing power, and steam was being vented to reduce pressure, according to officials from Exelon Nuclear and federal regulators.

Unit 2 at Byron Generating Station, about 95 miles northwest of Chicago, shut down at 10:18 a.m., after losing power, Exelon officials said. Diesel generators began supplying power to the plant, and operators began releasing steam to cool the reactor from the part of the plant where turbines are producing electricity, not from within the nuclear reactor itself, officials said.

The steam contains low levels of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, but federal and plant officials insisted the levels were safe for workers and the public.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission declared the incident an “unusual event,” the lowest of four levels of emergency. Commission officials also said the release of tritium was expected.

Exelon Nuclear officials believe a failed piece of equipment at a switchyard caused the shutdown. The switchyard is similar to a large substation that delivers power to the plant from the electrical grid and that takes power from the plant to the electrical grid. Officials were still investigating the equipment failure.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokeswoman Viktoria Mitlyng said officials can’t yet calculate how much tritium is being released. They know the amounts of tritium are small because monitors around the plant aren’t showing increased levels of radiation, she said.

Read the rest here.

By Alice Baghdjian | Reuters

BERLIN (Reuters) – A steady slide in beer consumption in Germany was stopped cold last year thanks to warmer weather, the federal statistics office said on Monday.

German brewers sold 98.2 million hectoliters of beer last year, down by just 0.1 percent in 2011 after dropping by an average of two percent every year since 2006. Beer consumption in Germany had fallen in all but two of the last 10 years.

Despite Germany’s reputation as a nation of beer lovers, young people are turning away from the national beverage in favour of other non-alcoholic beverages, brewers say.

The warmer weather last year as well as the World Cup soccer tournament in 2006 helped to put a floor beneath what is still the country’s most famous beverage. Germans still drink more than 100 liters of beer per capita each year.

“Beer sales depend on the weather. In the first half of 2011 — in April and May — we had a lot of warm weather, and the figures were up by 1.0 percent,” Juergen Hammer, an official at the Federal Statistics Agency, told Reuters.

“This is why this year’s results aren’t so bad. So I guess the old adage is true that when it’s warm people drink beer.”

Consumption of German beer, which has been subject to a purity law since 1516, has been in slow decline for decades.

The World Cup football tournament helped German beer consumption rise by 1.4 percent in 2006, the strongest increase in 12 years, the federal statistics office said on Monday.

Source

via Naked Capitalism

A new ProPublica story, “Freddie Mac Betting Against Struggling Homeowners,” treats the fact that Freddie Mac retains the riskiest tranche of its mortgage bond offering, known as inverse floaters, as heinous and evidence of scheming against suffering borrowers.

The storyline in this piece is neat, plausible, and utterly wrong. And my e-mail traffic indicates that people who are reasonably finance savvy but don’t know the mortgage bond space have bought the uninformed and conspiratorial ProPublica thesis hook, line, and sinker.

Read the rest here.

Ritholtz discusses last week’s report from Birinyi Research on the Golden Cross.

By Inyoung Hwang and Whitney Kisling – Jan 30, 2012 9:35 AM ET

Valuations for U.S. equities have been stuck below the five-decade average for the longest period since Richard Nixon’s presidency, a sign investors don’t trust earnings even after a three-year bull market.

Analysts estimate profits in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index will reach a record $104.78 this year after increasing 125 percent since the end of 2009, the fastest expansion in a quarter century, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. American companies are boosting income so much that even after stocks doubled, the S&P 500 hasn’t traded above its 16.4 mean ratio for 446 days, the longest stretch since the 13 years beginning in 1973.

Battered by the 14 percent decline in the S&P 500 since 2000, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the so-called flash crash 21 months ago, investors are staying away from stocks, even after record profits, 10 quarters of U.S. economic growth and promises by the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates near zero through 2014. Of the $37 trillion erased from global equities in the credit crisis, $24 trillion has been restored.

“After two significant bear markets, the flash crash and the lost decade, many have simply said, ‘No mas,’” Howard Ward, who helps oversee $35 billion at Gamco Investors Inc. in Rye, New York, said in an e-mail on Jan. 24. “Of course, bull markets have a history of climbing a wall of worry. And it is happening again.”

Read the rest here.

Two reports assessing wave and tidal resources in the U.S. released today by the Department of Energy (DOE) suggest that water power—including conventional hydropower and wave, tidal, and other resources—could provide 15% of the nation’s electricity by 2030.

The two reports—”Mapping and Assessment of the United States Ocean Wave Energy Resource” and “Assessment of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams in the United States“—were described by the DOE as “the most rigorous analysis undertaken to date to accurately define the magnitude and location of America’s ocean energy resources.”

The U.S. uses about 4,000 TWh of electricity per year, about 6% of which is generated by hydropower resources. According to the reports, the DOE estimates that the maximum theoretical electric generation that could be produced from waves and tidal currents is about 1,420 TWh per year—or about a third of the nation’s total annual electricity usage.

The DOE notes cautiously, however, that “not all of the resource potential identified in these assessments can realistically be developed.”

The two reports calculate the maximum kinetic energy available from waves and tides off U.S. coasts that could be used for future energy production, and which represent largely untapped opportunities for renewable energy development in the U.S. The West Coast, including Alaska and Hawaii, have especially high potential for wave energy development, while significant opportunities for wave energy also exist along the East Coast. “Additionally, parts of both the West and East Coasts have strong tides that could be tapped to produce energy,” the DOE concludes.

Earlier this year, the DOE announced the availability of its national tidal resource database, which maps the maximum theoretically available energy in the nation’s tidal streams. This database contributed to the “Assessment of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams in the United States” report, prepared by Georgia Tech.

The wave energy assessment report, titled “Mapping and Assessment of the United States Ocean Wave Energy Resource,” was prepared by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), with support and data validation from researchers at Virginia Tech and the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The report describes the methods used to produce geospatial data and to map the average annual and monthly significant wave height, wave energy period, mean direction, and wave power density in the coastal United States. NREL incorporated the data into a new marine and hydrokinetic energy section in its U.S. Renewable Resource atlas.

The DOE said it now plans to release additional resource assessments for ocean current, ocean thermal gradients, and new hydropower resources in 2012.

Source

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced plans to introduce a tax on financial transactions.

The 0.1% levy will be introduced in August regardless of whether other European countries follow suit.

The tax is part of a package of measures set out by the president to promote growth and create jobs.

Mr Sarkozy faces a presidential election in April, but is currently trailing in the opinion polls behind his Socialist rival, Francois Hollande.

In an interview with French television, Mr Sarkozy said he hoped the tax would push other countries to take action.

“What we want to do is create a shockwave and set an example that there is absolutely no reason why those who helped bring about the crisis shouldn’t pay to restore the finances,” he said.

“We hope the tax will generate one billion euros ($1.3bn, £0.8bn) of new income and and thus cut our budget deficit.”

Mr Sarkozy gave no further details on the tax, but a government source later told Reuters news agency it would target shares and not bonds.

Read the rest here.

Submitted by Tyler Durden

On the three month bankruptcy anniversary of the company whose rehypothecation gimmicks will one day be seen as a harbinger of everything that is  broken with the multi-trillion ponzi system, but not just yet despite loud warnings otherwise, we are getting close to a final verdict of where the $1.2 billion (and possibly more as originally predicted by Zero Hedge – see below) in commingled client money may have gone. Note the use of the passive voice because using the active, as in money that MF Global executives stole from clients, is prohibited in a legal system in which nobody goes to jail for something as modest as $1.2 billion in theft. That verdict? “Vaporized.”

Read the rest here.

Joe Weisenthal

Well actually the weekend has been over for awhile now, but yes, the tone is negative to start the week.

Many markets are down over 0.5%, including US futures, and Japan’s Nikkei, which is shown here.

By DINNY MCMAHON

BEIJING—For generations, Chinese men looking for a dose of vigor have sworn by a traditional remedy: fungus harvested from dead caterpillars, known in some quarters these days as Himalayan Viagra.

Now Chinese investors are using the rare fungus to try to boost something else—their investment returns. The fungus has doubled in price over the past two years and the top grade now fetches more than $11,500 a pound, according to Fuzhou-based brokerage firm Industrial Securities.

With Chinese stocks falling, real-estate markets flat and bank deposits offering measly returns, Chinese investors have been looking for help in strange places. Besides traditional medicinal products, they are plowing money into art-based stock markets, homegrown liquors, mahogany furniture and jade, among other decidedly non-Western asset classes.

Read the rest here.

By SUSAN EDELMAN

Last Updated: 8:31 AM, January 29, 2012

Hell no, he won’t go.

In a defiant raspberry to the city Department of Education — and taxpayers — disgraced teacher Alan Rosenfeld, 66, won’t retire.

Deemed a danger to kids, the typing teacher with a $10 million real estate portfolio hasn’t been allowed in a classroom for more than a decade, but still collects $100,049 a year in city salary — plus health benefits, a growing pension nest egg, vacation and sick pay.

Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo can call for better teacher evaluations until they’re blue-faced, but Rosenfeld and six peers with similar gigs costing about $650,000 a year in total salaries are untouchable. Under a system shackled by protections for tenured teachers, they can’t be fired, the DOE says.

(Reuters) – Delivery trucks wear out, computers break down, software becomes outdated — and finally businesses have to start investing in new equipment. Companies that want to remain competitive have to start spending again as an economy slowly recovers.

Four years after the downturn began, the replacement cycle shows signs of kicking into a higher gear in the United States even among small businesses, and it could give an unexpected boost to growth and employment this year.

Read the rest here.

By Angela Monaghan, and Richard Fletcher, Davos

12:44PM GMT 28 Jan 2012

Henry Blodget and Ben Walsh

I spoke with Yale professor Robert Shiller in Davos earlier this week.

Shiller has correctly identified (in advance) two major price bubbles in recent decades–the stock market bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the late 2000s.

One of the key attributes of most bubbles is that, when they finally burst, prices tend to “overshoot” on the downside, crashing well below fair value until all the exuberance is wrung out of the system.

So is that what’s going to happen to house prices this time? Or, as many people think, are house prices finally “bottoming” and getting reader to blast higher again?

by CalculatedRisk on 1/29/2012 02:11:00 PM

According to the deptofnumbers.com for monthly inventory (54 metro areas), listed inventory is probably back to early 2005 levels. Unfortunately the deptofnumbers only started tracking inventory in April 2006.

This graph shows the NAR estimate of existing home inventory through December (left axis) and the HousingTracker data for the 54 metro areas through January.

Read the rest here.

Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years

By David Rose

Last updated at 5:38 AM on 29th January 2012

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

A painting, dated 1684, by Abraham Hondius depicts one of many frost fairs on the River Thames during the mini ice age

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.

According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a  92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.

However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.

Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible – because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun’s output is likely to decrease until 2100, ‘This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.’ Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: ‘Our findings suggest  a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.’

These findings are fiercely disputed by other solar experts.

‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’

He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.

CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.

So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.

‘The ten-year projection remains groundbreaking science. The period for the original projection is not over yet,’ he said.

Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000 until now’.

‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said.

He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the  Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.

‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’.

She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years .

Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997.

The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.

‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’

Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

Source

By STEPHEN MOORE

One Sunday afternoon last spring, as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was working in his front yard, a car rolled slowly by and blared its horn. He and his two teenage sons looked up to see two middle fingers directed their way as the car screeched down the street. A few minutes later another car rolled by and a voice shouted “Hey governor!” Mr. Walker reluctantly looked up—to find two thumbs up coming through the open window.

No American politician had a more polarizing effect on voters last year than Scott Walker. This time last year, thousands of irate protesters were occupying Wisconsin’s state Capitol, comparing Mr. Walker to Hitler for trying to reform the pension and collective-bargaining systems of public-employee unions. He needed an entourage of 25 security officers to escort him through the building at the height of the pandemonium.

Now he faces what he predicts will be his most bruising fight of all: a union-funded recall election intended to toss him out of office. His opponents last week submitted one million signatures to trigger a recall election as early as spring or summer. Mr. Walker expects this to be a $70 million brawl—a record for Wisconsin and twice the total spent in the 2010 governor’s race. Smiling, Mr. Walker says he hopes to be the “first governor re-elected twice during his first term.”

The stakes here “go well beyond who will be governor of Wisconsin,” Mr. Walker explains. The recall’s ultimate objective is to intimidate any official across the country who’s thinking of crossing swords with the empire of teachers and other public-employee unions. “This is about killing reform initiatives in every state in the country,” says Mr. Walker.

In Wisconsin, the evidence is mounting that Mr. Walker hasn’t brought economic Armageddon but financial stability. Last year’s $3 billion deficit is now a $300 million surplus—and it was accomplished without the new taxes that unions favored. “If a business is failing, you don’t raise the prices on your customers,” Mr. Walker scoffs.

In addition to union reform, Mr. Walker and his allies in the legislature passed a statewide school voucher program, eased business regulation, and enacted tort reform. When Illinois raised its income taxes by 67%, he launched a PR campaign urging Illinois businesses to “escape to Wisconsin.”

When Mr. Walker took office, a survey of major business owners by the state’s Chamber of Commerce found that only 10% thought Wisconsin was heading “in the right direction.” Now 94% say it is. Chief Executive magazine found that Wisconsin’s business climate in 2011 showed the greatest one-year improvement of any state in the history of the magazine’s ratings. After bleeding 150,000 jobs in the previous three years, Wisconsin added 10,000 jobs in 2011.

All this matters little to public-employee unions looking to regain their perks. Yet granting local governments the legal authority to hire and fire teachers and other workers based on merit—as well as requiring teachers to contribute 5.8% into their pensions (up from 0%) and all public employees to pay 12.6% of their health-care premiums (about half what most private workers pay)—has already saved local governments $475 million.

Rather than assaulting government workers, these reforms avoided mass layoffs and allowed school districts to maintain and in some cases even reduce class sizes. You’d think unions would celebrate this, but no such luck.

Mr. Walker believes the union brass are most furious about his policy to stop automatically withholding union dues from the paychecks of approximately 300,000 municipal workers. He calculates that this “paycheck protection” measure saves as much as $1,400 annually for those workers who freely choose not to pay dues. That welcome pay raise for the workers has been catastrophic for the union bosses. Without the mandatory dues payments, the teachers union had to lay off 40% of its staff last year.

So now Mr. Walker, his lieutenant governor and four state senators will face the voters as early as this spring or summer. Last year a similar effort targeted four other GOP state senators and a Republican on the state supreme court. After unions spent millions on the campaign, two of the state senators were recalled but that failed to flip control of the legislature, and the supreme court justice kept his seat.

A problem for Democrats this year is finding an A-list candidate willing to run against Mr. Walker if he is recalled. A strong opponent could be Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, but the unions are furious with him too for implementing many of the Walker union reforms—saving his city $25 million and balancing its budget in the process. The likeliest candidates to challenge Mr. Walker are two liberals, former Congressman David Obey and Madison County Executive Kathleen Falk.

A new nonpartisan poll by Marquette University shows the governor at 50% job approval (with 45% disapproving), which is up from as low as 37% last summer. Even some of his most loyal followers say that he has never fully explained to Wisconsinites why ending collective bargaining for union benefits was a fiscal necessity. And local Democrats are smelling blood over a recent mini-scandal involving alleged embezzlement of public funds by two of Mr. Walker’s top aides when he was Milwaukee County Commissioner.

Still, the national unions have yet to decide whether spending another $30 million or $50 million on a recall roll of the dice is worth it given the higher priority of getting President Obama re-elected. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which has been severely critical of Mr. Walker’s power play, recently acknowledged that he has fulfilled his pledge of balancing the budget without new taxes and that “the sky isn’t falling.”

If unions succeed in getting voters to evict reformers, it could “set back the conservative reform agenda across the states for a generation,” Mr. Walker warns. This might be the most important nonpresidential election in a decade.

Source

Dominique Doms

Greece plans an orderly exit out of the Eurozone according to two sources close to Mr. Papademos, Greek Prime Minister, who spoke on condition of anonymity earlier today.

The sources confirmed that plans are ready to return to a legacy currency given the current circumstances and that such exit would be dealt with, quote “in as orderly a fashion as possible” unquote.

The plan does not come as a surprise but the timing may be surprising to most members and investors while negotiations about a severe haircut with the IIF are still ongoing.

Last year’s announcement by Mr. Papandreou, former Prime Minister, that a referendum would be held to decide whether or not to stay in the Eurozone may have set the precedent for developing a plan that apparently will be set in motion.

The stalemate in negotiations about the depth of the haircut on some of the outstanding Greek sovereign debt, said to be capped at 65-70% while Greece is looking for more concessions, may have set things in motion as the ultimate alternative.

Analysis by Jennifer Ouellette

Fusion Power?

It also bodes ill for the prospect of fusion using helium-3, a rare helium isotope that is missing a neutron. Physicists have yet to achieve pure helium-3 fusion, but if they did, we’d have a clean, virtually infinite power source. Or so the theory goes.

And that’s where the moon comes in. The moon’s lunar soil is chock-full of helium reserves, thanks to the solar wind. In fact, every star emits helium constantly, suggesting that one day, spaceships will carry on a brisk import and export trade to harvest this critical element — assuming we can figure out how to make such a process economically viable.

But helium-3 isn’t the only resource the moon might have to offer. It could also be a source for rare earth elements, such as europium and tantalum, which are in high demand on Earth for electronics and green energy applications (solar panels, hybrid cars), as well as being used in the space and defense industries.

China is the largest exporter of rare earth elements, but there are growing concerns over supply vulnerability as China drastically reduces its rare earth exports. Scientists know that there are pockets or rare earth deposits on the moon, but as yet they don’t have detailed maps of those areas. Potassium, phosphorus and thorium are other elements that lunar rocks have to offer a potential mining venture.

Lunar Prospecting?

And there’s more! In 2009, NASA bombed the moon — part of its Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission — and observed grains of water ice in the remnants of the resulting plume, as well as light metals such as sodium and mercury, and volatile compounds like methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrogen. This implies that the moon is chemically active — via a process called “cold grain chemistry” — and also has a water cycle. Where you have water ice, you have a potential mother lode for lunar prospecting of hydrogen.

Of course, we’re talking about huge capital expenditures just to set up a mining base camp on the moon, and the economies of scale might not be there. If the benefits don’t outweigh the costs, we might never see bona fide lunar prospecting. But it’s a possibility that the US — not to mention China — is taking very seriously.

Read the rest here.