edit: changed title from ‘False Fukushima Fears’ to ‘Exaggerated Fukushima Fears’, sacrificing my lovely alliteration as others have pointed out that it would be too much to say that the fears of radiation leakages are unfounded, but merely to say that this is the least bad option given previous precedent as cynesthesia has pointed out.
Image is of the large array of water storage tanks holding the tritium-contaminated water.
This week’s preamble is very kindly provided by our beautiful poster @[email protected], with some light editing. In periods where not much of earth-shattering importance is happening in the news, I hope to do this more often!
In 2011, the Fukushima nuclear incident occurred. Since then, water has been used to cool radioactive waste and debris, which contaminates the water with radioactive isotopes. Currently, TEPCO, the Japanese energy company that is reponsible to Fukushima, is storing about 1.3 million m3 of contaminated water (equivalent to about 500 Olympic swimming pools for our American friends) in about 1000 tanks. Approximately 100,000 m3 of contaminated cooling water is generated per year to this day. TEPCO doesn’t want to store escalating volumes of nuclear waste for decades until half-lives are spent. This would mean adding substantial storage capacity every year at increased cost and risk of tank spills.
The contaminated water includes heavier isotopes like caesium as well as hydrogen’s isotope, tritum. Caesium is a big atom at 137 molar mass (we love our tremendous atoms, folks) while tritium is heavy hydrogen and has only a molar mass of 3 (pathetic, low energy). The TEPCO people are using water treatment to remove heavy isotopes from water, but not tritium. The large adult isotopes are easy to remove with treatment but tritium is incorporated into water, so it blends in with the others. The treated Fukushima water contains low levels of the big isotopes but still contains tritium.
Isotopes release radiation that damages the body’s cells. The longer an individual molecule containing an isotope is in a body, the more likely it is that the isotope will go BRAZAP and release radiation that fucks up the cells. Bioaccumulation is a toxicology term for how certain contaminants can accumulate in the food cycle. For example, algae eat contaminants, then the algae is eaten by bugs, then bugs by fish, then fish by people. Isotopes that are bioaccumulative like our large adult son caesium are more hazardous. Tritium is not bioaccumulative because it is effectively part of water. Water cycles through bodies quickly - that’s why you sweat and pee and get thirsty. 
Fukushima water would be treated and then then mixed with seawater at a ratio of 1:800 before it is pumped 1km offshore. Each year approximately 166,000 m3 of treated water will be released, which will draw down the volume of contaminated water being stored over a few decades. Real-time stats associated with the release are found here. At the point of discharge, water contains about 207 Bq/L of radioactivity, about 16 times greater than the 10-15 Bq/L background level in the ocean overall. Drinking water guidelines for tritium radioactivity range from 1,000-10,000 Bq/L, if one were to drink seawater.
In wastewater treatment terms, this is a small amount of dilution in a very large body of water. It is unlikely to have any measurable impact per the terms of Western science. In the context of mother nature taking yet another one for the team and environmental distress, this sucks. In the context of making the best of a shitty situation, the Fukushima water release is peanuts compared to the many other environmental liabilities that are not addressed. For example, the Hanford Site is an example of a nuclear wastewater storage facility gone/going wrong in Oregon.
Ending note by 72: By far the biggest impact of the release of this water won’t be its direct effects, but those on commerce and international relations. Almost half of Japanese aquatic exports go to China, comprising 8% of all Japanese firms shipping goods to China, and they have now been cut off due to their anger at Japan. Perhaps this reaction and the cancellation of imports was inevitable, as nuclear power and radiation in general is a poorly understood, frightening, and thus easily exploitable topic in every country. China is not the first country to use a misunderstanding of radiation risk to try and achieve a goal - Germany seems very pleased with itself - and they will not be the last.
In all: it is unequivocal that China is massively exaggerating the risks of this water’s release. However, the bellicose rhetoric and actions of Japan, South Korea, and America are a much greater danger to the region, and none of the three seem to be in any hurry to try diplomacy instead of increasing military budgets and gearing up for war.
It’s that time again - every two months I give myself a week off, to rest and recalibrate. Your regularly scheduled programming will resume next week.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week’s discussion post.
Dear newschads,
Can you please help me explain to a lemmytor why competition is bad. I do not have the time right now, or the sources, and I could always use more theory. Here is the link.
I think this might help
by aimixin
This hits at one of the core flaws of libertarianism. They tend to hold as a core axiom that competitive markets and free markets are one in the same, i.e. that the “natural state” of the markets are highly competitive, and if there is a lack of competition, it must be an “unnatural state”, i.e. there is some sort of top-down interference, government policies, which restrict competition.
Libertarians thus see cronyism as happening from the top-down, where governments interfere with the markets, create monopolies, and all for the purpose of enriching themselves. Hence, they conclude the problem is government, that you have to get rid of government and then the problems will be solved.
This is the direct opposite view of Marxists. Marxists instead argue that markets inherently lead to a gradual increase in monopolization over time, what Marx referred to as the “laws of the concentration and centralization of capitals”, and that market economies have a natural tendency to move more and more away from competition over time.
More than this, Marxists also see political power as not ultimately originating from the superstructure of society (the politics), but instead from the base of society (the economics). Any government policy requires enforcement, but any enforcement inherently presupposes an economic system which can produce tools of enforcement and allocate them appropriately to the enforcers. Politics is inherently derivative of economics.
The reason the political system favors the wealthy is not because of some laws implemented by some evil cabal that if they were just abolished, then capitalism would “work”. No, the reason the political system favors the wealthy is because the wealthy are the ones who control society’s wealth, and so of course the political system will favor them.
No law you write on a piece of paper will make a billionaire like Jeff Bezos have equal political influence as a minimum wage worker barely making ends meet. Production is the most fundamental basis of human society and those who control production control society’s wealth and will inevitably have more influence. Even if you write laws saying bribery is illegal then they can just bribe those who enforce it.
Hence, Marxists do not see cronyism as a result of top-down processes implemented by a corrupt superstructure, by some evil cabal within the government that corrupted “true capitalism” and turned it into cronyism.
Rather, Marxists see cronyism as originating from a bottom-up process, that stems from the economic base in and of itself. Markets inevitably lead over time to greater and greater monopolization, creating a larger and larger gap between the working masses and the capitalists, and even if there is a “rising tide” and workers’ wages rise as well, the profits of capital increase disproportionality faster, and capital continues to centralize rapidly, leading to an increasing social chasm between the rich and the poor.
This is why libertarianism/conservatism has never worked in history and will never work. They can’t get rid of “big government” because the economic base, capitalism, inherently creates an enormous social divide, enormous polarization in the economy. This enormous wealth inequality naturally translates to power inequality, which then allows the capitalists to capture the state for their interests.
Once the capitalists capture the state, there is no reason for them not to implement “big government” but for their own benefit, i.e. corporate bailouts and subsidies and such. Libertarian policies, hence, in practice, always lead to “big government”. Never in human history have they actually achieved their goals, because their goals are fundamentally impossible and self-contradictory.
Another separate point is that these people also have a tendency to water down what “capitalism” means. Capitalism is about capital, that’s why it’s called capitalism. This refers to a specific kind of society dominated by capital, i.e. production for profit. Libertarians like water down “capitalism” to refer specifically just to trade or markets, but capitalism is not tradeism or marketism. It’s capitalism. Pre-capitalist economies have had trade and markets and so have socialist economies.
Because it is unprofitable. Sooner or later competitors will realize cooperation is more profitable overall. That is why unions are strong and big companies are not really competing
In the idealized capitalism that Adam Smith described several hundred years ago, you had hundreds and thousands of small cottage industries employing maybe a small number of workers, and in fact most workers at this time were still peasant farmers largely existing in a pre-capitalist economy so Adam Smith was describing the relatively small group of relatively skilled workers such as hat makers or bakers etc that had a particular skill meaning he was mostly describing only one part of the economy where the workers had bargaining power.
He contrasted the bargaining power of skilled workers with the lack of bargaining power that unskilled workers who lacked access to land had, and he was in fact very critical of the social ills of capitalism in much the same way that those other great economists Ricardo and Marx were. So that’s problem #1 with competition, it’s a Darwinian struggle for survival where the economically-strong can and do crush the economically-weak. A pure capitalist economy is the law of the jungle, and the jungle is full of predators who crush the defenseless.
Problem #2 with competition is what developed after the time of Adam Smith. We no longer live in a world where the markets are dominated by small business. We exist in a world where an extremely small number of corporations control the economy and those corporations are mostly owned by an extremely small fraction of society. Meaning this much vaunted “competition” is between a few hundred individuals who have real economic power and everyone else is just fighting for the scraps.
Problem #2 with completion is that over time the law of the jungle operates in a Darwinian fashion and the enterprises most able to survive are usually the biggest. The corporations with the largest production will benefit most from economies of scale. The corporations with the most money will be able to outspend or buy out their competitors. The corporations with the most influence will be able to influence politics by bribing or lobbying politicians for special favors. The law of the jungle means the strongest survive and in the evolutionary context of a capitalist market economy that means bigger and bigger corporations.
Problem #2 of competition is that it tends towards monopoly (or comfortable cartel duopoly / oligopoly) over time since that is the equilibrium state of capitalism.
That is to say, over the long term a competitive market economy has a strong evolutionary pressure to evolve towards an economy dominated by a tiny handful of corporations who dominate everything, so you end up with no or little competition anyway which means the social costs of crushing so many people at the alter of “competitiveness” wasn’t worth it anyway. It’s self-defeating since the mathematics of competition, the mathematics of game theory applied to a capitalist “free market”, result in an uncompetitive economy anyway.
And if the mathematical game theory argument is hard to grasp then I suggest you simply look out your window, because I’m describing the economy we currently got, the product of “capitalist competition” is when it’s borderline impossible not to consume food created by Nestle, etc. “Competition” as an ideal is self-defeating due to its Darwinian nature.
Problem #3 with competition is that it is less efficient than planning when that planning is performed by competent technocrats. We have historial examples:
Ultimately the two greatest economic success stories of the 20th century were:
That is to say the two outstanding economic performers of the 20th century were
And look at the failure of western “lassaiz faire” capitalism. It’s a complete joke to say our economy isn’t planned, just look at the trillions and trillions of dollars directed by central banks to keep the system working. Our economies are largely planned in the west these days, our most important sectors such as banking and major manufacturing are very close to government. The issue is was pretend they’re not planned and so allow the capitalist class to cream off the top.
this is fucking golden
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Poggers
time:
, competition ends at a certain point , somebody wins … its a saying that has its own negation in it, if ever once applied to the most basic fact of reality: Time moving on .