GENERAL ELECTRIC - Everything you wanted to know about . . .

[Oscar]

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT GENERAL ELECTRIC

GE, World's Largest Corporation, Paid Zero Dollars in U.S. Taxes Last Year

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/
540426/ge%2C_world%27s_largest_corporation%2C_paid_zero_dollars_in_u.s._taxes_last_year/#paragraph6

By Lauren Kelley | Sourced from 358
Posted at March 25, 2011, 9:36 am
You know how we've been covering the efforts of U.S. Uncut, the growing campaign to stop corporate tax dodgers from exploiting overseas tax havens? Well here's an excellent example of why such efforts are desperately needed, from the front page of the New York Times: General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
How can that be, you ask?
The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.
Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.
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Not only did GE not pay any taxes in the U.S. last year, it effectively got money back from the U.S. government.
But wait, there's more! ThinkProgress dug up a speech given by GE CEO Jeffery Immelt at West Point in 2009. Titled "Renewing American Leadership," the speech contains a rather ironic take-down of corporate greed:

Few of us will ever do what many of you will do for duty, honor and country. But America doesn’t expect heroism from all of us. [...] Wherever our talents lie, and whenever our conscience requires, we must all, to the best of our abilities, help keep America the great face for good it has long been. We are trying to do that at GE. [...]

I think we are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership, and maybe leadership in general. Tough-mindedness, a good trait – was replaced by meanness and greed – both terrible traits. Rewards became perverted. The richest people made the most mistakes with the least accountability.
And Immelt dared give that speech to the nation's future military leaders -- a group that knows a thing or two about true sacrifice.
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HAZARDS OF BOILING WATER REACTORS IN THE UNITED STATES

http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/bwrfact.htm

BACKGROUND

Of the 104 operational nuclear power reactors in the United States, thirty-five are boiling water reactors (BWR). General Electric is the sole designer and manufacturer of BWRs in the United States. The BWR's distinguishing feature is that the reactor vessel serves as the boiler for the nuclear steam supply system. The steam is generated in the reactor vessel by the controlled fissioning of enriched uranium fuel which passes directly to the turbogenerator to generate electricity.
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Here are copies of the three original AEC memos, including Hendrie's:

November 11, 1971:
outlines problems with the design and pressure suppression system containment.
http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/
19711117-hanauer-memo-bwr-pressure-suppression-containment.pdf

September 20, 1971:
memo from Steven Hanauer recommends that U.S. stop licensing reactors using pressure suppression system
http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/
19720920-hanauer-memo-pressure-suppression-containments.pdf

September 25, 1972:
memo from Joseph Hendrie (top safety official at AEC) agrees with recommendation but rejects it saying it "could well mean the end of nuclear power..."
http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/
19720925-hendrie-pressure-suppression-concerns-end-of-nucl~1.pdf

MORE:
http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/bwrfact.htm

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Fukushima Reactors Designed By General Electric Also Used In U.S. Have Serious Design Flaws (See articles below…Ed.)

http://stretchingminds.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/
fukushima-reactors-designed-by-general-electric-also-used-used-in-u-s-have-serious-design-flaws/

March 15, 2011
The jest of the design flaws, and implications for U.S. reactors, is this. An earthquake is not needed for this to happen, only a failure of some sort.
The design of the Fukushima reactors was also used in 23 nuclear plants operating in the US in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont.
There is no way to vent the hydrogen gas during a reactor failure. This is what caused generator buildings to explode in Fukushima.
This design also features huge pools of waste water high up in the containment building that hold huge amounts of old radioactive material. Robert Alvarez, a former nuclear energy adviser to President Bill Clinton says if just one reactor fails it can release several times the amount of radiation as was released at Chernobyl because each pool contains 5 to 10 times as much material as the reactor itself.
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Nuclear Reactor Design Caused GE Scientists To Quit In Protest

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/490/400/
Nuclear_Reactor_Design_Caused_GE_Scientist_To_Quit_In_Protest.html

March 17, 2011
Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing -- the Mark 1 -- was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.
Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power, and today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday's earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark 1s.
"The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant," Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. "The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release."
The situation on the ground at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is so fluid, and the details of what is unfolding are so murky, that it may be days or even weeks before anyone knows how the Mark 1 containment system performed in the face of a devastating combination of natural disasters.
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The Idiocy and Hubris of Engineers: Will GE Get Whacked for the Catastrophic Failure of its Nuk Plants in Fukushira?

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/509

Mon, 03/14/2011 – 12:44 by: Dave Lindorff
GE, the company that boasts that it “brings good things to life,” was the designer of the nuclear plants that are blowing up like hot popcorn kernels at the Fukushima Dai-ichi generating plant north of Tokyo that was hit by the double-whammy of an 8.9 earthquake and a huge tsunami.
The company may escape tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in liability from this continuing disaster, which could still result in a catastrophic total meltdown of one or more of the reactors (as of this writing three of the reactors are reported to have suffered partial meltdowns, and all could potentially become more serious total meltdowns with a rupture of the reactor container), thanks to Japanese law, which makes the operator–in this case Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) liable. But if it were found that it was design flaws by GE that caused the problem, presumably TEPCO or the Japanese government could pursue GE for damages.
In fact, the design of these facilities–a design which, it should be noted, was also used in 23 nuclear plants operating in the US in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont–appear to have included serious flaws, from a safety perspective. [ . . . ]

Related Story:
http://www.vancouverobserver.com/world/asia/
2011/03/15/japan-spent-fuel-rods-pose-danger-worse-chernobyl

[Oscar]

NIRS: Calls for Permanent Shutdown of 23 US General Electric Mark-I Reactors - Same Design as Fukushima

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/03/22-20

Calls Design Flaws Fundamental--Cannot Be Fixed

A list of the 23 US GE Mark I reactors is here:
http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/
gemk1reactorsinus.pdf

WASHINGTON - March 22 - Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) has launched a new campaign to permanently close the 23 General Electric Mark I reactors currently operating in the United States.

More than 3800 people have sent letters to President Obama, Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in support of permanent shutdown just since Saturday afternoon (March 19), when a website was first set up to encourage such letters:

(http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/550 ... on/public/
?action_KEY=6111).

The action was added on Monday to Change.org:
http://www.change.org/petitions/
its-time-demand-permanent-shutdown-of-ge-mark-i-reactors-in-the-us#?opt_new=f&opt_fb=f

“For nearly 40 years, top U.S. safety officials at the Atomic Energy Commission and later the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have warned about the safety shortcomings of the GE Mark I design,” said Michael Mariotte, executive director of NIRS. “A 1972 recommendation that the U.S. stop licensing the design was accepted on technical grounds but denied by the AEC’s top safety official, Joseph Hendrie, because it ‘could very well be the end of nuclear power.’ In 1986 Harold Denton, then the top safety official at the NRC, warned that Mark I containments have a 90% probability of failing under accident conditions.”

Despite these warnings, the NRC has not only allowed these reactors to continue operating, 21 of the 23 already have received license renewals to operate an additional 20 years, including the highly controversial Vermont Yankee reactor yesterday. There was no examination of the fundamental design flaws during the renewal application process for any of these 21 reactors, as the issue is considered generic and only site-specific issues are allowed to be heard in the license renewal process.

Yesterday, a federal appeals court (Third Circuit) ruled that the NRC must "advise the court what impact, if any, the damages from the earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station have on the propriety of granting the license renewal application for the Oyster Creek Generating Station." The Oyster Creek renewal has been challenged by a coalition of New Jersey and national organizations. See: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011 ... ar-reactor

“The world has now seen how these reactors fare in real-world accident situations,” said Mariotte. “Hydrogen and pressure builds up and the outer containment buildings explode.”

NIRS also pointed to the design flaw that places the irradiated fuel pools above the reactor core and outside the primary containment. “When the containment buildings exploded, release pathways from the irradiated fuel pools appeared,” said Mariotte. “And the explosions might not have merely exposed the fuel pools, but damaged them as well, allowing the loss of water and subsequent release of radiation.”

An explanation of the technical flaws of the Mark I design, along with links to three Atomic Energy Commission memos from 1971-72 is available here: http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/bwrfact.htm

After the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the NRC closed several reactors of the same Babcock & Wilcox design for several months until lessons learned from the accident were understood and design and operational changes were made. “While a similar shutdown would obviously be prudent,” said Mariotte, “the reality is that the design flaws of the Mark I’s are already well-known. The problem is that they are fundamental to the design and cannot be fixed short of actually rebuilding the reactor.”

The 23 Mark I reactors have a total capacity of about 20,000 Megawatts, or a little less than 20% of total U.S. nuclear capacity. In 2010, according to a March 2011 report from the Energy Information Administration, nuclear power provided about 19.5% of the nation’s electricity. Thus, the Mark I’s provide less than four percent of U.S. electricity.

“There is more than ample reserve capacity to make up for loss of the Mark I’s,” said Mariotte. “These reactors are older and their construction costs have mostly been paid off by the utilities, so they may be cash cows for their owners. But Americans shouldn’t have to live in a very rational fear of a Fukushima here simply so utilities can accumulate massive profits. It doesn’t take an earthquake to cause a loss of offsite power to a reactor; a myriad of factors can do that. Americans are not protected from that kind of situation.”

The campaign to close the Mark I’s will not be limited to the letter-writing website. Next steps being considered include rallies and protests, administrative actions before the NRC, and possible legal action.

A list of the 23 US GE Mark I reactors is here:
http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/
gemk1reactorsinus.pdf

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