Toshiba says it may write down nuclear business, U.S. units probed
Source: Reuters
Japan's Toshiba Corp (6502.T) said on Friday it was looking at whether it would need to write down its nuclear business given damage to the company's credit profile after a $1.3 billion accounting scandal last year.
The electronics conglomerate also confirmed a report that U.S. authorities are probing accounting at its U.S. units, although its Westinghouse nuclear power subsidiary denied that its finances were under investigation.
Wanting to draw a line under the accounting scandal, Toshiba has sought to move on to streamlining its businesses, whose poor performances had been masked by years of false bookkeeping.
At a business strategy update on Friday, it unveiled an extra 3,000 job cuts, taking its planned total to 14,000 - a restructuring measure that comes on top of a $5.9 billion sale of its medical equipment unit as well as the sale of its home appliances business announced this week.
<snip>
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-idUSKCN0WK02J
Wilms
(26,795 posts)Lost among the explosive reports about Hillary Clinton and her familys foundation on Thursday is a claim made by a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist that suggests she caught the Clinton Foundation red-handed in a lie about a meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Kazatomprom, a state-owned nuclear holding company in Kazakhstan.
But first, some context is required.
Years ago, officials with Kazatomprom were reportedly interested in taking an equity stake in Westinghouse, a U.S.-based corporation that works in the civilian nuclear field.
But, as New York Times reporter Jo Becker reported, such a deal would require review by the U.S. government. Thats where Frank Giustra, a Canadian business executive and founder of the company that would become Uranium One, entered the picture.
Giustra reportedly set up a meeting between Kazatomprom officials and Bill Clinton himself at the former presidents home in Chappaqua, New York.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/04/23/how-a-nyt-reporter-caught-clinton-foundation-in-lie-about-big-meeting-at-bill-clintons-house/
And
How Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into a machine for promoting U.S. business
On her 79th and probably last overseas trip as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton made a pit stop in the Czech Republic. One purpose of the 11-hour visit on Dec. 3, squeezed between NATO talks on the future of Afghanistan and the Syrian civil war, was to make a personal appeal to Czech Prime Minister Petr Nečas on behalf of Westinghouse Electric, which is vying for a contract to build a nuclear power plant there. The company is locked in a $10 billion bidding war with a state-owned Russian energy giant, and Clinton pressed the Czech officials about the wisdom of depending on Vladimir Putins Russia for something as essential as electricity. Westinghouse Chief Executive Danny Roderick, whos still awaiting a decision, says Clintons intervention made a big impression on the Czechs: I was proud that she was in the trenches with me.
snip
Although Clintons corporate cheerleading has won praise from business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, theres been a certain amount of resistance within the Commerce Department, says Edward Alden, a trade specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. There are concerns about why the State Department is doing this. Jake Sullivan, Clintons director of policy planning, says he hasnt heard any complaints from CEOs. None of these business leaders are saying, Wait! Youre not the Commerce Secretary. What are you doing here? (Clinton and Commerce officials say there is no tension between the agencies.)
snip
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-10/hillary-clintons-business-legacy-at-the-state-department
NNadir
(33,515 posts)...produced energy that saved lives, while Solyda, one of the myriad of failed solar companies that sucked money out of the pockets of naive investors yet didn't produce a single exajoule of energy. or even a petajoule, or even a terajoule.
The nuclear industry has suffered for years from attacks from very, very, very, very ignorant people who give not a rat's ass about the seven million people who die each year from dangerous fossil fuel waste dumped indiscriminately into the atmosphere while we all wait, like D'Estragnon waiting for Godot, for the grand solar energy fantasy to produce exajoule scale energy on a planet.
When an anti-nuke directs attention at nuclear economics, it is, as I say often, it is a case of arsonists celebrating forest fires. This is particularly amusing because of Solyndra and the other countless bankrupt scams run by the so called "renewable energy" industry the main product of the industry being security for the fossil fuel industry interests. All three dangerous fossil fuels are now being utilized at the highest rate ever observed, and the responsibility for this disaster rests solely and squarely at the feet of the purveyors of brainless anti-nuke rhetoric, and nowhere else.
It is the "nuclear exceptionalist" nonsense that is the sole reason that dangerous natural gas is the fastest growing, by far, source of energy on this planet. As a result of the stupidity, fear and ignorance directed at the nuclear industry by bombastic fools, 2015 came in as the worst year ever recorded for increases in carbon dioxide concentrations in the planetary atmosphere, even after two trillion bucks was squandered in just ten years on so called "renewable energy" while providing no result.
Sustaining the Wind Part 1 Is So Called Renewable Energy the Same as Sustainable Energy?
Carbon dioxide increases by year, in a plain easy to comprehend graphic, from the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory:
The solar and wind fantasy is working just great, just great, if you're fond of acidic seas, millions of air pollution deaths per year, scorched earth, [link:https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4259-european-heatwave-caused-35000-deaths/|tens of thousands heat wave deaths, droughts, increasing ranges for human and agricultural parasites...
Speaking of parasites, have a nice weekend.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)We do not want nuclear waste to be our legacy to generations that may follow us and may not have our scientific knowledge to deal with the nuclear industry's dangerous leftovers.
NNadir
(33,515 posts)...is, if you look into the matter = and I've been doing it on a very, very, very, very detailed level for several decades now, ever since Chernobyl blew up, everything from a consideration of the properties of cesium/barium titanates their possible utility in destroying the perfluorooctanoyl sulfonates that is now found in the breast milk of every nursing mother on the planet, to the fast neutron fission cross section of 242Pu - no such thing as "nuclear waste."
There is only fear and ignorance that transfers some of the most potentially useful material on the planet into "waste." We live in a culture having a waste mentality, a bourgeois hellhole devoid of imagination.
But let me tell you what's not imaginary. Right now dangerous fossil fuel waste is killing seven million people per year, half of them from outdoor air pollution, dangerous fossil fuel waste, the other half from indoor air pollution, mostly among the poorest people on the planet, but also recognized in places like, um, Vermont - from the combustion of "renewable" biomass.
Here, with an large consortion of international authors of research physicians, epidemiologists, health authorities, and other academic researchers is a comprehensive of all the major risk factors on this planet and the mortality that results from them:
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 19902010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010. (Lancet 2012, 380, 222460) If you're really interested in risk, you might mosey on over to a good scientific library and open the paper up. It's illuminating. For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.
Let me know if you see in that paper any reference to the storage of so called "nuclear waste."
Every seven years, right now, right here on this planet, more people die from air pollution than died from genocide, bombing, combat deaths, and other violence in World War II.
And you want to talk about what you call "nuclear waste?" Get serious. Come back to me and let me know when you've identified, in the half a century of the practice of commercial nuclear power, as many deaths from all nuclear operations that will die in the next two days from dangerous fossil fuel waste directly into humanity's favorite waste dump, the planetary atmosphere.
I note too, that dangerous fossil fuel waste accumulation in the atmosphere is driving the destruction of the planetary weather system, something so called "nuclear waste" about which people prattle endlessly, does not do.
Nuclear energy need not be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is. The practice of demonizing the form of energy invented by the finest minds of the 20th century is a crime against all future generations, an appalling crime, if one looks into it.
I explored this point elsewhere: Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come
Have a nice weekend.