Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Those Bastards at GE

There can hardly be a more frightening person to be President Obama's pet CEO than GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt. Yet, that is exactly who has the President's ear at the White House.

It is becoming apparent that GE, rather than "bringing good things to life", has a unique ability to cozy up to government, massage regulations and bring dangerous toxins into our lives---and I mean seriously dangerous.

NYT now tells us about the containment vessels at the damaged nuclear power plants in Japan are manufactured by GE:
...the type of containment vessel and pressure suppression system used in the failing reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant — and in 23 American reactors at 16 plants — is physically less robust, and it has long been thought to be more susceptible to failure in an emergency than competing designs.

G.E. began making the Mark 1 boiling water reactors in the 1960s, marketing them as cheaper and easier to build — in part because they used a comparatively smaller and less expensive containment structure.
GE is also heavily involved with the new CFL light bulbs we will all be forced to buy starting in 2014. According to a footnote to a Tim Carney piece on GE, and do note that this type footnote means GE corporates got to Carney, or his paper, to tone down what was in Carney's column. But look at the dirt that was left in the "tone down":

The original version of this article stated that GE "lobbied to kill the incandescent bulb." This was imprecise. In 2007 GE opposed proposals to explicitly outlaw incandescents. Instead, the company advocated simply setting efficiency standards for all bulbs, regardless of what type of bulb. This had the known effect of outlawing all traditional incandescents, but leaving open the possibility of high-efficiency incandescents.
Bottom line: Setting aside the weasel words that GE likely demanded be amended to the column, GE for all practical purposes was for the new CFL bulbs (which they manufacture) that killed the incandescents.

So what is the big deal about the new bulbs, aside from the fact that they are more expensive and some question whether they really are more efficient? According to Congressman Ted Poe, the EPA requires you to evacuate children and everyone else from a room where you break one of these light bulbs, then open windows to ventilate the room for 15 minutes, and leave the room yourself. You see these wonderful new bulbs contain the very poisonous element mercury.

Concerns about mercury's toxicity have led to mercury thermometers and sphygmomanometers being largely phased out in clinical environments. Yet, the bastards at GE advocated "efficiency standards" that will result in us all having these mercury micro-dirty bombs in all rooms of  our houses.

Great stuff you are bringing to life, there, GE.

15 comments:

  1. Somebody in the gallery of the House Chambers at the Capitol should lob a CFL down by the podium. I'd be interested in watching exactly what those bastards do.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The GE junk failed, the ceo should be over here carrying buckets of water to cool the rods down.

    ReplyDelete
  3. They've never been out of the holocaust business.

    ReplyDelete
  4. We won't have to use the CFL bulbs. I'm pretty sure I saw some intensive research into LED's the last time I toured the GE Research Center. So, bad press for the CFL's is no problem for them. They're two steps ahead!

    I remember when I worked there, I couldn't understand how a company could have such a dysfunctional culture and still compete in the marketplace. (Imagination at Work it is not!) Now that I understand how corporatism works, it makes more sense.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Just because they are banned doesn't mean you
    have to use the CFL's. First just order a
    lifetime supply while they are still available.
    I just ordered 1,000 of them wholesale at about
    $.40 each Second they are easy enough to make.
    You can buy tungsten wire, you can buy the
    sockets , you can buy small vacuum flasks and
    you can buy both argon and nitrogen. They may
    not be pretty but functionally real easy to
    make with some epoxy and a small vacuum pump.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I work for GE it's the most unorganized and crappy company I have ever worked for.Sure I will not be there much longer.Management is shitty and the work force and the poeple that work there have shitty credentials and plus GE pays a shitty wage even for specialized highly skilled individuals as myself.

      Delete
  6. Vaccines that haven't been injected into your children have to be disposed of in hazardous waste dumps because of the mercury, suckers.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "the type of containment vessel and pressure suppression system used in the failing reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant — and in 23 American reactors at 16 plants — is physically less robust, and it has long been thought to be more susceptible to failure in an emergency than competing designs."
    Jct: But it's cheaper! Think about it. Every nuclear reactor was built by the lowest bidder! Har har har har. The malfunction in the Rothschild usury mort-gage death-gamble money system is going to claim a lot more victims.

    ReplyDelete
  8. This meltdown problem threatens the world. Help could come in the form of people who are terminally ill or from healthy people who want to die and are willing to go in and do some task to help in areas with high radiation. There are probably many of these types of people. Perhaps the families of these "sacrificial workers" could be paid handsomely in exchange for the efforts of these people.

    Just a thought. Otherwise possibly millions of innocent people who do not want to die may die because this idea wasn't used.

    ReplyDelete
  9. People are dying in our neighborhood by the thousands from CFL. Yup. Stackin' 'em like cord wood. :)

    ReplyDelete
  10. I worked there briefly and recently. It is amazing they're still in business, considering the awful communication channels, the limpid response to customers they allegedly support, and more attention paid to corporate jingoism, jargon and other crap than actually running a business.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Not the stupid lightbulbs again. You had such a good story going and then you discredited yourself with BigCoal's cfl propaganda. Idiots.

    ReplyDelete
  12. General Electric...headed by MorganRockefeller shills...helped subsidize the collectivization of the US, the installation of Soviet Socialism in Russian and socialism in postWW1 Germany then the NATIONAL Socialism of NAZI Germany...until the end of war.

    The Private State Synthesis..ably exemplified by GE and its activities...and profits...is quite insidious and has a "good" track record of building, operating and MANAGING collectivism for over a hundred years..and they're BIPARTISAN too!...

    The private/public sector "cooperation" was best described by Mussolini and his speechwriters..only theirs was in Italian.

    ReplyDelete
  13. The end of the incandescent light is not GE's fault for gosh sakes. There is an international competition that ends in 2014 seeking to find CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lights) that have a similar color efficacy as well offer the same full spectrum lighting as incancesdents. This article is an uninformed rant.

    ReplyDelete
  14. GE Trio Quit in 1970s Over Japan Reactor Design, ABC Says

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-15/ge-staff-quit-in-1970s-over-design-in-japan-reactor-abc-says.html

    General Electric Co. (GE)’s design for a nuclear reactor at a damaged Japanese power plant spurred the 1970s resignation of three employees over concern that its core might not withstand the loss of cooling systems in a severe accident, ABC News reported.

    ReplyDelete