For those who thought that, with the new year, nuclear power had turned a page and put its “annus horribilis” behind it–as if the calendar were somehow the friend America’s aging reactors–let’s take a quick look at January 2012.

First, a glance across the Pacific, where the month began with the revelation that the Japanese government purposely downplayed their assessments of the Fukushima disaster–hiding the worst projected scenarios from the public from soon after the March earthquake by classifying the documents as personal correspondence–and ended with discovery of yet another large leak of radioactive water from one of the crippled reactors.

Closer to home, the lone reactor at Wolf Creek, Kansas, was shutdown on January 13 after the failure of a main generator breaker was followed by a still-unexplained loss of power to an electrical transformer. Diesel generators kicked in to run the safety systems until external power was restored, but the plant remains offline while a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection team tries to figure out what went wrong.

On the morning of January 30, a power failure caused a reactor at Exelon’s Byron Generating Station to scram, which in turn required a wee bit of venting: [cont'd.]

A contracting firm that specializes in anti-terrorism and force protection training, consulting and management services has been hired to train Cook County Sheriff’s Police in the run-up to the NATO-G8 meetings that are to be held in Chicago in May of this year.

The firm, Controlled FORCE Inc., bills itself as a “woman-owned small business” that provides a “low-liability method of subject control for law enforcement, adult corrections, juvenile justice, security, and military across the nation.” Its company profile claims it has a “unique ability to develop training curriculums and standardizations that integrate into existing programs,” which “has time and again exceeded expectations of federal, state, and local government agencies.” (FORCE stands for “first official response in a critical environment.”)

Anita Padilla, a reporter with the Fox News affiliate in Chicago recently met with Controlled FORCE staff. Controlled FORCE’s website has a photo up on the website. The reporter took the time to hear about the tactics Controlled FORCE is teaching police, who will be working the NATO/G8 protests. [Naturally, the reporter's understanding of these tactics will make it easier for her to be sympathetic toward police when they are throwing protesters' bodies to the ground in May. She will know that this is what they are trained to do and, if any violence happens, it is probably the fault of protesters, who were not properly submitting to the forceful arrest.]

The post with the picture describes a tactic that will likely be used to take out protesters perceived as threats:

The Controlled F.O.R.C.E. Mechanical Advantage Control Holds™ (M.A.C.H.) System of subject control provides the Arrest Team with a non-violent arrest control option to quickly and decisively remove individual threats before they have a chance to incite greater unrest. Using M.A.C.H. Team Arrest Tactics, no more than three Arrest Team members should be needed to restrain and remove a subject – no matter how hard the subject resists. The M.A.C.H. System allows security members to remove individual threats without using pain compliance or techniques that appear unnecessarily violent, which reduces the chance that others in the crowd will react with violence toward the arrest team.[emphasis added]

Controlled FORCE is an option for security training that takes into account how protesters widely use cell phones and video cameras now to record “crowd control” tactics police use at protests: [cont'd.]

Here’s one of my most favorite statistics of the last few years. In the past 90 days, since “Bank Transfer Day” in November, 5.6 million people have moved their money out of banks. 610,000 cited Bank Transfer Day as the reason. This research comes from the consulting firm Javelin Strategy.

Bank Transfer Day and the Occupy Movement have received tremendous attention, and for the first time we have market research data to measure the impact on the financial services industry. Javelin’s research estimates that 5.6 million U.S. adults with a banking relationship changed providers in the past 90 days. Of those switchers, 610,000 US adults (or 11% of the 5.6 million) cited Bank Transfer Day as their reason and actually moved their accounts from a large to a small institution.

People switch bank providers for a host of reasons, we cannot attribute all the switches to a Move Your Money type of campaign. Maybe you moved and your old bank doesn’t have a branch in your new area. But Javelin Strategy adds that this level of switching is three times the normal rate. And one-quarter of all transferring customers cited high fees as the reason for their switching.

This is significant. Account closures are up at Bank of America and the other big banks. They can put a brave face on this and say they actually lose money on small accounts, so this is a relief to them, but that’s really just bunk. We’re talking about tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in lost deposits. Surely nobody on Wall Street would tell you that they couldn’t do anything productive with that money.

It took a few years, but Move Your Money looks like a real movement. We’ll have to see if it continues.