As I said a couple weeks ago: "Before the President made an honest man of him, David Axelrod was a consultant to EXC". Some of the connections I didn't mention [he thinks everyone knows/cares about this stuff -ed] that Frank Clark, the CEO of EXC subsidiary Commonwealth Edison, a company with a storied securities and crony politics history dating back to the Sam Insull days and before, was an Obama advisor and fundraiser. Then there's some guy named Rahm Emanuel who, as his mayoral opponent in the recent election said:
...“I defy you to tell me anybody you know who jumped out of government into a business for which he had no credentials or background, made $18.5 million in two years and then jumped back into government,”...How did Rahm do it?* Among other things, during his 2 1/2 year stint he brokered the $15.2 Bil. (equity, there was another $16 Bil. of debt) merger of Com Ed's parent, Unicom, with Philedelphia's PECO Energy which the NYT noted with the headline "Peco and Unicom to Merge In Big Bet on Nuclear Power".
Exelon runs 5 of the 23 GE Mark I boiling water reactors in the U.S, sisters of two of the plants in trouble at Fukushima.
With that long [and meandering -ed] intro, here's the story via the Wall Street Journal:
Hitachi Ltd. (HIT) and General Electric Co. (GE) plan to enlist the aid of two U.S. firms in their efforts to resolve the problems at the quake-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, The Nikkei reported early Tuesday.After the merger Exelon laid off 3500 of it's workforce, while last year the job czar's G.E. canned around 19,000.
GE is Hitachi's tie-up partner in the nuclear power business. They are looking to form medium- to long-term technological partnerships with Exelon Corp. (EXC) and Bechtel Corp. to restore cooling functions and eventually scrap the reactors altogether.
Top U.S. electric utility Exelon, which operates a number of nuclear plants, drew up recovery plans and handled the scrapping of the No. 2 reactor in the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.
Bechtel, meanwhile, played a leading role in the efforts to contain the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It also handled cleaning and other tasks at the Three Mile Island site....MORE
There's no word whether Rahm will go hands on to fix the reactors the way Putin did to fight the Russian forest fires last summer.**
*The Sun-Times
**Hands on Management: "Putin puts out two wildfires in central Russia":
The Russian Superman. From RIA Novosti:
Putin puts out two wildfires in central Russia
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Tuesday took part in extinguishing forest fires in Ryazan Province on board an amphibious firefighting airplane.He dumped approximately 12 tons of water on each of two fires, extinguishing both completely....
The Russian head of government was the co-pilot for half an hour aboard a Be-200 plane scooping up water from the nearby Oka River and dumping it on raging forest fires some 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
