Earlier in the day Hitoshi had driven north to the crippled Fukushima Nuclear Power Station, where the reactors are feared to be leaking radiation and at risk of an outright meltdown.
In today's world -- to say nothing of tomorrow's -- these are going to be driven by more multifaceted considerations than simply the size of Russia's nuclear arsenal.
The market had basically held true to its news-driven moniker by falling on bad news relating to the risk of a nuclear catastrophe and then rising when those worries abated in the afternoon.
When the marginal price of electricity increases (driven by underlying gas prices), they derive more value from their existing nuclear assets (assuming they are unhedged).
Markets have seen bouts of volatility driven by political uprisings in the Middle East and Northern Africa, the earthquake and ensuing nuclear crisis in Japan, and ongoing sovereign debt issues in Europe.
It would also be free to innovate and expand into truly promising alternative energy sources, such as nuclear power, which has been hampered by superstition rather than science and by the resulting regulations that have unnecessarily driven up its costs.