Nuclear Meltdown Watch

[Iamwhomiam]

So organized crime construction companies may be responsible for destroying our global ecosystems?

Is this some new revelation?

It has always been so, long before nuclear power emerged from the minds of madmen.

Hormesis advocates typically argue that although radiation attacks DNA and causes mutations, DNA repair mechanisms quickly correct these. These mechanisms are certainly numerous and busy – it is estimated over 15,000 repairs per hour are carried out in each cell – but from the sheer number of repairs, many misrepairs occur and it is the misrepairs that cause the damage.

Astounding! Scientifically Blame the Victim for causing the mutations from their exposure to radioactivity.

"...radiation is linearly related to exposure and is always harmful, ie without a threshold."

Worth repeating, again and again. Reading about Hormesis, this immediately came to mind, as smokey's already pointed out: "The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off""

Despite concerns, there is no U.S. government agency monitoring the spread of low levels of radiation from Fukushima along the West Coast and around the Hawaiian Islands—even though levels are expected to rise over coming years.

Don't believe that. Surely they secretly are. They are not reporting publicly their findings.

Many suspect that the couriums are swimming in groundwater by now.

Surely the melted cores penetrated their containment when the explosion occurred, and melted into the earth within hours of that. All we can say for sure it that we "suspect" it has, because we lack the technology to be more exact.

Although "Hiroshima was a one-off event," its radioactive particles are still causing harm, as is the radioactive material from every nuclear weapon tested, as is the same from Chernobyl. Yablokov's report has been linked to earlier in this thread. P.60

Smokey, thank you very much for reporting about the NRC's desire to alter the current measuring standard from LCT, Linear No-Threshold, to the absurd Hormesis model.

Please, I implore you all to submit the simplest comment to the NRC in an email stating your objection to this change desired by the nuclear power industry and the NRC. It is a small thing to ask of you to help keep us safer from radioactive poisons. ( I recognize the irony. )
Here's the link to the proposed NRC Rule Change

[Iamwhomiam]

U.S. should apologize for nuclear arms, not glorify them

By John LaForge, Commentary
Updated 5:55 pm, Monday, September 28, 2015

Plutonium was named after Pluto, "god of the underworld," Hades or hell. It was created inside faulty reactors, concentrated and machined by U.S. scientists into the most devastating and horrifying of all weapons.

Photos of what the Manhattan Project's plutonium bomb did to human beings at Nagasaki prove the point. There is radioactive blowback in the fact that the thousands of tons of plutonium created since 1945 is so dangerously hot and long-lived that, like the underworld itself, nobody knows how to handle it at all — except maybe to trivialize it.

Hoping perhaps to show that the bomb from hell can be transformed from a vengeful, self-destructive, nightmare demon, into a benign, peace-loving, fairy-tale prince, nuclear propagandists and their friends in Congress are establishing nuclear war theme parks — without the taint of mass destruction — at former bomb factories and nuclear weapons launch pads all across the country:

Tours are being offered at the "B Reactor," on the Hanford Reservation in Washington state, which in 2008 was declared a National Historic Landmark. Plutonium production reactors for the nuclear arsenal were sloppily operated there for decades, releasing large amounts of radioactive fallout and causing permanent tainting of groundwater that now threatens the Columbia River — cover it up, make it a destination.

A National Wildlife Refuge has been established at Rocky Flats, Colo., outside Denver, where the machining of plutonium for nuclear bomb cores has poisoned dozens of square miles.

Near Fargo, N.D., the State Historical Society has acquired a deactivated Minuteman missile launch control center, dubbed it "Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site," and opened it to tourism.

In South Dakota, a retired launch control center is now the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site and is run by the National Park Service. With enough willful blindness — that if looked at squarely, might be considered a kind of devil worship — visitors may go underground and personally simulate a missile launch, "Satan laughing with delight."

Outside Tucson, Ariz., you can tour the Titan Missile Museum which opened in 1986 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994.

At White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., six hours from Washington, the Greenbrier hideaway was built by the Eisenhower Administration as a nuclear war fallout shelter for 1,000 people — including members of Congress and their families. The bunker came with a generator, a 60-day supply of food, a hospital, kitchen, dining room, waste-disposal and a dental operating room. Of course, a nuclear attack on Washington would have rendered evacuation impossible, the airport a smoldering ruin, and the trains unworkable. Now deactivated and elegantly restored, the site is making money by charging visitors for tours.

In 2011, then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recommended to Congress that a national historic park be established to honor the Manhattan Project — the secret program whose atom bombs killed 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki. National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis said then in a news release, "Once a tightly guarded secret, the story of the atomic bomb's creation needs to be shared with this and future generations."

Jarvis insults our intelligence by feigning ignorance of the vast literature concerning the development and use of nuclear weapons that is available in any good library — histories based on formerly classified documents that demolish the official government myth — that the Bomb "ended the war" and "saved lives."

These nuclear war theme parks are part of a deliberate attempt to trivialize nuclear weapons and to dumb down popular understanding of their environmental and human health legacy.

After employing hellish mythology to manufacture real massacres so vast that governments might quake, it wasn't too big a leap for the same scientists to follow Hiroshima and Nagasaki with 16,000 human radiation experiments on U.S. citizens, 100 atmospheric bomb tests, deliberate mass venting of radiation, intentional "test-to-failure" reactor meltdowns and ocean sinkings of tons of radioactive waste and entire navy propulsion reactors.

All this coldblooded recklessness severely and permanently endangers human, animal and environmental health, because radiation in the body in cumulative doses attacks the gene pool in multi-generational perpetuity. Enormous radiation releases by commercial reactors and nuclear waste sites — at Windscale, Chelyabinsk, Tomsk, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, etc. — have resulted directly from the nuclear weapons program first unveiled in a show of butchery, and later peddled like laundry soap to an uninformed public as a "peaceful atom" that would bring "electricity too cheap to meter." We now know the nuclear age will bring a never-ending due bill too gargantuan to quantify.

Last month, thanks largely to senators from nuclear weapons states Tennessee and New Mexico, a Manhattan Project National Historical Park was officially authorized. Oddly, three proposed sites for this "park" are secret sections of the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, off limits to the public.

In view of the fact that the Manhattan Project's atomic bombings of Japanese cities were not merely unnecessary but known in advance not to be necessary, the United States should be making formal apologies to the victims and their survivors in Japan, and offering reparations to them, not glorifying the planning, preparation and commission of mass destruction.

John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and edits its quarterly newsletter.

http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-opinion/article/U-S-should-apologize-not-glorify-nuclear-6535781.php

This link will place you in front of a paywall. Enter the title into a search engine and follow the resulting link, and in this way avoid being blocked by the paywall to gain direct access to the full article.

[seemslikeadream]

The fact that Fukushima has contaminated the entirety of the Pacific Ocean must be viewed as cataclysmic. The ongoing introduction of Fukushima’s radioactive runoff may be slow-paced, and the inevitable damage to sea life and human health may take decades to register, but the “canary in the mineshaft,” is the Pacific tuna population, which should now also be perpetually monitored for cesium.

Last November Buesseler warned, “Radioactive cesium from the Fukushima disaster is likely to keep arriving at the North American coast.” Fish eaters may want to stick with the Atlantic catch for 12 generations or so

OCTOBER 14, 2015
Fukushima Radiation in Pacific Reaches West Coast
by JOHN LAFORGE

“[W]e should be carefully monitoring the oceans after what is certainly the largest accidental release of radioactive contaminants to the oceans in history,” marine chemist Ken Buesseler said last spring.

Instead, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency halted its emergency radiation monitoring of Fukushima’s radioactive plume in May 2011, three months after the disaster began. Japan isn’t even monitoring seawater near Fukushima, according to a Sept. 28 story in “The Ecologist.”

The amount of cesium in seawater that Buesseler’s researchers found off Vancouver Island is nearly six times the concentration recorded since cesium was first introduced into the oceans by nuclear bomb tests (halted in 1963). This stunning increase in Pacific cesium shows an ongoing increase. The International Business Times (IBT) reported last Nov. 12 that Dr. Buesseler found the amount of cesium-134 in the same waters was then about twice the concentration left in long-standing bomb test remains.

Dr. Buesseler, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, announced his assessment after his team found that cesium drift from Fukushima’s three reactor meltdowns had reached North America. Attempting to reassure the public, Buesseler said, “[E]ven if they were twice as high and I was to swim there every day for an entire year, the dose I would be exposed to is a thousand times less than a single dental X-ray.”

This comparison conflates the important difference between external radiation exposure (from X-rays or swimming in radioactively contaminated seawater), and internal contamination from ingesting radioactive isotopes, say with seafood.

Dr. Chris Busby of the Low Level Radiation Campaign in the UK explains the distinction this way: Think of the difference between merely sitting before a warm wood fire on one hand, and popping a burning hot coal into your mouth on the other. Internal contamination can be 1,000 times more likely to cause cancer than the same exposure if it were external, especially for women and children. And, because cesium-137 stays in the ecosphere for 300 years, long-term bio-accumulation and bio-concentration of cesium isotopes in the food chain – in this case the ocean food chain – is the perpetually worsening consequence of what has spilled and is still pouring from Fukushima.

The nuclear weapons production complex is the only other industry that has a record of deliberate whole-Earth poisoning. Hundreds of tons of radioactive fallout were aerosolized and spread to the world’s watery commons and landmasses by nuclear bomb testing. The same people then brought us commercial nuclear power reactors. Dirty war spawns dirty business, where lying comes easy. Just as the weapons makers lied about bomb test fallout dangers, nuclear power proponents claimed the cesium spewed from Fukushima would be diluted to infinity after the plume dispersed across 4,000 miles of Pacific Ocean.

Today, globalized radioactive contamination of the commons by private corporations has become the financial, political and health care cost of operating nuclear power reactors. The Nov. 2014 IBT article noted that “The planet’s oceans already contain vast amounts of radiation, as the world’s 435 nuclear power plants routinely pump radioactive water into Earth’s oceans, albeit less dangerous isotopes than cesium.”

Fifty million Becquerels of cesium per-cubic-meter were measured off Fukushima soon after the March 2011 start of the three meltdowns. Cesium-contaminated Albacore and Bluefin tuna were caught off the West Coast a mere four months later; 300 tons of cesium-laced effluent has been pouring into the Pacific every day for the 4 1/2 years since; the Japanese government on Sept. 14 openly dumped 850 tons of partially-filtered but tritium-contaminated water into the Pacific. This latest dumping portends what it will try to do with thousands of tons more now held in shabby storage tanks at the devastated reactor complex.

Officials from Fukushima’s owners, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., have said leaks from Fukushima disaster with “at least” two trillion Becquerels of radioactivity entered the Pacific between August 2013 and May 2014 — and this 9-month period isn’t even the half of it.

The fact that Fukushima has contaminated the entirety of the Pacific Ocean must be viewed as cataclysmic. The ongoing introduction of Fukushima’s radioactive runoff may be slow-paced, and the inevitable damage to sea life and human health may take decades to register, but the “canary in the mineshaft,” is the Pacific tuna population, which should now also be perpetually monitored for cesium.

Last November Buesseler warned, “Radioactive cesium from the Fukushima disaster is likely to keep arriving at the North American coast.” Fish eaters may want to stick with the Atlantic catch for 12 generations or so.

[Joao]

Fukushima Radiation in Pacific Reaches West Coast

I was hiking a few miles north of San Francisco recently and saw this sign:

I guess everything's OK after all. I hate this mad nuclear science.

[backtoiam]

This will be a slow grinding disaster of epic proportions. When this first happened I was posting real time animated maps of the radioactive cloud plumes in an attempt to warn people in the U.S. to stay inside as much as possible, to not come in contact with standing pooled water from rain. Milk is contaminated with it due to cows eating grass, etc...We got dusted like bugs in a garden.

There is much more to the origins of this event than a random or cyclical act of god or nature. But I decline...

Software. Strange cameras. Japan swore to never be armed again, and now they are.

Although the US Environmental Protection Agency stopped its emergency radiation monitoring of Fukushima's radioactive contamination in May 2011, it does not mean that the problem has ceased to exist, US environmental expert John LaForge notes, warning that radioactive cesium is likely to keep arriving at the North American coast.

Citing the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) officials, John LaForge, a co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, calls attention to the fact that just between August 2013 and May 2014 "at least" two trillion Becquerels of radioactivity entered the Pacific Ocean — and "this 9-month period isn't even the half of it," the expert stressed.

"The fact that Fukushima has contaminated the entirety of the Pacific Ocean must be viewed as cataclysmic. The ongoing introduction of Fukushima's radioactive runoff may be slow-paced, and the inevitable damage to sea life and human health may take decades to register, but the 'canary in the mineshaft,' is the Pacific tuna population, which should now also be perpetually monitored for cesium," LaForge elaborated in his recent article for CounterPunch.

According to LaForge, Dr. Ken Buesseler from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution admitted last year that the cesium drift from Fukushima had eventually reached North America.

In an apparent attempt to reassure the public, Buesseler said that one could still swim in the ocean's water every day for an entire year, asserting that it would not pose any threat to one's health.

While on the one hand, the scientist is right, on the other there is a big difference between external radiation exposure and internal contamination from "ingesting radioactive isotopes, say with seafood," LaForge pointed out.

The expert explained that internal contamination can be 1,000 times more likely to lead to deadly diseases, particularly cancer, than the same external dose of radiation.

Members of the media wearing protective suits and masks report as they are escorted by TEPCO employees at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)'s tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima prefecture on February 20, 2012
© AFP 2015/ POOL / Issei KATO
Fukushima Disaster Aftermath: Japanese Government Has Something to Hide
"And, because cesium-137 stays in the ecosphere for 300 years, long-term bio-accumulation and bio-concentration of cesium isotopes in the food chain — in this case the ocean food chain — is the perpetually worsening consequence of what has spilled and is still pouring from Fukushima," LaForge warned.

The amount of cesium in seawater off the North American coast is steadily increasing, he emphasized, drawing attention to the fact that both Japanese and American officials are turning a blind eye to the creeping disaster: Japan is not monitoring seawater near Fukushima, according to The Ecologist report, while the US Environmental Protection Agency halted contamination monitoring in May 2011.

"Radioactive cesium from the Fukushima disaster is likely to keep arriving at the North American coast," LaForge noted, citing Dr. Buesseler. At the same time, US authorities remain mute on the potential environmental disaster that potentially lies in store.

http://sputniknews.com/environment/2015 ... coast.html

[seemslikeadream]

Japanese Prime Minister & Obama Want Japan Able to Wage War

Huge earthquake..Japan
by Ben D » Fri Mar 11, 2011 1:43 am


Nuclear Meltdown Watch
seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 11, 2011 6:24 pm

[Iamwhomiam]

Please note Tepco's well-considered concern for worker safety being modeled in the photograph below. It's a light new design and blocks all radiation. Now workers are relieved they no longer need to wear those worrisome, distracting radiation monitors.


Japan Compensates Worker Who Got Cancer After Fukushima Cleanup

By JONATHAN SOBLE OCT. 20, 2015



Workers tasked with removing spent fuel from a reactor at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan, in 2014.
Credit Hiroto Sekiguchi/Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press


TOKYO — A man who developed leukemia after working on a cleanup crew at the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been awarded workers’ compensation by the Japanese government, in what amounts to the first official acknowledgment that exposure to radiation at the disaster site may have caused cancer.

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said on Tuesday that the man, whom it did not identify by name, worked between October 2012 and December 2013 installing protective covers over damaged reactor buildings at the site.

More than 40,000 workers have participated in the vast and laborious cleanup effort at Fukushima Daiichi since the plant was struck four and a half years ago by a tsunami, leading to multiple reactor meltdowns and blanketing the area with toxic debris. A number of those workers have since been found to have cancer and are seeking compensation from public insurance programs or the plant’s owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as Tepco.

The compensation awarded to the man would cover treatment costs by supplementing his standard national health insurance.

Their claims are both politically and medically fraught. Pinpointing the cause of any individual cancer is usually impossible and, with so many workers involved, some cases would inevitably arise regardless of radiation exposure. About one in 150 Japanese is diagnosed with cancer each year, according to the country’s National Cancer Center. The disease is by far the leading cause of death in Japan.

Questions about the Fukushima accident’s health effects have fueled a polarizing national debate. About 80,000 former residents remain displaced from the vicinity of the plant, and although the government is gradually rolling back the evacuation zone and spending $10 billion to scrape up contaminated soil, many say they do not want to return. Radiation levels are well below what most scientists say are dangerous, but they are still measurably higher than they were before the disaster — a confounding signal for people making consequential decisions about their lives.

Differences among experts have added to the uncertainty: One well-publicized recent study found an elevated incidence of thyroid cancer in children living near the plant, for example, but its results have been contradicted by other research.

Plant workers face a different magnitude of risk. Tepco has been criticized for the sometimes sloppy training and protection it has offered cleanup workers at Fukushima, many of whom are unskilled and hired through arm’s-length subcontractors and labor brokers. A government examination of the utility’s safety practices in 2013 found it had underreported the radiation exposure of a third of the workers whose records were reviewed by inspectors.

The worker who developed leukemia was exposed to less radiation than many, according to the Health Ministry, suggesting that the number of compensation cases could balloon. Nearly half the workers who have spent time on Fukushima Daiichi cleanup crews, or more than 20,000 people, have been exposed to enough radiation that subsequent cancers could qualify as occupational illnesses, the ministry said.

The ministry said the worker was exposed to 15.7 millisieverts of radiation during his 14 months at Fukushima Daiichi. That was three times the level of five millisieverts a year required to claim workers’ compensation, though it was still well below the maximum of 50 millisieverts that safety regulators allow for nuclear workers. Before joining the Fukushima cleanup, he had also worked for several months at another nuclear plant, where he absorbed an additional, though smaller, dose.

Shigenobu Nagataki, an expert on radiation exposure at Nagasaki University, said the likelihood that there was a direct link between the man’s work and his leukemia was low, given his reported dose level. “But it’s still necessary to pay close attention to workers’ exposure,” he said in comments to the public broadcaster NHK.

The Health Ministry said that as of Tuesday, eight Fukushima cleanup workers had applied for compensation through a government-supervised occupational health insurance system. One claim was withdrawn, three were rejected and three are still pending, it said.

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/world/asia/japan-cancer-fukushima-nuclear-plant-compensation.html

[smoking since 1879]

Please note Tepco's well-considered concern for worker safety being modeled in the photograph below. It's a light new design and blocks all radiation. Now workers are relieved they no longer need to wear those worrisome, distracting radiation monitors.

I doubt it blocks much tbh.
Probably why they're burning through volunteers (*cough*) at a rate of 10,000 per year.

[cptmarginal]

Fukushima: The View From Ground Zero

Inside Fukushima's Potemkin Village: Naraha

See Arkadiusz Podniesiński’s full photographic essay on Fukushima here, and his work on Chernobyl here.

A fissure in the earth caused by the earthquake in Yoshizawa’s farmland.

Sign above one of the main streets of Futaba proclaims: “Nuclear power is the energy of a bright future”

Namie at dusk. Despite being totally deserted, the traffic lights and street lamps still work.

[seemslikeadream]

NOVEMBER 3, 2015
Fukushima Gets A Lot Uglier
by ROBERT HUNZIKER

As time passes, a bona fide message emerges from within the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster scenario, and that message is that once a nuclear power plant loses it, the unraveling only gets worse and worse until it’s at its worst, and still, there’s no stopping it. Similar to opening Pandora’s box, there’s no stopping a ferocious atom-splitting insanity that knows no end.

Four years of experience with Fukushima provides considerable evidence that splitting atoms to boil water is outright unmitigated madness. After all, nuclear power plants are built to boil water; yes, to boil water; it’s as simple as that, but yet at the same time it’s also extraordinarily complex. Conversely, solar and wind do not boil water and are not complex and never deadly (Germany knows).

As it unfolds, the Fukushima story grows more convoluted and way more chilling. For example, according to The Japan Times, October 30th Edition: “Extremely high radiation levels and the inability to grasp the details about melted nuclear fuel make it impossible for the utility to chart the course of its planned decommissioning of the reactors at the plant.”

Thereby, the bitter truth behind a major nuclear meltdown shows its true colors: “Impossible for the utility to chart the course of its planned decommissioning…” is very definitive, divulging the weak underbelly of the fission-to-heat process; only one slip-up, and it’s deadly dangerous and likely out of control!

Not only that, but the entire Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex is subject to recurring mishaps and setbacks, as well as various technical tribulations, something different going wrong on any given day. And, it’s always big, never small.

For example, according to The Japan Times, October 30th Edition: “Deadly 9.4 Sieverts Detected Outside Fukushima Reactor 2 Containment Vessel; Checks Stop.”

TEPCO also detected deadly radiation levels outside of reactor No. 1. According to a direct quote from the article: “People exposed to the maximum radiation dose for some 45 minutes will die.” Death in 45 minutes!

The potency contained within 9.4 Sieverts (Sv) is enormous. One Sievert of radiation is normally considered a massive dose, causing immediate radiation sickness. But, since levels beyond one Sievert are rarely, if ever, found in the normal course of everyday life, the industry standard uses millisieverts (mSv = 1/1000th) or microsieverts (uSv = one millionth of a Sievert) when measuring radiation.

Miserably, eight (8) Sieverts causes severe vomiting, severe headache, severe fever, incapacitation, and a 100% death rate over a period of time greater than 10 minutes within 48 hours (Radiation Survival Guide).

Chernobyl is a prime example of the potency of radiation. Immediately after the explosion (1986), radiation levels in the control room reached 300 Sv/hr, meaning a person dies within 1-2 minutes. Twenty-five years later, radiation levels in the same control room run approximately 30-34 Sv/hr, which is lethal within 10-20 minutes.

It’s little wonder TEPCO finds it impossible to plan decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which begs the question of if, and when, decommissioning will be possible. Who knows, if ever?

Furthermore, according to The Japan Times’ article: TEPCO planned to start checking inside the containment vessel in August by use of a remote-controlled robot but “high radiation levels have stalled the examination.” Rumor has it that extreme levels of radiation fried the robot, but it’s only rumor.

Unfortunately, not only is radiation sizzling outside of reactor No. 1, but a pipe connection at reactor No. 2 also shows extremely high radiation levels. Reactor No. 2 is where the hot melted radioactive core (corium) still has not been located. But, then again, with so much hot stuff sizzling throughout the entire Fukushima complex, how are workers expected to locate a melted nuclear core that may have already penetrated the steel-reinforced concrete containment vessel, entering the earth?

If total meltdown occurred/occurs, nobody has any idea of what to do next. There is no playbook. It’s likely impossible to do anything remedial once a melted nuclear core has burrowed into the ground because deadly isotopes uncontrollably spread erratically, ubiquitously into the surrounding underground soil and water. Then what?

In the final analysis, there is a distinct probability that Fukushima has no final analysis. Reports out of Japan indicate that Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cleanup and decommissioning is severely restricted by extremely high radiation levels and the inability to grasp the details about melted nuclear fuel. What could be worse? Keep reading.

Footnote: China plans on building 400 nuclear plants “fast and cheap” over the next few decades. (Source: Oliver Tickell, Does China’s Nuclear Boom Threaten Global Catastrophe? CounterPunch, Oct. 30th.) Answer: YES!

[seemslikeadream]

“In Fukushima,” writes Dr. Helen Caldicott, “it is not over. Everyday, four hundred tons of highly radioactive water pours into the Pacific and heads towards the U.S. Because the radiation accumulates in fish, we get that too. The U.S. government is not testing the water, not testing the fish, and not testing the ambient air. Also, people in Japan are eating radiation every day.”

Fukushima’s Radiation Goes Largely Uncovered: A Clear and Present Danger to the US

JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

As a follow-up to the Paris Climate Change Talks - the following commentary examines four alarming reports that received very little coverage in the media relating to the ongoing crisis at Japan’s Fukushima:

U.S. Navy sailors sue TEPCO for Fukushima radiation exposure: Rare cancers, blindness, paralysis of limbs, and deaths

The report came and went like a blip in the daily coverage of headline news over CBS network, KPIX, San Francisco, November 2014. It didn’t make the national news. Indeed, the worst nuclear disaster in history at TEPCO’s (Tokyo Electric Power Company) Fukushima has been hushed up and swept under the media radar as if it never happened that horrific day in May, 2011.

The media blackout on Fukushima is chilling to say the least because it’s a life-threatening crisis that has no ending, no solution, and yet no one is aware of the predicament due to the censorship of it. Not only has Fukushima been deleted in the newsrooms, nuclear power has been raised during the U.S. Presidential debates as a “safe, clean, alternative energy to address global warming.” Shamefully, the explosions at Fukushima were not even mentioned once or questioned. When Democratic candidate, Jim Webb, for instance, raved about the wonders of nuclear power, CNN’s Anderson Cooper experienced a convenient moment of amnesia of his extensive reports at Fukushima when the plants were exploding concrete walls before his very eyes. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders also drew blanks on Fukushima.

Fukushima’s nuclear hydrogen explosions, which occurred after the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that devastated Japan, blasted the strongest cement concrete containment facilities that could possibly be built into a pile of hot radiated ash. Radiation is immeasurably hot in terms of temperature. Mechanical robots that were sent into the blasted facilities melted in seconds. The hydrogen explosions that blew apart those buildings were the equivalent of four nuclear bombs, one after another, that released massive amounts of radioactivity.

Soon after, President Obama sent the USS Reagan to Japan to help survivors. The intention was good, but it was an irresponsible decision; he should have ordered the USS Reagan to stay clear from Fukushima after witnessing the nuclear meltdowns.

U.S. sailors were ordered to scrub decks, to stop drinking ship water and to seal the ventilation system when the USS Reagan sailed directly into Fukushima’s nuclear plume.

“We sat in this plume for over 5 hours,” said Simmons.

Rare cancers, blindness, birth defects and now, two deaths.

Hundreds of U.S. sailors who took part in rescue efforts following Japan’s earthquake and tsunami say they were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. Now a federal judge has ruled their class-action lawsuit against the Tokyo Electric Power Company can go forward…

The story of the USS Reagan as reported at KPIX last year is only the beginning of a much larger threat to marine life and humans up and down the Pacific in terms of massive exposure from the thousands of tons of radioactive water that TEPCO has been releasing into the Pacific for nearly five years. This is why it’s an ongoing crisis.

It makes the world’s worst oil spills look like child’s play by comparison for the reason that radioactive particles can last for thousands of years. Moreover, unlike oil, radioactive water is invisible to the naked eye. But if you could see it, the world would be shocked-outraged beyond belief as they watched a blue ocean turn toxic red all the way up to Alaska on currents.

Thyroid cancer in children living in Japan has increased 30-fold

This next Fukushima report is rarely discussed over the mainstream press. According to an October, 2015 EcoWatch report, “a study examining children who were 18 years and younger at the onset of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe found an increase in thyroid cancers, as predicted by World Health Organization (WHO) initial dose assessments.”

Fukushima and largest toxic algae bloom in recorded history

There are a lot of reports about the largest toxic algae bloom in the Pacific, but no one in the mainstream media, to my knowledge, has connected the dots between the release of thousands of tons of burning hot cancerous radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean for the last five years and the development of the toxic algae that continues to grow and poison everything it touches. To date, fish, crabs and most seafood cannot be sold to the public because they’re toxic from the algae. In addition to the health-risk problems, like the billion dollar fishing industry that died from the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe, so too, generations of Pacific fishermen are losing their incomes.

Mainstream reporters, politicians, NOAA scientists just can’t see the causal links between Fukushima that is boiling the Pacific and the growing toxic algae for some inexplicable reason. In fact, they go out of their way to deny any connection between five years of dumping thousands of tons of hot radioactive water into the Pacific and the creation of the toxic algae which started to grow after 2011.

“In Fukushima,” writes Dr. Helen Caldicott, “it is not over. Everyday, four hundred tons of highly radioactive water pours into the Pacific and heads towards the U.S. Because the radiation accumulates in fish, we get that too. The U.S. government is not testing the water, not testing the fish, and not testing the ambient air. Also, people in Japan are eating radiation every day.”

Why have they not speculated on the causal connection? My guess is that the nuclear oligarchs are as powerfully wealthy as the oil oligarchs. After all, how can the nuclear investors sell nuclear power to China or start a revival of nuclear power in the U.S. or anywhere else if all the facts on Fukushima were to be reported on a regular basis in the mainstream news? Hence: media blackout.

You don’t need to be a nuclear physicist or a marine biologist to see that the Pacific Ocean is heating up faster than anything global warming could have created. The sudden acceleration is from Fukushima’s radioactive water, thus producing the largest toxic algae in history that will continue to expand as long as Japan continues to dump radioactive water into the Pacific.

The radioactive water that is being released into the Pacific Ocean near Fukushima is so hot and toxic that it is literally boiling the ocean.

Think of it this way: dumping hundreds of tons of cancerous, hot radioactive water every day, year after year, into the Pacific Ocean amounts to global warming on steroids. In other words, it’s the most catastrophic weapon of mass destruction known to man, resulting in an acceleration of mass extinction.

That is not hyperbole. Hyperbole is when paid-off politicians and scientists tell the public that “it’s all good. Nothing to worry about…” Now that’s hyperbole! The truth is Fukushima is a “clear and present danger” to the United States.

“Blob” as cause of California’s severe drought

As for California’s drought, in addition to the abnormal warming of sea temperatures, we’ve seen dramatic changes in the jet-stream climate patterns in the last few years that global warming, alone, cannot explain: for example, the rapid severity of these irregular changes in the Pacific atmosphere, and the timing of the “blob’s” development occurred after Japan began dumping tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean: RT report, “The ‘Blob' in Pacific Ocean Might be to Blame for California Drought, Erratic US Weather – Studies”.

We can’t afford to turn a blind eye and pretend that it’s one big mystery. Over 160 dolphins and about 50 melon-headed whales washed ashore 50 miles from Fukushima’s border.

Tuna tested in labs caught off the Pacific coasts, for example, are tainted with cancerous Cesium-134 and Cesium-137. According to several reports last year, radiation levels in tuna off Oregon’s coast tripled.

The public has a right to know why the international community is allowing Japan to poison the entire Pacific Ocean with endless tons of radioactive water. Fukushima is accelerating the scientific prediction of the man-made, mass extinction of Earth.

It must stop. And the corporate media blackout must also end. It’s time for the major players in journalism to inform the public. This is an emergency crisis. TEPCO owners must find a solution. If they have to offer a billion dollar prize to the best and brightest nuclear physicists to find a solution—so be it. They can afford it. Turning our Pacific Ocean into a toxic Dead Zone with infinite tons of radioactive water is not the solution!

Recommended Reading

Two books by Helen Caldicott:

Crisis Without End: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe

Nuclear Power Is Not the Answe

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[seemslikeadream]

INSIGHT: Communities displaced by 2011 disaster deprived of rights to vote, live
December 31, 2015

By TOSHIHIDE UEDA/ Senior Staff Writer
In the lead-up to the fifth winter since the 2011 disasters, a man from Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, was speaking into a microphone at the side of Hachiko, the iconic statue of the faithful dog, in front of Tokyo's Shibuya Station.

“I am giving this stump speech here because I don’t quite understand,” said Keizo Oguro, who was running in the Namie mayoral election, on Nov. 9.

Oguro, 59, a former chairman of the Namie town assembly, was canvassing for votes from residents of his town who had evacuated from the nuclear accident. He was unsuccessful in his bid on Nov. 15.

Namie is located to the north of Futaba and Okuma, the two towns that co-host the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. With some 21,000 residents, Namie was also hit hard by a towering tsunami and the nuclear disaster in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011.

The quake and tsunami took the lives of 559 townspeople, including “associated deaths” and other causes, according to prefectural government figures as of Dec. 14. That death toll is the second highest among all municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture.

In addition, the whole of Namie was designated an evacuation zone following the nuclear disaster. The town remains “entirely evacuated,” the town government office and all.

What did Oguro have in mind when he said in front of Hachiko that he didn’t “quite understand”?

“I don’t quite understand where our eligible voters are,” he said. “The future and the survival of our town hinge on this mayoral election. I want to talk about key policies before voters, but I have few opportunities to talk about most of the issues. Elections, which are about the ABCs of democracy, are at risk.”

What exactly did Oguro mean?

'FOUNDATION OF DEMOCRACY'

The quake, tsunami and nuclear disaster sent Fukushima residents scattered across all 47 prefectures. More than 100,000 people remain evacuated, with nearly 44,000 living outside Fukushima Prefecture.

Namie is no exception. Its townspeople are dispersed across 45 prefectures, with more than 14,500 of them living in Fukushima Prefecture and more than 6,400 living outside of it, according to town officials. It has some 900 “townspeople” in Tokyo.

But Oguro said only about 3,300 of them, who live in temporary housing and public housing for disaster survivors, can be located.

“You have a vague idea of the footsteps of the rest, but you can never locate them exactly,” he said.

Residents’ addresses are part of personal information, which is not for disclosure. Oguro said half of the postal matter he sent to old addresses were returned to him on account of “address unknown.”

While the townspeople are spread across the country, the number of posting areas for candidates’ posters dwindled from the pre-disaster count of 89 to only 10 after the disaster. That is because all voting districts, of which there used to be 17 across the town, were unified following the disaster.

The Public Offices Election Law stipulates there should be between five and 10 posting areas per voting district. The number of polling stations also fell from 17 before the disaster to only eight.

Officials of Namie’s election administration committee said the voting districts were unified to “allow the townspeople, who are now scattered, to vote at whichever polling station they may visit.” The measure was therefore likely taken out of goodwill.

But temporary housing units within Fukushima Prefecture alone are spread across a total of 31 locations in seven municipalities. Most of the townspeople can no longer even get a look at posters of candidates in their own neighborhoods.

“The nuclear disaster not only spewed radioactive substances but also blew off the foundation of democracy,” Oguro said.

The voter turnout rate during the latest mayoral election stood at 56.05 percent, down from 73.51 percent eight years ago, the previous time voting was held.

The right to vote is a pillar of basic human rights. That right is being compromised.

NO BLUEPRINTS FOR LIVING

The urbanized section of Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, a town along the Sanriku coast, was destroyed by the gigantic tsunami spawned by the Great East Japan Earthquake. It left nearly 1,300 of the town’s 16,000 or so residents dead or missing.

Ruriko Suzuki, a professor with the Iwate College of Nursing, lived in this town, where she served as a public health nurse for 28 years. Suzuki, 67, is now working hard to have a facility built in Otsuchi for keeping an eye on, and looking after, the town’s elderly population.

Article 25 of the Japanese Constitution stipulates the right to live, another pillar of basic human rights.

“All people shall have the right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living,” the article says. “In all spheres of life, the state shall use its endeavors for the promotion and extension of social welfare and security, and of public health.”

Public health nurses have taken it upon themselves to face the residents of their communities and stand at the forefront of defending public health.

“The role of us public health nurses is to take care of an entire community,” Suzuki said. “It is so important to offer prospects for the future of each community. But we are not in a position to do that. With no fixed residence, people cannot draw up blueprints for living.”

Some 3,000 of Otsuchi’s population continue to live in temporary housing units within the town, whereas another 3,000 remain evacuated outside Otsuchi, according to the town's figures.

“A word or two uttered by an acquaintance can give you the motivation to continue to live, but that is not available, either,” said Suzuki, who is hoping to open a facility that would provide that kind of motivation.

[seemslikeadream]

Radioactive Water Flowing to Sea is New Fukushima 'Emergency'
By AARON SCHACHTER • JAN 21, 2016

Japan's nuclear regulatory agency has declared an emergency over radioactive water flowing into the ocean from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the government has stepped in for the first time to take a direct role in fixing the problem.

Host Aaron Schachter talks about the situation with Ken Buesseler, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

JANUARY 22, 2016
Fukushima Mon Amour
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR



Is the crisis in Fukushima over or just beginning? You might be forgiven for scratching your head at that one. Nearly five years after the nuclear meltdown triggered by the Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami, one of the planet’s worst radioactive catastrophes has almost completely faded from both the media and public consciousness. Amid that information void, the lethal history of those events has been swamped under pernicious myths being spread by nuclear hucksters.

In brief, the revised story of the Fukushima meltdown goes something like this: the Daiichi facility was struck by an unprecedented event, unlikely to be repeated; the failsafe systems worked; the meltdown was swiftly halted; the spread of radioactive contamination contained and remediated; no lives or illnesses resulted from the crisis. Full-speed ahead!

One of the first to squirm headlong down this rabbit hole of denial was Paddy Reagan, a professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Surrey: “We had a doomsday earthquake in a country with 55 nuclear power stations and they all shut down perfectly, although three have had problems since. This was a huge earthquake, and as a test of the resilience and robustness of nuclear plants it seems they have withstood the effects very well.”

For Reagan and other atomic zealots, the Fukushima meltdown did not represent a cautionary tale, but served as a real time exemplar of the safety, efficiency and durability of nuclear power. Call it Fukushima Mon Amour, or How They Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Atom.

Such extreme revisionism is to be expected from the likes of Reagan, and other hired guns for the Big Atom, especially at a moment of grave peril for their economic fortunes. More surreal is the killer compact between the nuclear industry and some high-profile environmentalists, which reached a feverish pitch at the Paris Climate conference this fall. Freelance nuclear shills, such as the odious James Hansen and the clownish George Monbiot, have left carbon footprints that would humble Godzilla by jetting across the world promoting nuclear energy as a kind of technological deus ex machina for the apocalyptic threat of climate change. Hansen has gone so far as to charge that “opposition to nuclear power threatens the future of humanity.” Shamefully, many greens now promote nuclear power as a kind ecological lesser-evilism.

Of course, there’s nothing new about this kind of rationalization for the doomsday machines. The survival of nuclear power has always depended on the willing suspension of disbelief. In the terrifying post-Hiroshima age, most people intuitively detected the symbiotic linkage between nuclear weapons and nuclear power and those fears had to be doused. As a consequence, the nuclear industrial complex concocted the fairy tale of the peaceful atom, zealously promoted by one of the most devious conmen of our time: Edward “H-Bomb” Teller.

After ratting out Robert Oppenheimer as a peacenik and security risk, Teller set up shop in his lair at the Lawrence Livermore Labs and rapidly began designing uses for nuclear power and bombs as industrial engines to propel the post-World War II economy. One of the first mad schemes to come off of Teller’s drafting board was Operation Chariot, a plan to excavate a deep water harbor at Cape Thornton, near the Inuit village of Point Hope, Alaska, by using controlled (sic) detonations of hydrogen bombs.

In 1958, Teller, the real life model for Terry Southern’s character Dr. Strangelove, devised a plan for atomic fracking. Working with the Richfield Oil Company, Teller plotted to detonate 100 atomic bombs in northern Alberta to extract oil from the Athabasca tar sands. The plan, which went by the name Project Oilsands, was only quashed when intelligence agencies got word that Soviet spies had infiltrated the Canadian oil industry.

Frustrated by the Canadians’ failure of nerve, Teller soon turned his attentions to the American West. First he tried to sell the water-hungry Californians on a scheme to explode more than 20 nuclear bombs to carve a trench in the western Sacramento Valley to canal more water to San Francisco, the original blueprint for Jerry Brown’s Peripheral Canal. This was followed by a plot to blast off 22 peaceful nukes to blow a hole in the Bristol Mountains of southern California for the construction of Interstate 40. Fortunately, neither plan came to fruition.

Teller once again turned to the oil industry, with a scheme to liberate natural gas buried under the Colorado Plateau by setting off 30 kiloton nuclear bombs 6,000 feet below the surface of the earth. Teller vowed that these mantle-cracking explosions, marketed as Project Gasbuggy, would “stimulate” the flow of natural gas. The gas was indeed stimulated, but it also turned out to be highly radioactive.

More crucially, in 1957 at speech before the American Chemical Society Teller, who later helped the Israelis develop their nuclear weapons program, became the first scientist to posit that the burning of fossil fuels would inevitably yield a climate-altering greenhouse effect, which would feature mega-storms, prolonged droughts and melting ice-caps. His solution? Replace the energy created by coal and gas-fired plants with a global network of nuclear power plants.

Edward Teller’s deranged ideas of yesteryear have now been dusted off and remarketed by the Nuclear Greens, including James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, with no credit given to their heinous progenitor.

There are currently 460 or so operating nukes, some chugging along far past their expiration dates, coughing up 10 percent of global energy demands. Teller’s green disciples want to see nuclear power’s total share swell to 50 percent, which would mean the construction of roughly 2100 new atomic water-boilers from Mogadishu to Kathmandu. What are the odds of all of those cranking up without a hitch?

Meanwhile, back at Fukushima, unnoticed by the global press corps, the first blood cancers (Myelogenous leukemia) linked to radiation exposure are being detected in children and cleanup workers. And off the coast of Oregon and California every Bluefin tuna caught in the last year has tested positive for radioactive Cesium 137 from the Fukushima meltdown. The era of eco-radiation has arrived. Don’t worry. It only has a half-life of 30.7 years.

[identity]

Fukushima’s Radiation Goes Largely Uncovered: A Clear and Present Danger to the US

The following comments from "Jim" in response to the linked article at truth-out.org are worth entering into the record here:

Either the author of this author is staggeringly ignorant or she's deliberately trying to discredit opposition to nuclear power by making a flagrantly absurd "straw dog" for others to use to show (supposedly) how dumb and completely ignorant their opposition is.

I raise the possibility because there have been numerous instances where industries (Exxon, tobacco, soft drink companies, junk food companies (includes almost all processed foods) etc) have poured millions of dollars into disinformation campaigns where they have, among many other abuses, paid people to write deliberately absurd articles with many factual misrepresentations and flagrant errors so they can point to them as supposed examples of how their opposition is "deluded" and "misinformed".

THE REALLY SEROUS PROBLEM HERE is that TruthOut/BuzzFlash apparently makes no attempt to VET its stories to weed out such rubbish. This is a SERIOUS problem because it gives alternative press a bad name. (a few more like this one and TO/BF is off my reading list for good)




The contamination is radioactive isotopes and not HEAT. Nor has any argument been presented to show any connection between the contamination and California's drought. (It is VERY remotely conceivable that there could be thru the mechanism of radioisotopes affecting certain microorganisms that reach very high altitudes and are known to have powerful effects on rainfall but that is a very long stretch (most microorganisms are resistant to radiation) and no argument (much less actual evidence) was presented to that end.

YOU NEED TO BE ACCURATE and to VET your stories. Just a few minutes reading on wikipedia.org should give enough background to understand the CRITICAL difference between radiation and radioactive isotopes.

Your intent may be good, but in the real world, good intentions are not remotely enough to ensure good results. Some of the most appalling results of all have resulted from actions by those who had good intent. The problem is when people do not check out their assumptions against reality.

I first started studying about nuclear power because some of my friends were strongly against it and I suspected that they were grossly misinformed. But instead of jumping to conclusions I started gathering FACTS (intending to better educate them) Instead I found that the FACTS supported them and wound up educating myself instead.

Even if you are arguing for the right cause, you will do more damage than good if you do not understand the issue. Arguing nonsense only discredits what you are trying to support. IT IS CRITICAL TO BE ACCURATE.

If you really want to help, it is critical to educate yourself.

UnionOfConcernedScientists.org

is an excellent place to start. Highly factual with highly qualified contributors, many of whom use to work in the Nuclear industry (and quit or got forced out because of industry intolerance of any who raised serious issues regarding safety.



Nuclear power is, by a massive margin, the most severe pollution known to Man. Most toxins, even dioxins can be biodegraded. Even plastics break down after a measly few hundred years. But some radioactive isotopes have half lives measured in 10's of thousands of years.

Yet the nuclear industry has the unmitigated gall to refer to nuclear power as "clean" and "non polluting". (even more flagrantly absurd than the original claims that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter" (please tell THAT to my power company!). This is the kind of outrageous nonsense you can only get away with when the media is firmly under your control.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the genie was out of the bottle. The USA knew it was only a matter of time until the USSR and others got the atomic bomb and so they'd need to build an arsenal (God forbid we just learned to CO-EXIST!). The problem was that it was fiendishly expensive to separate U-238 from U-235. They only way was gas diffusion and since the atomic weights are so similar, it takes many thousands of repeat passes. (and that means that leakage has to be kept to unimaginably low levels - many thousands of very high tech centrifuges, run 24/7 for years, consuming massive amounts of energy. Totally impractical (it took years to get enough for just three very small bombs).

But there was an alternative: Plutonium can be readily separated from spent nuclear fuel by chemical processes. So IF (and ONLY if) you have a lot of spent fuel from reactors lying around, you can make a lot of atomic bombs. But mining and processing the fuel and running reactors is not cheap. So that solution is only workable IF the reactors "finance themselves" i.e.: are used to generate electricity which is sold to consumers. (who have to be kept in the dark about how much it's really costing them: much of the cost is hidden in government subsidies for mining/refining etc) This is the real reason why the US government pushed nuclear power so hard. Is was and always will be, a far more expensive form of power generation than any other method (IF you calculate the REAL costs: false figures are calculated by leaving off the costs of various subsidies (paid by YOUR taxes), not calculating the cost of decommissioning the plants when they are worn out (radiation embrittles metals and they only last a few decades) (which have to be paid by future generations) and leave out the cost of storing the spent fuel (which we don't even have a safe way of doing yet, which is why no long term storage facility has been built!

Virtually everything the government has said about nuclear power is false, willfully, maliciously false "with full malice aforethought". And it does not take much digging to start ferreting out the long history of lies. EBR-1, Fermi, Brown's Ferry, Three Mile Island and on and on and on and on and on......

Fermi (Detroit) - a partial core meltdown (not admitted for decades). Did not even survive the testing period (VERY lucky: if they had been at full power, instead of at partial power for testing, they'd have had a FULL CORE MELTDOWN >>IN DETROIT<< The public was so ignorant about nuclear power back then they didn't even have to lie much. (and there was a huge opening in the containment dome (still under construction), who knows how much radioactivity was released? But back then no one in the public had instruments to measure it with (and NO government has EVER admitted to a radiation leak until AFTER it was detected publicized by outside sources.)

If you live in a jungle, you can shut your eyes and pretend you're in a garden. But the results may not be good. Best to learn what the reality is.,

IT SHOULD BE NOTED that the USSR did a VASTLY better job of protecting its people after it's major nuclear accident (Chernobyl) than either the USA ever did (Fermi, Brown's Ferry, Three Mile Island, etc) or Japan has done after Fukushima, The USSR began evacuating the local population WITHIN HOURS and completed it WITHIN A COUPLE OF DAYS. Japan took much longer AND THE USA NEVER EVEN CONTEMPLATED DOING IT. The difference is probably attributable to the fact that the Japanese and Russians (and most civilized countries, in starkest contrast to the USA) provide medical care for their people and figured it was far cheaper to EVACUATE and prevent medical problems. In the USA the victim bears all costs and it's not the governments concern. "Cheaper" here to just lie and do nothing.

And BTW both the federal government and the state of Pennsylvania took aggressive preemptive actions to bar anyone from collecting statistics. Better to not know if your firm resolve is to do nothing in any case.




Every movement has a lunatic fringe that cannot distinguish between its fevered imaginings and fact. The anti nuclear movement is no exception. The nuclear power advocates love to highlight and focus attention on the minority that have no scientific understanding or judgement, trying to give the impression that all who oppose nuclear power are similarly "intellectually challenged".

The ideas that Fukushima added significant amounts of heat to the ocean and that Fukushima caused the California drought are so ludicrous that one has to suspect that the author knows better and is an industry plant, authoring such flagrantly absurd articles to discredit their opponents. The nuclear industry is known to have been employing a wide range of "dirty tricks" from the get go, including:

Inflitrating anti nuclear groups
1) sabotaging equipment (in my group every piece of equipment handled by "Nick" and "Janet" seemed to get irreparably damaged.
2) sabotaging events: When we had to drive 50 miles to a nearby group to get a copy of an important film in time for a scheduled presentation, "Nick" and "Janet" insisted that they were going to the town anyway and would get it so the person designated needn't bother. They came in and claimed they'd been there to pick up up and the group had already mailed it to a different group (found out later they'd never showed up
3) stealing information on members and supporters and giving it to government agencies who used it to attack the group: donors were threatened with IRS audits. The church hosting presentations was visited by the Fire Marshal who warned them of big problems if they did not "exercise better judgement in what groups they supported"
and many such things. They mysteriously disappeared about the time people caught on to them. 6 monthys later one of us visiting an allied anti nuclear group many hundreds of miles away saw them leaving the office as they entered and discovered they'd been active there under different names and similar things were happening.

2) nuclear utility employees taking down license plate numbers of cars people arrived at anti nuclear events in.

3) people that no one in the group had ever seen before showing up from nowhere in the middle of an event dressed in totally bizarre outfits and acting outright deranged (and there always seemed to be a photographer/videotaper right there at the moment and guess what got center play in the news coverage.

Bottom line: when you have difficulty believing that anyone could really be THAT stupid or THAT deranged, maybe they are really only playing a role.

It's been well established that the FBI and other government agencies infiltrated many valid, peaceful and non violent political groups NOT merely to observe, but also doing serious sabotage of activities. The nuclear power industry has also participated in such activities.

In NC after years of lawsuits we forced the TV station to give equal time to the antinuclear movement because of their severely biased coverage (established by a mountain of statistics). the response was to allow a debate on air between the industry and a representative of the anti nulcear position., We'd had people doing extensive research and training for YEARS for such a debate. But NONE of US were allowed! They chose some high school teacher who NOBODY in the group had ever heard of, who knew next to nothing about either nuclear power nor energy production (or feigned ignorance when convenient). Needless to say the "debate" to give "equal time" was a total mockery.

Just as with Martha Mitchel, it's NOT "paranoia" where someone really is playing "dirty tricks".

"Freedom" in the USA has always been a sham. The only thing that changes (waxes and wanes) is the extent to which people are aware of that ugly reality.

The USA is like a hidden barrier zoo. The animals with any spunk, who've tried every way they can think of to get thru the barriers know d___ well they are not free. Only the lazy and weak animals without enough spirit to attempt anything can delude themselves that their environment is remotely normal. And ONLY a animal born and raised in a zoo is that pathetic.

if you want to know what the truth is, you have to be highly skeptical, check multiple sources and CORRELATE everything. And you have to TEST the barriers.




Ironically (a form of real "natural justice") one of the species most likely to be harmed is Homo (so called) "sapiens". Radioactive isotopes act chemically the same as important nutrients (although being atomically different) and get picked up and stored/used in organisms exactly the same. The critical difference is that radioactive isotopes break down and when they do they release radiation. The critical point is that this radiation is released inside the body.

The difference between radioactivity released in a nuclear accident and radioactive isotopes (the ones that are chemically equivalent to nutrients) is that radioactivity only affects those close to the point of release. If you don't work at or live very close to the accident, you're not at risk. It's radioactive isotopes that get picked up in the wind and carried hundreds or thousands of miles away. Then EVEN IF IN VERY LOW CONCENTRATIONS they get absorbed by microbes who concentrate them. Then a bigger microbe or a very small animal eats them and, because it's eating them continuously and storing the isotopes, further concentrates them. And so on up the food chain for many steps. And each step concentrated them by roughly a factor of 10. Go up 6 steps and the concentration may be a million times as great.

This is why the media ignores radioactive isotopes and concentrates on radioactivity.

Even at the top of the food chain there won't be a "die off" because radioactive isotopes are like a lottery ticket: you may get "lucky" and get cancer or you may not. Most likely not. But in humans a 1% or 0.1% or even 0.001% cancer rate is not acceptable, because it would translate into many thousands of deaths.

In Japan the rate or thyroid cancer in children is about 8 times normal. So we know that about 8 out of every 9 cases of thyroid cancer are a result of the accident. THE PROBLEM IS THAT THERE IS NO WAY TO DISTINGUISH NATURAL CANCERS (THAT WOULD HAVE OCCURRED WITHOUT THE ACCIDENT) FROM THOSE CAUSED BY IT. This is why governments like the USA very aggressively prevent the collection of statistics: they know that, without good data, it's impossible to estimate how many cancers were caused.

In the USA the victim, not the government, pays for medical costs (especially if there is no data to establish that the government was the CAUSE). So our government would rather take the easy/cheap way out and just LIE about it.

They did exactly the same thing at Love Canal. The government's own data showed conclusive evidence of severe chromosomal damage in residents (= very high cancer risk) and the government LIED about it and claimed that the data showed no problems. But an employee broke ranks and released the data. ONLY because someone released the data was the government forced to do anything about the accident.

(The toxicity was also evidence by severe effects in animals as well: " Voles in
the area were studied and found to have significantly increased
mortality compared to controls (mean life expectancy in exposed animals
"23.6 and 29.2 days, respectively, compared to 48.8 days" for control
animals).[31]:215" ) THAT serious and the government tried VERY hard to ignore it.

[seemslikeadream]

FEBRUARY 22, 2016
Fukushima – Deep Trouble
by ROBERT HUNZIKER


The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster may go down as one of history’s boundless tragedies and not just because of a nuclear meltdown, but rather the tragic loss of a nation’s soul.

Imagine the following scenario: 207 million cardboard book boxes, end-to-end, circumnavigating Earth, like railroad tracks, going all the way around the planet. That’s a lot of book boxes. Now, fill the boxes with radioactive waste. Forthwith, that’s the amount of radioactive waste stored unsheltered in one-tonne black bags throughout Fukushima Prefecture, amounting to 9,000,000 cubic metres

But wait, there’s more to come, another 13,000,000 cubic metres of radioactive soil is yet to be collected. (Source: Voice of America News, Problems Keep Piling Up in Fukushima, Feb. 17, 2016).

And, there’s still more, the cleanup operations only go 50-100 feet beyond roadways. Plus, a 100-mile mountain range along the coast and hillsides around Fukushima are contaminated but not cleansed at all. As a consequence, the decontaminated land will likely be re-contaminated by radioactive runoff from the hills and mountains.

Indubitably, how and where to store millions of cubic metres of one-tonne black bags filled with radioactive waste is no small problem. It is a super-colossal problem. What if bags deteriorate? What if a tsunami hits? The “what-ifs” are endless, endless, and beyond.

“The black bags of radioactive soil, now scattered at 115,000 locations in Fukushima, are eventually to be moved to yet-to-be built interim facilities, encompassing 16 square kilometers, in two towns close to the crippled nuclear power plant,” Ibid.

By itself, 115,000 locations each containing many, many, mucho one-tonne bags of radioactive waste is a logistical nightmare, just the trucking alone is forever a humongous task, decades to come.

According to Japanese government and industry sources, cleaning up everything and decommissioning the broken down reactors will take at least 40 years at a cost of $250 billion, assuming nothing goes wrong. But dismally, everything that can possibly go wrong for Tokyo Electric Power Company (“TEPCO”) over the past 5 years has gone wrong, not a good record.

And, Japan is hosting the 2020 Olympics?

Yet, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant remains totally out of control with no end in sight. As far as that goes, Olympic events alongside an out of control nuclear meltdown seem unfathomable.

As recently as October 30, 2015, The Japan Times reported: “Extremely high radiation levels and the inability to grasp the details about melted nuclear fuel make it impossible for the utility to chart the course of its planned decommissioning of the reactors at the plant.”

On the other hand, according to TEPCO, preparation is underway for removal of the melted nuclear fuel, scheduled to begin in 2021. “But it is difficult to know what is happening inside the reactors, and there are no established methods for doing so… It is not difficult to get a camera inside the reactor. The problem is the camera breaks down due to high levels of radiation,” according to Toru Ogawa, director of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency’s Collaborative Laboratories for Advanced Decommissioning Science (Kiyoshi Ando, senior staff writer, Long Road Ahead for Fukushima Cleanup, Nikkei Asian Review, Feb. 19, 2016).

Beyond the remote possibility they find the melted nuclear core aka: corium, engineers have not yet figured out how to cart the molten core away, assuming it can ever be located, and somehow handled. Meantime, if molten core burrows through the steel-reinforced concrete containment vessels into Earth, then what? It is likely a disaster for the ages! But, what about the Olympics?

If perchance melted nuclear core penetrates its steel-reinforced concrete containment vessel and burrows into the ground, it likely results in deadly isotopes uncontrollably spreading erratically, ubiquitously into surrounding underground soil and water. It is difficult to imagine Olympic events where melted nuclear core is still at large.

“Sporting events at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics are to be held in the Japanese region of Fukushima… Spectators and athletes in the Olympic village will be served with food from the region as part of an effort to restore the reputation of Fukushima, formerly one of Japan’s richest agricultural regions,” Fukushima to Host Olympic 2020 Events, The Times, Feb. 25, 2015.

The Tragedy of Countless Unreported Worker Deaths

Indeed, the question of whether Fukushima can ever be adequately, safely decontaminated is wide-open, which logically segues to question who does the dirty work, how workers are hired, and what’s their health status? According to mainstream news sources in Japan, workers are doing just fine, estimates range up to 45,000 workers all-in, no major problems.

As far as the world is concerned, the following headline sums up radiation-related issues for workers, First Fukushima Worker Diagnosed With Radiation-linked Cancer, The Telegraph, Oct. 20, 2015. All things considered, that’s not so bad. But, who’s counting?

Trustworthy sources outside of mainstream news claim otherwise, none more so than Mako Oshidori, a Japanese freelance journalist and a director of Free Press Corporation/Japan, and a former student of School of Life Sciences at Tottori University Faculty of Medicine, in a lecture entitled “The Hidden Truth about Fukushima” delivered at the international conference “Effects of Nuclear Disasters on Natural Environment and Human Health” held in Germany in 2014 co-organized by International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War.

Free Press Corporation/Japan was formed after the 2011 Great Sendai Earthquake as a counterbalance to Japan’s mainstream government influenced media, described by Mako as journalists who do not report truth, journalists afraid of the truth!

“There is one thing that really surprised me here in Europe. It’s the fact that people here think Japan is a very democratic and free country.” (Mako Oshidori)

According to Mako, TEPCO and the government deliberately cover-up deaths of Fukushima workers, and not only do they cover-up deaths, but once she investigated stories of unreported deaths, government agents started following her: “When I would talk to someone, a surveillance agent from the central government’s public police force would come very close, trying to eavesdrop on the conversation,” Exposed: Death of Fukushima Workers Covered-Up by TEPCO and Government, NSNBC International, March 21, 2014.

Mako Oshidori: “I would like to talk about my interview of a nurse who used to work at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) after the accident… He quit his job with TEPCO in 2013, and that’s when I interviewed him… As of now, there are multiple NPP workers that have died, but only the ones who died on the job are reported publicly. Some of them have died suddenly while off work, for instance, during the weekend or in their sleep, but none of their deaths are reported.”

“Not only that, they are not included in the worker death count. For example, there are some workers who quit the job after a lot of radiation exposure, such as 50, 60 to 70 mili Sieverts, and end up dying a month later, but none of these deaths are either reported, or included in the death toll. This is the reality of the NPP workers.”

The “reality of the NPP workers… dying a month later” does not correspond very well with Abe administration insistence that nuke plants reopen, even though the country has continued to function for five years without nuclear power, hmm.

In her speech, Mako talks about problems for journalists because of government interference: “An ex-agent who is knowledgeable about the work of the Public Security Intelligence Agency (“PSIA”) said that when you are visibly followed, that was meant to intimidate you. If there was one person visible, then there would be ten more. I think that is analogous to cockroaches. So, when you do a little serious investigation about the nuclear accident, you are under various pressure and it makes it more difficult to interview people.”

Still, she interviewed Fukushima mothers, e.g., “Next, I would like to talk about mothers in Fukushima. These mothers (and fathers) live in Iwaki City, Fukushima. They are active on school lunch issues. Currently, Fukushima produce isn’t selling well due to suspected contamination. So the prefectural policy is to encourage the use of Fukushima produce in school lunches, in an attempt to appeal to its safety… the mothers claim that currently in Japan only cesium is measured and they have no idea if there is any strontium-90. They oppose the use of Fukushima produce in school lunches for fear of finding out, ten-plus years down the road, that there was actually plutonium in the food that children ate.”

Mothers who oppose the prefecture’s luncheon policy are told to leave Fukushima Prefecture, move out if they worry about contamination, pull up stakes and move on.

Mako’s full interview is found here.

All of which begs the question of who does the dirty work? According to Michel Chossudovsky, director of Centre for Research on Globalization (Canada), Japan’s organized crime syndicate Yakusa is actively involved in recruitment. Personnel who qualify for radioactive cleanup work include underemployed, impoverished, indigent, unemployed, homeless, hard up, down-and-out, and poverty-stricken individuals, as well as non-destitute people willing to undertake under-paid, high-risk work. The nameless are shoe-ins.

As intimated by Mako Oshidori, governmental secrecy laws and intimidation techniques vastly overshadow the tragedy of the disaster, an oppressive black cloud that won’t go away. People are scared to say anything for fear of reprisal, jail, and blacklisting. Mako Oshidori’s name is prominently secretly blacklisted. A government mole told her.

Accordingly, it is instructive to look at Japan’s new state secrecy law Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets (SDS) Act No. 108 of 2013 passed on the heels of the Fukushima meltdown, very similar to Japan’s harsh Public Peace and Order Controls of WWII. According to Act No. 108, the “act of leaking itself” is bad enough for prosecution, regardless of what, how, or why.

Thereupon, Susumu Murakoshi, president of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations says: “The law should be abolished because it jeopardizes democracy and the people’s right to know,” Abe’s Secrets Law Undermines Japan’s Democracy, The Japan Times, Dec. 13, 2014.

Public opinion is shaped by public knowledge of events, but the Abe government’s enactment of an extraordinarily broad dastardly secrecy law (almost anyone can be arrested) that threatens prison sentences up to 10 years undermines confidence in believability of the Japanese government.
But categorically, Japan needs to nurture confidence.