Fukushima: Continuing Global Catastrophe and Coverup 3

ATOMKRAFT? NEIN DANKE

Watching tonight's The nature of things - Journey to the disaster zone: Japan 3-11.  

Wow.

I saw that show last week when it was first aired. I was, as usual, disappointed with Suzuki. Very thin on science and facts. I learned essentially nothing.

By contrast, PBS's Frontline this week had an excellent program on Fukushima. It was riveting and terrifying, and at the same time very informative. PBS knows how to do science programming in a way that Suzuki never dreamed of.

That may be, M. Spector and NDPP (I assume you agree as you post the link), and I'll probably watch the PBS doc when I have some time, feel up to it.  Maybe I shouldn't have posted here, because it wasn't focused on Fukushima entirely.  What I liked about the Nature of Things program is that it was terrifying enough to prompt reflection and presents a way for people to act.  Because that's what we've got to do, right?  It's not enough to just be terrified. 

Maybe I'll have more to say after I've watched the PBS doc.

That is so true. That's one of the "terrifying" things about that program.

[url=http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports... Greenpeace report on the "Lessons from Fukushima"[/url]

... and an [url=http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/02/28-5]article about the report.[/url]

Fukushima one year later: http://www.pgs.ca

Scientific American has an [url=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=worlds-largest-movable-... article[/url] (with pictures) about current efforts to entomb the Chernobyl reactor. One can assume that similar methods will be required at Fukushima — similarly costing billions of dollars, emitting megatonnes of CO2 in its construction, and requiring replacement in another 100 years:

Quote:

Imagine a metal arch taller than the Statue of Liberty. Now picture it sliding a distance of roughly three football fields, making it [b]the largest movable structure ever[/b]. Under this steel rainbow engineers are planning to entomb the site of the worst nuclear accident in history, the destroyed reactor at the Chernobyl power plant, using robotic cranes to dismantle the ruins and keep its deadly remains from poisoning the rest of the planet.

[url=http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/japan-in-uproar... in Uproar Over Censorship of Emperor's Anti-Nuclear Speech[/url]

Quote:

The 78-year-old Emperor Akihito had insisted on attending the [March 11 tsunami/earthquake] memorial service, though he had been released from the hospital for heart bypass surgery less than a week earlier. While the emperor is technically just a figurehead, he is still deeply revered here. Many Japanese see him a source of guidance in times of political difficulty, which have been many in the last 20 years. His speech was highly anticipated. Unlike Prime Minister Noda, who never mentioned the nuclear crisis in his speech on the anniversary, the Emperor addressed it directly.

Quote:

As this earthquake and tsunami caused the nuclear power plant accident, those living in areas designated as the danger zone lost their homes and livelihoods and had to leave the places they used to live. In order for them to live there again safely, we have to overcome the problem of radioactive contamination, which is a formidable task.

While this statement may seem more obvious than radical to outsiders, underneath the Imperial-grade Japanese understatement were two ideas that have become quietly explosive. [b]First, he seemed to suggest that the nuclear crisis is not over, a "formidable task" yet to be overcome. This noticeably contradicts the government's official stance that Fukushima has achieved a cold shutdown and, for all practical purposes, the crisis is over.  Second, it implies that it is not yet safe for people to return to areas stricken with high levels of radiation, at least not before the "formidable task" is "overcome." This, again, contradicts the government's position that it is now safe for people to return to almost all areas and that neither Tokyo Electric Power Company nor the national government are obliged to assist in long term evacuations.[/b]

It's impossible to say for sure whether the emperor intended to weigh in on two of the country's most sensitive policy debates. Either way, his words have struck Japan's national conversation with a weight that could only be delivered by the emperor himself.

"The emperor's words were like a knife to my heart." tweeted @shun1sta, in a string of comments typical of the public reaction. "He seemed in such pain as well... I can only imagine the determination he felt to say what he did." "It seems to me that the Emperor was doing the most he could do, despite the constraints of his position, to communicate his opinion on the nuclear matter." "Surely the government asked him not to mention the nuclear crisis. He must have fought hard to tell the truth."

It is rare for Emperor Akihito, an accomplished biologist and the world's leading authority on certain species of Gobi Fish, to publicly take sides on any subject other than biology. It is said that his love for the sciences is partly due to the ease in which his colleagues can disagree with him. The reverence he commands in other spheres is so strong that, [b]when it comes to politics, his opinion is considered a constitutionally guarded state secret. His normal silence only adds to the weight of his rare public statements on such matters.[/b]

So many Japanese were shocked when [b]TV media began cutting out the emperor's dramatic statement. Live daytime broadcasts of the event contained the whole speech and newspapers printed it in its entirety. But, by that evening, all of the major news programs aired edited versions of the speech without his nuclear comments, which also went unmentioned and undiscussed on the heavily watches news shows. The vast majority of Japanese, who don't watch TV news during the day, missed the comments entirely.[/b]

<a href="http://phillyworkersvoice.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/the-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-one-year-later-socialist-action-april-2012/">Socialist Action</a> wrote:

To ensure that Japan can function at a “full-scale” economy, Secretary of State Clinton promised the prime minister that the U.S. would continue to support its enterprises and not reject contaminated products. Both Canada and the U.S. are accepting Japanese imports, and our governments conveniently halted all radiation monitoring last spring to keep the lines of commerce running smoothly as well as to maintain public ignorance of how much radioactivity is in the environment. There is also the concern for North American consumers of the radiation levels in our migratory fish, such as salmon and tuna.

The tsunami generated 25 million tons of debris, a good portion of which (a quarter to a third) was sucked out to sea at least 24 hours before the radiation releases from the nuclear power plant. The stuff has begun arriving on the Pacific Northwest Coast, cluttering beaches, creating navigation problems, and spreading plastics and other toxins an entire year ahead of the predictions. It is expected that some of it will join the Northern Pacific garbage gyre, where it will pollute the marine habitat for years.

The horrors of the Japanese nuclear disaster are due to decades of perpetuating the cruel myth of the “absolute safety” of nuclear power. The propaganda from both industry and one subservient government after the other was cranked out to get the Japanese people to accept the “peaceful use of the atom” after experiencing the devastation of the murderous atomic bomb blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Consequently, just as with Big Oil and Big Pharma in the U.S., the nuclear industry has been allowed to write its own rules. In Japan, TEPCO executives, with a wink and a nod from corrupt agencies, chose to ignore 2000 years of earthquake evidence in the region, and then claimed that the magnitude 9.0 tremor and tsunami were “unanticipated” events. Both industry and government are guilty of collusion, lying to the public, incompetence, and criminal negligence.

The capitalist media and pro-nuke academics have chimed in, repeating ad nauseum that the radiation to which millions are exposed is no cause for alarm—when, in fact, there are no safe levels. All radiation is mutagenic and carcinogenic, and we are all exposed to background and medical radiation as well as that from the nuclear fuel cycle and weapons production. They have habitually lied about the dangers of atomic bomb fallout and the routine emissions of radioactive gases and tritiated water from the daily operation of nuclear reactors.