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<u>Fukushima: It’s Getting Worse</u><br>
<br>
A week ago, Fukushima abruptly dropped out of the news headlines.
The NATO onslaught on Qaddafi took over. This came after an initial
week – following the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, of steadily
escalating alarums about what the EU energy commissioner tactlessly
called “apocalypse.” Suddenly the down-column stories about the
situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant took on a tone of cautious
reassurance: there were “improvements” in effort to keep units 5 and
6 at the Daiichi plant cool; “progress” in efforts to reconnect the
stricken plant to the electrical power grid were proceeding;
hydrogen explosions should be no cause for alarm; why, TEPCO workers
could even switch on lights in a control room in Unit 1. Reports
stressed the restraint and dignity of beleaguered Japanese citizens,
thus implying that spreading alarmist reports was pretty much the
equivalent of robbing refugees. Speaking personally, news of lynch
parties of outraged Japanese prodding TEPCO executives into clean-up
duty in the plant alongside George Monbiot and the 50 Japanese
worker-martyrs would have been most welcome.<br>
<br>
TEPCO’s crimes and cover-ups go back to the dawn of Japan’s nuclear
power industry. A Russian, Iouli Andreev who once ran the Soviet
Spetsatom agency involved in the Chernobyl clean-up told Reuters
that “corporations had deliberately ignored the lessons of
Chernobyl” in the pursuit of profit and had been abetted by the
negligence of of the IAEA and that “in order to cut costs, spent
fuel rods at Fukushima had been too closely stacked in pools near
the nuclear reactors. One of those pools caught fire, dispersing
radioactivity into the atmosphere. The Japanese were very greedy and
they used every square inch of the space. But when you have a dense
placing of spent fuel in the basin, you have a high possibility of
fire if the water is removed from the basin.”<br>
<br>
Amid reasonable suspicions that leading news media might have been
in receipt of informal government advisories to stop creating panic,
it became much harder to find credible bulletins on what was
actually happening. In fact careful perusal of the daily briefings
at the Vienna hq of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency in
Vienna disclosed absolutely no substantive progress and indeed
discreet admissions that “[this was on March 23) the “Agency still
lacks data on water levels and temperatures in the spent fuel pools
at Units 1, 2, 3 and 4.”<br>
<br>
The IAEA emphasized each day that the situation at Fukushima’s
Daiichi plant remained “extremely serious.” Bulletins from other
bodies such as France’s Autorité de sûreté nucléaire retained a
similarly grave tone.<br>
<br>
Meanwhile bulletins about hazardous fallout and poisoning of air,
earth and sea were similarly cast in a reassuring frame, even as the
Japanese government issued warnings about eating spinach and other
greens from Japan’s north east, and by the end of the week putting
out an advisory for parents not to let small children drink tap
water in Tokyo. On our own website, by contrast, several articles
and interviews stressed what Hirose Takashi said:<br>
<br>
“All of the information media are at fault here I think. They are
saying stupid things like, why, we are exposed to radiation all the
time in our daily life, we get radiation from outer space. But
that’s one millisievert per year. A year has 365 days, a day has 24
hours; multiply 365 by 24, you get 8760. Multiply the 400
millisieverts by that, you get 3,500,000 the normal dose. You call
that safe? And what media have reported this? None. They compare
it to a CT scan, which is over in an instant; that has nothing to do
with it. The reason radioactivity can be measured is that
radioactive material is escaping. What is dangerous is when that
material enters your body and irradiates it from inside. These
industry-mouthpiece scholars come on TV and what to they say? They
say as you move away the radiation is reduced in inverse ratio to
the square of the distance. I want to say the reverse. Internal
irradiation happens when radioactive material is ingested into the
body. What happens? Say there is a nuclear particle one meter away
from you. You breathe it in, it sticks inside your body; the
distance between you and it is now at the micron level. One meter is
1000 millimeters, one micron is one thousandth of a millimeter.
That’s a thousand times a thousand: a thousand squared. That’s the
real meaning of “inverse ratio of the square of the distance.”
Radiation exposure is increased by a factor of a trillion. Inhaling
even the tiniest particle, that’s the danger.”<br>
<br>
Both Arjun Makhijani and Robert Alvarez stressed that a Worst Case
explosion at Fukushima Daiichi could be worse than Chernobyl. As
Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research in Maryland, wrote:<br>
<br>
“The mechanisms of the accident would be very different than
Chernobyl, 4 where there was also a fire, and the mix of
radionuclides would be very different. While the quantity of
short-lived radionuclides, notably iodine-131, would be much
smaller, the consequences for the long term could be more dire due
to long-lived radionuclides such as cesium- 137, strontium-90,
iodine-129, and plutonium-239. These radionuclides are generally
present in much larger quantities in spent fuel pools than in the
reactor itself. In light of that, it is remarkable how little has
been said by the Japanese authorities about this problem.”<br>
<br>
Now, by March 25 TEPCO and the Japanese government can’t keep the
lid on any longer. They are admitting that the containment vessel in
unit 3 is ruptured. Radiated water sloshing into workers’ boots is
10,000 times above safety levels. Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy
director-general of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency,
announced that radiation from the mox fuel in reactor 3 — a
combination of uranium and plutonium — could be escaping into the
atmosphere.<br>
<br>
In other words, Japan and the rest of the world indeed face “the
worst case”, as we have since March 11. There’s been no let up.<br>
<br>
What the nuclear industry and the nuclear agencies have been aiming
for is a kind of Mithridatization of the crisis. Mithridates was the
king who took poison every day to immunize himself against
poisoners. Crisis becomes normalcy. Sure, radiation levels are way
above the redline; the dirt around Fukushima and huge slabs of north
east Japan is poisoned; the ground around Fukushima is radiated
sludge; the seas show significant contamination, not least because
the seawater being sprayed on the units itself become poisoned and
sinks into the dirt and back into the ocean after its detour to pick
up toxicity.<br>
<br>
Sure, this is all true, but “there’s no cause for alarm.” Never
believe anything till it’s officially denied! The industry’s flacks
lie steadily, as they have always done, about impacts on humans and
the environment.<br>
<br>
The fiercest defenders of nuclear power these days are greens like
George Monbiot who wrote yet another insane hosanna to nuclear power
in The Guardian (“Why Fukushima Made Me Stop Worrying and Love
Nuclear Power … Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the
harshest possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has
been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to nuclear
power.” It was written on the 21st of March.) Greens like Monbiot,
fixated on their increasingly discredited anthropogenic – humanly
caused -- global warming (AGW) models, clamber even further out in
their assertions that the nuclear industry’s official spokesmen. <br>
<br>
On the recruitment of Greens to the cause of the nuclear industry,
Martin Kokus sent us the following very interesting letter:<br>
<br>
“Instead of saying that global warming rescued the nuclear lobby, I
would say the nuclear complex invented global warming. I was
working on man-made climate change during the 70's and I think that
even the biggest conspiracy theorist is underestimating the role
that the nuclear complex played in shaping the debate on AGW. When
I say nuclear complex, I am not just referring to the power lobby,
but also the weapons manufacturers, the military, the nuclear labs,
the academics who are funded by nuclear labs, and those who think
that there is some huge geopolitical advantage for the west to go
nuclear.<br>
<br>
“The nukes were pushing AGW from my earliest political memory. In
1973-74, the Hoover Institute funded a tour by Edward Teller where
he described co2 as the real environmental problem and nuclear power
was its only solution. (I am sure that you are aware that the
Hoover Institute is now espousing AGW as a liberal conspiracy.)
During the same time period Bernard Cohen, head of U of Pitt's Nuke
Labs, self-appointed expert on safety, and proponent of nuclear
power was funded by Americans for Energy Independence (AEI) to do
the same thing. One of the organizers of AEI was longtime Cohen
associate Zalman Shapiro who was the subject of a series of
Counterpunch essays by Grant Smith in regards to the Israeli nuke
program. These speakers were not sponsored by climatology
departments but by nuclear engineering departments.<br>
<br>
“I was in the first US seminar on man-made climate change at UVA.
We were worried about particulates, land use, deforestation, and
most of all the introduction of agribusiness into the third world.
My profs dismissed AGW in about 15 minutes. But even then, one of
our contract monitors from Oak Ridge AEC was pushing me to get
interested in the greenhouse effect. I also remember Outside
magazine (which I always considered right wing and phony
environmentalist) doing a series that considered AGW to be the most
serious environmental threat. I always found this interesting
because there were absolutely no data behind it.<br>
<br>
“The real money came into AGW after Thatcher got elected. I am sure
that you are familiar with the Centre for Policy Studies, a
conservative British think tank, decision to hype AGW. Well, the
Reagan administration more than matched that money. We funded half
the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s climate
group. The UEA was the scene of the recent Climategate scandal. The
Hadley Centre and the UEA were the incubators for the IPCC. The
money was monitored by what used to be the AEC lab at Oakridge which
is now under DOE. The older climatologists were ignored in this
funding buildup. In fact, existing funding for non co2 climate
change research disappeared.”<br>
<br>
One more email from CounterPuncher James Cronin:<br>
<br>
“One important aspect of the current nuclear catastrophe is not
being discussed in progressive media: the fact that
radiation-induced cancers do not simply arise immediately following
exposure. It's not as though it will be like the Black Plague,
where one would see one's neighbors being hauled out of their
houses, dead. This damage to human life, these murders, will only be
visible -- if they are allowed to be visible -- in statistical data
collected long years after the exposure event.<br>
<br>
“In other words, there will be no evident epidemic that would
stimulate citizen action. So we may well be exposed to enough
radiation, such as with Iodine-131, to give us thyroid cancer, but
the distribution of these cancers will be over the entire population
in the exposed areas, manifesting only as a statistic years after
the fact. Even if we know someone who develops thyroid cancer, we
will be unable to identify the Japan catastrophe (at least at this
point) as the cause. Thus the nuclear industry has a clear escape
path at this point.<br>
<br>
“I think we can be assured that the research exists. If we know the
exposures or potential exposures, the number of cancers (and deaths)
that will result can be estimated. I think this estimate should be
found or done ASAP. A table could be generated, if it does not
already exist in the scientific literature somewhere.<br>
<br>
“I have long distrusted many so-called progressive websites for
their obvious promotion of Obama, and how they report this
catastrophe should be looked at, as you have with Monbiot.”<br>
<br>
“Keep up the good work, Counterpunchers.”<br>
<br>
As I wrote last week, the New York Academy of Sciences report on
Chernobyl, published in 2009 has a wealth of data on lethal health
consequences surfacing years after the disaster. The report by
Yablokov and the Nesterenkos, had as its consulting editor Janette
Sherman-Nevinger whose commentary, on this site last week, is well
worth reading.<br>
<br>
From <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03252011.html"><http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03252011.html></a>.<br>
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