<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Great needling, but not even wrong. Coming from someone who believes in the supernatural, it says a lot. --mkb<div><br></div><div><br><div><div>On Mar 27, 2011, at 12:28 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">
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I'm (not really) surprised to hear Mort testify to his religious
faith in the tenets of AGW: but I thought it was a question (like
most real religious questions) involving evidence and arguments - of
the sort Alex Cockburn had raised. (It's true that George Monbiot
too - supposedly engaged in the same question - has called for the
casting out of unbelievers.) And in fact the evidence is quite
interesting - such as that in a piece I posted the other day, for
the possibility of prehistoric (= before 5000 years ago) AGW.<br>
<br>
The subject of my post was different: it was the (likely)
possibility that the news of the Japanese nuclear disaster was being
manipullated by the corporate media becasue of the vast amonunt of
corporate money to be made in the promotion of nuclear energy. "A
week ago, Fukushima abruptly dropped out of the news headlines" -
just as we were beginning to hear of "TEPCO’s crimes and cover-ups
[and how] 'corporations had deliberately ignored the lessons of
Chernobyl' in the pursuit of profit" ... "leading news media might
have been in receipt of informal government advisories to stop
creating panic..."<br>
<br>
<br>
On 3/27/11 11:31 AM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:0C268152-0C83-4FB8-AEB9-7EABA27E36C1@illinois.edu" type="cite">Correction: The radiation was down not by about a
million, but by over a thousand… Still, the point is the same.
<div>--mkb</div>
<div><br>
<div>
<div>On Mar 27, 2011, at 12:23 AM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:</div>
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<div> the radiation level of 400 mSv/hour was recorded one
day early on [See <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents]">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents]</a>
and close to the reactor, and in subsequent days the
level had decreased by a factor of about a million.
<div>
<div><br>
<div>
<div>On Mar 25, 2011, at 5:03 PM, C. G. Estabrook
wrote:</div>
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<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> <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 moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03252011.html"><http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03252011.html></a>.<br>
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