[Peace-discuss] News management on nukes?

[C. G. Estabrook]

_Fukushima:  It's  Getting Worse_

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.

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."

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."

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.

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:

"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."

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:

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the recruitment of Greens to the cause of the nuclear industry, Martin Kokus 
sent us the following very interesting letter:

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

One more email from CounterPuncher James Cronin:

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

"Keep up the good work, Counterpunchers."

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.

 From <http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03252011.html>.
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