Thread: Fukushima worse than Chernobly

Russia Today: Gundersen First to Say Fukushima Worse than Chernobyl
April 26, 2011

April 26th was the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident. Six weeks ago, when Gundersen first appeared on Russia Today, he said that Fukushima would be "Chernobyl on steroids". Japanese authorities are now admitting Chernobyl-level releases as the plant continues to leak radioactive gases and liquids.

http://www.fairewinds.com/multimedia

Also this


"No threat to human health in Japan and the US" BUT "All French citizens were warned against consuming rainwater, leafy greens, and all milk derived products (including from goats and sheep as well as cows) due to radioactive fallout contamination in Europe. The U.S. and Canadian governments still claim that all of the above foods are safe in North America, even for infants and pregnant women; unfortunately the reality is that the level of radioactive fallout present here [in the US/Canada/Mexico-Dr. Rima] is 8 to 10 times greater that of France and the rest of Europe."http://www.euractiv.com/en/health/radiation-risks-fukushima-longer-negligible-news-503947

OK. Fukishima is leaking radiation every hour of every day and it is blowing across the US and Europe. Now what do I do about radiation risk for myself and my family?

http://tinyurl.com/radprotect


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Kathyet

U.S. Senator sounds alarm about 'precarious' Fukushima situation, warns of imminent release of radiation

Wednesday, May 09, 2012
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)



(NaturalNews) U.S. Senator Ron Wyden is, as far as Senators go, an honorable guy. I don't agree with all his politics, but I actually used to live in his district in Oregon when he was a congressman (1981 - 1996), and I remember him standing out as someone who genuinely seemed to care about the People.

To my knowledge, Sen. Wyden is the only U.S. Senator who has actually visited the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility and warned the U.S. public about what he saw. And what did he see? A wrecked, half-collapsed building site littered with massive collections of nuclear fuel rods that now threaten the entire Northern hemisphere with a radiation apocalypse. (http://www.naturalnews.com/035789_Fu...Plume-Gate.htm...)

When Wyden returned to the USA following the visit, he immediately issued an urgent warning, now reprinted on his website. In the watered-down language of political correctness, the warning is still quite strong. As his website says: (http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/pre...our-of-fukushi...)

Wyden's principal concern is the relocation of spent fuel rods currently being stored in unsound structures immediately adjacent to the ocean. He strongly urged the Ambassador to accept international help to prevent dangerous nuclear material from being released into the environment.

He then went on to say, in his own words: (emphasis added)

"The scope of damage to the plants and to the surrounding area was far beyond what I expected and the scope of the challenges to the utility owner, the government of Japan, and to the people of the region are daunting. The precarious status of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear units and the risk presented by the enormous inventory of radioactive materials and spent fuel in the event of further earthquake threats should be of concern to all and a focus of greater international support and assistance."

His website goes on to say something that should stun anyone who understands the threat of radioactive contamination of the environment:

"Wyden found that the facilities designed to house spent nuclear fuel and the reactors themselves were still in a state of disrepair and located in areas that would make them susceptible to further damage from future seismic events. The reactor buildings still contain large amounts of spent fuel -- making them a huge safety risk and the only protection from a future tsunami, Wyden observed, is a small, makeshift sea wall erected out of bags of rock."

Did you catch that last part? The only protection from a tsunami is a "makeshift sea wall erected out of bags or rock."

And to think, the fate of the world now depends on us all just "lucking out" and crossing our fingers in the hope that no earthquake or tsunami takes place before they clean up the Fukushima facility mess.

Which brings up the question: What exactly is being done to clean up the Fukushima facility mess?

In a word, nothing.

Governments play pretend
Virtually nothing is happening. All the governments involved (Japan and USA, primarily) are playing a ridiculously stupid game of pretending there is no problem. The Japanese government, for its part, has decided that instead of admitted to a radiation problem, it's easier to just tell Japanese citizens they have a mental disorder if they're concerned about radiation (http://www.prisonplanet.com/fear-of-...s-psychiatric-...).

The U.S. government plays a similar mind game, raising the allowable levels of radiation exposure by thousands of times and then declaring Fukushima fallout to be suddenly safe! (EPA to raise limits for radiation exposure while Canada turns off fallout detectors)

Governments, in other words, are in denial mode even while Fukushima smolders and hurls us all toward irreversible global disaster.

If Fukushima were a "terrorist," the U.S. government would stop at nothing to defeat it
What's really telling in all this is that if a "terrorist" organization were threatening the USA with the same amount of nuclear material held at Fukushima, the U.S. would take immediate and decisive action to eliminate that threat. For the record, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility has enough radioactive material to make thousands of terrorist "dirty bombs".

All that radioactive material now threatens America, but because it is subjected to random "natural" causes (earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.) instead of "terrorist" causes, the U.S. government has stupidly chosen to ignore it. It's not politically advantageous to talk about Fukushima, you see, because it doesn't fit into the false theatrical narrative of terrorists threatening America.

This leaves us all in a frustratingly idiotic catch-22, where governments refuse to address a problem that threatens the world unless and until the problem explodes in their faces, at which point it is too late to address it.

All this leads to the obvious solution for resolving the Fukushima conundrum. The way to get governments to address Fukushima is to allow the facility to be taken over by terrorists! Only then will the U.S. government consider the threat to be real, since the entire government only sees things through "terrorist glasses."

The science of denial
Of course, the real source of all this terror is the arrogance of modern science itself, which now threatens the very survival of the human race. As I recently wrote here on NaturalNews, the human race is being "suicided" in the name of science. (Human race being terminated by 'scientific suicide')

Science has become a far greater threat than terrorism could ever imagine, because in the name of "science," we have been placed in the crosshairs of not just a nuclear apocalypse, but also the disastrous effects of self-replicating genetic pollution via GMOs.

"Science" has handed us antibiotic-resistant superbugs, the global pollution of crops and soils with synthetic pesticides, the death of the honey bees, and the mass poisoning of children with mercury through dentistry and vaccines (among other crimes). "Science" told us that nuclear power was safe ... yet here we are in 2012, on the verge of an event that could kill a quarter of the human population on the planet, and all the scientists can do is deny any problem exists at all.

Denial may be an effective psychological tactic in politics and poker, but unfortunately for the rest of us it does not alter the laws of physics. "Denial" does not change the 30-year half life of Cesium-137, a radioactive isotope that mimics the mineral potassium and thus is easily absorbed into food crops, poisoning the entire food supply.

Denial is not a tactic of genuine leaders; it is a last-ditch desperate ploy of the weak-minded.

We are living in the land of denial, led by elected denialists who are voted into office by working-class denialists. Denial has become our modus operandi, our fabric of fairytales. It has allowed our civilization to ride high on a global debt pyramid and it will be the harbinger of our ultimate destruction at the hands of "scientists" who promised us life but delivered us unto death.

Learn more: U.S. Senator sounds alarm about 'precarious' Fukushima situation, warns of imminent release of radiation




U.S. Senator sounds alarm about 'precarious' Fukushima situation, warns of imminent release of radiation

Plume-gate: Secret documents prove global cover-up of continued Fukushima radiation pollution

Saturday, May 12, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer



(NaturalNews) A Freedom of Information Act(FOIA) request filed by Friends of the Earth (FoE), Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), and the Nuclear Information and Resource Center (NIRS) has unearthed a shocking series of new evidence proving a deliberate, global cover-up of the true severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. And the unfortunate reality is that the mainstream media continues to blatantly ignore this colossal scandal.

Private emails, meeting transcripts and other key documents reveal that both the Obama White House and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC) were well aware of just how bad things really were with Fukushima from the early days of the disaster, but did nothing to warn the public about it. In fact, NRC and the White House purposely did not warn Americans about a massive radiation plume that struck the West Coast just days after the massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan's eastern coast.

According to information gathered from hundreds of pages worth of private NRC emails, conference calls and secret meetings, key players in the Fukushima whitewashing campaign, including the NRC's David McIntyre and Elliot Brenner, were hard at work in the days following the disaster distracting public attention away from it. By pretending that a radioactive plume did not exist while simultaneously sending out misinformation to the media, these two, in conjunction with White House officials, actively participated in a criminal cover-up of the truth.

You can read key portions of these criminal dealings at the following link:
http://theintelhub.com

Plume-gate, the world's biggest nuclear cover-up to date
A situation that is now being dubbed "Plume-gate," this massive cover-up of critical information about Fukushima could have saved thousands of lives, including the more than 14,000 individuals, many of whom were babies, that died in the weeks following the disaster (Study: Fukushima killed at least 14,000 people in the US, mostly babies, in weeks following disaster). And yet to this very day, the federal government's cozy relationship with the nuclear industry has allowed the injustice to continue, as no proper investigation into this dastardly crime has yet taken place.

"The executive branch and multiple federal agencies, agencies tasked with keeping the American public safe, did their best to hide and to cover-up information about a deadly radioactive plume and ensuing fallout that was headed for the West Coast of the United States from Japan," writes Tony Muga from The Intel Hub about the situation.

Not only did these government agencies hide the truth and deliberately deceive the public, they also used other events, including the infamous Qur'an burning in Afghanistan, as a distraction to divert public attention away from Fukushima, and away from the 104 nuclear reactors in the U.S. that are of a similar age and vulnerability as Fukushima.

So why is the federal government getting away with all this? It is for the same reason that it gets away with most of its other crimes against humanity: corporate fascism. And sadly, corporate fascism is a bipartisan problem, as both Republicans and Democrats today are slaves to it, representing opposite but identical sides of the same coin.

"It seems that the fundamental problem with what Americans are experiencing is not just radioactive fallout but Fascism, the merging of the corporate and the state," adds Muga. "In a fascist state, there is little or no responsible action from the corporations for there is little or no promotion of accountability from the state. The corporations, for all intents and purposes, control the state."

Be sure check out the exposed documents for yourself linked at the bottom of the following article:
http://theintelhub.com

And read the activist website www.AlexanderHiggins.com

Sources for this article include:

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com

Learn more: Plume-gate: Secret documents prove global cover-up of continued Fukushima radiation pollution

Forty million Japanese in 'extreme danger' of life-threatening radiation poisoning, mass evacuations likely

Thursday, May 17, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer


(NaturalNews) Japanese officials are currently engaging in talks with Russian diplomats about where tens of millions of Japanese refugees might relocate in the very-likely event that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility's Reactor 4 completely collapses. According to a recent report by EUTimes.net, Japanese authorities have indicated that as many as 40 million Japanese people are in "extreme danger" of radiation poisoning, and many eastern cities, including Tokyo, may have to be evacuated in the next few weeks or months to avoid extreme radiation poisoning.

As we continue to report, the situation at Fukushima is dire, to say the least. Reactor 4 is on the verge of complete collapse (Fukushima reactor No. 4 vulnerable to catastrophic collapse; could unleash 85 times Cesium-137 radiation of Chernobyl; human civilization on the brink), which would send radioactive nuclear fuel from thousands of fuel rods directly into the atmosphere. These fuel rods, after all, are already exposed to the open air, but the full release of their fuel would cause not only a regional catastrophe, but also a global nuclear holocaust.

"A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant's No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be 'the weakest link' in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster," reported the Mainichi Daily News recently.

"The worst-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant's other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate."

So in an effort to establish contingency for the Japanese people in closest proximity to the fray, authorities are considering potentially relocating tens of millions of Japanese people to the Kuril Islands, which are located in Russia's Sakhalin Oblast region, or potentially even to China, where hundreds of uninhabited "ghost town" cities with no apparent use could house at least 64 million refugees. If this relocation were to occur, Japan would largely become a barren wasteland.

'Wave' of highly-radioactive waste reportedly headed for West Coast of U.S.
For the Japanese people, the Fukushima disaster represents the complete demise of their nation, as literally nothing is being done to contain the thousands of exposed fuel rods that will eventually explode when Reactor 4 fails. But the consequences of all this are not limited to just Japan, as the rest of the world, including the U.S., will bear the brunt of this ticking nuclear time-bomb as well. We are, in fact, already suffering the consequences of this "nuclear war without a war" (Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War: The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation).

Late last year, for example, it was reported that U.S. officials ordered the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to release three million gallons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean. Now, according to The Intel Hub, this waste will soon arrive on the shores of the U.S. West Coast, unbeknownst to the millions of Americans living in that region that will be exposed to it.

This new 'wave' of radiation is, of course, in addition to previous waves that have already killed thousands of people, many of whom were children, and sparked a considerable uptick in cancer cases. And as time goes on, more and more people living in America will begin to develop chronic conditions as a result of perpetual radiation poisoning from Fukushima, and many will die, all while the mainstream media remains willfully silent on the issue.

And the federal government has known all along that the Fukushima disaster is shaping up to be the most severe global catastrophe in recorded history, as was evidenced in a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Not only were federal authorities aware of the extreme dangers posed by Fukushima from the early days of the disaster, but they also orchestrated misinformation campaigns to keep the American people, and the rest of the world, in the dark about the truth (Plume-gate: Secret documents prove global cover-up of continued Fukushima radiation pollution).

Since neither the U.S. nor the Japanese governments appear willing to actually deal with Fukushima, and particularly the Reactor 4 situation, NaturalNews is calling on the United Nations (U.N.) to take swift action. A new petition urges the U.N. to organize a Nuclear Security Summit to address the problem of Reactor 4, and also establish an independent assessment team to somehow stabilize it and prevent its fuel from potentially destroying all life on earth.

You can access that petition here:
http://fukushima.greenaction

Sources for this article include:

The European Union Times - World News, Breaking News
Learn more: Forty million Japanese in 'extreme danger' of life-threatening radiation poisoning, mass evacuations likely

Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Fukushima Radiation Hitting the Streets of LA
Dees Illustration
Dr. Mark Sircus
Activist Post

Right after Chernobyl blew its top, Edward Teller said on the ABC Evening News in late April 1986, “The chances of a real calamity at a nuclear power station are infinitesimally small. But should it happen, the consequences are impossible to imagine.” The plume from the burning graphite at Chernobyl initially traveled in a northwest direction toward Sweden, Finland and Eastern Europe, exposing the public to levels up to 100 times the normal background radiation.

Hope Burwell wrote, “On my first trip to Chernobyl in November 2000, I spent three days touring schools in Cherikov and the even more contaminated areas of the Mogilev district. Then we traveled to children’s hospitals in Minsk. What I saw there still shows up in nightmares: children with eyes in the sides of their heads, and children with no eyes at all, children with fingers that look like toes and children whose genitals are so poorly formed one can’t determine their sex. Those nightmares are audible with infant wails like the cries of wounded wild animals.”

In her widely read essay Burwell reported that 23% of Belarus was contaminated with Chernobyl’s fallout, 32,592 square miles, more land than six eastern states combined. The average level of contamination on the polluted territories, 37 curies (Ci) per square kilometer, is notated scientifically as 37Ci/km2. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) set the “safe for residency limit” at a maximum of 5Ci/km2. Eighty-eight percent of contaminated Belarus is 111-370 times more contaminated than that.

Western predictions of Chernobyl’s consequences were based on Hiroshima-Nagasaki data, and on the then-current belief that iodine-131 had a low carcinogenic potential. But within a year after the accident, Belarusan scientists reported an increase in a rare childhood thyroid cancer to 5,000 times its spontaneous occurrence in “clean” countries.


According to the 2000 report on Minsk’s United Nations Development Program (UNDP), life expectancy in Belarus in the 1960s was almost level with that in Western Europe. By 1999, 13 years after Chernobyl, it had fallen 12-14 years for men and 7-9 years for women. A baby boy born in rural Belarus today can expect to live 59 years.

But they may be very hard years. Nearly half of Belarus’s teenagers have serious health problems. Of those graduating from high school, 45-47% have physical disorders like gastrointestinal anomalies, weakened hearts, and cataracts; 40% of them have chronic “blood disorders” and malfunctioning thyroids. The number of handicapped adolescents has tripled in the last decade.

It has always been known that ionizing radiation, in higher doses than background levels, can cause measurable increase in cancers and leukemias as well as cause genetic mutations that affect future generations. Whether they say it openly or not, this is what we are facing today in Japan, Hawaii, the continental United States, Canada and Europe, which have all received too much radiation from Fukushima.

No one wants to imagine the future and what will happen even if the situation does not get worse. Radiation is pouring out of Fukushima and that radiation is hitting the streets of Los Angles quite hard. In April 2012 environmental journalist and LA Weekly contributor Michael Collins, an independent who has tested over 1500 samples since the Fukushima earthquake of 2011, was shocked to find that radiation levels in the falling rain over L.A. measured five times above normal.

A March 6th test of a HEPA filter recorded radiation levels 668% or 6.68 times the normal background radiation levels. This test took place 43 days after initial tests and shows a 130% increase since January 22nd 2012. “The California Highway Patrol considers anything over three times background, 300% of background above, a trigger level to a hazardous materials situation,” reported the EnviroReporter.

Our last HEPA filter measurements January 22 produced some astonishing results. Doing a spot test on the Honeywell barrel-style filter and a Kenmore Plasmawave, we found radiation ~351% of normal background. The machines had been running for 42 days. The combined aggregate dust came in even hotter at 538% of normal background radiation at Radiation Station Santa Monica.

Now 43 days later the dust was a lot hotter. A spot test was ~377% of the previous background. Then we vacuumed out the filters with a HEPA filter Eureka vacuum cleaner and tested the aggregate. The March 6 test of the combined dust came in at a sizzling 668% of background or 6.68 times normal. Since the last testing period, the radiation detected has risen another 130% indicating a continued upward trend.

That radiation is rising in Los Angeles as it is in many places in the northern hemisphere. For some reality checking, we have the New York Times saying that, “The amount of radioactive materials released in the first days of the Fukushima nuclear disaster was almost two and a half times the initial estimate by Japanese safety regulators, the operator of the crippled plant said in a report released on the 24th of May, 2012.

“The operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the meltdowns it believes took place at three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant released about 900,000 terabecquerels of radioactive substances into the air during March 2011. The accident, which followed an earthquake and a tsunami, occurred on March 11. The latest estimate was based on measurements suggesting the amount of iodine-131 released by the nuclear accident was much larger than previous estimates, the utility said in the report. Iodine-131 is a fast-decaying radioactive substance produced by fission that takes place inside a nuclear reactor. It has a half-life of eight days and can cause thyroid cancer.”

The newly released information just adds insult to injury to not only the Japanese but everyone on the west coast of North America, then onward across the plains to the east coast and then Europe. There are literally a billion people that have not been told the extent of the accident or the risks it posed directly for them.

A terabecquerel is a trillion becquerels, a commonly used measure of the radiation emitted by a radioactive material. So the New York Times is saying that early on 900,000,000,000,000,000 becquerels were released in the first 20 days of the nuclear disaster. Sounds like a lot but how much is that really? The becquerel is a useful measure of the amount of radiation emitted by a substance, but it tells us little about the effect of that radiation on our bodies.

Radiation can damage our bodies by breaking the chemical bonds in our cells. The amount of damage done depends on how much radiation we are exposed to. This in turn depends on how much radioactive material is present in our environment, our food and so on. So it is important to have some way to talk about amounts of radiation. This is what the unit becquerel is for.

“The greatest human experiment with radiation exposure is taking place in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, where much of the 50 million curies the Soviet government says were released by the 1986 accident at Chernobyl is being felt… Chernobyl legacy could include hundreds of thousands of additional cancer deaths… Current estimates predict anything from 14,000 to 475,500 deaths worldwide from Chernobyl.” (A curie measures the intensity of radiation and is equal to 37 billion disintegrations per second. As a reference point, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs released an estimated one million curies.)

If we translate what the New York Times is saying in terms of radiation released in the first 20 days, 900,000 terabecquerels translates into 27 million curies. It is over a year later and no one knows or is saying how much aggregate radiation has been released but we can imagine it’s a staggering amount.

One curie is the amount of radiation equal to the disintegration of 37 billion atoms—37 billion becquerels—per second. It is a very large amount of radiation. We multiply these amounts (27 million curies times 37 billion radioactive atoms) and we are back to just a little more than our 900,000 terabecquerels… all the way up to 999,000,000,000,000,000 becquerels, which translates into 999,000,000,000,000,000 nuclear particles decaying in the first 20 days of the Fukushima nuclear nightmare.

TEPCO has reported on what happens when it opens doors in Fukushima. An estimated 1.6 billion becquerels of radioactive materials were released, compared with 500 million becquerels when the double doors of the building of reactor No. 1 were opened one day in May.

So let’s go back to Belarus where the average level of contamination on the polluted territories was 37Ci/km2 and the maximum safe limit for residency is 5Ci/km2. We had 27 million curies released in the first 20 days and that would contaminate an area of approximately five million square kilometers if distributed equally. Of course that never happens as we can see in the fallout patterns surrounding Chernobyl. It can be assumed that the worst of the radiation was released in the first month with the complete meltdown of multiple reactor cores and the destruction and probably vaporization of spent-fuel rods.

Radioactive News

Health authorities continue to insist that there are no health risks involved, but The Huffington Post tells us that bluefin tuna caught in California last August showed radiation levels that were ten times the norm, according to a new paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Scientists believe that the radiation—in the form of the isotopes caesium-137 and caesium-134—came from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster that began in March of 2011.

In addition, radioactive debris is already being found on West Coast shores as far as Washington State and is expected to continue to be washed up in the next three years.

Dr. Mark Allan Sircus, Ac., OMD, DM (P)
Director International Medical Veritas Association
Doctor of Oriental and Pastoral Medicine
IMVA Publications
Dr. Mark Sircus' Blog | IMVA


Activist Post: Fukushima Radiation Hitting the Streets of LA

Friday, July 6, 2012
Commission report: Fukushima 'a profoundly man-made disaster'
image credit: David Guttenfelder, Pool
Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post

In a damning 641-page report (the introduction to which is embedded below) produced by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC),
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/07/...rofoundly.html
investigators reveal that the horrific and ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima was “a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.”

Unlike other entities associated with the Japanese government, the NAIIC came to some quite damning conclusions, not the least of which is the accusation that the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, which continues to refuse to allow outside inspections of the reactor four building containing the dangerous spent fuel pool four, “betrayed the nation’s right to safety from nuclear accidents.”

The Fukushima NAIIC was formed by the statutory law enactment of Diet of Japan (the Japanese bicameral legislature made up of the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors) on October 7, 2011, although the Chairman and Members were appointed in December of 2011.

Unfortunately, it looks like the Japanese peoples’ “right to safety from nuclear accidents” will likely never be respected seeing as they just restarted a reactor amidst massive public protest and that, statistically speaking, nuclear disasters may occur once every 10 to 20 years.

From a purely rational standpoint, it is impossible to recognize a “nation’s right to safety from nuclear accidents” without recognizing their right to be safe from nuclear power entirely, and the Japanese government seems unwilling to do that.

While recognizing the deadly combination of the tsunami and earthquake in March 2011, the investigatory committee concluded that the disaster was in large part actually man-made.


This is because, according to their findings, the conduct and practices which came both before and after the natural disaster aspect of the tragedy actually compounded the problem and “was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties.”

If the report ended there in pointing to collusion between the government and industry, I would be cheering on the authors of this report. However, they don’t stop there and actually say that had the “most basic safety requirements” been addressed, the disaster would never have been of this magnitude.

Some of these safety requirements, which, “The operator (TEPCO), the regulatory bodies (NISA and NSC) and the government body promoting the nuclear power industry (METI), all failed to correctly develop,” include, “assessing the probability of damage, preparing for containing collateral damage from such a disaster, and developing evacuation plans for the public in the case of a serious radiation release.”

All of this and more is included in a brief but incredibly important “Conclusions” section, which I highly encourage everyone to read. Some of the conclusions are generally surveyed in a BBC report, although I would exhort people to actually do the reading for themselves instead of having it fed to them, especially by the BBC.

The chairman of the commission, Kiyoshi Kurokawa, former head of the Tokyo University Department of Medicine, noted in the introduction:

It was a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response.

This is no baseless claim, mind you. Their investigation included interviews with some 1,167 people and over 900 hours of hearings.

Unsurprisingly, most of the conclusions and facts dug up by the investigators are in completely contradiction to the version of reality spun by TEPCO and the Japanese government. It is no surprise that they had to actually pay people to disseminate their misinformation.

However, the report did note that in order to pass down a truly comprehensive assessment, the team would have to gain increased access to the inner workings of the various reactors, which is not likely anytime soon.

The investigators determined that the earthquake – which was “more foreseeable” than the tsunami – did a great deal more damage than TEPCO and the government would like us to believe.

This is of vital importance because the constant line we’ve heard is that this was never accounted for because no one would expect such a massive earthquake and tsunami to hit at once.

Indeed, the report notes:

Fukushima Prefecture’s emergency response system was also built on the assumption that a nuclear disaster would not occur at the same time as an earthquake and tsunami.

If the report’s findings are accurate, this means, “the very assumptions informing the building codes governing reactor construction in Japan are open to question,” as Homeland Security News Wire pointed out.

The report is far from flowery in its language, pointing out that TEPCO, the government and regulators all “betrayed the nation’s right to safety from nuclear accidents.” Furthermore, TEPCO, “manipulated its cozy relationship with regulators to take the teeth out of regulations,” according to the report.

The commission also found that the government – especially Prime Minister Naoto Kan – TEPCO and the nuclear regulators were bumbling, inept, ill-informed and incapable of sharing information properly.

“What must be admitted, very painfully, is that this was a disaster ‘Made in Japan,’” said Kurokawa.

“Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program;’ our groupism; and our insularity,” added chairman Kurokawa.

It’s incredible to see the quite hideously ugly truth finally emerging. This wasn’t pure accident. This was the product of cover-ups and corporatist relationships which should never exist in the first place.

Hopefully this will serve as the impetus for greater scrutiny and reform of the nuclear industry in every nation which still maintains these types of tight-knit and corrosive relationships with the industries they are supposed to keep in check in order to protect their people.

At least one politician in another country, in this case the United States, is stepping up to the task: Congressman Ed Markey. All we can do now is show our support, speak out, spread this information and hope this trend continues.

Did I forget anything or miss any errors? Would you like to make me aware of a story or subject to cover? Or perhaps you want to bring your writing to a wider audience? Feel free to contact me at admin@EndtheLie.com with your concerns, tips, questions, original writings, insults or just about anything that may strike your fancy.

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This article first appeared at End the Lie.

Madison Ruppert is the Editor and Owner-Operator of the alternative news and analysis database End The Lie and has no affiliation with any NGO, political party, economic school, or other organization/cause. He is available for podcast and radio interviews. Madison also now has his own radio show on Orion Talk Radio from 8 pm -- 10 pm Pacific, which you can find HERE. If you have questions, comments, or corrections feel free to contact him at admin@EndtheLie.com

Activist Post: Commission report: Fukushima 'a profoundly man-made disaster'

Do your children play outside? You need to know this about radiation risk

Monday, July 23, 2012 by: Alexandra Du Toit, TRUE Earth Mama

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(NaturalNews) It has been over a year since the devastating earthquake and tsunami that slammed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant in Japan. Countless lives have been forever affected, but sadly it's the lives of the children that will never be the same. Children and infants, whose cells are still rapidly dividing and bodies still growing, have had to change their entire way of life to try and minimize their radiation exposure levels. Those that survived the tsunami have had to relocate to an area outside the deadly 12-mile exclusion zone. Regardless, the radiation levels are still dangerously high beyond the exclusion zone; in fact, it stretches as far as the Hawaiian Islands and radiation levels on the west coast of the United States continue to rise.

The Fukushima children no longer have a "normal" way of life. Their lives have become focused on regulating their exposure to radiation since the radioactive materials that they are consuming through eating; breathing and every day life are continuously bombarding their little bodies. They have had to adapt to a strange, new world where learning about radiation has become part of growing up. Every child in Fukushima has been asked to wear a device that records their level of radiation exposure and this data is sent to Tokyo University; however, the results are not shown to the children or parents. The nuclear accident not only took away their homes but it also took away their youth.

I recently wrote an article titled "Dirt is not dirty": (Dirt is not dirty) which has been read by thousands all over the world. I received a comment from a Japanese man who wished that he could take his daughter to play in dirt. This comment truly broke my heart. He literally cannot take his daughter outside without checking radiation levels. There is no playing in dirt and building her immune system; in fact, playing in dirt would harm her as the dirt and grass have higher levels of radiation than man-made surfaces. She cannot walk barefoot on the earth, as she has to wear thick-soled shoes and a face mask just to play on the asphalt. Her father has to constantly wash her hands, further reducing her immune system growth. This same story is repeated for all the children whose lives have been affected by the nuclear meltdown. In some instances, children cannot even go to the second floor of their houses because radiation levels are too high. Parents have severe restrictions about when their children can go out, what they wear and what they drink and eat. Children have basically become locked up in their houses with no end to this in the near future. As much as the children are forced to remain inside, they are still living with radiation wherever they go out and the effects may not be seen for many years.

A few weeks after the disaster, Fukushima children were tested for radiation levels in their bodies and nearly half of the children had radioactive iodine in their thyroid. Although the government plans to conduct medical checks for the duration of the lives of 360,000 people 18 and younger that were living near the nuclear plant, they also plan not to inform the public out of fear that this will create 'unnecessary' anxiety. The government has now passed an official order of censorship, making it a crime to report anything negative about Fukushima. The children of Fukushima are stuck living a life without the pure innocence of childhood and instead, the dark heaviness of a future unknown.

Sources for this article include:

<h1>We are All the Children of Fukushima!</h1>
Nearly half of children living in Fukushima region have radioactive iodine in their thyroid glands
DAWN.COM | Latest News, Breaking News, Pakistan News, Pakistani News, World News, Business, Business News, Science and Technology, Entertainment News, Sport News, Cricket, South Asia, South Asia News, Memo Gate
ABC.net.au
BBC Two - Children of the Tsunami
Science news and science jobs from New Scientist - New Scientist

About the author:
Alex is a TRUE Earth Mama, helping others tune into their most natural state while bringing harmony and balance into all areas of their lives in order to THRIVE.
TRUE Earth Mama - Home https://www.facebook.com/TrueEarthMama. https://www.twitter.com/EarthMama2

Learn more: Do your children play outside? You need to know this about radiation risk

Dangerous levels of Fukushima radiation headed for West Coast, say scientists

Tuesday, July 24, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer


(NaturalNews) In the immediate wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that occurred in Japan last year, radioactive releases of epic proportions flooded the waters of the Pacific Ocean, where they now flow adrift. And even though more than a year has passed since the time of the first releases, some scientists believe the worst is yet to come as these water-borne radioactive plumes head for the U.S. West Coast.

Russia Today (RT) reports that a team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory recently constructed some models designed to assess the impact of Fukushima radiation over the longer term. To do this, they simulated ocean currents in the Pacific, and evaluated how radiation would both disperse and travel.

They discovered that, within the next few years, the worst of Fukushima's radiation releases will make its way across the Pacific and hit the American coastline. So-called "packets" of radiation are also expected to continue forming as the larger plumes travel via the ocean currents, which could result in highly radioactive waves of ocean water striking West Coast beaches in the very near future.

"Within one year, it will have spread over the entire western half of the North Pacific, and in five years we predict it will reach the U.S. West Coast," says Claus Boning, co-author of the study, about the Fukushima radiation releases. "The levels of radiation that hit the U.S. coast will be small relative to the levels released by Fukushima. But we cannot accurately estimate what those levels will be because we do not know for certain what was released by Fukushima."

Leaked - Fukushima clean-up crews covered up true radiation readings
And the world may never know just how much radiation was, and potentially continues to be, released by Fukushima, as a recently leaked recording verifies that Fukushima plant workers were encouraged to lie about radiation readings at the plant. According to RT, clean-up workers were given lead boxes which they were told to use as "shields" to block radiation readings in order to make them appear lower than they really were.

This obviously insinuates that radiation readings were far higher at the Fukushima plant than the world was told they were, and that these levels more than likely far exceeded the maximum exposure levels considered to be safe for plant workers. The company accused of the cover-up, Build-up, later admitted that workers were encouraged to wear these deceptive radiation shields.

Radiation readings at Reactor 1 reach record levels
The situation at the Fukushima plant itself appears to still be highly problematic as well, as reports indicate that radiation levels at Reactor 1, the fuel rod of which sustained 70 percent damage as a result of the disaster, are the highest they have ever been. According to the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owns the Fukushima plant, levels of radiation at Reactor 1 reached 10 times higher than levels recorded at Reactors 2 and 3.

"Workers cannot enter the site and we must use robots for the demolition," said TEPCO officials about the severity of the situation. According to reports, levels of radiation in the basement water of Reactor 1 reached 10,300 millisieverts per hour (mSv/hr), which is the equivalent of receiving the maximum annual dose of radiation in just 20 seconds, or enough to become gravely ill in just a few minutes.

Sources for this article include:

US West Coast to receive dangerous levels of Fukushima radiation &mdash; RT

Fukushima contractor forced workers to fake radiation readings &mdash; RT

Fukushima radiation sizzling at 10 sieverts in flooded basement of unit 1 | The Japan Times Online

Learn more: Dangerous levels of Fukushima radiation headed for West Coast, say scientists

I hope that the claims that the radiation level on Earth's northern hemisphere are slowly climbing as the Fukishima reactors continue to spill radiation is an exaggeration!?!?!

W

As truth about Fukushima radiation emerges, Japanese authorities struggle to maintain cover-up

Tuesday, July 31, 2012 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer


(NaturalNews) The cat is out of the bag, as more evidence continues to emerge proving that clean-up workers at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility in Japan deliberately covered up high radiation readings at the order of their superiors. And as more people become aware of this disturbing fact, Japanese authorities are trying to maintain the facade that the cover-up was an isolated incident, and that there was not a larger conspiracy to hide legitimate radiation readings from the public.

The Japanese news source Asahi Shimbun (AS) reports that a senior official working for Build-Up, a subcontractor hired during the Fukushima clean-up efforts, has admitted to instructing his workers to wear lead coverings over their dosimeters in order to shield accurate radiation readings. Dosimeters measure an individual's exposure to radiation, and indicate when it is no longer safe to be in the presence of a radiation source.

Recordings uncovered from a December 2 conversation between the official and his employees reveals that he coaxed them to use the lead coverings by claiming that he had used them many times before without issue. He also apparently told them that they would have to use them in future clean-up efforts as well, and implied that they should get used to using them now.

According to AS, the senior official also came up with an alibi that the workers could use to explain the coverings, should anyone inquire about the unusual presence of tape on their torn radiation protection suits. All the bases were covered, in other words, which was enough to convince four of the workers to go along with the plan.

Senior official's confession makes no sense, appears to be even more cover-up
But now that the media has blown the lid off the story, the senior official in question is now claiming that the incident was isolated, and that he came up with it himself on the fly in order to protect him and his team from radiation. What? Even though this explanation makes absolutely no sense, as dosimeters cover up radiation readings, not the radiation itself, this is the story he is now telling, and the mainstream media appears to be buying it.

When asked about this obviously contradictory statement, the senior official followed up his answer with another nonsensical one about how his workers were new at the job, and how he thought that telling them to wear lead coverings over the only thing that would have alerted them to dangerous levels of radiation would somehow quell their fears. Again, this explanation makes no sense, and appears to point to a cover-up as to who really instructed him and his team to wear the lead coverings.

So a senior official takes the hit for a cover-up intended to deceive the public into thinking that radiation levels were lower than they really were at the Fukushima plant. When asked to explain what he was thinking when he made this decision, he offers up senseless explanations that make no sense, and insists that he was the only one involved, for some unknown reason. Suspicious? You be the judge.

Sources for this article include:

Official of TEPCO subcontractor: Dosimeter ruse was one-time act - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun

Business & Financial News, Breaking US & International News | Reuters.com

Dangerous levels of Fukushima radiation headed for West Coast, say scientists

Learn more: As truth about Fukushima radiation emerges, Japanese authorities struggle to maintain cover-up