Thread: Fukushima worse than Chernobly

Months” → Something Is Killing Life All Over The Pacific Ocean – Could It Be Fukushima?

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Michael Snyder



Why is there so much death and disease among sea life living near the west coast of North America right now? Could the hundreds of tons of highly radioactive water that are being released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day have anything to do with it? When I wrote my last article about Fukushima, I got a lot of heat for being “alarmist” and for supposedly “scaring” people unnecessarily. I didn’t think that an article about Fukushima would touch such a nerve, but apparently there are some people out there that really do not want anyone writing about this stuff. Right now, massive numbers of fish and sea creatures are dying in the Pacific Ocean. In addition, independent tests have shown that significant levels of cesium-137 are in a very high percentage of the fish that are being caught in the Pacific and sold in North America. Could this have anything to do with the fact that the largest nuclear disaster in the history of mankind has been constantly releasing enormous amounts of radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean for more than two years? I don’t know about you, but to me this seems to be a question that is worth asking.

Since I wrote my last article, major news outlets have reported that large numbers of sea stars living off of the west coast of North America appear to be “melting“…

Divers were out in Puget Sound waters Saturday to see if they can help solve a mystery. Scientists are trying to figure out what’s causing one species of starfish to die in parts of Puget Sound and the waters off of Canada.
Seattle Aquarium biologists Jeff Christiansen and Joel Hollander suited up in scuba gear in their search for answers. “We’re going to look for both healthy and potentially diseased sea stars,” Christiansen explained. “We’ve got some sea stars that look like they’re melting on the bottom.”
The same thing is happening in the waters near Canada and nobody’s sure why.

If scientists don’t know why this is happening, perhaps there is an unusual explanation for this phenomenon.
Could it be Fukushima?
The following is what one invertebrate expert quoted by National Geographic says is happening to the starfish…

“[The starfish] seem to waste away, ‘deflate’ a little, and then just … disintegrate. The arms just detach, and the central disc falls apart. It seems to happen rapidly, and not just dead animals undergoing decomposition, as I observed single arms clinging to the rock faces, tube feet still moving, with the skin split, gills flapping in the current. I’ve seen single animals in the past looking like this, and the first dive this morning I thought it might be crabbers chopping them up and tossing them off the rocks. Then we did our second dive in an area closed to fishing, and in absolutely amazing numbers. The bottom from about 20 to 50 feet [6 to 15 meters] was absolutely littered with arms, oral discs, tube feet, gonads and gills … it was kind of creepy.”

That certainly does not sound normal to me.
Shouldn’t we be trying to figure out why this is happening?
Something is also causing a huge spike in the death rate for killer whales living off of the coast of British Columbia…

A Vancouver Aquarium researcher is sounding the alarm over “puzzling” changes he’s observed in the killer whale pods that live off the southern British Columbia coast.
Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard says he fears changes in the ocean environment are prompting odd behaviour and an unusually high mortality rate.
Barrett-Lennard says the southern resident orca pod, which is found in the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland, has lost seven matriarchs over the past two years, and he’s noticed a lack of vocalizations from the normally chatty mammals.

Once again, scientists do not know why this is happening.
Could it be Fukushima?
I am just asking the question.
Clearly something unusual is happening to the Pacific. The following is what one Australian discovered as he journeyed across the Pacific Ocean recently…

The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.
“After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead,” Macfadyen said.
“We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.
“I’ve done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I’m used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen.”
In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.
“Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it’s still out there, everywhere you look.”

What would cause the Pacific Ocean to be “dead”?
Could it be Fukushima?
When you consider the evidence presented above along with all of the other things that we have learned in recent months, it becomes more than just a little bit alarming.
The following are some more examples of sea life dying off in the Pacific from my recent article entitled “28 Signs That The West Coast Is Being Absolutely Fried With Nuclear Radiation From Fukushima“…
-Polar bears, seals and walruses along the Alaska coastline are suffering from fur loss and open sores…

Wildlife experts are studying whether fur loss and open sores detected in nine polar bears in recent weeks is widespread and related to similar incidents among seals and walruses.
The bears were among 33 spotted near Barrow, Alaska, during routine survey work along the Arctic coastline. Tests showed they had “alopecia, or loss of fur, and other skin lesions,” the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement.

-There is an epidemic of sea lion deaths along the California coastline…

At island rookeries off the Southern California coast, 45 percent of the pups born in June have died, said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service based in Seattle. Normally, less than one-third of the pups would die. It’s gotten so bad in the past two weeks that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “unusual mortality event.”

-Along the Pacific coast of Canada and the Alaska coastline, the population of sockeye salmon is at a historic low. Many are blaming Fukushima.
-Something is causing fish all along the west coast of Canada to bleed from their gills, bellies and eyeballs.
-Experts have found very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.
-One test in California found that 15 out of 15 bluefin tuna were contaminated with radiation from Fukushima.
-Back in 2012, the Vancouver Sun reported that cesium-137 was being found in a very high percentage of the fish that Japan was selling to Canada…
• 73 percent of mackerel tested
• 91 percent of the halibut
• 92 percent of the sardines
• 93 percent of the tuna and eel
• 94 percent of the cod and anchovies
• 100 percent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish
Is it really so unreasonable to wonder if Fukushima could be causing all of this?
And the total amount of nuclear material in the Pacific Ocean is constantly increasing. According to the New York Times, the latest releases from Fukushima contain “much more contaminated water than before”, and the flow of contaminated water will not stop until 2015 at the earliest…

The latest releases appear to be carrying much more contaminated water than before into the Pacific. And that flow may not slow until at least 2015, when an ice wall around the damaged reactors is supposed to be completed.

And that same article explained that cesium-137 is entering the Pacific at a rate that is “about three times as high” as last year…

The magnitude of the recent spike in radiation, and the amounts of groundwater involved, have led Michio Aoyama, an oceanographer at a government research institute who is considered an authority on radiation in the sea, to conclude that radioactive cesium 137 may now be leaking into the Pacific at a rate of about 30 billion becquerels per year, or about three times as high as last year. He estimates that strontium 90 may be entering the Pacific at a similar rate.

Right now, approximately 300 tons of contaminated water is pouring into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every 24 hours.
But apparently we are not supposed to ask any questions about this and we are just supposed to blindly accept that this is not having any significant impact on our environment even though sea life in the Pacific appears to be dying in unprecedented numbers.
I don’t know about you, but I really think that the people of the world deserve to know the truth about what is happening out there.
Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter.

http://dcclothesline.com/2013/10/29/...ean-fukushima/

Fukushima Radiation Turns Into Alaska’s Tragedy

Posted by: Allison Martinez Posted date: November 13, 2013

We know we are being lied to about Fukushima. Even amateurs with little academic training in reading equipment know that the levels of radiation hitting Alaska are in excess of those experienced in the cold war era of the 1960s. The radiation in the North Pacific due to above ground nuclear testing were regarded as fairly high. The levels being experienced now is higher than that, at least as measured by local residents.
In July of 2013, the Representatives in the Japanese Diet learned that the amount of radiation from the Fukushima was 20 times the amount of radiation of Hiroshima every day. The situation in Japan has become worse rather than better, and that is having an impact on radiation levels in Alaska. Japan has asked for help from anyone in the world, and so far, there are no takers.




Just before the Tsunami and earthquake in 2011, spent fuel rods were placed 6 stories high in one of the buildings. The building those fuel rods are in is now in a building that is “listing” or leaning like the tower of Pisa. A typhoon and an earthquake this past week has made the situation critical. If the building collapses, the situation will become grave, not just for Japan, but for most of the Pacific Rim and North America.



The mainstream media has been a deadly silent on Fukushima and its impact on the west coast. Part of that silence is from a lack of official data. Monitoring of radiation by our government of our own lands appears to be nonexistent.
While Alaska is part of the United States, the only agencies that seems to recognize this is the Internal Revenue Service, the National Park Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA does a fabulous job policing the emissions of a drop of water from the sluice boxes of gold miners in places like Chicken, Alaska. They do a wonderful job ensuring that no one can burn wood or coal to heat their homes on cold winter nights because of elevated PM2 levels but you can burn all the diesel and cook all the meth your heart desires as far as the EPA is concerned. Monitor radiation? Fat chance.
The EPA stopped monitoring the radiation a while back. They would rather get their jollies from harassing locals over burning a stick of wood trying to stay warm than monitor radiation levels. Monitoring radiation levels is far beneath their dignity and offers no hope of amusement for them.
John Kelley, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told CNBC that he’s not sure contamination has reach dangerous levels for humans but says without better data, who will know?

“The data they will need is not only past data but current data, and if no one is sampling anything then we won’t really know it, will we? The general concern was, is the food supply safe? And I don’t think anyone can really answer that definitively.”

The issue is critical in Alaska because so many people live off the land for their sustenance. Since nobody is measuring, nobody know for certain if the food is safe, indeed if anything is safe. The federal government seems far more interested in what time what kid left what bus stop, and the voting records of parents but doesn’t seem to care about the radiation levels to which the child and parent is being subjected to daily.
At the beginning of the Fukushima crisis, Alaska state officials discovered there wasn’t any sort of radiation measuring equipment or supplies to handle such a crisis. The state learned that Federal officials during the Bush era moved radiation detection equipment to the lower 48. Since Alaska had no nuclear power plant or nuclear weapons, there seemed little need for the equipment. Air samples are periodically mailed to the EPA lab in Alabama for evaluation, but somehow got lost the mail during the first weeks of the Fukushima crisis.
When Fukushima happened, there was no way to measure anything in the state.
At the end of March of 2011 the environmental agency established radiation testing centers in key locations in response to citizens asking about the impact of Fukushima. The EPA set up a monitoring station in Dutch Harbor, Alaska roughly 2,700 miles away from Fukushima. It attempted to set up one in Nome, but the equipment arrived damaged and unusable. Anchorage Daily News reported two weeks after the disaster began,

Dutch Harbor also reported the highest levels of cesium-137, more than three times any other reporting station in the United States and twice the level of the next highest station, in Guam. Dutch Harbor’s reading on quickly decaying but dangerous tellurium-132, though tiny, was more than 100 times higher than any place else that reported.

The state kept assuring everyone that all was well, everywhere else appeared fine. Then the story went away as far as the media was concerned. Ridicule was aimed at anyone who asked. The radiation website for Alaska seemed to eventually disappear. Locals began to monitor things on their own out of frustration.
Evidence of problems continue to be obvious, yet it is presented with strange excuses. There have been disastrous years of low fish runs that have no explanation. It is only in editorials where the obvious is posited and quickly ridiculed until recently. As the editors of the Juneau paper finally wrote,

We are concerned our Alaska salmon are being slowly tainted with nuclear waste. We are worried about the impact this waste could have on our resources, and especially the people who consume them…
We urge scientists in Alaska to be proactive about conducting research and monitoring our salmon species. And we urge them to be vocal about their findings.

Fat chance of that happening. The Food and Drug Administration only recently put a warning out on eating sea food from Fukushima, and appears to have done nothing to monitor food elsewhere. The state of Alaska would rather promote salmon than worry about a few locals biting the dust. As early as October of 2011, reports of elevated thyroid cancer of Alaska’s children were squashed from the news by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They did what they could to hide reports from Freedom of Information Act requests.



There are issues now with killer whales who seem to have greatly diminished in number with “no known cause.” Seals with hair loss and lesions from no known origin. Star fish through the west coast appear to have a strange disease all along the Pacific coast that cause them to disintegrate. Yet the denial continues by Republican and Democrats alike.




And while the EPA continues to monitor the smoke stack of every home in Alaska for PM2.5 down to a city block, there seems to be only volunteer amateurs monitoring radiation with their own equipment in the interior of Alaska. The federal government has held multiple hearings on PM2.5, but none on the impact of radiation from Fukushima. There is no official source measuring radiation, and it is all through voluntary efforts. If levels rise, it is up to volunteers to notify friends, and be ridiculed by others. Further, since Alaska is far from any medical help for radiation poisoning, citizens are on their own to take precautions and stockpile their own iodine or other resources. Radiation levels are at or have exceeded the levels experienced in the North Pacific during the era of nuclear testing in the 1960s. Those high radiation levels spurred many of the testing treaties in later years.
Perhaps someone who is somebody can get the EPA to actually do the job they are supposed to do and monitor.



Allison Martinez

Allison Martinez writes as the “Arctic Conservative” lives in northern Alaska. An economist by training, AC lives as an economic refugee on the edge of the country.
More Posts

http://freepatriot.org/2013/11/13/fu...askas-tragedy/

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Crony Democracy and Japan's Nuclear Disaster

image source

Andrew McKillop
Activist Post

LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC DISASTER

Abenomics has come, but is already on its way out. A short-term pack of phony reforms to befuddle public opinion, buy time, and develop new bad panic responses to Japan's enduring economic crisis. Because this is New Normal anywhere in the former rich nations - which are called “advanced industrial” as well as “postindustral” (well exhibiting their cognitive dissonance, schizophrenia and existential crisis) - Shinzo Abe and his clique of crony corporate profiteers stumble along to their next crisis with their heads held high. TEPCO, until March 2011, was a peer-respected player in the crony corporate court circus close to power. Today it is special – because it brought down a nuclear disaster of planetary scale, bigger than Chernobyl – but Japan's crony democracy, like its peers is hardwired to only react with panic to any disaster its incompetence produces. Bad panic or good panic, always panic.

To be sure we have the left, intellectuals, historians and philosophers bemoaning the demise of vibrant democracy, the impoverishment of political life and the worldwide installation of No Alternative corporate crony capitalism. The Japanese nuclear disaster throws a very cruel light on this entropic and degenerate fin-de-siecle deathwish, very similar to the late 18th century birthplace and times of economic liberalism in the last years of King Louis' reign as visiting Adam Smith glimpsed Marie Antoinette and imbibed the ramblings of Francois Quesnay, her charlatan soothsayer and “economist” who taught so much to Smith.

At its worst, the Fukushima disaster could or might usher-in totalitarian government in Japan – this worst case option cannot be excluded. At best, that is at least, it will further drive public despair with the image of a government sphere where dialogue and shared responsibility have shrivelled to nothing, replaced by hubris and unbridled intolerance, the triumph of greed, ignorance, fear, anger and the loss of reason in public life.

Whether it is Shinzo Abe or his lookalike and talkalike No Alternative leaders perorating in Pretoria and preening their image at Soweto's Soccer City, in a mix of football hysteria and funereal razzmatazz for Nelson Mandela, we have a spectacular death-grip embrace of infantile emotionalism. However, this is already outdated. It was built for the early years of black-and-white television, the George Orwell era of atomic weapons, mass communication with bakelite radios, 78 rpm records and the leaden prose of a select few leading national newspapers dictating and dominating public thought.

LIBERAL ECONOMIC DISASTER

This infantile emotionalism is made for television. It was designed for the Cold War, the first age of nuclear power – that is nuclear weapons, massive overkill and mutually assured destruction. The economic disaster of nuclear power came later, but surely and certainly, like a cancer.

The goal of lying and infantile emotionalism is to empty the language of public life of all substantive content, and dovetails perfectly with its only other goal, to hawk consumer gadgets, sell commodities and pump up equity “values”, promote celebrity culture and create a heavy background atmosphere of Armageddon and world's end, which was impeccably reproduced by the long-running but laughably incompetent Global Warming hysteria doctrine.

One very simple reason we should be terrified by the Fukushima disaster is that it is already clear, today, that Tepco has no intention of “fixing the problem” and is technically bankrupt. It basically cannot afford to clean up its gargantuan mess. Liberal economics indeed proposes and operates by the unlimited printing of chaff money in the post 2008 world– called Quantitative Easing – but this fools nobody. The economic resources are not available to deal with a crisis of the Fukushima magnitude. Only an international and multilateral response could handle the disaster. But this is unlikely until it is too late.

The context was exactly the same with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Fake national pride is in play. Soviet arrogance symbolized by the egoist “Gorby” or Mikael Gorbachev decreed a point blank refusal of any foreign clean-up help. That was until the total panic phase started, when very brave foreign nationals were permitted to give their own lives, alongside the lives of The Liquidators, in the bungled and deadly clean-up operation.

The Chernobyl disaster surely and certainly helped make the fall of the Soviet Union more certain. Its coming defeat in its absurd and aggressive, racist and incoherent war in Afghanistan – exactly like the US war in Afghanistan – was already certain. Its economy, despite the laughably pathetic liberal economic reforms of “Gorby”, called Perestroika, was already broken and could only collapse. The Chernobyl disaster was a flag event of this collapse – not a false flag, but a real one. Only one end result was possible.

For Shinzo Abe, a check on the Chernobyl disaster may be useful to him. However, due to the post-Soviet world, the post-2008 era of permanent economic crisis, and the liberal deathwish of abandon and degeneracy - what we can call the Comfort of Corruption and the Desire for Decline - Shinzo Abe is opposed by strawmen reporters wallowing in the wreckage of journalistic standards. Abe can count on the Internet circus of hysteria to create a confusing smokescreen of mostly-fake conspiracy stories.

CIVILITY AND ANGER

Asian philosophy teaches that Obsession is the opposite of Generosity, and Civility is the opposite of Anger. When civility, which demands and expects truthfulness, is denied and thrown into the wastebin, Anger is certain. Public anger is certain in response to the elite panic response that Shinzo Abe has enacted, like Gorbachev enacted before this egoistic charlatan was swept from power amid total economic meltdown. Gorbachev was unable to count on his state propaganda system to smother public anger. Shinzo Abe cannot count on today's counterpart of Soviet propaganda - civic illiteracy, the dumbed down mass, junk news on the Internet – to hide the extent of his failure.

The decline of civility has another counterpart - the emergence of mob rule, enacted in Russia in the wake of the Soviet collapse by the quick emergence of and takeover by the Oligarch Mob, using Mafia methods for their somber version of Mother Russia. In Japan and any other of the world's 29 nations said to be “committed to peaceful nuclear power”, the age of Soviet technocratic ignorance and anti-intellectualism – symbolized by nuclear power – lives on. Public illiteracy in this case concerns the inability of mass audiences to grasp the extent of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The upstream cause of this is political and will stay political. Glorifying the principle of private and individual self-interest and greed as a “paradigm for understanding” is especially disastrous in this case, because the Fukushima catastrophe is already – by its radiation release – worse than the Chernobyl disaster. Shinzo Abe may well try to turn public anger against “foreign devils” to explain the Fukushima disaster, his playact will be interesting to watch – for example blowing on the embers of political and territorial disputes and conflicts with China and North Korea. Bread, circuses and war!

But we are already 2 years and 9 months into the crisis. Time is certainly counted, and is counting down by the second. The most extreme forms of mob rule and public illiteracy could be the default situation, that is a lurch into totalitarian rule. Alongside this we will have the culture of militarization, the cult of security, the urge to denounce and to spy.

NUCLEAR ILLITERACY

All of these forces, whose public educational influence should not be underestimated, constitute a new type of civic illiteracy helping further the drift apart of connecting everyday problems people face with larger social, environmental, economic, scientific and existential issues and forces. The result of this divide further depoliticizes public life and further hollows out politics, making it only an empty gesture. Very soon, Shinzo Abe may be fully able to operate the spectacle of national humiliation and rage in a playact panic response to the Fukushima disaster.

Nuclear power with its illusion of “clean, cheap and safe” energy for the consumer nirvana of constant economic growth fits well with the society of spectacle. Nuclear fear, which is intrinsic, can be reduced to private anguish — privatized in the real and full sense of the term. The dangerous cocktail of elite arrogance and privatized anguish however has limits and thresholds, as the global warming clique pretended was true for climate change and human CO2 emissions. The willed and wanted paralysis of public fear submerged in a sea of resentment is the age-old breeding ground for manipulating extremists of all kinds, from religious fanatics to political fanatics. Played correctly by the crony elite, the public demand for an answer to their individual anguish and their emotional woes, and the fact of nuclear disaster, can be thrown together like a ball-and-cup atom bomb detonator, and canceled out leaving only public numbness and a further decline in calls for political responsibility and meaningful action.

CELEBRITY DISASTER

Casino finance, the corporate state (all power to the multinationals!), privatized anguish and privatized crony education conspire to make Fukushima a celebrity disaster. As a spectator cult event it is still carried by evening news shows, but well after the football and stock exchange news. Celebrity nuclear disaster is modeled around the one-only model of narcissistic and privatized needs of consumer culture – as we await the free market innovative response! But believing that will come will take the exhaustion of far too many half-lives of the radiation spewing from the wreckage, day and night.

In Japan as elsewhere in the former or ex-rich societies, stripped of ethical and political importance or “relevance”, the public domain is a space where private interests are displayed and then aggregated, piled on top of each other in a layer cake of private woes and problems. By definition there are no solutions except those mystically delivered by “the market”, when or if it chooses. Most importantly, the idea of concerted public action no longer exists because that is politics from a time before.

For Japanese liberal democratic society and its hollowed-out economy, emptied of any substantial content, the ability of individuals to transform their privatized anguish into genuine public debate, political concern, and collective action is doubtful and difficult. The Fukushima disaster occurred at a similar cultural, economic, political and social moment for the USSR, with its Chernobyl disaster. The new and one-only mass illiteracy can only respond and react – with hysteria and a potential lurch into totalitarianism – to the disasters it creates.

Under national emergency conditions, authoritarianism is “the natural response”. Abetted if not enabled by a dumbed-down public, by its inability to grasp the questions of power and public consciousness, the Fukushima disaster has serious and real potential for transforming Japan's society and politics in the worst possible way. As we know, Japan's government like that of the US, Russia, China, France, the UK and other “nuclear nations” was always willing to invest vast sums in nuclear power and war preparedness. Like them, whether openly authoritarian or not, and for 30 years since the 1980s, it has locked itself into a system in which the public – meaning private persons - are complicit in their own exploitation, disposability, humiliation and potential death by cancer.

The celebrity cult only operates by default and through extreme public weakness and ignorance. The celebrity nuclear disaster is a vast, extreme version of this cult, the exhibition 24/24 of public incompetence and inability, submerged in a whirling sandstorm of fake-and-real news and information. It is a problem as serious as any the self-defined “democratic world” has ever faced, not merely a political issue exhibiting the degeneration of politics, but also a cultural and educational issue.

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO. McKillop is Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/12/...ear-power.html