Remember Fukushima

[Suff]

You know that reactor thing that nearly went out of control but they got to it in time and now it's just one long and expensive recovery job...

Well at least that's what the governments and the press want us to believe.

But is it really?

This is something which is dear to my heart as I read a lot abut it at the time. Every now and again I keep on dipping back in to see how much more bad news they are willing to leak out to the public.....

[Aggers]

I'd forgotten about this event. On looking it up now, I am surprised that it was not
more publicised. On trawling the Internet, I find the following information....

Over 60,000,000 killed by nuclear fallout… More than 120,000,000 cancers from radioactive releases… Doesn’t include millions more dead babies and foetuses — Professor: “Horrifying… This is a war crime far greater in magnitude than any that has occurred in recorded human history”

Doesn't the future look rosy?

[Workingman]

Before putting on our 20:20 hindsight spectacles let us not forget that Fukushima was an accident caused by the magnitude 9 Tohoku earthquake, the largest ever to hit Japan and the fourth largest in recorded history. The earthquake triggered a tsunami the power of which had us glued to our TVs as we watched the force of waves as high as 9.3m rip buildings from their foundations and wash debris many kilometres inland.

As for the events after the tsunami hit there have been some good and some bad things. However, the event was a one off and unpredictable, there was no way that it could have been practised for - the same as Chernobyl. Every step those brave people in Fukushima take is a step in the dark and for some of the problems that keep cropping up they do not have the technology to deal with them: nowhere has!

As for us not being kept informed. I am given to think that after five years it has flown under the news radar rather than there being any cover-up going on. The Wikipeda page lists many incidents, with references.

Btw: I was not sure about ENENEWS as it seemed a bit alarmist. It turns out to be a vehicle for an anonymous lawyer and prolific blogger with a penchant for nuclear power scare stories, mainly Fukushima.

[Workingman]

Over 60,000,000 killed by nuclear fallout… More than 120,000,000 cancers from radioactive releases… Doesn’t include millions more dead babies and foetuses — Professor: “Horrifying… This is a war crime far greater in magnitude than any that has occurred in recorded human history”

Ah yes, I also came across those figures, they are from the eminently sounding European Committee on Radiation Risk(ECRR), but wait. The ECRR is nothing more than an informal group of like minded people, mainly Greens. It has nothing to do with the EU, European Commission, European Council, Europe or Eurovision it might well have called itself the European Knitting Society for all it matters.

Its figures are self-described as "objective calculations" based on the nuclear age, but are they? Was the trebling of the global population taken into account? What was the 'rate' of cancer deaths in the 50 year period leading up to 1945 and how does it compare to the 50 years after?

It is not as simple as throwing out big numbers to get people to notice.

[Aggers]

I accept what you say, Frank.

It's not easy to get a true picture of the situation, is it?

[Workingman]

No it isn't, Aggers, but there are plenty of people claiming to know exactly what to do from the safety of their sofas thousands of miles away.

I don't hear any of them volunteering to go to Fukushima to oversee their brilliant ideas on site. Yet brave men and women are there risking their lives to do their best to make the site as safe as possible.

[Suff]

The point is that they denied it was a china syndrome right until the washed out radioactive material proved they were lying.

Then the press dropped it because it was not "news" any more.

They heavy nuclear elements which are washing out into the Pacific are going to pollute the wildlife there for hundreds if not a thousand years.

Clear communication of this fact? None. Clear statements that they can't even reach the tons of material which is still at critical mass and still incredibly hot? None.

Fukushima may have been a natural disaster, but the actions since are turning it into a catastrophe of the worst kind. I accept that the incident was way beyond anything anyone expected. Unlike Chernobyl where they were, quite literally, playing with the reactor to see how it responded when it blew it's top off, the Japanese were in no way to blame for the Tsunami and what it did. In fact, if anything, the buildings stood up better than the design parameters.

However what has happened since with the critical mass meltdown, the near meltdown of the spent rods in the cooling pools and the tight rein on information is something which should not have happened. Yes I know it would scare people. But they need to be scared. Because it's the only way we will get the correct safeguards in the new reactors for the future.

This continued silence, to me, is worrying.

Other reports I have seen say that the interim storage which is literally keeping a lid of things would rapidly collapse in the presence of a moderately large cyclone. Which Japan sees very regularly. Not seeing that in the new are we. Well not until the said storm actually turns up which is about 5 years too late to talk about it...

[Workingman]

The heavy nuclear elements which are washing out into the Pacific are going to pollute the wildlife there for hundreds if not a thousand years.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration measured cesium-134 at points in the Pacific Ocean and models were cited in predictions by several government agencies to announce that the radiation would not be a health hazard for North American residents. Groups, including Beyond Nuclear and the Tillamook Estuaries Partnership, challenged these predictions on the basis of continued isotope releases after 2011, leading to a demand for more recent and comprehensive measurements as the radioactivity made its way east. These measurements were taken by a cooperative group of organizations under the guidance of a marine chemist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and it was revealed that total radiation levels, of which only a fraction bore the fingerprint of Fukushima, were not high enough to pose any direct risk to human life and in fact were far less than Environmental Protection Agency guidelines or several other sources of radiation exposure deemed safe.

So, the fearmongers took their version to a facility on their side and the results turned out to be less harmful than than their adversaries had found.

Tough luck, conspiracy theorists.