Harvey Wasserman | February 2, 2014 12:45 pm
[This is the first in a two part series]
Fukushima’s missing melted cores and radioactive gushers continue to fester in secret.
Japan’s harsh dictatorial censorship has been matched by a
global corporate media blackout aimed—successfully—at keeping Fukushima out of the public eye.
But that doesn’t keep the actual radiation out of our ecosystem, our markets … or our bodies.
Speculation on the ultimate impact ranges from the utterly harmless to the intensely
apocalyptic .
But
the basic reality is simple: for seven decades, government Bomb
factories and privately-owned reactors have spewed massive quantities of
unmonitored radiation into the biosphere.
The impacts of these
emissions on human and ecological health are unknown primarily because
the nuclear industry has resolutely refused to study them.
Indeed,
the official presumption has always been that showing proof of damage
from nuclear Bomb tests and commercial reactors falls to the victims,
not the perpetrators.
And that in any case, the industry will be held virtually harmless.
This
“see no evil, pay no damages” mindset dates from the Bombing of
Hiroshima to Fukushima to the disaster coming next … which could be
happening as you read this.
Here are 50 preliminary reasons why
this radioactive legacy demands we prepare for the worst for our oceans,
our planet, our economy … ourselves.
1. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945), the U.S. military
initially denied
that there was any radioactive fallout, or that it could do any damage.
Despite an absence of meaningful data, the victims (including a group
of U.S. prisoners of war) and their supporters were officially
“discredited” and scorned.
2. Likewise, when Nobel-winners Linus Pauling and Andre Sakharov
correctly warned
of a massive global death toll from atmospheric Bomb testing, they were
dismissed with official contempt … until they won in the court of
public opinion.
3. During and after the Bomb Tests (1946-63),
downwinders in the South Pacific and American west, along with thousands
of U.S. “atomic vets,” were told their
radiation-induced health problems were imaginary … until they proved utterly irrefutable.
4. When British Dr. Alice Stewart proved (1956) that even
tiny x-ray doses
to pregnant mothers could double childhood leukemia rates, she was
assaulted with 30 years of heavily funded abuse from the nuclear and
medical establishments.
5. But Stewart’s findings
proved tragically accurate, and helped set in stone the medical health
physics consensus that there is no “safe dose” of radiation … and that
pregnant women should not be x-rayed, or exposed to equivalent radiation.
6. More
than 400 commercial power reactors have been injected into our
ecosphere with no meaningful data to measure their potential health and
environmental impacts, and no systematic global data base has been
established or maintained.
7. “Acceptable dose” standards for commercial reactors were conjured from faulty
A-Bomb studies
begun five years after Hiroshima, and at Fukushima and elsewhere have
been continually made more lax to save the industry money.
8. Bomb/reactor fallout
delivers alpha and beta particle emitters
that enter the body and do long-term damage, but which industry backers
often wrongly equate with less lethal external gamma/x-ray doses from
flying in airplanes or living in Denver.
9. By refusing to compile
long-term emission assessments, the industry systematically hides
health impacts at Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc.,
forcing victims to rely on isolated independent studies which it
automatically deems “discredited.”
10. Human
health damage has been amply suffered in radium watch dial painting,
Bomb production, uranium mining/milling/enrichment, waste management and
other radioactive work, despite decades of relentless industry denial.
11. When Dr. Ernest Sternglass, who had worked with Albert Einstein, warned that
reactor emissions were harming people, thousands of copies of his
Low-Level Radiation (1971)
mysteriously disappeared from their primary warehouse.
12. When the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) Chief Medical Officer, Dr. John Gofman, urged that r
eactor dose levels be lowered by 90 percent, he was forced out of the AEC and publicly attacked, despite his status a founder of the industry.
13. A
member of the Manhattan Project, and a medical doctor responsible for
pioneer research into LDL cholesterol, Gofman later called the
reactor industry an instrument of “premeditated mass murder.”
14. Stack
monitors and other monitoring devices failed at Three Mile Island
(1979) making it impossible to know how much radiation escaped, where it
went or who it impacted and how.
15. But some
2,400 TMI downwind victims and their families were denied a class action
jury trial by a federal judge who said “not enough radiation” was
released to harm them, though she could not say how much that was or
where it went.
16. During TMI’s meltdown,
industry advertising equated the fallout with a single chest x-ray to
everyone downwind, ignoring the fact that such doses could double
leukemia rates among children born to involuntarily irradiated mothers.
17. Widespread death and damage downwind from TMI have been
confirmed
by Dr. Stephen Wing, Jane Lee and Mary Osbourne, Sister Rosalie
Bertell, Dr. Sternglass, Jay Gould, Joe Mangano and others, along with
hundreds of anecdotal reports.
18. Radioactive harm to farm and
wild animals downwind from TMI has been confirmed by the Baltimore
News-American and Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.
19. TMI’s owner quietly
paid out at least $15 million
in damages in exchange for gag orders from the affected families,
including at least one case involving a child born with Down’s Syndrome.
20. Chernobyl’s
explosion became public knowledge only when massive emissions came down
on a Swedish reactor hundreds of miles away, meaning that—as at TMI and
Fukushima—no one knows precisely how much escaped or where it went.
21. Fukushima’s
on-going fallout is already far in excess of that from Chernobyl, which was far in excess of that from Three Mile Island.
22. Soon after Chernobyl blew up (1986), Dr. Gofman
predicted its fallout would kill at least 400,000 people worldwide.
23. Three Russian scientists who
compiled more than 5,000 studies concluded in 2005 that Chernobyl had already killed nearly a million people worldwide.
24. Children
born in downwind Ukraine and Belarus still suffer a massive toll of
mutation and illness, as confirmed by a wide range of governmental,
scientific and humanitarian organizations.
25. Key
low-ball Chernobyl death estimates come from the World Health
Organization, whose numbers are overseen by International Atomic Energy
Agency, a United Nations organization chartered to promote the nuclear
industry.
Read More Here
.....
Photo: AFP
Radiation
is a rather tricky enemy. You cannot see it, you cannot smell it yet
it’s harmful for our ecosystem, our markets and our bodies. The
Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster is still making headlines but no
one knows the full truth about the ultimate impact of this accident. We
should prepare for the worst case scenario, writes American democracy
activist Harvey Wasserman in his article "50 Reasons We Should Fear the
Worst from Fukushima".
Impact
of Fukushima a serious problem and deserves serious discussion and
action however it is being kept out of the public eye thanks to Japan’s
censorship and a global corporate media blackout, writes Mr. Wasserman
in the first of his two part series at
EcoWatch. The "see no evil, pay no damages" mindset dates back from the Bombing of Hiroshima.
Nuclear
industry is a big business which doesn't want anyone to know what is
happening at Fukushima in specific and whole "nuclear" cycle as a whole,
underlines the activist.
The impacts of radiation
emissions on human and ecological health are unknown primarily because
the nuclear industry has resolutely refused to study them.
The
author lists 50 preliminary reasons why the radioactive legacy demands
we prepare for the worst for our oceans, our planet, our economy and
ourselves. Here are some of them:
· First of all, there
have been of lot of cases in which authorities claimed that nuke
accidents had no radioactive damages. For example, during and after the
Bomb Tests (from 1946 to 1963), downwinders in the South Pacific and
American west, along with thousands of US "atomic vets," were told their
radiation-induced health problems were imaginary until they proved
utterly irrefutable.
· "Acceptable dose" standards for
commercial reactors were conjured from faulty A-Bomb studies begun five
years after Hiroshima, and at Fukushima and elsewhere have been
continually made more lax to save the industry money.
·
Chernobyl’s explosion became public knowledge only when massive
emissions came down on a Swedish reactor hundreds of miles away, meaning
that—as at TMI and Fukushima—no one knows precisely how much escaped or
where it went. Fukushima’s on-going fallout is already far in excess of
that from Chernobyl.
· By refusing to compile long-term
emission assessments, the nuclear industry systematically hides health
impacts at Three Mile Island, Fukushima, etc., forcing victims to rely
on isolated independent studies which it automatically deems
"discredited."
· When the Atomic Energy Commission’s
(AEC) Chief Medical Officer, Dr. John Gofman, urged that reactor dose
levels be lowered by 90 percent, he was forced out of the AEC and
publicly attacked, despite his status a founder of the industry.
·
A member of the Manhattan Project, and a medical doctor responsible for
pioneer research into LDL cholesterol, Gofman later called the reactor
industry an instrument of "premeditated mass murder."
·
To the extent they can be known, the quantities and make-up of
radiation pouring out of Fukushima are now a state secret, with
independent measurement or public speculation punishable by up to ten
years in prison. At least 300 tons of radioactive water continues to
pour into the ocean at Fukushima every day, according to official
estimates made prior to such data having been made a state secret.
·
Radiation’s real world impact becomes even harder to measure in an
increasingly polluted biosphere, where interaction with existing toxins
creates a synergy likely to exponentially accelerate the damage being
done to all living things.
· Hyman Rickover, father of
the nuclear navy, warned that it is a form of suicide to raise radiation
levels within Earth’s vital envelope, and that if he could, he would
"sink" all the reactors he helped develop. "Now when we go back to using
nuclear power," he said in 1982, "I think the human race is going to
wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible
force and try to eliminate it."
The overall picture is
way far from being optimistic. For seven decades, state and
privately-owned reactors have spewed massive quantities of unmonitored
radiation into the biosphere and no one knows what kind of disaster the
humankind is facing.
Voice of Russia, EcoWatch.com
.....
Jackie Johnston/AP file photo
