50 Reasons To Fear
the Worst from Fukushima
Harvey Wasserman
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 studiesbegun 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 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.
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.
26. After 28 years, the reactor industry has still not
succeeded in installing a final sarcophagus over the exploded Chernobyl Unit 4,
though billions of dollars have been invested.
27. When Fukushima Units 1-4 began to explode, President
Obama assured us all the fallout would not come here, and would harm no one,
despite having no evidence for either assertion.
28. Since President Obama did that, the U.S. has established
no integrated system to monitor Fukushima’s fallout, nor an epidemiological
data base to track its health impacts … but it did stop checking radiation
levels in Pacific seafood.
29. Early reports of thyroid abnormalities among children
downwind from Fukushima, and in North America are denied by industry backers
who again say “not enough radiation” was emitted though they don’t know how
much that might be.
30. Devastating health impacts reported by sailors stationed
aboard the USS Ronald Reagan near Fukushima are being denied by the industry
and Navy, who say radiation doses were too small to do harm, but have no idea
what they were.
31. While in a snowstorm offshore as Fukushima melted,
sailors reported a warm cloud passing over the Reagan that brought a “metallic
taste” like that described by TMI downwinders and the airmen who dropped the
Bomb on Hiroshima.
32. Though it denies the sailors on the Reagan were exposed
to enough Fukushima radiation to harm them, Japan (like South Korea and Guam)
denied the ship port access because it was too radioactive (it’s now docked in
San Diego).
33. The Reagan sailors are barred from suing the Navy, but
have filed a class action against Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), which has
joined the owners at TMI, the Bomb factories, uranium mines, etc., in denying
all responsibility.
34. A U.S. military “lessons learned” report from
Fukushima’s Operation Tomodachi clean-up campaign notes that “decontamination
of aircraft and personnel without alarming the general population created new
challenges.”
35. The report questioned the clean-up because “a true
decontamination operations standard for ‘clearance’ was not set,” thereby
risking “the potential spread of radiological contamination to military
personnel and the local populace.”
36. Nonetheless, it reported that during the clean-up, “the
use of duct tape and baby wipes was effective in the removal of radioactive
particles.”
37. In league with organized crime, Tepco is pursuing its
own clean-up activities by recruiting impoverished homeless and elderly
citizens for “hot” on-site labor, with the quality of their work and the nature
of their exposures now a state secret.
38. At least 300 tons of radioactive water continue to pour
into the ocean at Fukushima every day, according to official estimates made
prior to such data having been made a state secret.
39. To the extent they can be known, the quantities and
make-up of radiation pouring out of Fukushima are also now a state secret, with
independent measurement or public speculation punishable by up to ten years in
prison.
40. Likewise, “There is no systematic testing in the U.S. of
air, food and water for radiation,” according to University of California
(Berkeley) nuclear engineering Professor Eric Norman.
41. Many radioactive isotopes tend to concentrate as they
pour into the air and water, so deadly clumps of Fukushima’s radiation may
migrate throughout the oceans for centuries to come before diffusing, which
even then may not render it harmless.
42. 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.
43. Reported devastation among starfish, sardines, salmon,
sea lions, orcas and other ocean animals cannot be definitively denied without
a credible data base of previous experimentation and monitoring, which does not
exist and is not being established.
44. The fact that “tiny” doses of x-ray can harm human
embryos portends that any unnatural introduction of lethal radioactive isotopes
into the biosphere, however “diffuse,” can affect our intertwined global
ecology in ways we don’t now understand.
45. The impact of allegedly “minuscule” doses spreading from
Fukushima will, over time, affect the minuscule eggs of creatures ranging from
sardines to starfish to sea lions, with their lethal impact enhanced by the
other pollutants already in the sea.
46. Dose comparisons to bananas and other natural sources
are absurd and misleading as the myriad isotopes from reactor fallout will
impose very different biological impacts for centuries to come in a wide range
of ecological settings.
47. No current dismissal of general human and ecological
impacts—”apocalyptic” or otherwise—can account over time for the very long
half-lives of radioactive isotopes Fukushima is now pouring into the biosphere.
48. As Fukushima’s impacts spread through the centuries, the
one certainty is that no matter what evidence materializes, the nuclear
industry will never admit to doing any damage, and will never be forced to pay
for it (see upcoming sequel).
49. 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.
50. “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.” As
Fukushima deteriorates behind an iron curtain of secrecy and deceit, we
desperately need to know what it’s doing to us and our planet. It’s tempting to
say the truth lies somewhere between the industry’s lies and the rising fear of
a tangible apocalypse. In fact, the answers lie beyond.
Defined by seven decades of deceit, denial and a see-no-evil
dearth of meaningful scientific study, the glib corporate assurances that this
latest reactor disaster won’t hurt us fade to absurdity. Fukushima pours
massive, unmeasured quantities of lethal radiation into our fragile ecosphere
every day, and will do so for decades to come. Five power reactors have now
exploded on this planet and there are more than 400 others still operating.
What threatens us most is the inevitable next disaster … along with the one
after that … and then the one after that …Pre-wrapped in denial, protected by
corporate privilege, they are the ultimate engines of global terror.
ecowatch.com
