It involves international entities,
especially the International Atomic Energy Agency, national governmental
bodies—led in Japan by its current prime minister, the powerful nuclear
industry and a “nuclear establishment” of scientists and others with a vested
interest in atomic energy.
Deception
was integral to the push for nuclear power from its start. Indeed, I opened my
first book on nuclear technology, Cover
Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know
About Nuclear Power, with: “You have
not been informed about nuclear power. You have not been told. And that has
been done on purpose. Keeping the public in the dark was deemed necessary by
the promoters of nuclear power if it was to succeed. Those in government,
science and private industry who have been pushing nuclear power realized that
if people were given the facts, if they knew the consequences of nuclear power,
they would not stand for it.”
Published
in 1980, the book led to my giving many presentations on nuclear power at which
I’ve often heard the comment that only when catastrophic nuclear accidents
happened would people fully realize the deadliness of atomic energy.
Well, massive nuclear accidents
have occurred—the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the Fukushima catastrophe that
began on March 11, 2011 and is ongoing with large discharges of radioactive
poisons continuing to spew out into the environment.
Meanwhile, the posture of the
nuclear promoters is denial—insisting the impacts of the Fukushima catastrophe
are essentially non-existent. A massive nuclear accident has occurred and they
would make believe it hasn’t.
“Fukushima is an eerie replay of
the denial and controversy that began with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki,” wrote Yale University Professor Emeritus Charles Perrow in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last
year. “This is the same nuclear denial that also greeted nuclear bomb tests,
plutonium plant disasters at Windscale in northern England and Chelyabinsk in
the Ural Mountains, and the nuclear power plant accidents at Three Mile Island
in the United States and Chernobyl in what is now Ukraine.”
The difference with Fukushima is
the scale of disaster. With Fukushima were multiple meltdowns at the
six-nuclear plant site. There’s been continuing pollution of a major part of
Japan, with radioactivity going into the air, carried by the winds to fall out
around the world, and gigantic amounts of radioactivity going into the Pacific
Ocean moving with the currents and carried by marine life that ingests the
nuclear toxins.
Leading the Fukushima cover-up
globally is the International Atomic Energy Agency, formed by the United
Nations in 1957 with the mission to “seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace,
health and prosperity throughout the world.”
Of the consequences of the
Fukushima disaster, “To date no health effects have been reported in any person
as a result of radiation exposure from the accident,” declared the IAEA in
2011, a claim it holds to today.
Working
with the IAEA is the World Health Organization. WHO was captured on issues of
radioactivity and nuclear power early on by IAEA. In 1959, the IAEA and WHO,
also established by the UN, entered into an agreement—that continues to this
day—providing that IAEA and WHO “act
in close co-operation with each other” and “whenever either organization proposes to initiate a program
or activity on a subject in which the other organization has or may have a
substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to
adjusting the matter by mutual agreement.”
The
IAEA-WHO deal has meant that “WHO cannot undertake any research, cannot
disseminate any information, cannot come to the assistance of any population
without the prior approval of the IAEA...WHO, in practice, in reality, is subservient
to the IAEA within the United Nations family,” explained Alison Katz who for 18
years worked for WHO, on Libbe HaLevy’s “Nuclear Hotseat” podcast last year.
On nuclear issues “there has been a
very high level, institutional and international cover-up which includes
governments, national authorities, but also, regrettably the World Health
Organization,” said Katz on the program titled, “The WHO/IAEA—Unholy Alliance
and Its Lies About Int’l Nuclear Health Stats.”
Katz is now
with an organization called IndependentWHO which works for “the complete
independence of the WHO from the nuclear lobby and in particular from its
mouthpiece which is the International Atomic Energy Agency. We are demanding
that independence,” she said, “so that the WHO may fulfill its constitutional
mandate in the area of radiation and health.”
“We are
absolutely convinced,” said Katz on “Nuclear Hotseat,” “that if the health and
environmental consequences of all nuclear activities were known to the public,
the debate about nuclear power would end tomorrow. In fact, the public would
probably exclude it immediately as an energy option.”
WHO last
year issued a report on the impacts of the Fukushima disaster claiming that
“for the general population inside and outside of Japan, the predicted risks
are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are
anticipated.”
Then there
is the new prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, who last year insisted before
the International Olympic Committee as he successfully
pushed to have the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo (180 miles from Fukushima):
“There are no health-related problems until now, nor will there be in the
future, I make the statement to you in the most emphatic and unequivocal way.” Abe has been driving hard for a restart of
Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants, all shut down in the wake of the Fukushima
catastrophe.
His is a
totally different view than that of his predecessor, Naoto Kan, prime minister
when the disaster began. Kan told a conference in New York City last year of how he had been a supporter of nuclear power but after the Fukushima
accident "I changed my thinking 180-degrees, completely.” He declared that
at one point it looked like an "area that included Tokyo" and
populated by 50 million people might have to be evacuated. "We do have
accidents such as an airplane crash and so on," Kan said, "but no
other accident or disaster" other than a nuclear plant disaster can
"affect 50 million people... no other accident could cause such a
tragedy." Moreover, said Kan, “without nuclear power plants we can
absolutely provide the energy to meet our demands." Japan since the
accident began has tripled its use of solar energy, he said, and pointed to
Germany as a model with its post-Fukushima commitment to shutting down all its
nuclear power plants and having "all its power supplied by renewable
power" by 2050. The entire world could do this, said Kan. "If
humanity really would work together... we could generate all our energy through
renewable energy."
A major
factor in Abe’s stance is Japan having become a global player in the nuclear industry. General
Electric (the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants) and Westinghouse have been
the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power plants worldwide, historically building or
designing 80 percent of them. In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse's nuclear
division and Hitachi entered into a partnership with GE in its nuclear
division. Thus the two major nuclear power plant manufacturers worldwide are
now Japanese brands. Abe has been busy traveling the world seeking to peddle
Toshiba-Westinghouse and Hitachi-GE nuclear plants to try to lift Japan’s
depressed economy.
As for the
nuclear industry, the “Fukushima accident has caused no deaths,” declares the
World Nuclear Association in its statement “Safety of Nuclear Power
Reactors...Updated October 2013.” The group, “representing the people and
organizations of the global nuclear profession,” adds: “The Fukushima accident
resulted in some radiation exposure of workers at the plant, but not such as to
threaten their health.”
What will
the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster be?
It is
impossible to know exactly now. But considering the gargantuan amount of
radioactive poisons that have been discharged and what will continue to be
released, the impacts will inevitably be great. The claim of there being no
consequences to life and the prediction that there won’t be in the future from
the Fukushima catastrophe is an outrageous falsehood.
That’s because it is now widely understood
that there is no “safe” level of radioactivity. Any amount can kill. The more
radioactivity, the greater the impacts. As the National Council on Radiation
Protection has declared: “Every increment of radiation exposure produces an
incremental increase in the risk of cancer.”
There was once the notion of there
being a "threshold dose" of radioactivity below which there would be
no harm. That’s because when nuclear technology began and people were exposed to radioactivity, they didn’t
promptly fall down dead. But as the years went by, it was realized that lower
levels of radioactivity take time to result in cancer and other illnesses—that
there is a five-to-40-year "incubation" period
Projecting a death toll of more
than a million from the radioactivity released from Fukushima is Dr. Chris
Busby, scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk who has
been a professor at a number of universities. . “Fukushima is still boiling
radionuclides all over Japan,” he said. “Chernobyl went up in one go. So
Fukushima is worse.”
Indeed, a report by the Institute
for Science in Society, based in the U.K., has concluded: “State-of-the-art
analysis based on the most inclusive datasets available reveals that
radioactive fallout from the Fukushima meltdown is at least as big as Chernobyl
and more global in reach.”
A death toll of up to 600,000 is
estimated in a study conducted for the Nordic Probabilistic Safety Assessment
Group which is run by the nuclear utilities of Finland and Sweden.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, a founder of
Physicians for Social Responsibility, told a symposium on “The Medical
Implications of Fukushima” held last year in Japan: “The accident is enormous
in its medical implications. It will induce an epidemic of cancer as people
inhale the radioactive elements, eat radioactive vegetables, rice and meat, and
drink radioactive milk and teas. As radiation from ocean contamination
bio-accumulates up the food chain...radioactive fish will be caught thousands
of miles from Japanese shores. As they are consumed, they will continue the the
cycle of contamination, proving that no matter where you are, all major nuclear
accidents become local.”
Dr. Caldicott, whose books on
nuclear power include Nuclear Madness, also
stated: “The Fukushima disaster is not
over and will never end. The radioactive fallout which remains toxic for
hundreds to thousands of years covers large swaths of Japan will never be
‘cleaned up’ and will contaminate food, humans and animals virtually forever.”
Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear
industry senior vice president, has said: “The health impacts to the Japanese
will begin to be felt in several years and out to 30 or 40 years from cancers.
And I believe we’re going to see as many as a million cancers over the next 30
years because of the Fukushima incident in Japan.”
At
Fukushima, “We have opened a door to hell that cannot
be easily closed—if ever,” said Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight
Project at the U.S.-based group Beyond Nuclear last year.
Already an excessive number of
cases of thyroid cancers have appeared in Japan, an early sign of the impacts
of radioactivity. A study last year by
Joseph Mangano and Dr. Janette Sherman of the Radiation and Public Health
Project, and Dr. Chris Busby, determined that radioactive iodine fall-out from
Fukushima damaged the thyroid glands of children in California. And the biggest
wave of radioactivity in the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima is slated to hit the
west coast of North America in the next several months. Meanwhile, every
bluefin tuna caught in the waters off California in a Stanford University study
was found to be contaminated with cesium-137, a radioactive poison emitted on a
large scale by Fukushima. The tuna migrate from off Japan to California waters.
Daniel Madigan, who led the study, commented: “The tuna packaged it up [the
radiation] and brought it across the world’s largest ocean. We were definitely
surprised to see it at all and even more surprised to see it in every one we
measured.”
There is,
of course, the enormous damage to property. The Environmental Health Policy
Institute of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) in its summary of the
“Costs and Consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi Disaster” cites estimates of
economic loss of between $250 billion and $500 billion. Some 800 square
kilometers are “exclusion” zones of “abandoned cities, towns, agricultural
land, homes and properties” and from which 159,128 people have been “evicted,”
relates PSR senior scientist Steven Starr. Further, “about a month after the
disaster, on April 19, 2011, Japan chose to dramatically increase its official
‘safe’ radiation exposure levels from 1 mSv [millisievert, a measure of radiation dose] to 20 mSv
per year—20 times higher than the U.S. exposure limit. This allowed the
Japanese government to downplay the dangers of the fallout and avoid evacuation
of many badly contaminated areas.”
And last
year the Japanese government enacted a new State Secrets Act which can
restrict—with a penalty of 10 years in jail—reporting on Fukushima. “”It’s the
cancerous mark of a nuclear regime bound to control all knowledge of a lethal
global catastrophe now ceaselessly escalating,” wrote Harvey Wasserman,
co-author of Killing Our Own, in a
piece aptly titled “Japan’s New ‘Fukushima Fascism’.”
Meanwhile,
back in the U.S., the nation’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission has over the past
three years consistently refused to apply “lessons learned” from Fukushima. Its
chairman, Dr. Gregory Jaczko, was forced out after an assault led by the
nuclear industry after trying to press this issue and opposing an NRC licensing
of two new nuclear plants in Georgia “as if Fukushima had never happened.”
Rosalie Bertell, a Catholic nun, in
her book No Immediate Danger, wrote
about the decades of suppression of the impacts of nuclear power and the reason
behind it: “Should the public discover the true health cost of nuclear pollution,
a cry would rise from all parts of the world and people would refuse to
cooperative passively with their own death.”
Thus the
desperate drive—in which a largely compliant mainstream media have been
complicit—to deny the Fukushima catastrophe, a disaster deeply affecting life
on Earth.
