Radioactive ‘mass murder': nuclear industry keeps Fukushima impact in secret, worst to come
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
