Attention! This is important! This article by Harvey
Wasserman is a brilliant piece of research. I am reposting it because it needs
to be and I recommend you send it to your family and friends everywhere.
RGS
(From Wikipedia)
Harvey Franklin Wasserman
is an American journalist, author, democracy activist, and advocate for renewable
energy. He has been a strategist and organizer in the anti-nuclear movement in the
United States for over 30 years. He has been a featured speaker on Today, Nightline, National Public Radio, CNN Lou
Dobbs Tonight and other major media outlets. Wasserman is senior
advisor to Greenpeace
USA and the Nuclear Information and
Resource Service.
(From yesterday’s Nation of
Change)
50 Reasons We Should Fear
the Worst from Fukushima
By 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.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/50-reasons-we-should-fear-worst-fukushima-1391444405.
All rights are reserved.
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