Thursday 31 March 2011

Japan radiation detected in at least 15 states and in milk samples inWashington state - By: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

Japan radiation detected in at least 15 states and in milk samples inWashington state - 

By: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

(NaturalNews) Radioactive isotopes unique to the Fukushima disaster are now being detected in at least 15 US states, according to recent reports from CNN 
(http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/03/2... 
). And the 
Associated Press (AP) has issued a report claiming that milk samples taken in Washington state have tested positive for low levels of the same radioactive component, Iodine-131, raising concerns about the true widespread effects of the Fukushima nuclear fallout (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic... 
).

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and various state and local 
authorities continue to repeat the same empty reassurances that all detected levels of radiation -- whether they be in air, water, or food -- are far below levels of concern, and that people do not need to worry or do anything in response. But is this sound advice?

Earlier in the week, several nuclear facilities in North and South Carolina, as well as in Florida, reportedly detected low levels of Iodine-131 in the air 
(http://www.naturalnews.com/031881_r... 
). That same radiation has also been detected across the West Coast, as well as in 
northeastern states like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, which clearly indicates that Fukushima radiation has made its way throughout the US, at least in very low levels.

But now, reports have been issued claiming that milk samples from Washington state have also turned up contaminated with Iodine-131. The levels were allegedly far lower than the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concern limits for the radioactive particles, but they are not necessarily safe even at the levels being detected.

According to the FDA "Radiation Safety" website, the Derived Intervention Level (DIL) for Iodine-131 is 170 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg) 
(http://www.fda.gov/newsevents/publi... 
). A /Wall Street 
Journal/ report of the milk incident explains that the Washington samples 
contained only 0.8 picocuries per liter (pCi/l), or 0.03 Bq/kg. That level is 
clearly far lower than the FDA's DIL for Iodine-131, but is any level of this 
radiation actually "safe"? And what about the other more serious types of 
radioactive particles being emitted from Fukushima that authorities appear to not even be looking for?

Based on Japanese guidelines for radiation safety, Iodine-131 is the least of 
our worries. Cesium, uranium, and plutonium all have much lower maximum 
"concern" thresholds, with plutonium being the most serious. A Bloomberg report explains that just one Bq/kg of plutonium is enough to cause major concern if found in water or milk (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-... 
). 
Are authorities testing for plutonium and the other serious radioactive 
particles that we know have escaped from the Fukushima plant?

The mainstream media has mostly abandoned the Fukushima incident in favor of the newly-instigated war in Libya. And yet reports are still continuing to trickle in -- though mostly without much fanfare -- concerning Japan radiation popping up across the US in air, water, and now food. But all the while, the EPA and others repeatedly dismiss the situation as being no big deal, despite the fact that conditions at Fukushima have basically reached a frightening dead end 
(http://www.naturalnews.com/031894_F... 
).

As we keep saying here at NaturalNews, preparedness is key. And preparedness, of course, does not involve panic. It does, however, involve using your critical thinking skills to evaluate the seriousness of the situation, consider the anomalies surrounding the official US government position on it, and take appropriate steps to prepare you and your family for whatever may soon come as a result.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031909_radiation_milk.html#ixzz1ICuLi6UT

http://www.prisonplanet.com/japan-radiation-detected-in-at-least-15-states-and-in-milk-samples-in-washington-state.html

-- 
http://english-juttaschmitt.blogspot.com
http://juttaschmitt.blogspot.com


***** 

Mike Adams / Natural News Insider Alert - Latest developments from Fukushina: "three raging meltdowns" now under way

Mike Adams / Natural News Insider Alert - Latest developments from Fukushina: "three raging meltdowns" now under way

* As the Wall Street Journal reports 
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703806304576233221749626458.html), the 
U.S. government has now admitted that radiation is being found in milk from 
Washington state. They say it's "safe" to drink, of course. That's the U.S. 
government for you: Irradiated milk is safe, but raw milk is dangerous!

* The battle to save Fukushima is now over, as Japanese officials admit the 
nuclear power complex must now be abandoned and entombed 
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371793/Fukushima-nuclear-plant-entombed-concrete-Japan-admits-lost-battle-crippled-reactors.html?ito=feeds-newsxml). 
The Dailymail published, "officials said it would mean switching off all power and abandoning attempts to keep the nuclear fuel rods cool." The problem with that, of course, is that there are already "three raging meltdowns" under way as Dr. Kaku explains (below). If you abandon efforts to cool the fuel rods, then an accelerated meltdown is "inevitable," says Dr. Kaku.

* Japanese nuclear experts now admit it will require 20 years to decommission the Fukushima nuclear reactors. 
(http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/82090.html)

* Cesium-137 has now been found 25 miles from Fukushima at such dangerously high concentrations that they far exceed the threshold of land abandonment used by the Soviet Union following the Chernobyl catastrophe 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/world/asia/31japan.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss 
). 
This is raising questions of whether the evacuation zone around Fukushima should now be expanded.

* It has now been revealed that Japan's nuclear disaster preparedness plans were written by complete morons. The entire Fukushima power plant complex, for example, called for only one emergency stretcher to be on-site, and only 50 protective suits (even though hundreds of people worked there). Do you see shades of the TITANIC at play here? 
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703712504576232961004646464.html)

* In a shocking video interview, physicist Dr. Michio Kaku explained, "If it 
goes to a full-scale evacuation of all personnel, it means that firefighters are no longer putting water onto the cores. That's the only thing preventing a full-scale meltdown at three reactor sites. Once they evacuate, then we past the point of no return. Meltdowns are inevitable at three reactor sites, leading to a tragedy far beyond that of Chernobyl, creating permanent dead zones in Japan." 
Watch that video at: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=604AB3FA803FF3647DF6E34EC5E8C8A0

* Meanwhile, the *Fukushima denialists* are in full swing, complaining that 
anyone talking about Fukushima's meltdown is "fearmongering." One especially idiotic journalist in the UK constructed a completely fabricated article today, claiming that "nobody has suffered or will suffer any radiological health consequences [from Fukushima]." How's that for a total denial of reality? This writer goes on to say, "The nuclear power plants in the stricken region have suffered less damage and caused less trouble to local residents than anything else that was there." (I'm not linking to this source because they don't deserve the attention, but trust me, this is from a major newspaper in the UK.) It just goes to show you that these spin doctors will stop at nothing to try to convince people that nuclear power is the safest thing in the world. There's little question that most of these denialists are on the payroll of the nuclear industry (or just hate the human race for their own twisted or demonic reasons).

* As reported by the New York Times 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/world/asia/31japan.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss 
), 
"The level of radioactive iodine 131 in the waters off the Daiichi plant 
continued to increase on Thursday, rising to 4,385 times the statutory limit... The increases raise the possibility that contaminants from the plant are continuously leaking into the sea."

* Fears about radioactive seafood are growing as Japan's ocean waters are 
increasingly contaminated with very high levels of radiation, now even exceeding the 3,300 times recently reported 
(http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Tainted-seafood-fears-spread-apf-166668369.html?x=0&.v=19 
).

But remember, everyone: There's nothing to worry about according to your 
government! Don't be concerned about radiation. *It's invisible, so it must be safe!*

At least, that's the message we're hearing from many "official" sources. The 
FDA, laughably, thinks that drinking radioactive milk in the U.S. is just fine 
for you, but drinking RAW milk is extremely dangerous!

That's how twisted things have become in our world today: The stuff that's 
actually good for you is outlawed, criticized or suppressed. But the things that are really dangerous for your health -- ionizing radiation, vaccines, GMOs, chemotherapy and pesticides -- are all promoted as the solutions for our world.

It's insane, of course. Beyond insane. And it's all being done in the name of 
"science," which has proven itself to be the cause of needless suffering, death and destruction across our world. Beware of anything being done today under the claim of being "scientific." That's now a red flag keyword for something that will probably either harm your health or contribute to the destruction of the planet.
**** 

Wednesday 30 March 2011

Jutta Schmitt: Prospects of a radiant future: From Chernobyl to Fukushima

Prospects of a radiant future: From Chernobyl to Fukushima


http://english-juttaschmitt.blogspot.com/
 
By: Jutta Schmitt

Less than a month away from the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, I remember it as if it had been yesterday. The coverup was in operation from the point go. I was working for a German airline at that time, and on the 29th of april 1986, three days after the explosion of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's infamous reactor 4, I was on duty on board a DC-10, covering the route from Frankfurt to Toronto. The captain called the crew into the cockpit, informing us that he had received information which confirmed that an accident had occured a few days earlier at a nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and that it was feared radioactive material could have been released into the atmosphere to a considerable extent. However, there was no accurate information as to what exactly had happened and more than anything else, confusion reigned. On the ground in Toronto, the crew gathered in the lounge of the hotel, trying to catch up with the bits of information or rather speculation that the international media had begun to transmit about the incident. A mixture of fear and incredulity got hold of us. For a brief moment, we considered trying to find a way to prolongue our layover in Toronto at least until we would have clarity about what was going on.

But it wasn't until way into the second week of the disaster that the silhouette of the real picture had begun to emerge. In the case of Germany, it was revealed that radioactive fallout from Chernobyl had reached the German South as soon as four days after the reactor explosion in Chernobyl, with much of it raining down on Bavaria. Although government authorities in Southern Germany had undertaken measurements of radioactive fallout in the days after news of the accident had transcended, results were deliberately withheld so as to avoid an "unneccesary concern" among the general public. As of May 6th, 10 days into the nuclear catastrophe, the values measured in Erding County near Munich - although admitted to be "relatively high" - kept being undisclosed to the public, (1) whereas the German Federal Government was quick to confirm it would hold the course of the nuclear energy option.

Uncertainty, fear and confusion spread amongst the population. On the initiative of Ekkehard Krueger, physicist and former staff member at Munich-Garching's famous Nuclear Research Reactor (dubbed the "nuclear egg" for its shape), a group of concerned environmental activists in Munich, tired of the silence from government authorities with regard to critical radiation fallout data, founded an independent research institute which was to measure radioactivity levels in the environment in order to unveil the plain and uncensored results to the public. The citizen-based Umweltinstitut Muenchen e.V. (Munich Environmental Institute -MEI-), was born. (2) The Institute focused specifically on measuring the radioactive contamination of food, making the results directly available to the people and to the media. In addition, by measuring the radioactivity of fencepost tops all over the region of Bavaria, the MEI had detected a method by which to determine the exact distribution of the radioactive fallout throughout Bavaria and thus elaborated a register of contaminated land in Southern Germany.

For taking a radical, zero-contamination stance with regard to food safety and for the mere fact of disclosing the results of their measurements to the public and the media, the Munich Environmental Institute became a headache for government authorities from its very inception. Both, the Bavarian State Office for Environment and the Federal Radiation Protection Office, waged an information war against the MEI, disavowing the accuracy of its measurements, whereas the latter, in turn, denounced the deliberate scaling-down of measured values or the arbitrary rising of 'legal' radiation thresholds as well as the overall disinformation campaign, practiced by government authorities.   

In 1989, the year my brother joined the MEI doing his community service, the radioactive contamination of food and land had not subsided. Milk and milk products, as well as mushrooms, berries, nuts, vegetables, fresh produce in general and processed food, too, all were radioactively contaminated beyond the established 'legal' limits. My brother used to call me several times a week to give me the latest "war report" on radioactive contamination, according to the items measured by the MEI, which often forced me to dispose of determined food items I had bought because their level of contamination was too hazardous. Given the different ways of radiation exposure, for example through inhalation of airborne particles and dust, food and water intake, contact with contaminated soil, etc., the team working at MEI, apart from food, tested everthing ranging from air and soil samples to people's clothes and the contents of vaccuum cleaner bags. And everything they tested was still considerably contaminated.

Also and due to my brother's work at MEI, we learnt that a considerable part, that is, 20%, of the radioactive contamination of our environment is due to the atmospherical testing of nuclear weapons conducted in the 50's and 60's, which caused the massive dispersion of radionuclides all over the planet and which have been identified as one of the causes for the world wide rise of cancer, along with medical radiation exposures and exposures from radiation in close range vicinities of nuclear power plants, where cancer rates in children are 60% up from 'normal'. (3)

Today and in spite of the massive cover-up that tried to bury the facts of the Chernobyl accident under a disinformation sarcophagus, we know that worldwide almost one million people died from exposure to the radiation released from the explosion of its infamous reactor block number four. (4) We also know, that radioactive emissions from the Chernobyl reactor may have been up to 200 times greater than initially estimated, exceeding by far the fallout from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. (5) And today, as we are nearing the 25th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident, the catastrophe and coverup are repeating themselves in Fukushima, in what can only be described as a kind of 'Chernobyl to the nth power'. Russian politician and leader of Russia's Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, echoed later by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, may perhaps turn out to be the person who's had the most accurate foresight for things to come, when - flirting with the idea of benefitting from Japanese labor potential - he suggested to offer Japanese the chance to resettle in the underpopulated areas of Russia's Far East. (6)

Considering that Fukushima power plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese government have been downplaying the catastrophe and covering up the true scope of the disaster to avoid a mass panic amidst an already extreme situation, delaying critical information about damages to reactor cores, containment vessels, ongoing partial meltdowns, radiation levels in air, seawater and food, and considering that a scenario as bad as the release of plutonium into the environment has been unfolding ever since last week, the question arises indeed, if the whole of Japan could be rendered uninhabitable if things continue along this path. 

However, TEPCO and the Japanese government authorities are not the only actors involved in coverup and downplay, engaging in a desperate effort of damage control of whatever is left to be 'controlled'. The March 26th online edition of Mainichi Daily News reported that the International Commission of Radiological Protection (ICRP) "has recommended the Japanese government temporarily raise the annual limit of radiation exposure for the general public in light of the ongoing crisis at the quake- and tsunami-crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture. The government stipulates that regular citizens in Japan should be exposed to no more than 1 millisievert of radiation per year, but the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) on March 21 recommended the limit be tentatively raised to 20 to 100 millisieverts per year, with the nuclear crisis showing no signs of abating. [...] it suggested, even after the power plant crisis is resolved, the government should keep the upper limit at 1 to 20 millisieverts per year before it gradually brings it back to its original 1, in order to prevent residents of Fukushima Prefecture from abandoning their hometowns." (7) Drastically put, in order to avoid having to accept the Russian offer of resettlement in its Far Eastern territories, all that the Japanese government has to do is raise the limit for radiation exposure and the problem is solved! Let the darn reactors spew a whole fireworks of highly radioactive and toxic particles, all you have to do is rise the legal threshold for radiation exposure and all will be just fine.    

It is along a similar line of 'damage control' that the European Union has begun to act with regard to imports from Japan. In a joint press statement of yesterday, March 29th, the Berlin-based organisation Foodwatch and the already mentioned Munich Environmental Institute have expressed their criticism of Germany's 'information' policy with regard to radioactive contamination of food imports from Japan. The criticism is directed against the German Federal Consumer Affairs Minister, who talks about "reinforced control mechanisms" and "special protection standards" for imports from Japan, but has kept silent about the fact that the European Union has just recently raised the legal thresholds for radioactive contamination of food coming from the affected regions of Japan. The organisations warn that the EU has elevated the threshold for cumulated radioactivity from caesium-134 and caesium-137 from 600 becquerel per kilogram to 12.500 becquerel per kilogram for determined products imported from Japan, which amounts to an almost twenty-fold increase of the formerly established values. (8) With regard to the above mentioned "base threshold" of 600 becquerel per kilogram it must be said that any food item measured by the Munich Environmental Institute back in 1989 which would have amounted to 30, 20 or to even 15 becquerel per kilogram would already have been cause for concern, and anything beyond 100 becquerel per kilogram would have been considered unsuitable for consumption.

Meanwhile, The Guardian UK is reporting that the radioactive core of reactor 2 has melted through the containment vessel and fallen onto the concrete floor, which will conduct to a major release of radiation. The Guardian cites Richard Lahey, former head of safety reserach for Boiling Water Reactors at General Electric, as saying: "The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell, ... I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards." (9)

It is beyond doubt that both, Chernobyl and now Fukushima with their respective, nefarious crisis mismanagements and their criminal disinformation campaigns, have paved the way for a radiant future. But we will not exactly be beaming with joy.


Notes

(1) http://www.greenpeace-berlin.de/tschernobyl/tag10.html
(2) http://umweltinstitut.org/
(3) See documents available on http://www.ippnw.org, and http://www.naturalnews.com/025767_Radiation_Ct_Scans.html and
    http://www.lebenshaus-alb.de/magazin/004743.html respectively.
(4) http://janettesherman.com/2011/03/22/casualties-of-chernobyl-nuclear-disaster-“official”-and-other-versions/
(5) http://janettesherman.com/2011/03/22/casualties-of-chernobyl-nuclear-disaster-“official”-and-other-versions/
(6) http://rt.com/politics/zhirinovsky-russia-japan-immigration/ and
    http://www.eurasiareview.com/medvedev’s-offer-to-resettle-japanese-angers-nationalists-analysis-22032011/
(7) http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110326p2a00m0na005000c.html
(8) http://foodwatch.de/presse/pressearchiv/2011/atom_katastrophe_in_japan/index_ger.html
(9) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/29/japan-lost-race-save-nuclear-reactor

10/24/10

Achieving big things in small spaces: Towards Venezuelan food sovereignty



Jutta Schmitt 
jutta@franzlee.org.ve

Tuesday 29 March 2011

Venezuela and the Globe, will we go down in atomic radiation without putting up a global anti-capitalist fight?

Venezuela and the Globe, will we go down in atomic radiation without putting up a  global anti-capitalist fight?

By Franz J. T. Lee


Venezuela, the question is: as a huge oil producing country will we really go down in atomic radiation disaster without declaring global war against the current imperialist disasters in Japan and Libya?


As ruling class
es, in reality, as a Lilliputian, infinitesimal, powerful minority, arrogantly they declared themselves as a herrenvolk, as a master race, as homo sapiens sapiens, but they never ever nurtured real human philia (love) nor did they cultivate sophia (wisdom) with regard to nature and working slaves. They only believed in their hen kai pan, in their one and all, in themselves as 'chosen' Platonic philosopher kings; even when they lose popular 'democratic' presidential elections - like in the cases of Bush I and of Bush II - they still take it all. They only believed in a systemic panta rhei, in the eternal dialectical flux of accumulation of corruption, privileges, wealth, profits and war is the father of all things' (Heraclitus). Like Napoleon, for them global life is veni, vidi vici', is: I came, I saw, I conquered. They have a ravenous, insatiable hunger for blood, conquest, war and booty. Currently in North Africa, in Libya, and in the Middle East, NATO and its Western allies and Arab puppets verify this quintessential, wolfish trait of this imperialist, Hobbesian homo homini lupus, of his bellum omnium contra omnes, of his imperialist 'war of all against all'.

Those who did not belong to the sonorous species, to Man - among them, wo-men, natives, pagans, Blackamoors, Black  slaves, Red Indians, Bushmen, 'les miserables' (Victor Hugo) and 'witches' (later upgraded to 'bitches') were simply burned at the stake, persecuted, exploited, violated, tortured and quartered. The 'royal' treatment given to non-European 'pack animals' and 'camel drivers' is practically beyond description. 

On this side of the Rubicon, the European rulers, the clergy and nobility, were trying to erect an earthly 'Civitas Dei' (City of God) of St. Augustine. On the other side, in feudal reality, outside divine wishful thinking, ten thousands were killed in cruel 'peasant wars', crusades and the  'Thousand Years War'. Violently they were sent into the hereafter, into everlasting fire.

Small wonder that the present kith and kin of these Draconian ruling classes could kill without any respect for life, for nature and society.

Since millennia, behind all this was (and still is) the brutal historic process of capital accumulation.

 The rulers - nobility, clergy, feudal lords and upsurging capitalists - became incorrigible experts in telling lies, in organizing theft and endless torture, terror and murder. Inter alia, this whole historic process was euphemistically called civilization, Western Culture, Christianity, humanity, freedom, democracy, peace, revolution and progress. What are the real connotations of the above terms we could see across the globe, could read in Orwell's novel "1984". The rest is simply political lip service and diplomatic jargon, sweet talk of the rulers, their hoaxes and racist, arrogant ideology.

During discovery, conquest and colonialism, that is, during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and the establishment of the world market, horrendously, without any moral feeling or mercy millions and millions of innocent peoples were sacrificed on the racist altar of the Moloch of capitalism.
Till today, this is the 'vale of tears' for the poor, are the soulless conditions in a heartless world, in globalization. This is happening now in Libya and could soon occur here in Latin America, in Venezuela.

Across the past millennia, ever since the introduction of capitalism, inexorably a mode of anarchic destruction was launched on Mother Earth. Until now, in latency and tendency, that is, in scientific and philosophic possibility, this world order, globalization, is hell bent on destroying the experiment life on Planet Earth. In colonial and imperialist world wars, millions and millions of rebellious slaves, peasants, serfs and workers were simply massacred in the name of business, of capitalism.

Who really cared about the 'outcasts' of bourgeois society, about the 'white man's burden' (Kipling), who still cares today? Where is concrete, effective international workers' solidarity?

In reality, all over we see the signs of a coming global apocalypse. Capitalism is destroying the very substratum of the experiment life on the blue planet, and therewith the cosmic experiment homo novum.

What the experimentum mundi (Ernst Bloch) has created across more than four billion years, now homo homini lupus is busy to destroy within the next decades.

In case we have deleted and forgotten some events of contemporary reality, let us refresh our memory and transilluminate  some issues which reveal a most troublesome global reality for humanity.

* Till 1996, France carried out atomic tests in the vicinity of the Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in the South Pacific. Today still the indigenous peoples are suffering from intensive radiation. Even the turtles have lost their sense of direction and are perishing.

* The same is true elsewhere for bees and birds. Einstein warned that if the former should happen to die, then mankind probably could have only a few years more to live.

* According to scientific estimates, over the past decades the atomic reactor 'accidents' of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have already claimed one million victims.

* The Exxon-Valdez oil disaster near Alaska has already killed nearly all those workers who were trying to clean up the corporate mess; it seems that none of them reached the age of fifty years; the death toll will be much higher for the 'heroic liquidators' in Japan.

* The current apocalyptic situation (the oil 'leaks') in the Gulf of Mexico and the Niger Delta are still spelling doom for the inhabitants of the region. The corporate giants do not care a dime what is happening all over with precious human life. 

* Millions of human beings are dying as the results of the experiments in the production of biological and chemical arms of mass destruction.

* Also AIDS, bird and swine flu, after having left the military laboratories, especially as vaccination, are also take their million death toll across the globe.

* Not only uncountable plants, insects, fish and birds are perishing, a while ago, a million 'mad 'cows' were cremated; more recently in South Korea, a million infected pigs were buried alive.

* Who knows, as a matter of pure speculation, during the Iraq wars, how many soldiers probably could have suffered the same fate. After electro-magnetic treatment, followed by an overdose of Extra Low Frequency (ELF) waves, some thousands may have been buried alive under the desert sand; in fifty years, like in the case of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, we might get wise.

* ELF-waves, depleted uranium bullets and white phosphorus bombs complete the initial stage of capitalist global destruction.

 * Those African countries which did not join 'Africom' - Libya, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Eritrea - are now being violently integrated into NATO.

The Second Conquest, the Third World War, is even more devastating, it already is launching the total, totalitarian bodily, mind and thought holocaust, the global maafa (Swahili: apocalyptic disaster).

The earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan is just a premonition, an ominous warning about far worse things to come, about true, real global fascism, called globalization.

What is taking place in Japan now, the same could occur anytime in France, the USA or Russia. Hundreds of atomic reactors are ready to give up the ghost. A tremendous continental or regional black-out could already spark off a chain reaction of uncontrollable events. With the weapons of mass destruction stockpiled  all over soon we will be playing Russian roulette. Powerful arms like HAARP could reproduce the Japanese maafa anywhere, could cut the USA into half, in fact, could split the planet itself, and could even rip it out of its orbit.

What is happening in Japan now is not comparable to more recent events, perhaps in its possible human toll partially to the Transatlantic slave trade and the Conquest. In all probability there is no Japanese on the islands who are not affected radically by the atomic radiation, if not yet affected, then very soon in the following months everybody will have a huge problem. The real dimension of this disaster, which is really beginning now, we will only know in the next decades. This time not only Chernobyl or Japan are threatened, all human life is in danger of extinction. 

Not even at this dimension of danger seven billion 'condemned of the earth´are taking up arms against a sea, a tsunami of troubles. Venezuela and Elsewhere, Will we go down in history, in the solar system, without a global anti-capitalist fight?


What is to be thought, done and transcended? 

As we stated in so many writings already, the very simple answer to this multiple question is: To get rid of world capitalism in all its manifold dimensions, in all walks of life, of nature and society! Who has not tried to do this since birth already has a serious mental and physical problem, but it is not too late to mend. This is how capitalism surpassed all obsolete modes of production, and how it also became obsolete and merits to pass away. Dialectically, like any historic process capitalism affirms and negates itself ,as 'A' and 'Non-A'. It makes no sense only to attack the affirmation (A) of capitalism, to be truly anti-capitalist, radically we have to get rid of 'Non-A' too, have to transcend the whole capitalist global order, towards cosmic, creative emancipation, towards homo novum, the New Man.  
franz@franzlee.org.ve
http://www.franzlee.org.ve

Friday 25 March 2011

Chernobyl-Style Yellow Rain Causes Panic In Japan

Chernobyl-Style Yellow Rain Causes Panic In Japan

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, March 24, 2011

Authorities assure alarmed citizens yellow powder is pollen, but victims of 
Chernobyl radiation were told the same thing

Radioactive yellow rain that fell in Tokyo and surrounding areas last night 
caused panic amongst Japanese citizens and prompted a flood of phone calls to 
Japan’s Meteorological Agency this morning, with people concerned that they were 
being fed the same lies as victims of Chernobyl, who were told that yellow rain 
which fell over Russia and surrounding countries after the 1986 disaster was 
merely pollen, the same explanation now being offered by Japanese authorities.

“The (Japan Meteorological) agency received more than 200 inquiries Thursday 
morning about yellowish residue left on roofs and elsewhere by the rain, 
stirring concerns that radioactive substances had fallen after accidents caused 
by the March 11 quake and tsunami at a nuclear power plant around 220 kilometers 
northeast of Tokyo,” reports Japan Today.

Officials later suggested the discoloration was caused by air-borne pollen 
falling with the rain. “The JMA believes the yellow patches are pollen, but has 
yet to confirm this,” reports the Wall Street Journal, adding that the JMA 
received over 280 calls after residents in the Kanto region discovered yellow 
powder on the ground.

“A health official at the Tokyo metropolitan government also said there is a 
possibility that the rain contained radioactivity but not at a level to have had 
adverse effects on people’s health,” adds the Japan Today report.

Given the fact that Japanese authorities have been habitually deceptive about 
the Fukushima crisis from start to finish, assurances that the yellow powder was 
merely a result of air-borne pollen particles are dubious at best. With people 
living in Tokyo already being told that tap water is unsafe to drink, along with 
contaminated vegetables and milk from certain areas near Fukushima, the fact 
that they were panicked by yellow rain is unsurprising.

Although pollen can turn rain a yellow color, the fact that the phenomenon 
occurred a couple of hundred kilometers south of the radiation-spewing Fukushima 
nuclear plant has stoked alarm, and understandably so given the fact that 
victims of Chernobyl nuclear fallout in 1986 were also told by authorities that 
yellow rain was harmless pollen, when in fact it was deadly radioactive 
contamination.

A University of California Daily Bruin article entitled “Remembering Chernobyl,” 
documents how children in Belarus happily splashed around in puddles of yellow 
rain having been assured by Russian authorities that it was merely pollen, when 
in fact it was a toxic mixture of radioactivity that had been blasted from the 
Chernobyl plant 80 miles away.

Thinking back to 20 years ago, it’s the splashing in yellow rainwater that 
Antonina Sergieff vividly recalls.

“We all jumped in the puddles with the yellow stuff. … You don’t see (it in) the 
air, it doesn’t materialize. But when you see the yellow dust, you see 
radiation,” Sergieff said.

When these elements first reached Sergieff 20 years ago, they came in the form 
of yellow rain.

It was not long after that residents in her hometown knew it wasn’t simply 
“pollen” – which is what government officials assured them, she said.

The effects of this “pollen” soon confirmed that those puddles of yellow rain 
contained something far more sinister, namely iodine-131, caesium-137, 
strontium-90 and plutonium-239.

“Soon, people started losing their hair, pictures of deformed animals sprouted 
up in independent newspapers, and incidences of cancer in Belarus skyrocketed, 
Sergieff said. According to the U.N. brief, cases of breast cancer in Belarus 
doubled between 1988 and 1999, among other increases.”

With levels of radiation emitted by Fukushima now approaching those spewed out 
by the blast at Chernobyl, as the establishment media bizarrely pretends that 
the crisis is all but over, seawater samples taken around 330 meters south of 
the plant confirm that levels of radioactive iodine released are the highest yet 
recorded.

As we have highlighted, despite UN and World Health Organization studies that 
claim Chernobyl led to a maximum of 9,000 deaths and 200,000 cases of radiation 
sickness, more contemporary studies have shown that nearly a million people have 
been killed from cancers caused by the disaster over the course of the last 25 
years.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the 
author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex 
Jones Show.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/chernobyl-style-yellow-rain-causes-panic-in-japan.html

Wednesday 23 March 2011

Nuclear Apocalypse in Japan - Lifting the Veil of Nuclear Catastrophe and cover-up - By Keith Harmon Snow


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Nuclear Apocalypse in Japan
Lifting the Veil of Nuclear Catastrophe and cover-up

By Keith Harmon Snow

Global Research, March 18, 2011
ConsciousBeingAlliance.com - 2011-03-17

As the sun set over quake-stricken Japan on Thursday 17 March 2011, we learned 
that four of six Fukushima nuclear reactor sites are irradiating the earth, that 
the fire is burning out of control at Reactor No. 4's pool of spent nuclear 
fuel, that there are six spent fuel pools at risk all told, and that the sites 
are too hot to deal with. On March 16 Plumes of White Vapor began pouring from 
crippled Reactor No. 3 where the spent fuel pool may already be lost. Over the 
previous days we were told: nothing to worry about. Earthquakes and after 
shocks, tidal wave, explosions, chemical pollution, the pox of plutonium, 
contradicting information too obvious to ignore, racism, greed -- add these to 
the original Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine and Death. 
The situation is apocalyptic and getting worse. This is one of the most serious 
challenges humanity has ever faced.

The U.S. nuke industry is blaming Japanese experts, distancing itself from the 
monster it created. Instead of sending nuclear or health experts to assist the 
Japanese people in their time of desperate need, US President Barack Obama first 
sent teams of intelligence agents and FEMA trained military grunts with special 
security clearances. The Pentagon floated a naval strike force led by the 
nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan off the coast of Japan: 
advertised as a 'humanitarian' operation, the strike force was repositioned 
after it was partially irradiated. Can we trust officials and the corporate news 
media to tell us what is happening in an honest, timely, transparent manner? Are 
there precedents to the nuclear crisis in Japan? What is the U.S. defense 
establishment really concerned with here?

Humanity now faces a deadly serious challenge coming out of Japan -- the 
epicenter of radiation. Intentional efforts to downplay or dismiss this 
catastrophe reveal the immaturity of western civilization and some of our most 
acute human pathologies, including our worship of technology and our 
psychopathology of denial. The widespread distortion and cover-ups to protect 
private profits, national and corporate interests, to fool and betray the 
people, are unacceptable. Here are some of the deeper whats and whys and hows -- 
some technical issues and the kinds of questions people need to ask -- about the 
nuclear apocalypse unfolding on planet earth. Prayers are not enough. It's time 
to question everything, to put politics aside, to take personal action to halt 
nuclear expansion and defend ourselves from this industrial juggernaut.


PRO-NUKE ANTI-NUKE NO NUKES


I know something about technology, and science: I have Bachelor's and Master's 
degrees in Electrical Engineering -- with honors -- from one of America's top 
Engineering schools. Before 1990 I worked in classified programs for General 
Electric -- the maker of the nuclear reactors now irradiating Japan. I worked at 
GE Aerospace Electronics Laboratories: low-level classified government programs 
in communications, radars and missile guidance systems for Ronald Reagan's 
infamous Star Wars (Strategic Defence Initiative) programs.

 >From 1990 to 1993 I taught English at Japan's big Soga Shosa (trading houses) 
like Mitsubishi and Sumitomo Corporations, and meanwhile I biked the rivers, 
swam the beaches, hiked the mountains and studied the culture of Japan. Japanese 
corporations were paving the shorelines and rivers with concrete, sinking giant 
tetrapods off shore. One corporation even developed these giant rubber bladders 
-- the size of football-fields -- sunk offshore, which could be pumped full of 
seawater to provide a giant barrier against tsunami's. Of course, the profit 
margins for these corporations supplying these bags were huge, but I wonder what 
happened to the technology, if these were ever deployed, and where.

For the first 34 years of my life I was in favor of nuclear power. This changed 
when I saw young people in the United States put their bodies on the line to 
protest the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Station operations in Tennessee (1994). The 
commitment and integrity of these young people made me rethink my nuclear bias.

I began my career as a journalist by looking deeply into the rabbit-hole of 
nuclear power from 1993 to 2000. I visited the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's 
(NRC) Public Document Rooms -- which have since been closed in many places -- 
where I read thousands of microfilms and scanned microfiche records and 
excavated document after document in search of truth. I visited nuke plants in 
New England and industry conferences. I interviewed officials and I attended the 
most boring and sometimes secretive public meetings with the most stifling and 
unimaginative bureaucrats and with engineers (like me) so dry they squeaked. And 
then I reported on regulatory corruption, technical failures, undemocratic 
initiatives to betray the public trust, and the accumulating radiation and 
nuclear poisons -- and the many ways that the mass media supported and 
perpetuated the mythology.

THE ARROGANCE OF HUMANISM

"I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity 
from the damaged Japanese reactors," wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
professor Dr. Joseph Oehmen on March 13. "By 'significant' I mean a level of 
radiation of more than what you would receive on -- say -- a long distance 
flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high 
levels of natural background radiation."
So begins a recent U.S. business sector article titled You Can Stop Worrying 
About A Radiation Disaster in Japan -- Here's Why, published four days after the 
earthquake struck in Japan. It has already proved false. Properly understood for 
what it is -- a childish, myopic, arrogant attempt to belittle the truth and 
influence public opinion -- the article provides an apt example of the rampant 
industry disinformation that is sweeping aside rational and compassionate and 
precautionary assessments with irrational jingoism, simplistic emotional 
appeals, and wrong-headed thinking. The post went viral and was republished widely.

How do we define apocalypse? EARTHQUAKE + TSUNAMI + AGED NUKE PLANT + 
LOSS-OF-COOLANT ACCIDENT + PLUTONIUM + FIRES + DISINFORMATION + GREED + DENIAL + 
FEAR + POLITICS = APOCALYPSE.

How many nuke plants are involved? We don't really know. Not that we have not 
been told, we have. There are six reactors at the Fukushima site, one reactor at 
the Tokai nuclear facility and three reactors at the stricken Onagawa nuclear 
complex. There are toxic chemical spills, petroleum refinery fires, gas fires, 
dangerous debris and human pathogens from the thousands of dead people and 
animals. The place is an apocalyptic nightmare, to be sure, but from the 
beginning the most important facts regarding the status of the nuclear pants and 
their components, their functioning or failing systems, the operability of the 
control rooms or integrity of the reactor containment structures, were being 
denied to the public. Now we are seeing some damage control by the U.S., the 
Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the media.

It is simultaneously as though we are believed to be incapable of even the most 
rudimentary understanding of what is going on, while also being denied the truth 
in keeping with more than sixty years of secrecy and denial by the cult of the 
atom and its incestuous cult of intelligence.

The question is: what can we believe to be true? Look at the photos of the 
explosion. Are we stupid enough to believe that no radiation has been released 
from this reactor's primary or secondary containment systems? On Wednesday March 
16 we were finally told that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had ordered 
its remaining staff to evacuate areas of the Fukushima plant after radiation 
levels spiked and plumes of white vapour "were seen pouring from what 
authorities identified as [emphasis added] the station's No. 3 reactor.

The language about white vapors "seen pouring from what authorities identified 
as the stations No. 3 reactor" does not inspire confidence that 'authorities' 
had any clue about the status of things. Indeed, they are not in the control 
room, obviously, or anywhere near it, or anywhere near 'the station's No. 3 
reactor' because they are standing back trying to identify what they are seeing, 
to see what is going on, and where it is going on. The reactor's are too hot: 
this is radiation: this is the nightmare scenario we were told could not happen. 
Radiation is contaminating air, soil, ocean, people.

The You Can Stop Worrying "article" first appeared as a reader's comment posted 
following the Business Insider journal story Japan Death Toll Climbs 
Astronomically As Nuclear Crises Intensifies, which was itself a republished and 
retitled New York Times feature of Monday March 13. At first glance, the two 
Business Insider stories couldn't be further apart in their general themes: You 
Can Stop Worrying, which translates to, calm down, don't get hysterical, pay no 
attention to those anti-nuclear fanatics who think that even microwave ovens 
will kill you, versus the Death Toll Climbs Astronomically feature, which for 
all practical purposes we can translate to Holy shit, brother! Run for your 
life! Duck and Cover!

However, both stories serve as part of the unraveling global media 
disinformation campaign about the ongoing nuclear catastrophe in Japan. The 
primary imperatives of this campaign are economic. In other words, most of the 
reportage out there about what is happening in Japan -- so far -- has been 
anchored in western epistemological frameworks based in money, greed, private 
profits and loss. The loss should not be interpreted to mean that people (mostly 
we are talking about people NOT affected by the apocalypse in Japan) care about 
who lives or dies, but rather that their primary concerns are their financial 
balance sheets, their corporate images, their personal retirement portfolios, 
and the fall of the Nikkei Index and Dow Jones trading they drool over.

Sadly, the attitudes of many "news" writers (and their readers), government 
officials, energy consultants, corporate executives, nuclear experts and 
technicians, western humanitarian relief professionals (such as World Vision 
careerists), or of environmentalists for nuclear power -- like scientist James 
Lovelock -- and many other people who, for one reason or another, have had 
something to say about the nukes crisis in Japan, or about how Japan's nuclear 
misfortune can never become a Chernobyl, or how Three Mile Island didn't kill 
anyone, or why the events in Japan, no matter how alarming, should not be 
allowed to interrupt the "nuclear renaissance" touted by U.S. President Barrack 
Obama, or something about the beauty of some nuke somewhere else, are all based 
in self-interest, not the altruistic and compassionate concerns of all humanity, 
of environmental stewardship or the preservation of all life on earth, but in a 
self-righteous, arrogant and ignorant selfishness of the kind that author David 
Ehrenfeld elaborated in his monumental work, The Arrogance of Humanism.

Japanese are technical geniuses. The rail system and subways were precise: you 
could set your watch by them. In 2003, their advanced magnetic levitation 
Shinkansen bullet trains performed at 581 kilometers per hour (361 mph). If the 
Japanese can't do, no one can. Yet today Japan is on fire -- the epicenter of 
deadly radiation now emanating out of that sizable island. This is not about 
Japan, folks, or national borders: its about all of us, everywhere.

SPENT FUEL POOL FOOLS

While the absence of cooling water facilitated the nuclear crises in Japan, most 
likely some major reactor components (proven unsafe) also failed under the 
seismic stresses of the 9.0 quake. Key components likely cracked or shattered. 
The tsunami and huge aftershocks advanced the chaos. These factors were 
complicated by the loss of offsite electrical power (an electrical BLACKOUT), 
the failure of emergency diesel generators, and the subsequent loss-of-coolant 
(water).

Embrittlement of nickel-based superalloys that comprise reactor internals was 
flagged as a major safety issue as early as the 1960s, yet such problems were 
bureaucratically dismissed, covered over, buried in paperwork and regulatory 
studies produced by the NRC ("NUREG" documents), and ignored. Intergranular 
stress corrosion cracking of BWR core shrouds (the core shroud is next to fuel 
rods deep inside) is another major safety issue in GE designed BWRs built by 
Hitachi at Fukushima, and these plague every BWR reactor in the U.S.

We don't know, however, and for many days we were offered the standard industry 
refrain: no need to worry, no threat to public health and safety. BWR core 
shroud cracking (NUREG-1544), reactor pressure vessel cracking (NUREG-1511), 
embrittled components and aging (NUREG/CR-5939), cooling system failures 
(NUREG/CR-6087), reactor containment isolation systems failures (NUREG/CR-6339) 
-- all thoroughly documented.

The redundancy and ever-touted 'defense-in-depth' systems failed at Fukushima. 
All over the U.S. such systems have been routinely disabled to minimize 
electricity-generating outages, increase output power and maximize corporate 
profits. There are as many possibilities of failures outside what we have been 
spoon-fed -- the official sequence of events -- as there are dead people.

Amongst the most troubling and most deeply underplayed questions of the entire 
crisis concern the Fukushima Spent Fuel Pools. These basin are packed with tons 
of irradiated fuel rods that need to be cooled. One of the major postulated 
accident scenarios involves a Loss-of-Coolant Accident (LOCA) to the reactor 
core, but a LOCA event can also occur with a spent fuel pool. It has. Fires and 
explosions in Japan. The Spent Fuel Pools at the six Fukushima reactors are NOT 
inside primary containment. They are exposed. Burning. About to burn.

Reactors No. 4, 5, and 6 at Fukushima were shutdown when the earthquake struck. 
After the water drained and the spent fuel became exposed, the pool at reactor 
No. 4 caught fire, and continues to burn, as of Thursday March 17, releasing 
massive amounts of radiation into the environment. The status of the other six 
spent fuel pools at Fukushima is unknown. A courageous U.S. journalist Rachel 
Maddow explored the spent fuel pool issue with a former government official. The 
most important, critical point made by Princeton professor Frank Von Hippel 
occurs at minute 14:19 -- where Rachel Maddow talks over him: these are 
LONG-LIFE RADIONUCLIDES being emitted from the spent fuel pool(s). Isotopes of 
cesium: Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years and will be around and hot for decades.

How much disaster are we talking about? The atomic bomb that exploded at 
Hiroshima created about 2000 curies of radioactivity. The spent fuel pools at 
Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant (U.S.) are said to hold about 75 million curies. 
There are six spent fuel pools at Fukushima, but the numbers of tons of fuel 
rods in each have not been made public.

The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) did the math: If Fukushima's 
Reactor No. 4 operated for 35 years and produced 30 tons of irradiated fuel per 
year and each ton is equivalent to 24 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by 
the Hiroshima bomb, then each fuel pool could contain on the order of 24,000 
times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, if all the 
produced irradiated fuel remains in the fuel pool.

Nuclear stupidity No. 1: the Fukushima reactor buildings are square (not 
circular) and had to absorb the force of the tsunami wave straight on. Stupidity 
No. 2: six reactors clustered too close together. Stupidity No. 3: no shoreline 
protection against a tsunami. Stupidity No. 4: reactors sited on earthquake 
faults. Stupidity No. 5: assumptions and calculations proving that the reactor, 
prior to its construction, could withstand anything that nature threw at it. 
Stupidity No. 6: it didn't begin in Japan: the industry, with all its 
corruptions, false assumptions and technological hubris, was born in secrecy in 
the United States of America.

Stupidity No. 125: spent fuel pools are packed too tightly, as is 
well-established by industry documents, for economic reasons, discarding safety 
concerns. Stupidity No. 458: the Spent Fuel Pools at Fukushima are suspended up 
high inside the reactor buildings secondary containment -- the same buildings 
whose roofs are blowing off! Are we to believe that the massive explosions that 
were captured on film, and others that were not, did not damage these elevated 
time bombs?

How many stupidities do we need to admit before we admit that it can happen in 
the United States and Europe and Canada too? Imagine those courageous Japanese 
nuclear workers at Fukushima -- sacrificing their lives! -- trying to save their 
families, Japan and the rest of us from our unprecedented stupidity!

During World War II they were called kamikazis and we have always portrayed them 
as terrorists: they were soldiers and pilots sacrificing their lives for the 
sake of their nation. Well, these heroic men and women sacrificing themselves at 
Fukushima have my deepest respect.

There is an ocean adjacent to the Fukushima complex, and yet the reactors and 
fuel pools cannot be kept cool. Impossible. The huge heat sink necessary to cool 
the melting fuel is not available. This is not about earthquakes and tsunamis -- 
it is about loss of off-site power, backup generators and emergency systems that 
occur in a blackout. Do electrical outages and blackouts occur anywhere else? 
Blizzards? Tornadoes? Hurricanes? The world is seeing more and more extreme and 
unpredictable weather. Claims that a serious nuclear 'accident' cannot happen in 
the U.S., Europe or Canada are false, and nuclear executives know it. That is 
why corporations refused at first to get into the nuclear power business, until 
the U.S. Government indemnified them with the Price Andersen Act (1957).

"What this [Fukushima] station suffered was a station blackout," says Deb Katz 
of the Citizens Awareness Network, who helped shut down Yankee Atomic in Rowe 
Massachusetts, "and the backup safety systems that were supposed to keep it 
operational -- the backup diesel generators -- failed. This can happen without 
an earthquake. A midwest [U.S.] power company caused the northeast grid to fail 
a few years ago; a flood or a terrorist attack could do the same. We could then 
experience a similar slow motion catastrophe though not on the grand scale of 
the Japanese site with its 6 nukes."
A LONG HISTORY OF DECEPTION

Like the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the International Atomic 
Energy Agency, Japanese officials have a long history of covering up ugly 
nuclear realities. In a recent WikiLeaks diplomatic cable, politician Taro Kono, 
a high-profile member of Japan's lower house, told U.S. diplomats that the 
Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (MITI) -- the Japanese government 
department responsible for nuclear energy -- has been "covering up nuclear 
accidents and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear 
industry." In 2002 "the chairman and four executives of TEPCO, the company that 
owns the stricken Fukushima plant, resigned after reports that safety records 
were falsified."

Such singular but remarkable events follow a pattern of wholesale U.S. cover-ups 
that define the industry as secretive and criminal, and they involve shoddy 
equipment, human incompetence, unsafe designs, inadequate safety measures, and 
economic decisions that have occurred since the very beginining of Japan's 
nuclear power era -- which itself was born out of the bombing of Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki with U.S.-made weapons of mass destruction.

In the 1960's, TEPCO planned to build a reactor outside Kashiwazaki city: 
nuclear officials told the local community, for example, that radioactivity from 
the plant would increase rice cultivation and the coloring of the carp (a 
delicacy): seven reactors were eventually built there. In June 1973, radioactive 
waste water leaked from a storage tank at Fukushima's reactor No. 1. In July 
1974, Kansai Electric asked Westinghouse Corporation to replace the steam 
generator of one of Kansai's two Mihama reactors after Mihama I experienced four 
major shutdowns in less than four years.

In September 1974, following the emergency shutdown of 21 of the then 55 U.S. 
reactors due to radioactive leaks at the Illinois Dresden Reactor No. 1, 
Japanese officials inspected their six Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs), similar to 
the Dresden BWR, and they found similar defects at Fukushima I and Hamaoka. 
Ditto, 1975: emergency shutdown's in the U.S. prompted inspections that 
discovered Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) problems at the Fukushima I and 
Tsuruga BWR reactors. Japan's Mihama reactors were plagued with radioactive 
'leaks' and faulty equipment that prompted Kansai officials to demand a refund 
from U.S. contractor Westinghouse Corporation. The Mihama Pressurized Water 
Reactors (PWRs) have been scrammed and shutdown and leaked. The accident at the 
Mihama Reactor No. 3 on 9 August 2004 was previously considered Japan's worst 
nuclear accident: there was no tsunami, and no earthquake.

Japan's fleet of white elephant nukes only grew more problematic. From April to 
September 1977, six of Japan's fourteen reactors were shutdown. Japanese 
corporations joined with Westinghouse and General Electric in the 1980's to 
export their destructive technology to other countries, mostly targeting the 
so-called Third World. Before 1979 there were some 25 reactors under 
construction or completed in Japan, and until last week there were 55 operating 
reactors. In 2006, GE and Hitachi Corporation teamed up to create three joint 
venture nuclear companies to expand nukes in North America.

One fact is certain: we have already been massively lied to about a massive and 
still unfolding nuclear disaster. The radiation releases from some four to six 
nuclear reactors in collapse are already known to be excessive, described by 
reputable experts as "worse than Three Mile Island but not as bad as Chernobyl." 
It may be worse than Chernobyl yet.

Additional radiation has been reported at the Onagawa complex, but this was 
explained away as wind-blown radioactivity from the Fukushima complex. 
Meanwhile, in the same reports, officials said that radiation was not leaking 
from Fukushima, or it was minimal, and there was no cause for alarm.

After several days of lies and distortions and official government censorship, 
reports appeared under the headlines Japan radiation leaks feared as nuclear 
experts point to possible cover-up. Reports also began citing partial meltdowns 
of nuclear fuel rods. The threat of meltdown is real, it has been happening to 
some degree, and it has already occurred far more than we have been told. The 
physical and thermonuclear states of materials and systems and the spread of 
radioactivity at Japan's reactors remains shrouded in disinformation and silence.

THE CLEAN AND GREEN PROPAGANDA


Of course, technology gurus and corporate executives and financial consultants 
are hysterical, claiming there were no deaths from Three Mile Island and that 
deaths at Chernobyl are exaggerated by the mass media. These claims are false. 
The new book, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the 
Environment provides irrefutable evidence of massive loss of life.

"The book is solidly based -- on health data, radiological surveys and 
scientific reports -- some 5,000 in al," says journalist Karl Grossman. "It 
concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly 
of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. That is between when the 
accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow."

James Lovelock, author of the renowned GAIA Hypothesis, is a celebrated 
environmentalist for nuclear energy peddling nuclear power as a clean, green, 
renewable energy source of the future. However, Lovelock has a long history 
working for NASA -- the outer-space division of the Pentagon -- and is deeply 
enmeshed in the western epistemological framework.

Commenting on Japan's nuclear crisis, Lovelock said that people were 
'prejudiced' against nuclear power unreasonably. "It is very safe," he said. 
Chernobyl, for instance, was "an idiotic mess-up that could only have occurred 
in the Soviet Union", and according to UN estimates had killed only about 56 
people. More people are routinely killed in oil refineries and coal mines, he 
pointed out."

James Lovelock's Chernobyl statement should immediately discredit him as a 
quack: Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is unwilling to go on record 
claiming anything less than many, many deaths. Further, Lovelock's comment about 
the 'idiotic mess-up' by Russians is inherently racist: the Russians were the 
first to put a satellite (Sputnik) into orbit, for example, and NASA 
collaborated with the Russian MIR Space Station, which broke all kinds of records.

Lovelock suggests that nuclear reactors are our only hope to curtail global 
climate change, and that this may involve, for example, the 'suspension of 
democracy'. However, democracy has been long since suspended for many of the 
earths people and species -- forced to live and die with our burgeoning wastes, 
consumption and exploitation. Lovelock's analysis is patently false -- 
contaminated by his own inability to see beyond his privilege and self-interests.

Not convinced? Lovelock has also reportedly stated, wrongheadedly: "One of the 
striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the 
richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb 
test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River 
nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War."

Tell this to the mutant babies, weak-spined and deformed children from the 
Chernobyl killing zones, chronicled in Russian filmmaker Vladimir Kuznetsov's, 
"While We Are Still Alive, and to the people of Bikini Atoll whose stolen island 
is officially acknowledged to be highly contaminated. Savannah River is another 
SUPERFUND site.

The nuclear power cycle involves disease, despair and death from the uranium 
mining to daily operations to the nuclear waste "'dumping'. Uranium mines in 
Niger that have built France's entire nuclear complex are toxic wastelands 
spreading radiotoxins across north and sub-Saharan Africa. The Tuareg and Toubou 
nomads have been completely shattered by the confiscation, exploitation and 
irradiation of their lands by the nuclear complex. Native Americans continue to 
suffer massive epidemics of disease, contamination and confiscation of lands in 
the Secret Nuclear War at the American Ground Zero: the nuclear complex has 
compounded the native American genocide begun in 1492. Daily contamination 
releases into water, soil and air occur at every operating nuclear reactor in 
the world. There is no 'disposal' of deadly nuclear toxins that now exist to 
perpetuity, and yet wastes are typically dumped on poor communities like 
Barnwell, South Carolina, or native American lands.

Out of sight, out of mind: nuclear poisons are colorless, odorless, and deadly.

START WORRYING, HERE'S WHY
The writing You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster in Japan -- Here's 
Why is packed full of disinformation and technical jargon, masked as scientific 
expertise, meant to confound, confuse and scientifically impress the 
un-technical (concerned) reader. The author at first did not identify himself, 
which is a tactic many people use so that they do not have to take 
responsibility, or worry about being held accountable. Appended as a sort of 
disclaimer to the article that morphed out of the comment we find the statement: 
"Since posting this, we have learned that it was written by Dr. Josef Oehmen, a 
research scientist at MIT."

In the nuclear arena, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is known 
for the infamous Nuclear Reactor Safety Study (WASH 1400), chaired by MIT 
nuclear scientist Norman P. Rasmussen (commonly known as The Rasmussen Report), 
that whitewashed the massive flaws and safety failures of a burgeoning, 
secretive, incestuous nuclear power industry, even while it exposed them to some 
degree.

According to a Nuclear Information and Resource Service fact sheet on Fukushima, 
in 1986, Harold Denton, then the NRC's top safety official, told an industry 
trade group that the GE "Mark I [BWR] containment, especially being smaller with 
lower design pressure, in spite of the suppression pool, if you look at the WASH 
1400 safety study, you'll find something like a 90% probability of that 
containment failing."

Produced at the height of the United States' anti-nuclear movement in 1974, the 
Rasmussen Report downplayed the risk of nuclear accidents and polished the image 
of a technologically diseased industry. The stridently pro-nuclear MIT has spent 
billions of taxpayers dollars on secretive and highly biased research programs 
of all things nuclear. MIT is also a known hotbed of the Central Intelligence 
Agency (CIA), with a revolving door from MIT to government to the CIA.

"I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake," 
wrote MIT's Dr. Josef Oehmen in his initial post of March 12. "There has not 
been one single report that was accurate and free of errors... By 'not free of 
errors' I do not refer to tendentious anti-nuclear journalism - that is quite 
normal these days. By 'not free of errors' I mean blatant errors regarding 
physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an 
obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors 
are build and operated. I have read a 3 page report on CNN where every single 
paragraph contained an error."

Turns out Dr. Oehmen's report had so many errors, and yet was so widely 
regurgitated, that it was taken over by MIT's nuclear experts. Dr. Oehmen 
employs the standard ruse of claiming that the press, which can very easily be 
shown to as stridently pro-nuclear as MIT itself, is instead plagued by 
"tendentious anti-nuclear journalism -- that is quite normal these days." He 
then explains nuclear power (wrongly) arriving at last at his definitive 
statement that, "I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release 
of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors."

"The first 'type' of radioactive material is the uranium in the fuel rods," 
wrote Dr. Oehmen, "plus the intermediate radioactive elements that the uranium 
splits into, also inside the fuel rod (Cesium and Iodine). There is a second 
type of radioactive material created, outside the fuel rods. The big main 
difference up front: Those radioactive materials have a very short half-life, 
that means that they decay very fast and split into non-radioactive materials. 
By fast I mean seconds. So if these radioactive materials are released into the 
environment, yes, radioactivity was released, but no, it is not dangerous, at 
all. Why? By the time you spelled "R-A-D-I-O-N-U-C-L-I-D-E", they will be 
harmless, because they will have split up into non radioactive elements..."

It takes about five seconds to spell R-A-D-I-O-N-U-C-L-I-D-E and it takes about 
the same amount of time to read a chart (below) which shows the actual lifetimes 
and half-lives of radioisotopes that people need to be concerned about today.

Not only does Dr. Oehmen intentionally misinform people about the inherent 
design flaws and potential failures of nuclear reactors and subsystems, but he 
knowingly disinforms about the potential for serious health consequences and the 
radioactive contaminants that are typically released during a nuclear power 
accident. While millions of people in Japan are suffering the personal 
psychological terror of a possible nuclear holocaust, the fears and horrors of 
life and death from a natural disaster, starvation and thirst, and radioactive 
poisoning. Dr. Joseph Oehmen -- safe in Boston Massachusetts -- has been been 
boasting about his blog post -- equally popular with people who hate it and love 
it -- which spread like a virus on the Internet.

During nuclear fission, the uranium from the fuel rods splits into many 
radioactive fission products that can then escape during a nuclear power 
'event'. These include dangerous Noble Gases (xenon and krypton); Hallogens 
(including iodines and bromines); Alkali Metals (including cesium 137); Alkaline 
earths (including barium 133 and strontium 90) and the elements Tellurium and 
Ruthenium. Some fissionable elements decay rapidly and are inconsequential 
during releases, but some decay into other, more deadly nuclides. The most 
dangerous nuclides have half-lives in days (I-131 = 8 days), years (Cs-137 = 30 
years) or centuries (Pu-239 = 24,000 years). Half-life is the time it takes for 
one-half of the material to decay -- lest we forget that the other half is still 
present.


All of these fissionable products are potentially released and they have varying 
degrees of half-lives, mobility, migration and toxicity depending on factors 
like atmospheric conditions, temperature of the reactor core and operating 
capacity (megawatts) at shutdown, and the presence of coolants. The most 
dangerous of these are iodine 131 (I-131), cesium 137 (Cs-137), strontium 90 
(Sr-90), cobalt 60 (Co-60) and plutonium 239 (Pu-239). All of these negatively 
affect the human body and all of these have been released in nuclear power 
'accidents', during venting of radioactive steam or flushing of radioactive 
water, and other 'events'. Another deadly isotope which seems to consistently 
'escape' from nuclear power sites is cobalt 60 (Co-60), half-life 5.2 years. 
Co-60 accumulates and migrates through steam generator tubes and other secondary 
coolant processes, in core shrouds and reactor pressure vessels, and many of the 
other components of nuclear reactors whose histories of failures are thoroughly 
documented.

Is radiation leaking in Japan? Yes and no. The term 'leak' suggests air 
squeaking out of a balloon. In Japan we have leaks, here and there, but we also 
have explosions, fires and other phenomena that create massive radioactive 
emissions. To say 'leak' is to downplay what is happening. The balloons in Japan 
have burst: primary containment has been breached at Reactor No. 3 and at least 
one spent fuel pool is burning up. With the walls blown out and roof blown off, 
it seems at least one other spent fuel pool is gone or going.

Nuclear advocates deride and dismiss public ignorance about radionuclides like, 
for example, the noble gases. Nuclear advocates frequently state that both xenon 
and krypton decay and disappear in a matter of seconds or minutes. What they 
don't tell us is that these isotopes decay into daughter isotopes that are 
extremely deadly emitters. Many credible physicians, scientists and other 
nuclear experts -- free of the self-interests of nuclear profits, academic 
sponsorship or career advancement -- have outlined the absence of 
epidemiological studies of certain radionuclides emitted or flushed at nuclear 
reactors. Dr. Helen Caldicott has elaborated the detrimental health effects of 
the noble gases xenon (Xe) and krypton (Kr), and she notes that these have 
appearance hundreds of miles from reactors believed to have emitted them.



• Xenon 137, with a half-life of 3.9 minutes, converts almost immediately to the 
notoriously dangerous cesium 137 with a half-life of thirty years.
• Krypton 90, half-life of 33 seconds, decays to rubidium 90, half-life of 2.9 
minutes, then to the medically toxic strontium 90, half-life of twenty-eight years.
• Xenon 135 decays to cesium 135 with an incredibly long half-life of 3 million 
years.
• Large amounts of xenon 133 are released at operating reactors, and although it 
has a relatively short half-life of 5.3 days, it remains radioactive for 106 days.
• Krypton 85, which has a half-life of 10.4 years, is a powerful gamma radiation 
emitter.
• Argon 39 has a 265-year half-life.


"Other dangerous noble gases include xenon 141,143 and 144, which decay to 
cerium 141,143 and 144," Dr. Helen Caldicott reports in Nuclear Power is Not the 
Answer. "According to the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP Report 
No. 60) these three cerium isotopes,which are beta emitters,are abundant 
products of nuclear fission reactions and have moderately long half-lives. They 
bio-concentrate in the food chain, and they irradiate the lung, liver, skeleton, 
and gastrointestinal tract, where they act as potent carcinogens."

On March 14 Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) outlined the risks from 
Japan. Iodine 131 migrates in air and is known for causing thyroid cancers, 
especially in children. Strontium 90 causes different cancers. Cesium 137 
concetrates in bone and causes leukemia. Microscopic particles of plutonium 239 
cause lung cancer if inhaled and Pu-239 kills instantly in any sizeble dose. 
Areas contaminated by plutonium will have to be abandoned -- as happened at 
Chernobyl.

"Since 2010, Fukushima Daiichi Unit-3 reactor had been using mixed-oxide fuel 
(also called plutonium fuel or MOX)," PSR reported, in Japan's Nuclear Crises 
Worsens, "which is even more dangerous to the public than a severe accident with 
uranium fuel. Plutonium fuel contains plutonium and other very toxic actinides 
that would increase the number of resulting cancers. Current reports say that 
this fuel has been exposed to air."

"Pressure in at least two of the reactors have reported to be well above normal 
levels," continued PSR, "and the reactor operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, 
released some of the pressure by venting radioactive vapor from the containment 
structure. In addition, the radionuclide cesium has been reportedly found 
outside the reactor, which indicates that there has been fuel damage."

The proponents of nuclear power have used all kinds of disinformation and 
tactics to protect the industry -- compelling the nuclear complex to arm guards 
to 'protect' these secrets and to 'protect' civilian reactors. It is not only 
'terrorists' that the nuclear establishment seeks to protect us from: the armed 
guards and classified documents are to prevent the public from learning the 
truth about the destruction of documents, the disappearing of evidence, the 
falsification of reports and records, the calculated fudging of risk and safety 
assessments. There have been countless exposes, such as Daniel Ford's 1982 book 
The Cult of the Atom: The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission.


FALSE STATEMENTS AND PREMATURE ASSURANCES

The original New York Times story, Death Toll Estimate in Japan Soars as Relief 
Efforts Intensify (retitled by Business Insider, commented on by Dr. Joseph 
Oehmen), follows the patterns of the media and government begun on DAY ONE, 
wherein authorities offered false assurances, premature evaluations, and 
outright lies. These officials -- and the media that quoted them -- repeatedly 
reiterated that there was no cause to worry. At first, no radiation was 
released, we were told, over and over, even though, admittedly, there were some 
slight reactor problems here and there. Then there were explosions, but still 
the radiation levels were normal, or, well, maybe there was a puff of steam, 
which we were told was a hydrogen blast, but radiation monitors showed nothing, 
and there was no threat to the public health or safety.

The Japanese Government soon dispatched health and rescue teams dressed in white 
moon suits and breathing through respirators and hauling around geiger counters 
to measure radiation levels in frightened children, but still, no radiation was 
released, they chanted, no cause for alarm, the media reported. A handful of 
citizens reported to the hospital showing signs of radiation poising, but still 
there were 'no serious radiation concerns', officials were everywhere quoted, or 
else what little radiation was released was compared to what you might get 
riding on a school bus in the sunshine. While evacuating thousands of people in 
the 20 kilometer zone (12 miles) around Fukushima, on the one hand, the 
government continued to tell people that the public was not at risk, on the 
other, and the media continued to report the lie, as they have always done, and 
still do, with radiation emergencies in the United States.


For example, on November 23, 2009, a radioactive contamination at Three Mile 
Island led to a Reuters news report titled Federal Officials: Radiation Leak At 
Three Mile Island No Threat to Public Safety. Like the 'news reportage' coming 
out of Japan, the Three Mile Island leak story was bereft of any discussion, 
analysis, counterpoint or critique from anyone. Journalists who collaborate with 
the western English-language news-consuming media have no comprehension of the 
technological issues, the industry cover-ups, the deceptions, the bureaucratic 
inertia or the radiological poisons produced and the concomitant epidemics of 
disease clustered around nukes. They have swallowed the industry slogans and 
green-washing for so long that their capacity to provide comprehensive, 
informed, investigative reportage is less than zero. Hence we find innocent 
[sic] people like CNN's Anderson Cooper (360) reporting from 100 kilometers 
north of Fukushima and then freaking out and running for their lives from the 
invisible killer: radiation. Meanwhile, CNN cuts back-and-forth from Cooper to 
Jim Walsh -- 'our nuclear expert and CNN contributor' -- who arrogantly 
reassures the increasingly anxious Anderson Cooper that everything is under 
control and the blasts and white smoke are of no concern.

"We had an explosion," MIT's Dr. Jim Walsh reports, the Boston, Massachusetts 
skyline and the Prudential Center skyscrapers glimmering brightly behind him. 
"It turned out that explosion did not compromise the [nuclear] core facility," 
he guesses (minute 29). Walsh immediately betrays his speculation a few minutes 
later (minute 59). "Hopefully [emphasis added], it's just the outer structure, 
and has left unaffected the reactor, and unaffected the containment vessel. 
Because if it were to affect those things...uh... that would be bad news..."

"The subtext here is Should I Get Out of Here?" interrupts the alarmed Anderson 
Cooper, in the live on-the-air broadcast. Of course, from this point on the 
western press increasingly focuses the public's attention on the trials and 
tribulations and death-defying escape of the courageous [white] investigative 
reporter, Anderson Cooper.

"I hear you Anderson," responds expert Jim Walsh, chuckling. "I want to err on 
the side of caution for you here, Anderson." Walsh is barely able to contain his 
laughter as he sells Cooper out. "Uh, ah, my guess is that you are O.K. But I 
don't want you to sue me if I am wrong. But, uh, I'm inclined that you're O.K."

"There have been release of..uh..uh...I guess a gas," Cooper continues, "and 
correct me, I flunked science... There have been releases out over the 
ocean...why were they doing these controlled releases?"

Dr. Jim Walsh then pontificates that radiation releases that ostensibly drift 
out over the ocean -- releases questioned by the ill-prepared and uneducated 
Cooper -- are 'mildly radioactive', unwanted but not dangerous, in any case, 
that they are being screened for dangerous radonuclides by the Japanese reactor 
experts, and "it's not going to be a major health threat."

Nonsense! Here is a simultaneous catastrophe beyond human comprehension: At 
least six nuclear reactors in various states of collapse, out-of-control, and in 
partial meltdown, and at least one even more deadly spent fuel pool overheating 
and burning, amidst the apocalypse from the original Richter 9.0 earthquake, the 
Richter 5.0 and 6.0 aftershocks, the Tsunami, the massive death toll, the lack 
of emergency vehicles and spreading radioactivity, the fires, the melting Spent 
Fuel Pools -- they are not "screening" radioactive releases which, in any case, 
are now uncontrolled.

Of course, according to his own biography, CNN's nuclear consultant, Dr. Jim 
Walsh, an expert in international security and a Research Associate at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program (SSP) -- which 
also shares U.S. special forces as 'research fellows'. He is published and 
selected as the chosen expert by the major U.S. and European media. Dr. Jim 
Walsh is the former Executive Director of the Managing the Atom project at 
Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a visiting 
scholar at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore 
National Laboratory -- one of our Department of Energy SUPERFUND sites, deep 
down the dark [nuclear] rabbit hole. Dr. Jim Walsh is another government spook.

For another example, "[T]he most urgent worries concerned the failures at two 
reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant," the New York Times 
wrote, in Death Toll Estimate in Japan Soars as Relief Efforts Intensify, "where 
engineers were still struggling to avert meltdowns and where some radiation had 
already leaked. An explosion at one of the reactors on Monday did not appear to 
have harmed it, Japanese officials said."

In one sentence we are told that a nuclear meltdown may be imminent, and in the 
next sentence, same paragraph, Japanese officials assured the public (the New 
York Times backed them up) that an explosion occurred but the reactor was not 
harmed. Is this believable? When the Japanese nuke experts took the drastic 
measure of pumping seawater into the reactors they knew that the reactors would 
be ruined forever. Given the economics of such a choice -- billions upon 
billions of Japanese yen destroyed forever -- we can infer that the situation is 
beyond grave: the Fukushima area is now a permanent sacrifice zone: people, 
wildlife, land has been sacrificed to the Gods of nuclear technology.

"We have no evidence of harmful radiation," deputy Cabinet secretary Noriyuki 
Shikata told reporters after one of the recent reactor building explosions.

Environmental activists in the area of the Fukushima reactors began to cry foul 
after finding that radiation monitoring stations were not operating. At the top 
of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Monitoring Website it said 
"monitoring goes on around the clock year round" and at the bottom it said "THIS 
SYSTEM IS CURRENTLY SHUTDOWN." Activists believed that TEPCO was downplaying 
radioactive releases. At the same time, TEPCO was announcing that it planned to 
vent the containment [vessel] to relieve the pressure, which caused releases of 
radioactivity into the air.

On Wednesday March 16, National Public Radio reported that "the chief of the 
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that all the water is gone from one of 
the spent fuel pools at Japan's most troubled nuclear plant, but Japanese 
officials denied it." Of course, National Public Radio has been heavily 
subsidized by the nuclear power industry and has consistently advanced the 
nuclear industry agenda.

More nonsense: Radiation from Japan's troubled nuclear reactors has virtually no 
chance of reaching the U.S. -- the West Coast, Alaska or other locations -- the 
Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Tuesday March 15. (Note that they don't want 
to disturb the tourist industry, so they say nothing about Hawaii.) The 
statement from the NRC said that "the 'small' radiation releases so far [sic] 
from the Japanese reactors has been blown out to sea, away from populated areas."

On Wednesday March 16, the United Nations Comprehensive Test Ban treaty 
Organization reported that a radiation plume from Japan nukes would hit Southern 
California late Friday. Of course, health and NRC officials say it poses very 
little risk.

DISTANCING U.S. NUKE INDUSTRY FROM JAPAN


NBC News on Wednesday evening (March 16) ran several short 'news' clips about 
Japan's nuclear crises. One of these was clearly intended to distance General 
Electric and the nuclear Regulatory Commission from Japan, a sort of betrayal of 
the culture of secrecy and their historically incestuous relationship. Why? To 
perform damage control, improve investor confidence, assuage public fears of a 
similar catastrophe at one of the 110 reactors in the U.S.

The NBC broadcast began by pointing out that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission (NRC) has advised U.S. citizens who are within 50 miles (80 
kilometers) of the Fukushima reactors to evacuate or stay indoors. The U.S. set 
a higher standard, and the news went on to promote the idea that Japanese 
officialdom cannot be trusted, but U.S. officialdom can.

Then the NBC News reporter, Lester Holt, was shown being scanned for radiation 
after returning from the Sendai area: no contamination on his body, but his 
"shoe bottoms [soles] contained slightly elevated amounts of radiation, but of 
no danger to us," he said. Again, the standard tactic of reporting that 
contamination has occurred -- this time it is on his shoes -- but that it is of 
no danger. Furthering the myths about radioactivity and its deadly means of 
spreading disease, the shoe bottom problem was nothing a little soap and elbow 
grease couldn't fix. And so, later in the hour, they showed the shoes being 
scrubbed and everything being returned to [business as] normal.

NBC followed the news tidbits about radioactive shoes with pictures of Fukushima 
reactors -- buildings with their roofs blown apart -- accompanied with 
assertions that there is a POSSIBLE breach of containment at the Fukushima 
Reactor No. 2, and that a breach of Reactor No. 3 containment vessel is CONFIRMED.

Cut to the U.S. Congress, where NBC brings us a very, very short clip from a 
special Senate hearing held on Wednesday March 16. Suddenly the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission (NRC) is awake, and they care, and they are telling an 
equally awake and suddenly concerned U.S. Congress that they believe that Japan 
has covered up the extent of the nuclear disaster.

"Radiation levels are extremely high," proclaims NRC chief Dr. Gregory B. 
Jaczko. The spent fuel pools are dry. Secondary containment at the reactor [No. 
3] has been breached, but Tokyo is denying this."

Finally, NBC informs its viewers, in passing, that General Electric -- the 
designer and salesmen of the GE Mark I Boiling Water reactors that General 
Electric dumped on Fukushima back in the 1970s -- is a part owner of MSNBC. Full 
disclosure, of course.

Suddenly the 'news' shifted to big bold banners flashed across the TV screen in 
big blue fonts. These banners remind good, tax-paying and law-abiding citizens 
-- good people watching the evening news after a hard day's work -- that GE has 
reviewed the safety concerns that were previously raised about GE BWR reactors, 
and so reactors in the U.S. are safe. It was no longer news: it was a public 
relations ploy, a photo op for GE to improve its image, right out of George 
Orwell's 1984.

The latest psychological operation underway is to convince and reassure the U.S. 
public and English-language speaking world that General Electric is not 
responsible for what is happening in Japan; that U.S.-based G.E.-designed 
reactors elsewhere, being of the same age and design, are not going to have the 
same problems as reactors in Japan. The message is also that the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission runs a tight ship, that oversight is comprehensive and 
thorough, people are doing their jobs, and that the nuclear industry in the U.S. 
is nothing like the secretive and bungling industry in Japan.

While the message is racist at its [nuclear] core, nothing could be further from 
the truth. It can happen here. San Onofre. Diablo Canyon. Vermont Yankee. There 
have been all kinds of warning signs. It won't be a tsunami, on the back of an 
earthquake, or maybe it will. It will be a BLACKOUT scenario of some kind, as it 
is in Japan.

In the Congressional Hearing, Senator Barbara Boxer was suddenly awake, and 
suddenly concerned, and suddenly the U.S. Congress is going to straighten this 
all out and protect us. The U.S. Senate Hearings began with some grandstanding 
by U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), whose jabs were directed at Republicans, 
but in the end she asked a few questions.

The next speaker, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla) reads a garbage speech about how 
wonderful the NRC is and how safe are U.S. reactors. Our first and foremost 
concern is safety, he says, and we must continue to develop and site and license 
and operate new reactors world wide. "We've delayed for 30 years now. So I think 
that we certainly don't want to slow down, let's keep going."

The hearing was completely corporate, one Senate official citing recent New York 
Times stories that have suddenly awoken them (the Senators) to the many warnings 
that had previously occurred. My God, we didn't know. Meanwhile, the NRC 
Chairman testified that the NRC can not attribute a single death to the nuclear 
accident at Three Mile Island.

A few months ago, President Obama signed some 8.5 billion dollar loan guarantees 
for a nuclear reactor construction project for U.S. nuclear corporation Southern 
Company, in partnership with the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

Of course, the Price Andersen Act, passed in 1957, indemnifies nuclear utilities 
and reactor operators from all lawsuits, financial liability or related 
responsibility.

Everything suggests that it will be business as usual. Destabilization, 
destruction, war and catastrophe have always been turned into a big business for 
the United States of America. Across the ocean tens of thousands of people are 
protesting in Germany and France and Briton. Here, even the discussion is off 
course. The wrong questions are being asked and the wrong people are answering 
them. Instead of talking about limits to growth, the focus is on expansion, 
profits, trade and so-called progress. Why would this situation be any 
different? As Senator Barbara Boxer eventually said: we should be humbled.

Perhaps the worst horror of all is that people trapped in the contaminated zones 
are now being shunned by outsiders, including aid organizations. Radiation 
fears, mingled with a sick sense of abandonment, reported the Los Angeles Times, 
as people are afraid to help them. People in the evacuation zones - elders and 
those without fuel or transport -- are geting no help, and no information. We 
should be humbled.

Keith Harmon Snow is a war correspondent, photographer and independent 
investigator, and a four time (2003, 2006, 2007, 2010) Project Censored award 
winner. He is also the 2009 Regent's Lecturer in Law & Society at the University 
of California Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work, outside of 
academia, contesting official narratives on war crimes, crimes against humanity 
and genocide while also working as a genocide investigator for the United 
Nations and other bodies. From 1985 to 1989, he worked as Engineer, and then 
Manager, GE Aerospace Electronics Laboratories, Syracuse NY. He has three papers 
published in the journals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics 
Engineers (IEEE).
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of 
the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on 
Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the 
author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or 
liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

© Copyright Keith Harmon Snow, ConsciousBeingAlliance.com, 2011

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