Fukushima Nuclear Plant Falling Apart… Because Plant Operator Has No Incentive To Spend Money To Fix It

Oldspeak: “Only when you understand that the American government is dictating Japanese Nuclear policy does this situation make a macabre sense. That’s the only way it would make sense for the Japanese government to leave clean up to a company that had no means or incentive to do so. Expose its entire nation and the world to continuous radioactive contamination for years. But my question is who has dictated these decisions to the to the American Government? Why is the American government, with 31 of these aging and dangerously insecure reactors on its soil, just not saying anything to the public about this ongoing disaster? Collaborating with the Japanese government to raise acceptable radiation limits, turning off radiation detectors… Who has that little regard for humanity and the planet that sustains us to allow an obviously unprepared and negligent energy corporation to make this ongoing disaster WORSE? Imagine for a second, the contamination and destruction wrought if the BP’s gulf oil spill was never contained. The reason this many orders of magnitude worse and ongoing leak is being largely ignored and forgotten is that what is leaking is invisible. It’s not visibly coating everything it touches. But it is being transported around the world via sea, air and rain. In another sad commentary on the state of our capitalist civilization, profit comes before safety for TEPCO Energy Corporation. I guess the logic is, there’s nothing they can really do about it, so why alarm the public… Cut losses and let the planet get contaminated.  My thing is, what happens when radiation levels get unignorable? “Neon City” soon come…

By Washington’s Blog:

Mainstream Media Awakens to the fact that Fukushima Is Still a Total Mess

After visiting Fukushima a year ago, Senator Ron Wyden warned that the situation was worse than reported … and urged Japan to accept international help to stabilize dangerous spent fuel pools.

A year ago, an international coalition of nuclear scientists and non-profit groups called on the U.N. to coordinate a multi-national effort to stabilize the fuel pools. And see this.

A year ago, former U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura – whose praises have been sung by Mikhail Gorbachev, U.S. Ambassadors Stephen Bosworth and Glenn Olds, and former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and Goldman Sachs co-chair John C. Whitehead – noted:

The current Japanese government has not yet mentioned the looming disaster, ostensibly to not incite panic in the public. Nevertheless, action must be taken quickly. *** We believe an independent, international team of structural engineers and other advisers must be assembled and deployed immediately.

Yesterday – after Fukushima reactor operator Tepco’s recklessness and nickel-and-diming cheapness in dealing with the post-accident response caused new releases of radioactivity – the New York Times reported:

Increasingly, experts are arguing that the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, cannot be trusted to lead what is expected to be decades of cleanup and the decommissioning of the plant’s reactors without putting the public, and the environment, at risk.

***

“The Fukushima Daiichi plant remains in an unstable condition, and there is concern that we cannot prevent another accident,” Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, said at a news conference.

***

“No wonder the water is leaking,” said Hideo Komine, a professor in civil engineering at Ibaraki University, just south of Fukushima. He said that the outer protective lining should have been hundreds of times thicker.

***

Muneo Morokuzu, a nuclear safety expert at the Tokyo University Graduate School of Public Policy, said that the plant required a more permanent solution that would reduce the flood of contaminated water into the plant in the first place, and that Tepco was simply unable to manage the situation. “It’s become obvious that Tepco is not at all capable of leading the cleanup,” he said. “It just doesn’t have the expertise, and because Fukushima Daiichi is never going to generate electricity again, every yen it spends on the decommissioning is thrown away.”

“That creates an incentive to cut corners, which is very dangerous,” he said. “The government needs to step in, take charge and assemble experts and technology from around the world to handle the decommissioning instead.”

This is just like BP’s massive efforts to hide the extent and damage from the oil spill – even though their approach led to greater oil pollution – in order to avoid costs.  (And the big banks’ cover up of the extent and damage from criminal fraud on the U.S. economy.)

AP provides additional details:

A makeshift system of pipes, tanks and power cables meant to carry cooling water into the melted reactors and spent fuel pools inside shattered buildings remains highly vulnerable, Nuclear Regulation Authority chairman Shunichi Tanaka acknowledged Wednesday.

***

The problems have raised doubts about whether the plant can stay intact through a decommissioning process that could take 40 years, prompting officials to compile risk-reduction measures and revise decommissioning plans.

***

Just over the past three weeks, there have been at least eight accidents or problems at the plant, the nuclear watchdog said.

***

Experts suspect the radioactive water has been leaking since early in the crisis, citing high contamination in fish caught in waters just off the plant.

***

“The nuclear crisis is far from over,” the nationwide Mainichi newspaper said in a recent editorial. “There is a limit to what the patchwork operation can do on a jury-rigged system.”

Fukushima Uncontained: Nuclear Plant Continuosly Releasing 93 Billion Becquerels Of Radiation A DAY Into Pacific Ocean For Years

Oldspeak: “The bottom line is that the reactors have lost containment. There are not “some leaks” at Fukushima. “Leaks” imply that the reactor cores are safely in their containment buildings, and there is a small hole or two which need to be plugged. But scientists don’t even know where the cores of the reactors are. That’s not leaking. That’s even worse than a total meltdown.” This is a daily, ongoing ecological catastrophe. Being ignored and denied  by American and by proxy Japanese goverments to preserve and proliferate pro-nuclear energy policy. Why is this profoundly dangerous, toxic and perpetually contaminating energy source being propped up as viable? Our ecosystem is continuously being contaminated by deadly radiation. It’s being transported around the planet via water and air. How is this part of American environmental policy? It is destroying the environment!? Tell your elected officials you want to your food, air and environment tested for radiation.  You want to know what’s being done to protect the public and environment from this ongoing catastrophe.  I, for the first time in two years, heard a 1 minute mention of the conditions at the plant just now on Free Speech TV on the Thom Hartman Show. Zero coverage in corporate controlled media. “

 By Washington’s Blog:

You may have heard that Tepco – the operator of the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plants – announced a large leak of radioactive water.

You may have heard that the cooling system in the spent fuel pools at Fukushima has failed for a second time in a month.

This is newsworthy stuff … but completely misses the big picture.

Associated Press notes:

Experts suspect a continuous leak into the ocean through an underground water system, citing high levels of contamination in fish caught in waters just off the plant.

(Tepco graphics of the Fukushima plants even appear to show water directly flowing from the plant to the ocean. And see this.)

In fact, Japanese experts say that Fukushima is currently releasing up to 93 billion becquerels of radioactive cesium into the ocean each day.

How much radiation is that?

A quick calculation shows that Chernobyl released around ten thousand times more radioactive cesium each day during the reactor fire. But the Chernobyl fire only lasted 10 days … and the Fukushima release has been ongoing for more than 2 years so far.

Indeed, Fukushima has already spewed much more radioactive cesium and iodine 131 than Chernobyl. The amount of radioactive cesium released by Fukushima was some 20-30 times higher than initially admitted.

Fukushima also pumped out huge amounts of radioactive iodine 129 – which has a half-life of 15.7 million years. Fukushima has also dumped up to 900 trillion becquerels of radioactive strontium-90 – which is a powerful internal emitter which mimics calcium and collects in our bones – into the ocean.

And the amount of radioactive fuel at Fukushima dwarfs Chernobyl … and so could keep leaking for decades, centuries or millenia.

The bottom line is that the reactors have lost containment. There are not “some leaks” at Fukushima. “Leaks” imply that the reactor cores are safely in their containment buildings, and there is a small hole or two which need to be plugged. But scientists don’t even know where the cores of the reactors are. That’s not leaking. That’s even worse than a total meltdown.

So what are the consequences for people living outside of Fukushima itself?

They could be quite severe, indeed.

Chomsky: Why America & Israel Are The Greatest Threats To Peace

Oldspeak:”"It is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation should arm itself with nuclear weapons, which inspires other nations to do so.” -General Lee Butler. Imagine if Iran — or any other country — did a fraction of what America & Israel do at will. “It would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.) -“Which Path To Persia?”, Brookings Institution, 2009

By Noam Chomsky @ AlterNet:

It is not easy to escape from one’s skin, to see the world differently from the way it is presented to us day after day. But it is useful to try. Let’s take a few examples.

The war drums are beating ever more loudly over Iran. Imagine the situation to be reversed.

Iran is carrying out a murderous and destructive low-level war against Israel with great-power participation. Its leaders announce that negotiations are going nowhere. Israel refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and allow inspections, as Iran has done. Israel continues to defy the overwhelming international call for a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region. Throughout, Iran enjoys the support of its superpower patron.

Iranian leaders are therefore announcing their intention to bomb Israel, and prominent Iranian military analysts report that the attack may happen before the U.S. elections.

Iran can use its powerful air force and new submarines sent by Germany, armed with nuclear missiles and stationed off the coast of Israel. Whatever the timetable, Iran is counting on its superpower backer to join if not lead the assault. U.S. defense secretary Leon Panetta says that while we do not favor such an attack, as a sovereign country Iran will act in its best interests.

All unimaginable, of course, though it is actually happening, with the cast of characters reversed. True, analogies are never exact, and this one is unfair — to Iran.

Like its patron, Israel resorts to violence at will. It persists in illegal settlement in occupied territory, some annexed, all in brazen defiance of international law and the U.N. Security Council. It has repeatedly carried out brutal attacks against Lebanon and the imprisoned people of Gaza, killing tens of thousands without credible pretext.

Thirty years ago Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor, an act that has recently been praised, avoiding the strong evidence, even from U.S. intelligence, that the bombing did not end Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program but rather initiated it. Bombing of Iran might have the same effect.

Iran too has carried out aggression — but during the past several hundred years, only under the U.S.-backed regime of the shah, when it conquered Arab islands in the Persian Gulf.

Iran engaged in nuclear development programs under the shah, with the strong support of official Washington. The Iranian government is brutal and repressive, as are Washington’s allies in the region. The most important ally, Saudi Arabia, is the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist regime, and spends enormous funds spreading its radical Wahhabist doctrines elsewhere. The gulf dictatorships, also favored U.S. allies, have harshly repressed any popular effort to join the Arab Spring.

The Nonaligned Movement — the governments of most of the world’s population — is now meeting in Teheran. The group has vigorously endorsed Iran’s right to enrich uranium, and some members — India, for example — adhere to the harsh U.S. sanctions program only partially and reluctantly.

The NAM delegates doubtless recognize the threat that dominates discussion in the West, lucidly articulated by Gen. Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command: “It is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East,” one nation should arm itself with nuclear weapons, which “inspires other nations to do so.”

Butler is not referring to Iran, but to Israel, which is regarded in the Arab countries and in Europe as posing the greatest threat to peace In the Arab world, the United States is ranked second as a threat, while Iran, though disliked, is far less feared. Indeed in many polls majorities hold that the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons to balance the threats they perceive.

If Iran is indeed moving toward nuclear-weapons capability — this is still unknown to U.S. intelligence — that may be because it is “inspired to do so” by the U.S.-Israeli threats, regularly issued in explicit violation of the U.N. Charter.

Why then is Iran the greatest threat to world peace, as seen in official Western discourse? The primary reason is acknowledged by U.S. military and intelligence and their Israeli counterparts: Iran might deter the resort to force by the United States and Israel.

Furthermore Iran must be punished for its “successful defiance,” which was Washington’s charge against Cuba half a century ago, and still the driving force for the U.S. assault against Cuba that continues despite international condemnation.

Other events featured on the front pages might also benefit from a different perspective. Suppose that Julian Assange had leaked Russian documents revealing important information that Moscow wanted to conceal from the public, and that circumstances were otherwise identical.

Sweden would not hesitate to pursue its sole announced concern, accepting the offer to interrogate Assange in London. It would declare that if Assange returned to Sweden (as he has agreed to do), he would not be extradited to Russia, where chances of a fair trial would be slight.

Sweden would be honored for this principled stand. Assange would be praised for performing a public service — which, of course, would not obviate the need to take the accusations against him as seriously as in all such cases.

The most prominent news story of the day here is the U.S. election. An appropriate perspective was provided by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who held that “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

Guided by that insight, coverage of the election should focus on the impact of wealth on policy, extensively analyzed in the recent study “Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America” by Martin Gilens. He found that the vast majority are “powerless to shape government policy” when their preferences diverge from the affluent, who pretty much get what they want when it matters to them.

Small wonder, then, that in a recent ranking of the 31 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of social justice, the United States placed 27th, despite its extraordinary advantages.

Or that rational treatment of issues tends to evaporate in the electoral campaign, in ways sometimes verging on comedy.

To take one case, Paul Krugman reports that the much-admired Big Thinker of the Republican Party, Paul Ryan, declares that he derives his ideas about the financial system from a character in a fantasy novel — “Atlas Shrugged” — who calls for the use of gold coins instead of paper currency.

It only remains to draw from a really distinguished writer, Jonathan Swift. In “Gulliver’s Travels,” his sages of Lagado carry all their goods with them in packs on their backs, and thus could use them for barter without the encumbrance of gold. Then the economy and democracy could truly flourish — and best of all, inequality would sharply decline, a gift to the spirit of Justice Brandeis.

 

High Radiation Levels Detected In Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Pacific Seawater/Seafood Radioactive; Media & Government Turn Blind Eye

Oldspeak:“Southern California is still getting hit by Fukushima radiation at alarmingly high levels that will inevitably increase as the main bulk of radioactive  Pacific Ocean water reaches North America over the next two years. High radiation readings in Santa Monica and Los Angeles air during a 42-day period from late December to late January strongly suggest that radiation is increasing in the region including along the coast in Ventura County. Even with government, University of California and this reporter’s tests showing high radiation in the air, water, food and dairy products in this state, the state and federal governments cut off special testing for Fukushima radionuclides more than half a year ago.” -Michael Collins This ongoing disaster is an existential threat. Untold millions of tons of radioactive water has been continuously dumped into the Pacific Ocean, radiation has been detected in rain, snow, air, water &  food in a number of places far away from the west coast. Why has the level of concern of state and federal governments been so low? Why has radioactivity testing been stopped? Why is the Ventura County Reporter the only news outlet reporting on this acute threat to the lives of millions of Americans? It’s become clear that this ongoing catastrophe will be ignored until it is no longer possible to do so. By then it will be too late to do anything about it. WHY?! In the mean time people living in pacific coast bordering regions should take steps to protect themselves. Avoid seafood. Stay inside during rainstorms. Avoid the beach. Limit your time outdoors. “

Related Stories:

“Absolutely Every One” – 15 Out of 15 – Bluefin Tuna Tested In California Waters Contaminated with Fukushima Radiation

California Slammed With Radiation: Fukushima Radiation Plume Hit Southern & Central California

“Planetary Genocide”: Fukushima One Year Later : The Poisoning Of Planet Earth Continues

Read more By Michael Collins @ The Ventura County Reporter:

The Top Short-Term Threat To Humanity: The Spent Fuel Pools Of Fukushima

Oldspeak:”It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of Japan and the whole world depends on NO.4 reactor – Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata. The U.S. started 2 wars, created new government agencies and has hemorrhaged trillions in military and surveillance spending in response to 9/11 and the deaths of 2,996 people. As many as 18,000 deaths in the U.S. have been attributed to exposure to Fukushima radioactivity. The Pacific Ocean is contaminated with radioactive waste water. The response?  Radiation detectors have been turned off, ‘acceptable limits’ of radiation exposure have been raised, reports of contaminated seaweed, rainwater, milk, seafood products have been largely ignored. This is any existential threat. Why is so little attention being paid to it? Another earthquake in the vicinity of Fukushima could spell the end of civilization as we know it. More energy needs to be put into containing this disaster and preparing for the worst.

Related Stories:

“Planetary Genocide”: Fukushima One Year Later : The Poisoning Of Planet Earth Continues

California Slammed With Radiation: Fukushima Radiation Plume Hit Southern & Central California

By Washington’s Blog:

The Greatest Single Threat to Humanity: Fuel Pool Number 4

We noted days after the Japanese earthquake that the biggest threat was from the spent fuel rods in the fuel pool at Fukushima unit number 4, and not from the reactors themselves. See this and this.

We noted in February:

Scientists say that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hitting Fukushima this year, and a 98% chance within the next 3 years.

Given that nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen says that an earthquake of 7.0 or larger could cause the entire fuel pool structure collapse, it is urgent that everything humanly possible is done to stabilize the structure housing the fuel pools at reactor number 4.

Tepco is doing some construction at the building … it is a race against time under very difficult circumstances, and hopefully Tepco will win.

As AP points out:

The structural integrity of the damaged Unit 4 reactor building has long been a major concern among experts because a collapse of its spent fuel cooling pool could cause a disaster worse than the three reactor meltdowns.

***

Gundersen (who used to build spent fuel pools) explains that there is no protection surrounding the radioactive fuel in the pools. He warns that – if the fuel pools at reactor 4 collapse due to an earthquake – people should get out of Japan, and residents of the West Coast of America and Canada should shut all of their windows and stay inside for a while.

The fuel pool number 4 is apparently not in great shape, and there have already been countless earthquakes near the Fukushima region since the 9.0 earthquake last March.

Germany’s ZDF tv quotes nuclear engineer Yukitero Naka as saying:

If another earthquake occurs then the building [number 4] could collapse and another chain reaction could very likely occur.

(Unit 4 contains plutonium as well as other radioactive wastes.)

Mainchi reported on Monday:

The storage pool in the No. 4 reactor building has a total of 1,535 fuel rods, or 460 tons of nuclear fuel, in it. The 7-story building itself has suffered great damage, with the storage pool barely intact on the building’s third and fourth floors. The roof has been blown away. If the storage pool breaks and runs dry, the nuclear fuel inside will overheat and explode, causing a massive amount of radioactive substances to spread over a wide area. Both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and French nuclear energy company Areva have warned about this risk.

A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant’s No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be “the weakest link” in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster. The worse-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant’s other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate.

Former Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Sumio Mabuchi, who was appointed to the post of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s advisor on the nuclear disaster immediately after its outbreak, proposed the injection of concrete from below the No. 4 reactor to the bottom of the storage pool, Chernobyl-style.

***

“Because sea water was being pumped into the reactor, the soundness of the structure (concrete corrosion and deterioration) was questionable. There also were doubts about the calculations made on earthquake resistance as well,” said one government source familiar with what took place at the time. “[F]uel rod removal will take three years. Will the structure remain standing for that long?

Asahi noted last month that – if Unit 4 pool gets a crack from an earthquake and leaks, it would be the end for Tokyo.

Kevin Kamps said last month:

Unit 4 storage pool… The entire building is listing including the pool. What they have is steel jacks underneath the pool to try to keep the floor from falling out or the pool from flipping over.

If that cooling water supply is lost, it will be just a few hours at most before that waste is on fire. 135 tons outside of any radioactive containment. They would be direct releases into the environment. 100% of cesium-137 could be released to the environment.

Former U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura – whose praises have been sung by Mikhail Gorbachev, U.S. Ambassadors Stephen Bosworth and Glenn Olds, and former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and Goldman Sachs co-chair John C. Whitehead – notes:

The unit suffered enormous damage during the tsunami—a hydrogen explosion blew the roof off, leaving the highly radioactive fuel pool exposed to the open air. If another high level earthquake hits the area, the building will certainly collapse. Japanese and American meteorologists have predicted that such a strong earthquake is indeed likely to hit this year.

The meltdown and unprecedented release of radiation that would ensue is the worst case scenario that then-Prime Minister Kan and other former officials have discussed in the past months. He warned during his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos that such an accident would force the evacuation of the 35 million people in Tokyo, close half of Japan and compromise the nation’s sovereignty. Such a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe is unimaginable. Hiroshi Tasaka, a nuclear engineer and special adviser to Prime Minister Kan immediately following the crisis, said the crisis “just opened Pandora’s Box.”

The current Japanese government has not yet mentioned the looming disaster, ostensibly to not incite panic in the public. Nevertheless, action must be taken quickly. This website over the last year has published a running commentary from scientists explaining why Reactor 4 must be stabilized immediately, who might be able to accomplish such a task, and why the situation has largely gone unnoticed. We believe an independent, international team of structural engineers and other advisers must be assembled and deployed immediately. Mounting public pressure would force the Japanese government to take action. We hope these resources are helpful in educating the public about the crisis that we face.

As the eminent German physicist Dr. Hans-Peter Durr said ten months ago, if the spent fuel pool spills, we will be in a situation where science never imagined we could be.

Matsumura was told that if the fuel pool at unit 4 collapses or the water spills out, so much radiation will spew out for 50 years that no one will be able to approach Fukushima:

Even more dramatically, Matsumura writes:

Japan’s former Ambassador to Switzerland, Mr. Mitsuhei Murata, was invited to speak at the Public Hearing of the Budgetary Committee of the House of Councilors on March 22, 2012, on the Fukushima nuclear power plants accident. Before the Committee, Ambassador Murata strongly stated that if the crippled building of reactor unit 4—with 1,535 fuel rods in the spent fuel pool 100 feet (30 meters) above the ground—collapses, not only will it cause a shutdown of all six reactors but will also affect the common spent fuel pool containing 6,375 fuel rods, located some 50 meters from reactor 4. In both cases the radioactive rods are not protected by a containment vessel; dangerously, they are open to the air. This would certainly cause a global catastrophe like we have never before experienced. He stressed that the responsibility of Japan to the rest of the world is immeasurable. Such a catastrophe would affect us all for centuries. Ambassador Murata informed us that the total numbers of the spent fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi site excluding the rods in the pressure vessel is 11,421 (396+615+566+1,535+994+940+6375).

I asked top spent-fuel pools expert Mr. Robert Alvarez, former Senior Policy Adviser to the Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment at the U.S. Department of Energy, for an explanation of the potential impact of the 11,421 rods.

I received an astounding response from Mr. Alvarez [updated 4/5/12]:

In recent times, more information about the spent fuel situation at the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site has become known. It is my understanding that of the 1,532 spent fuel assemblies in reactor No. 304 assemblies are fresh and unirradiated. This then leaves 1,231 irradiated spent fuel rods in pool No. 4, which contain roughly 37 million curies (~1.4E+18 Becquerel) of long-lived radioactivity. The No. 4 pool is about 100 feet above ground, is structurally damaged and is exposed to the open elements. If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident.

The infrastructure to safely remove this material was destroyed as it was at the other three reactors. Spent reactor fuel cannot be simply lifted into the air by a crane as if it were routine cargo. In order to prevent severe radiation exposures, fires and possible explosions, it must be transferred at all times in water and heavily shielded structures into dry casks.. As this has never been done before, the removal of the spent fuel from the pools at the damaged Fukushima-Dai-Ichi reactors will require a major and time-consuming re-construction effort and will be charting in unknown waters. Despite the enormous destruction cased at the Da–Ichi site, dry casks holding a smaller amount of spent fuel appear to be unscathed.

Based on U.S. Energy Department data, assuming a total of 11,138 spent fuel assemblies are being stored at the Dai-Ichi site, nearly all, which is in pools. They contain roughly 336 million curies (~1.2 E+19 Bq) of long-lived radioactivity. About 134 million curies is Cesium-137 — roughly 85 times the amount of Cs-137 released at the Chernobyl accident as estimated by the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP). The total spent reactor fuel inventory at the Fukushima-Daichi site contains nearly half of the total amount of Cs-137 estimated by the NCRP to have been released by all atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, Chernobyl, and world-wide reprocessing plants (~270 million curies or ~9.9 E+18 Becquerel).

It is important for the public to understand that reactors that have been operating for decades, such as those at the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site have generated some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet.

Many of our readers might find it difficult to appreciate the actual meaning of the figure, yet we can grasp what 85 times more Cesium-137 than the Chernobyl would mean. It would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.

There was a Nuclear Security Summit Conference in Seoul on March 26 and 27, and Ambassador Murata and I made a concerted effort to find someone to inform the participants from 54 nations of the potential global catastrophe of reactor unit 4. We asked several participants to share the idea of an Independent Assessment team comprised of a broad group of international experts to deal with this urgent issue.

I would like to introduce Ambassador Murata’s letter to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to convey this urgent message and also his letter to Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda for Japanese readers. He emphasized in the statement that we should bring human wisdom to tackle this unprecedented challenge.

Ambassador Murata’s letter says:

It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of Japan and the whole world depends on NO.4 reactor. This is confirmed by most reliable experts like Dr. Arnie Gundersen or Dr. Fumiaki Koide.

Anti-nuclear physician Dr. Helen Caldicott says that if fuel pool 4 collapses, she will evacuate her family from Boston and move them to the Southern Hemisphere. This is an especially dramatic statement given that the West Coast is much more directly in the path of Fukushima radiation than the East Coast.

Will humanity rise to the occasion, and figure out how to stabilize fuel pool number 4 before catastrophe strikes?

Or will modern civilization win a Darwin award for failing to pay attention to the real threats?

“Planetary Genocide”: Fukushima One Year Later : The Poisoning Of Planet Earth Continues

Oldspeak:” While hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions?) will develop various radiation-related illnesses (cancers and diabetes, as well as radiation-induced miscarriages, stillbirths and birth deformities) over the next decades, the coffers of the medical profession, pharmaceutical companies, and nuclear industry will be bursting with profits. The 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl continues its deathly impact –and that was only one reactor. Fukushima had six reactors. As long as profits trump safety, and as long as the entire nuclear industry has ties to the military, we will never be safe. Valid citizens’ and medical concerns continue to be ignored. We are all expendable.-Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri “Profit Is Paramount” We’re all being continuously and systemically poisoned by toxic radioactivity. Why has there been so little coverage of this existential threat in corporate media?

 

by Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri @ Center For Research On Globalization:

“The most difficult thing of all is to see is what is right in front of your eyes.”  Goethe.

 

As we approach the tragic one-year anniversary of Fukushima’s multiple nuclear reactors’ accident on March 11, that initially affected the entire Japanese population, we now know that this nightmare has engulfed all of us. Let us also not forget that this is the third nuclear attack on the Japanese (the first two were Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Given what has not been done to ensure public safety, we cannot think of it any other way. From the very first day, there were lies and a massive cover-up of the extent of the destruction and the inherent radioactive dangers –not just from Japanese officials and TEPCO corporate reports, but also from the US. The Mark 1 reactors, built by General Electric, have design flaws. There are many of these same-designed reactors in the US.

 

A year later, much of the corruption, deceit, and careless practices have been documented extensively here at Global Research –while mainstream news continues Orwellian doublespeak. Last month, in a rare but very belated mainstream account, CBS News reported that after the tsunami and nuclear accident: “The normal lines of [government] authority completely collapsed in Japan.” See:

 

www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57386266/report-govt-collapsed-during-japan-nuke-crisis

 

Early on, even essential radioactive monitoring was shut down. In May 2011, the prestigious Norsk Institute’s online site was blocked from the US. They had been monitoring on a daily basis the worldwide radioactive contamination to which we were all –and continue to be– exposed. Conveniently, any early radiation monitoring in the US was inconsistent, with numerous sites supposedly not working for one or another reason. Then the so-called “acceptable” radiation levels in food were raised in the US and EU:

www.activistpost.com/2011/04/eu-follows-epa-raises-acceptable.html

 

As Dr. Helen Caldicott and Dr. Chris Busby have repeatedly reported: “There is no safe level of radionuclide exposure, whether from food, water, or other sources. Period.” See:

www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=23902

and

 

www.helencaldicott.com/2011/05/unsafe-at-any-dose/#more-285

 

So, what is not monitored, or where the radiation rates are manipulated, then no one –government officials and corporations– can ever be held accountable, nor can increased death rates, diabetes, stillbirths, birth defects ever be attributed to this catastrophic planetary event.

 

When have we ever been told the truth about our life-long systemic radiation poisoning? For decades, we have been uninformed experimental laboratory rats since before the Manhattan Project. There never were any ethical or precautionary considerations. Greed and secret agendas trumped everything else.

 

With various half-lives –some eons-long– of numerous radioactive components, the human race and every other living creature on our planet is on its way to extinction, due to the known sterilization effects of radiation. Here is a short list of the half-life of five of the radioactive isotopes that are and will continue to poison all of our children, and us, ad infinitum, in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink and in which we bathe:

• 
  ·         Cesium 137: 30 years

 

• ·         Plutonium 239: 24,000 years

 

• ·         Strontium 90: 29 years [mimics calcium in the body]

 

• ·         Uranium 235: 700-million years

 

• ·         Iodine 131: 8 days [absorbed into the thyroid and gives heavy radiation dose. Also goes into the soil, passed onto us through cow’s milk.]

 

In a report released just a few week’s ago, the milk tested in the San Francisco area still had radioactive levels of Cesium 134 and Cesium 137. According to even a compromised EPA, these are now at “150 percent of their maximum contaminant level.” Here’s the chart:

http://enenews.com/highest-level-radioactive-cesium-san-francisco-area-milk-august-2011-150-epas-maximum-contaminant-limit-chart

 

In addition, Fukushima’s Unit 3 reactor also used MOX [mixed oxide], a plutonium-uranium fuel mixture that is deadly. A single milligram of MOX is 2-million times more deadly than enriched uranium.

 

Current radiation levels reported on Feb. 25 in Tokyo, 100 miles from Fukushima and an international hub, are “25 times the Fukushima mandatory evacuation zone.” The eminent physicist Dr. Paolo Scampa has reported in detail his latest calculations on deadly radiation exposure here (see page 2):

www.veteranstoday.com/2012/02/25/evacuate-tokyo-and-all-us-forces-from-japan

For 30-million Japanese this is an epic tragedy.

 

Any reasonable safety precautions or realistic evacuations never took place at Fukushima or elsewhere. In addition, a collection of 40-years worth of 600,000 spent fuel rods posed an immediate HazMat threat that never went away. The water poured over them evaporated into radioactive steam to go directly into our planet’s atmosphere and the tons of sea water sprayed on the entire nuclear conflagration were criminally dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Again, because it was not monitored, we will never know how many millions of tons of radioactive water were dumped into the Pacific Ocean. The entire web of ocean life then was irreversibly contaminated with radioactive nuclear waste and detritus, as the ocean currents carried this nightmare to the west coast shores of North America (California, Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver). As with other major planetary bodies of water, the Pacific Ocean has become an enormous radioactive garbage dump of incalculable proportions that are beyond any remediation currently known to science. This majestic body of water has become one of our planet’s toilets.(1)

 

What about the entire web of ocean life? From the great and magnificent whales to the variety of microscopic life, this entire vast ecosystem has been poisoned. Yet, we will never know the immense extent of death and destruction that Fukushima caused to it. Even knowing that the ocean food chain is contaminated with radioactivity, this was not reported by mainstream media. So, the fishing industry is catching and selling various fish and crustaceans that are radioactive. How many tons of these have gone up through the entire food chain, and then sold to uninformed consumers who eat these HazMat foods? Profits always trump our safety and well-being. This is the massive global poisoning of our only home –Mother Earth. We are fortunate, however, that the alternative internet media has reported on these dangers.

 

While hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions?) will develop various radiation-related illnesses (cancers and diabetes, as well as radiation-induced miscarriages, stillbirths and birth deformities) over the next decades, the coffers of the medical profession, pharmaceutical companies, and nuclear industry will be bursting with profits. The 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl continues its deathly impact –and that was only one reactor.(2) Fukushima had six reactors.

 

Medical reports are already showing a significant rise in deaths due to Fukushima’s radioactive fallout. Noted toxicologist and internist Dr. Janet Sherman recently said:” Based on our continuing research, the actual death count here [in the US] may be as high as 18,000…but we continue to find that infants are hardest hit because their tissues are rapidly multiplying, they have undeveloped immune systems, and the doses of radioisotopes are proportionally greater than for adults.” See:

www.radiation.org/press/pressrelease111219FukushimaReactorFallout.html

 

This massive and frightening crisis is the result of no precaution, no prevention, and no care or concern for human or any other kind of life on our planet. None of this is mainstream news. E.O. Wilson (“The Future of Life” and “Biodiversity”) and Bill McKibben (“The End of Nature”) were writing about these issues decades ago. The dangers of the nuclear age continue to mount with off-the-scale disastrous results to all of us.

 

How much longer can we be deceived about the extreme dangers of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons? Everything that encompasses nuclear energy is unsafe. It is hazardous in the extreme. Further, nuclear waste has been accumulating for six decades. There is NO LONG-TERM SAFE WAY TO STORE ANY NUCLEAR WASTE. For example, countless drums of nuclear waste have been dumped into the ocean, and have been found to be leaking radioactive poisons.

 

Everything on our planet has been contaminated with life-long and long-term radiation. I continue to write: “Invisible does not mean safe.” With many nuclear facilities in the US old and having numerous problems, the core issue of it as a hazardous endeavor remains. Two nuclear plants with serious troubles are Vermont Yankee, and just last month San Onofre (built right on a fault line). They are just the tips of the proverbial radioactive iceberg.

 

So, as long as profits trump safety, and as long as the entire nuclear industry has ties to the military, we will never be safe. Valid citizens’ and medical concerns continue to be ignored. We are all expendable.

 

This is not a one-issue health and/or environmental crisis. We MUST think of the bigger picture, across many disciplines. We are in the midst of a long-planned and multi-pronged assault on our health and our planet’s. The destruction of real and long-term good health has been replaced by multiple and chronic diseases (often caused by enormous toxic pollution that envelops all of us). Our entire biology has been battered for a century. The blood-brain barrier has been breached. Nano-technology and invisible stealth-created micro-organisms –both unregulated– are our modern-day plagues. Many were created in some bio-hazard lab. To add to this is the poisoning of our water, air and food supply. In 1998, the print-edition of London’s “The Ecologist” (perhaps the earliest environmental magazine, first published in the 1970s), devoted their entire issue to “The Monsanto Files. Can we survive genetic engineering?”(3) For many years, F. William Engdahl (“Seed of Destruction”) and Dr. Mae Wan-Ho both have written about the abundant and well-documented dangers of genetic engineering and the GM poisoned foods.

 

Add to that:, we have an illegal but on-going geo-engineered aerosol 24/7/365 stealth assault overhead that has completely changed our air and poisoned our health. In numerous lectures and research papers, Clifford Carnicom has documented that our air has been transformed to a plasma state; and with it is the associated tragedy of Morgellons syndrome that was created from some synthetic self-replicating nano-organism. There is no “off switch” for this; but the media ridicules sufferers. Time magazine recently published an article noting that these very real and documented symptoms were “delusional.” Into this synergistic nightmare are also 100,000 chemicals –90 percent of which are untested– that surround our every move.

 

Last, but by no means the least, of these hazards is the hidden dangers of the EMF/RF spectrum [Electromagnetic Frequency/Radiation Frequency]. The proliferation of this deadly technology encompasses: cell phones and Wi-Fi and their towers that poison our landscapes. With more than 5-billion cell phones sold, consumers were never told how dangerous they were. Outdated data and reports do not include the now constant barrage of these higher frequencies that wreck our health. There is also newly reported research demonstrating that this also includes impairment of cognitive function and brain damage.(4)

 

The latest release of this hazardous technology is the so-called “Smart” Meters that are being installed all over North America and Europe without any mandate and without any preliminary research that the utility [electric, gas, and water] companies did on the numerous biological threats they are already causing people who have had a meter installed.(5)

 

With 8,000 complaints, California leads the US in the most vocal concerns about these meters. Several cities, including Santa Cruz, CA, have banned them with year-long moratoria. There was never any mandate to force these meters on anyone; the utility companies did not warn customers of the extreme risks of constantly pulsing EMF, nor did they warn customers about breakage to our DNA or brain damage. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (founded in 1965) has called for a moratorium on these dangerous meters.(6) It is conceivable that the unfolding EMF crisis will be far worse than the asbestos and tobacco hazards combined. Scientist Prof. Olle Johansson of Sweden’s prestigious Karolinska Institute, has been warning about these invisible biological dangers for decades. See:

1. 
   1.    www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS7YIZ1x0r8

and

1. 2.  www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJZumEgSblQ

 

Corporations have personhood and have the same legal standing as any real humans. They have the financial means to block any real justice for the environmental and health damage their products continue to cause. They are rarely held accountable. Add to that the destruction of 30-years of environmental laws meant to protect us, this is another part of the disaster recipe in which we live out our days. The nuclear industry has never told us the truth about the permanent level of radiation dangers to which we are all exposed. The plunder of our planet and the destruction of vast ecosystems have been documented for decades. These poisons, mostly invisible, envelop our every move, contaminate our DNA, and wreck our health and ability to reproduce safely. The past 10 years this destruction has been accelerated at a phenomenal rate, while mainstream media continues to report lies.

 

Nevertheless, more and more millions of people are waking up and connecting many of the dots of these epidemics of serious illnesses, loss of millions of jobs, theft of millions of homes, stealing of trillions of dollars of wealth to pay off banksters, CEOs and insiders, while the middle class around the globe is in extremis. Evidence continues to mount of what insider trading and printing of fiat money has done to destroy people’s lives and economies around the globe. We cannot minimize or discount a situation that is totally out of control; and we cannot think of each of these HazMats as separate problems. They are all inter-related and they are destroying out health. Connecting the dots of this multi-pronged assault on all of us as well as our entire biosphere is ESSENTIAL. It is not sustainable. It is up to all of us to become well-informed and educated about what is happening, join together, and to paraphrase Dr. Rosalie Bertell “refuse to co-operate in our own destruction.” We still have that choice.

 

Remember: What we don’t look for, we can’t find. If those in charge decide NOT to monitor or report the dangers, then no one is ever held accountable –that includes those in charge. We all suffer the consequences.

 

NOTES:

1. Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri. “The Pacific Ocean: A Radioactive Garbage Dump.” May 14, 2011:

http://consciouslifenews.com/pacific-ocean-radioactive-garbage-dump/116277

 

2. Mittica, Pierpaolo, et al. “Chernobyl. The Hidden Legacy.” London: Trolley, Ltd., 2007; and Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri. “Chernobyl: The Horrific Legacy. 25 Years and Counting.” April 25, 2009:

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13349

 

3. “The Monsanto Files. Can we survive genetic engineering?” London. The Ecologist. Vol. 28, No. 5: Sept./Oct. 1998.

 

4. Adamantia Fragopoulou et al. “Brain proteome response following whole body exposure of mice to mobile phone or wireless DECT base radiation.” Jan. 25, 2012.There is an abstract at:

 

http://electromagnetichealth.org/electromagnetic-health-blog/mice-proteome

 

5. See: “The Invisible Hazards of ‘Smart’ Meters.” August 19, 2011:

 www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26082; and ‘”Smart’ Meter Dangers Update: Scientific Proof of These Hazards.” Feb. 10, 2012:

http://consciouslifenews.com/smart-meter-dangers-update-scientific-proof-hazards/1124466

 

6. “American Academy of Environmental Medicine calls for a halt to wireless smart meters.” Jan. 23, 2012:

http://emfsafetynetwork.org/?p=6985

 

Educator and environmental writer Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri is the author of the highly acclaimed book, “The Uterine Crisis.” London’s “The Ecologist” calls this book “an inspiration.”

 

“The Whole World Will Be Exposed From The Radiation From Fukushima”: Huge Quantities Of Radiation Are Still Being Released By Fukushima Nuclear Plant

Oldspeak:” Radiation expert Dr. Chris Busby says that huge quantities of radiation - 10¹³ or 10 trillion becquerels per hour – are right now,  being released from Fukushima. And former Nasa photo analyst Michael Rivero – who has been measuring radiation levels in Oahu, Hawaii, every day since the Japanese earthquake – reports the highest radiation readings yet are occurring right now. Radioactive material is being burned and dumped into the ocean by the Japanese, exponentially increasing the distribution of radiation around the globe. So basically the whole planet is bathed in toxic radiation, no serious efforts are being made to contain it, and there is no mention of it in corporate media, it is literally being ignored and un-reported. It’s just gonna keep spewing into the atmosphere unabated, indefinitely. Why?

By Washington’s  Blog:

Physicist Michio Kaku appeared on 60 Minutes (the Australian edition), and said:

• The whole world will be exposed from the radiation from Fukushima.

• [The Japanese people] are guinea pigs, absolute human guinea pigs.

In fact, radiation experts say that huge quantities of radiation are currently being released by Fukushima.

In addition to direct releases, the Japanese are burning radioactive material, putting much more radioactivity into the air.

Japanese doctors are warning about the dangers of radiation for the Japanese people … especially kids.

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen says that radioactive rain-outs were documented recently in British Columbia and Oklahoma with geiger counters.

And former Nasa photo analyst Michael Rivero – who has been measuring radiation levels in Oahu, Hawaii, every day since the Japanese earthquake – reports the highest radiation readings yet are occurring right now.

Huge Quantities of Radiation Are Still Being Released By Fukushima

Radiation expert Dr. Chris Busby says that huge quantities of radiation - 10¹³ or 10 trillionbecquerels per hour – are still being released from Fukushima.

This is down slightly from some of the radiation levels observed in March, which – as noted in April – exceeded levels pumped out at Chernobyl during the week-long fire.

But given that the Fukushima crisis has continued for months, Fukushima dwarfs Chernobyl in terms of radiation released. See this and this.

Very High Radiation Levels Found in Tokyo

Busby brought sophisticated radiation testing equipment to Japan, and says that the radiation from one sample from Tokyo was higher than existed inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Postscript: No, the levels of radiation we’re being exposed to are not safe. And see this. 

Fukishima Reactors A Raging Nuclear Inferno Vast Amounts Of Radiation Still Being Released Into Atmosphere

Oldspeak: “The deafening silence continues with next to no coverage of this ongoing environmental catastrophe. More than 2 months later we learn that 3 of the 4 reactors have melted down. Crickets from corporate media. The Russians having gone through Chernobyl are rightfully concerned and are reporting on it. With recently raised ‘acceptable’ radiation limits at 1000 times that which is safe for the human body, and radiation detectors turned off, apparently there is nothing to be concerned about here. “Ignorance is Strength”.

By Kurt Nimmo @ Infowars:

Professor Christopher Busby, who sits on the European Committee on Radiation Risks, told RT yesterday that the reactors at Fukushima are a raging nuclear inferno and he believes at least one of the reactors is now outside its containment structure and emitting vast amounts of radiation into the atmosphere.

The Japanese newspaper Asahi reports today that data reveals meltdowns occurred at the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors. Goshi Hosono, special adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan, acknowledged the likelihood of meltdowns. “We have to assume that meltdowns have taken place,” Hosono said at a news conference May 16.

Infowars.com and other alternative news sources reported the probability of a nuclear meltdown at the plant, but this was virtually ignored by the corporate media.

Soon after an earthquake and tsunami crippled the plant, nuclear experts said meltdowns occurred at all three reactors. TEPCO and the corporate media downplayed the possibility of nuclear meltdown. On April 17, TEPCO released a schedule to reach a cold shutdown at the Fukushima plant within six to nine months, but eventually had to revise the schedule.

Nuclear experts indicate more than a decade will be required to remove the melted fuel, eliminate the contamination, and dismantle the reactors.

Public release of data on the situation at the plant, which had been kept at the central control room, was delayed because it took time to restore power and remove radioactive materials attached to the papers, according to TEPCO. According to the data, the pressure in the pressure vessel of the No. 2 reactor dropped at 6:43 p.m. on March 15. A similar drop in pressure also took place at the No. 3 reactor at 11:50 p.m. on March 16.

“We have yet to be able to grasp the entire situation at the plant,” a TEPCO official said on May 16.

Radioactive technetium was discovered in water in the No. 3 reactor building. The discovery raised speculation that the melted nuclear fuel has breached the pressure vessel and landed in the containment vessel. Technetium is produced when nuclear fuel rods are damaged.

Related articles

• TEPCO admits nuclear meltdown occurred at Fukushima reactor 16 hours after quake(tipggita32.wordpress.com)
• TEPCO now confirms nuclear meltdown in Fukushima reactor No. 1(theboldcorsicanflame.wordpress.com)

Fukushima Reactor 1 melted down, 2 and 3 may have too

By John Timmer @ Ars Technica:

Yesterday, TEPCO, the company responsible for running the Fukushima nuclear reactors, released a provisional analysis of the events that occurred in Unit 1, one of the reactors that was active when the tsunami struck. In five stark pages, the report lays out the impact of the tsunami on the facility: water levels that plunged below the bottom of the fuel, a complete meltdown of the nuclear fuel, and extensive damage to the reactor vessel.

The new analysis was enabled by the recent installation of air purifiers that let personnel reenter the reactor control room for the first time. Once inside, they were able to recalibrate some of the instruments that have been monitoring the reactor core; the revised numbers have enabled TEPCO to better understand what happened in the wake of the tsunami.

Things moved fairly quickly: by four hours after the tsunami hit, the levels of cooling water had dropped enough that the top of the fuel stack was exposed to the air. Shortly after that happened, the temperature in the core reached nearly 3,000°C, and the cooling water boiled off the bottom of the fuel stack. Melting of fuel rods started at 4.8 hours after the earthquake hit, and a partial meltdown had already occurred by 5.1 hours. According to TEPCO, any residual integrity in the fuel rods was gone by 15 hours after the quake, and the reactor core was emptied of fuel by 16 hours.

If there’s a bright side here, it’s that, by melting to the floor of the reactor, most of the fuel was resubmerged in cooling water. Temperatures there are now in the area of 100-120°C. The temperatures still fluctuate based on the rate of cooling water injection, suggesting the majority of the fuel is still inside the reactor vessel. The temperature and pressure readings indicate that the vessel is generally intact, as well. But the continued loss of cooling water indicates that it almost certainly has been leaking water that is heavily contaminated with radioactive isotopes (though not necessarily reactor fuel).

As Nature’s Geoff Brumfiel puts it, “Nobody really knows where all the water is going—but it can’t be anywhere good.” The best hope is that it largely leaked into the basement areas of the reactor building but we currently don’t know for certain where the water escaped to or how far it has spread. Complicating matters further arereports that TEPCO thinks that the two other reactors that were active at the time of the quake suffered similar damage. Confirmation will have to wait for access to their control rooms.

All of this will make the cleanup efforts extraordinarily complex, as the fuel can no longer be lifted out using the structure it was incorporated into, since all that supporting material has melted away. Workers will also have to contend with leaks of highly radioactive water during the process; that water will have to be removed or contained before it leaches into the surrounding soil. There are positives here—temperatures are relatively low now, and the fuel appears to have remained in the reactor vessel—but Fukushima is likely to be a long-term worry.

Further reading

• The TEPCO report (tepco.co.jp)

The Planet Strikes Back: Why We Underestimate Mother Earth And Overestimate Ourselves

Oldspeak: “The civilization that you live in, that you were born in, is fueled by death. That’s not hyperbole. Why do they call them fossil fuels? Because they’re living? Or because they’re dead? We take oil, a substance that has been dead for 60 million years, and we pull it out of the ground. We take coal, which has been dead for 300 million years, and we dig holes to pull it out of the ground. We pull out of the ground death, and we burn it in our engines. And we burn death in our power plants, without ceremony. And then we act shocked when, having pulled death out of the ground and burned it—we act shocked when we get death from the skies in the form of global warming and death on our oceans in the form of oil spills and death in our children’s lungs in the form of asthma and cancer. Let’s stop fueling our society based on death and start using living things. Let’s start using living things now.” -Van Jones. We keep poking the earth with oil, gas, and coal mining, poking the sky with HAARP, poking the water with incessant dumping of our waste. Sooner or later Earth will poke back. And it won’t be pretty.”

Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the Rights of Mother Earth:

“Hold Both Parties to High Standards”: Van Jones, Obama’s Ex-Green Jobs Czar:

By Michael T. Klare @ Grist:

This essay was originally published onTomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission.

In his 2010 book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, environmental scholar and activist Bill McKibben writes of a planet so devastated by global warming that it’s no longer recognizable as the Earth we once inhabited. This is a planet, he predicts, of “melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat.” Altered as it is from the world in which human civilization was born and thrived, it needs a new name — so he gave it that extra “a” in “Eaarth.”

The Eaarth that McKibben describes is a victim, a casualty of humankind’s unrestrained consumption of resources and its heedless emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases. True, this Eaarth will cause pain and suffering to humans as sea levels rise and croplands wither, but as he portrays it, it is essentially a victim of human rapaciousness.With all due respect to McKibben’s vision, let me offer another perspective on his (and our) Eaarth: as a powerful actor in its own right and as an avenger, rather than simply victim.

It’s not enough to think of Eaarth as an impotent casualty of humanity’s predations. It is also a complex organic system with many potent defenses against alien intervention — defenses it is already wielding to devastating effect when it comes to human societies. And keep this in mind: We are only at the beginning of this process.

To grasp our present situation, however, it’s necessary to distinguish between naturally recurring planetary disturbances and the planetary responses to human intervention. Both need a fresh look, so let’s start with what Earth has always been capable of before we turn to the responses of Eaarth, the avenger.

Overestimating ourselves

Our planet is a complex natural system, and like all such systems, it is continually evolving. As that happens — as continents drift apart, as mountain ranges rise and fall, as climate patterns shift — earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, typhoons, prolonged droughts, and other natural disturbances recur, even if on an irregular and unpredictable basis.

Our predecessors on the planet were deeply aware of this reality. After all, ancient civilizations were repeatedly shaken, and in some cases shattered, by such disturbances. For example, it is widely believed that the ancient Minoan civilization of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed following a powerful volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (also called Santorini) in the mid-second millennium B.C. Archaeological evidence suggests that many other ancient civilizations were weakened or destroyed by intense earthquake activity. In Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, Stanford geophysicist Amos Nur and his coauthor Dawn Burgess argue that Troy, Mycenae, ancient Jericho, Tenochtitlan, and the Hittite empire may have fallen in this manner.

Faced with recurring threats of earthquakes and volcanoes, many ancient religions personified the forces of nature as gods and goddesses and called for elaborate human rituals and sacrificial offerings to appease these powerful deities. The ancient Greek sea-god Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans), also called “Earth-Shaker,” was thought to cause earthquakes when provoked or angry.

In more recent times, thinkers have tended to scoff at such primitive notions and the gestures that went with them, suggesting instead that science and technology — the fruits of civilization — offer more than enough help to allow us to triumph over the Earth’s destructive forces. This shift in consciousness has been impressively documented in Clive Ponting’s 2007 volume, A New Green History of the World. Quoting from influential thinkers of the post-Medieval world, he shows how Europeans acquired a powerful conviction that humanity should and would rule nature, not the other way around. The 17th-century French mathematician René Descartes, for example, wrote of employing science and human knowledge so that “we can … render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”

It’s possible that this growing sense of human control over nature was enhanced by a period of a few hundred years in which there may have been less than the usual number of civilization-threatening natural disturbances. Over those centuries, modern Europe and North America, the two centers of the Industrial Revolution, experienced nothing like the Thera eruption of the Minoan era — or, for that matter, anything akin to the double whammy of the 9.0 earthquake and 50-foot-high tsunami that struck Japan on March 11. This relative immunity from such perils was the context within which we created a highly complex, technologically sophisticated civilization that largely takes for granted human supremacy over nature on a seemingly quiescent planet.

But is this assessment accurate? Recent events, ranging from the floods that covered 20 percent of Pakistan and put huge swaths of Australia underwater to the drought-induced fires that burned vast areas of Russia, suggest otherwise. In the past few years, the planet has been struck by a spate of major natural disturbances, including the recent earthquake-tsunami disaster in Japan (and its many powerful aftershocks), the Jan. 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Feb. 2010 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, the March 2011 earthquake in Burma, and the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake-tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in 14 countries, as well as a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in and around Indonesia.

If nothing else, these events remind us that the Earth is an ever-evolving natural system; that the past few hundred years are not necessarily predictive of the next few hundred; and that we may, in the last century in particular, have lulled ourselves into a sense of complacency about our planet that is ill-deserved. More important, they suggest that we may — and I emphasize may — be returning to an era in which the frequency of the incidence of such events is on the rise.

In this context, the folly and hubris with which we’ve treated natural forces comes strongly into focus. Take what’s happening at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex in northern Japan, where at least four nuclear reactors and their adjoining containment pools for “spent” nuclear fuel remain dangerously out of control. The designers and owners of the plant obviously did not cause the earthquake and tsunami that have created the present peril. This was a result of the planet’s natural evolution — in this case, of the sudden movement of continental plates. But they do bear responsibility for failing to anticipate the potential for catastrophe — for building a reactor on the site of frequent past tsunamis and assuming that a human-made concrete platform could withstand the worst that nature has to offer. Much has been said about flaws in design at the Fukushima plant and its inadequate backup systems. All this, no doubt, is vital, but the ultimate cause of the disaster was never a simple design flaw. It was hubris: an overestimation of the power of human ingenuity and an underestimation of the power of nature.

What future disasters await us as a result of such hubris? No one, at this point, can say with certainty, but the Fukushima facility is not the only reactor built near active earthquake zones, or at risk from other natural disturbances. And don’t just stop with nuclear plants. Consider, for instance, all those oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico at risk from increasingly powerful hurricanes or, if cyclones increase in power and frequency, the deep-sea ones Brazil is planning to construct up to 180 miles off its coast in the Atlantic Ocean. And with recent events in Japan in mind, who knows what damage might be inflicted by a major earthquake in California? After all, California, too, has nuclear plants sited ominously near earthquake faults.

Underestimating Eaarth

Hubris of this sort is, however, only one of the ways in which we invite the planet’s ire. Far more dangerous and provocative is our poisoning of the atmosphere with the residues of our resource consumption, especially of fossil fuels. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, total carbon emissions from all forms of energy use had already hit 21.2 billion metric tons by 1990 and are projected to rise ominously to 42.4 billion by 2035, a 100 percent increase in less than half a century. The more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we dump into the atmosphere, the more we alter the planet’s natural climatic systems and damage other vital ecological assets, including oceans, forests, and glaciers. These are all components of the planet’s integral makeup, and when damaged in this way, they will trigger defensive feedback mechanisms: rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and increased sea levels, among other reactions.

The notion of the Earth as a complex natural system with multiple feedback loops was first proposed by environmental scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s and propounded in his 1979 book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. (Lovelock appropriated the name of the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, the personification of Mother Earth, for his version of our planet.) In this and other works, Lovelock and his collaborators argue that all biological organisms and their inorganic surroundings on the planet are closely integrated to form a complex and self-regulating system, maintaining the necessary conditions for life — a concept they termed “the Gaia Hypothesis.” When any parts of this system are damaged or altered, they contend, the others respond by attempting to repair, or compensate for, the damage in order to restore the essential balance.

Think of our own bodies when attacked by virulent microorganisms: our temperature rises; we produce more white blood cells and other fluids, sleep a lot, and deploy other defense mechanisms. When successful, our bodies’ defenses first neutralize and eventually exterminate the invading germs. This is not a conscious act, but a natural, life-saving process.

Eaarth is now responding to humanity’s depredations in a similar way: by warming the atmosphere, taking carbon from the air and depositing it in the ocean, increasing rainfall in some areas and decreasing it elsewhere, and in other ways compensating for the massive atmospheric infusion of harmful human emissions.

But what Eaarth does to protect itself from human intervention is unlikely to prove beneficial for human societies. As the planet warms and glaciers melt, sea levels will rise, inundating coastal areas, destroying cities, and flooding low-lying croplands. Drought will become endemic in many once-productive farming areas, reducing food supplies for hundreds of millions of people. Many plant and animal species that are key to human livelihoods, including various species of trees, food crops, and fish, will prove incapable of adjusting to these climate changes and so cease to exist. Humans may — and again I emphasize that may – prove more successful at adapting to the crisis of global warming than such species, but in the process, multitudes are likely to die of starvation, disease, and attendant warfare.

Bill McKibben is right: We no longer live on the “cozy, taken-for-granted” planet formerly known as Earth. We inhabit a new place, already changed dramatically by the intervention of humankind. But we are not acting upon a passive, impotent entity unable to defend itself against human transgression. Sad to say, we will learn to our dismay of the immense powers available to Eaarth, the Avenger.

Michael T. Klare is a professor at Hampshire College and an author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy.

EPA To Raise Limits For Radiation Exposure While Canada Turns Off Fallout Detectors

Oldspeak: Yes! Brilliant way to deal with this monumental (and curiously underreported in corporate media) public heath and environmental disaster. Raise radiation limits and turn off radiation detectors! That’ll make it all better. With recent reports of IMMEASURABLE LEVELS of radiation at Fukishima, A meltdown at reactor #2, TEPCO dumping thousands of gallons of radioactive water into the sea, (that will end up in rain in the U.S.), radioactive material being detected in water and food from California to Massachusetts, we’re supposed to believe we’re safe. Nevermind the obvious fact that cumulative low levels of radiation have serious health risks. Why is there NO preparation for the worst? These government agencies wouldn’t take these drastic actions for no good reason.”

By Mike Adams @ Natural News:

Related: Radiation Experts Say Radiation Standards Are Up to 1,000 Higher Than Is Safe for the Human Body

The mass radioactive contamination of our planet is now under way thanks to the astonishing actions taking place at the Fukushima nuclear facility in Japan. As of last night, TEPCO announced it is releasing 10,000 tons of radioactive water directly into the Pacific Ocean. That 2.4 million gallons of planetary poison being dumped directly into the ocean.

This water is being released because they have run out of places to keep it on land. It’s too deadly to transport anywhere else, and all the storage pools around Fukushima are already overflowing. So they’re dumping it into the ocean, then calling it“safe” because they claim the ocean will “disperse” all the radiation and make it harmless.

But because there’s more radioactive water being produced every day at Fukushima, this process of releasing radioactive water into the ocean could theoretically continue for years, easily making Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in the history of our world.

Quick, fudge the numbers before anybody notices!

Fukushima, you see, is doing to the Pacific Ocean what BP and the Deepwater Horizon did to the Gulf of Mexico last summer. Except that in the case of Fukushima, that radiation doesn’t just disappear with the help of millions of gallons of toxic chemicals.Nope, that radiation sticks around for decades.

(Courtesy Reuters)

So what to do? If you’re the United States Environment Protection Agency, there’s only one option: Declare radiation to be safe!

Yes indeed, friends, we have reached a moment of comedic insanity at the EPA, where those in charge of protecting the environment are hastily rewriting the definition of “radioactive contamination” in order to make sure that whatever fallout reaches the United States falls under the new limits of “safe” radiation.

The EPA maintains a set of so-called “Protective Action Guides” (PAGs). These PAGs are being quickly revised to radically increase the allowable levels of iodine-131 (a radioactive isotope) to anywhere from 3,000 to 100,000 times the currently allowable levels.

The group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is all over this issue, having obtained internal emails from a FOIA requests that reveal some truly shocking revelations of the level of back-stabbing betrayal happening inside the EPA. For example, under the newly-revised PAGs, drinking just one glass of water considered “safe” by the EPA could subject you to the lifetime limit of radiation.

(http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.ph…)

“In addition,” PEER goes on to say, “it would allow long-term cleanup limits thousands of times more lax than anything EPA has ever before accepted. These new limits would cause a cancer in as much as every fourth person exposed.”

These new PAGs would also vastly increase the allowable levels of radiation in soil and food, too. That way, when the radioactive fallout from Fukushima’s massive release of raw radioactive water begins to rain down upon the West Coast, the EPA can officially announce that all the radiation is “below accepted limits.” That’s very comforting to many people, you see.

And why is it below the limits? Because the EPA just raised the limits by as much as 100,000 times!

Quack science is alive and well as the government

Truly, this is science at its most delightful. When the facts don’t fit your fairy tale, simply rewrite the fairy tale to discard the facts! That’s science for you today, folks: There’s nothing that can’t be denied, censored, oppressed or ignored if you just fudge the numbers with enough determination and arrogance.

The U.S. government does the exact same thing with vitamin D, of course. By lowering the definition of vitamin D deficiency to mean only those with a blood level below 30, the government magically and instantly transforms a wildly deficient American population into a “sufficiently nourished” population! It’s magic, friends. Magic with numbers.

But even the EPA’s sleight-of-hand magic isn’t fooling very many people this time around. Even the most TV-obsessed, CNN-watching news zombie has by now figured out that too much radiation is bad for you. After all, the media has been screaming at people about the dangers of sunlight radiation for years, insisting that the mere act of sunlight touching your skin could kill you from skin cancer.

And yet, thanks to the EPA’s magically-morphing numbers, even though sunlight radiation might kill you, Fukushima radiation is perfectly safe for ya!

You have a front row seat in this entertaining charade

Isn’t it amazing? Watching the U.S. government try to fudge its way out ofthe physical realities of Fukushima probably beats the best stage magic show you’ll ever find in Vegas. Sure, in Vegas they can make white tigers disappear right in front of your very eyes, but with the help of the U.S. government, they can cause the world’s largest nuclear catastrophe to vanish by simply redefining radiation exposure limits.

You may wonder, dear readers, where the U.S. government learned these amazing and fantastic tricks of fudging the numbers. The answer, as regular NaturalNews know all too well, is that they learned it from the U.S. Treasury, where fudging the numbers is an essential skill to keep things running. After all, if the federal government can pretend that trillions of dollars in toxic debt have no impact on the U.S. economy, it’s a no-brainer to also pretend that massive doses of radioactive fallout have no impact on environmental health, either.

That’s the new mantra in Washington: We just wish it away! It should be Obama’s new campaign slogan, actually: Are you ready to wish it all away? Watch the distraction in my right hand while I steal the money out of your wallet with my left…

British scientists have the solution: Spread it all around!

Getting back to the absolutely glowing situation in Fukushima, if you can’t believe the U.S. EPA, then perhaps you can take comfort in the authoritative words of a British newspaper, which assures us that:

“Scientists also confirmed that ocean currents will swiftly dilute the radioactive iodine-131, eliminating risks to human health and the environment.”

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor…)

Surely this logic is impeccable, no? Any amount of toxic radiation can simply be declared safe by dumping it into the ocean and watching the waves sweep it all away. By this same logic, you could clean up a toxic chemical spill by swishing it around with wet mops and then declaring the zone to be safe again.

Didn’t we try this already with pesticides, herbicides and agricultural runoff? And didn’t it create massive ocean dead zones all around the planet? Now we’re going to add Chernobyl-sized radiation releases to that equation, too?

Fukushima is a massive dirty bomb

I’m reminded that if an Islamic-looking individual conducted such an actanywhere near a U.S. shoreline, it would be considered an act of terrorism. A dirty bomb, actually. And those individuals would be shipped off the Guantanamo Bay to be interrogated in a facility that President Obama once promised the voters would be closed down if he were elected. He was lying, of course. But that’s not even the news here. Everybody already knows he was lying about Gitmo.

So why is unleashing a dirty bomb an act of terrorism if you’re Islamic-looking, but if you’re Japanese suddenly it’s all officially safe? And by what contortions in its twisted agenda of anti-public service does the EPA go to these extraordinary lengths to redefine the very margins of radiation exposure? If Fukushima goes into a total meltdown, will the EPA just add more zeroes to the end of its safety margin numbers until we’re all assured our food is U.S. government approved 100% safe even while our hair falls out from eating it?

Will the FDA soon tell us that radioactive milk is safe to drink, but RAW milk is deadly?

Canada tries to out-stupid the USA

Ah, the fascination of watching this tragic comedy of errors unfold in the U.S. government almost cannot be exceeded. But Canada is sure trying. Its own nuclear monitoring network has simply been shut off, and its website now reads “Please note that as of March 25, 2011, the frequency of data collection by NRCan using the mobile surveys has been decreased due to the low levels of radiation being detected.”

Seriously, see the bottom of the page:http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hc-ps/ed-ud/…

Yep, since they’re detecting low levels of radiation, this is apparently justification for turning off the monitors altogether, which of course is the kind of brilliant early warning plan that could have only been dreamed up by a brain-dead bureaucrat. It’s as if these morons are sitting around a table having a conversation that goes something like this:

Bureaucratic Moron #1: Remember how we spent a hundred million dollars installing a national network of radiation detectors?

Bureaucratic Moron #2: Yeah.

Bureaucratic Moron #1: And remember how we started to detect some of the radioactive fallout from Fukushima as it began raining down upon Canada?

Bureaucratic Moron #2: Yeah.

Bureaucratic Moron #1: Well, I have a great idea. Let’s turn OFF all the detectors so that we stop detecting radiation!

Bureaucratic Moron #2: That’s brilliant! You’re a genius!

Bureaucratic Moron #1: I know I am. And we wouldn’t want to waste this expensive equipment, you know.

Bureaucratic Moron #2: Right, we want to save it for a scenario when we might really need it, eh?

Bureaucratic Moron #1: Exactly! And we’ll save millions of dollars in operating fees, because the best way to save money on radiation detectors is to not use them.

Bureaucratic Moron #2: You’re a genius! You should run for Prime Minister!

Yes there is a plan, but you’re not in it

Obama, of course, is trying to best his Canadian counterpart by simply urging the American people to do nothing in the case of radioactive fallout. Don’t worry, my little consumer sheeple, you don’t need to prepare in any way whatsoever, Obama says from his nuclear fallout shelter that’s stocked with 10 years of food, water, emergency medical supplies, government ammunition and military communications equipment. It’s okay for the President to prepare for emergencies, I guess. Just not YOU.

There is a plan, you see, for the government to survive every disaster that comes our way. You’re just not part of it. The government feels that its own survival is far more important than yours. And just to make sure you don’t interfere with its own plans, the government is going to turn off the radiation detectors, raise the official EPA limits of radioactive exposure, urge Americans to avoid preparing for fallout, and then pretend absolutely nothing’s wrong. Keep on buying, consuming and paying your bills, all you voters! Punch your time clock at your job if you still have one, and don’t ask any questions about radiation, vaccines or the chemical additives they put in hot dogs.  Some food ingredients, you see, are only disclosed on a need-to-know basis. And you don’t need to know.

Run for the cure. Vote in the next election. Buy diet sodas and watch lots of sports programs on television with occasional interruptions from the news programs now featuring “info babes” regurgitating scripted mindless propaganda bracketed by flying news network logos. Report suspicious activities at Wal-Mart (http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=5A4B5…). Call 911on your Arab-looking neighbors just because they look Arab-looking. Watch “Ow, My Balls!” on your television set (http://www.naturalnews.com/021558_I…) and stop thinking about your future.

Your government already has your future planned for you. That’s why there’s no need for you to expend any effort considering it yourself. Why bother thinking when you can just passively consume everything you’re being spoon-fed by the State? And don’t worry about the radioactive fallout. It’s all safe now. I’ve been assured of that by the EPA.