USS Reagan Exposed to More Radiation Than Navy Initially Admitted

THERE ARE DOZENS OF STORIES TOLD BY THOSE WHO SERVED ON THE REAGAN DURING THAT TIME AND BY THEIR SPOUSES ABOUT HOW ILL THEY ARE, ABOUT BIRTH DEFECTS OF THEIR NEWBORNS, ABOUT CANCER DEATHS...BUT ALL ALONG THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, ET AL, HAVE DENIED THE CLAIMS OF THESE VETERANS AND CURRENT MEMBERS OF OUR NAVY.
THE CLAIM BY OUR OWN OFFICIALS HAS BEEN THAT THE RADIATION LEVELS ABOARD THE REAGAN WERE NOT THAT HIGH.
WELL, IT WAS A LIE THEN AND THE LIE IS PROVEN TO HAVE BEEN A LIE NOW!

Mar 17, 2014  SASEBO NAVAL BASE, Japan -- When the USS Ronald Reagan arrived off the coast of Japan's main Honshu Island on March 13, 2011, it was greeted by radiation levels that far exceeded what Navy leadership had been told to expect by the Japanese government, according to a new report in the Asia-Pacific Journal.
The report, "Mobilizing Nuclear Bias: The Fukushima Nuclear Crisis and the Politics of Uncertainty," says that the carrier was exposed to levels of radiation that were 30 times greater than normal as the carrier steamed for the coast to aid victims of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami.
Navy leadership has said that sailors were not exposed to harmful levels, even though those aboard were told to scrub the ship and equipment in protective suits. But the damage to the Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima plant was far worse than initially feared.
The report, released Feb. 17, and documents obtained by its author Kyle Cleveland, an associate sociology professor at Temple University Japan, fuel questions that remain more than three years later over what the Japanese government and TEPCO knew and what they told the U.S. as the nuclear disaster was escalating. Debate also continues over the level at which exposure to radiation becomes a health risk.

The report comes on the heels of a January directive from Congress, instructing the Defense Department to look at the potential health impact on the Navy first responders in Japan. In 2012, sailors and Marines filed a lawsuit alleging that TEPCO's misinformation coaxed U.S. forces closer to the affected areas and made them sick. An amended suit was filed last month. 
Cleveland's report included transcribed telephone conversations between U.S. based federal government officials, nuclear authorities, U.S. embassy officials in Tokyo and military staff in the Pacific Command. In one such conversation, Adm. Kirkland Donald, then director of naval reactors; Michael Weber from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Donald's patrol director Troy Mueller; and Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman discussed issues on the ground.
Poneman asked Donald about the difference between radiation levels they were finding and what they were being told by the Japanese. Mueller told Poneman that levels detected 100 nautical miles away were about 30 times those in a normal air sample out at sea. "We thought based on what we had heard on the reactors that we wouldn't detect that level even at 25 miles," he said. "So it's much greater than what we had thought. We didn't think we would detect anything at 100 miles." 

The 50 servicemembers and their children in the suit claim to suffer from exposure-related ailments such as unexplained cancer, excessive bleeding and thyroid issues; lawyers say more than 100 more have asked to join the suit. The majority of the plaintiffs are from the Reagan, which can accommodate 6,275 sailors.
Many of the issues regarding the Reagan's Tomodachi mission, including its proximity to the plant and whether sailors on board were given iodine tablets, have been challenged by servicemembers in the suit.
The Japanese utility has until March 31 to respond, according to Paul Garner, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
Congress has given Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. Jonathan Woodson until April 15 to submit a report regarding the Reagan and adverse health impacts. 

DARE WE DREAM THAT OUR SERVICEMEN WILL SEE JUSTICE, THAT THE TRUTH WILL BE ENTIRELY TOLD?

A stunning new report indicates the U.S. Navy knew that sailors from the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan took major radiation hits from the Fukushima atomic power plant after its meltdowns and explosions nearly three years ago.  Many of the sailors are already suffering devastating health impacts, but are being stonewalled by Tepco and the Navy.
The $4.3 billion carrier is now docked in San Diego. Critics question whether it belongs there at all. Attempts to decontaminate U.S. ships irradiated during the Pacific nuclear bombs tests from 1946-1963 proved fruitless. 

Among the 81 plaintiffs in the federal class action are a sailor who was pregnant during the mission, and her “Baby A.G.,” born that October with multiple genetic mutations.

Officially, Tepco and the Navy say the dose levels were safe.
But a stunning new report by an American scholar based in Tokyo confirms that Naval officers communicated about what they knew to be the serious irradiation of the Reagan. Written by Kyle Cunningham and published in Japan Focus, “Mobilizing Nuclear Bias” describes the interplay between the U.S. and Japanese governments as Fukushima devolved into disaster.
Cunningham writes that transcribed conversations obtained through the Freedom of Information Act feature naval officials who acknowledge that even while 100 miles away from Fukushima, the Reagan’s readings “compared to just normal background [are] about 30 times what you would detect just on a normal air sample out to sea.”
On the nuclear-powered carrier “all of our continuous monitors alarmed at the same level, at this value. And then we took portable air samples on the flight deck and got the same value,” the transcript says.
Serious fallout was also apparently found on helicopters coming back from relief missions. One unnamed U.S. government expert is quoted in the Japan Focus article as saying:
At 100 meters away it (the helicopter) was reading 4 sieverts per hour. That is an astronomical number and it told me, what that number means to me, a trained person, is there is no water on the reactor cores and they are just melting down, there is nothing containing the release of radioactivity. It is an unmitigated, unshielded number. (Confidential communication, Sept. 17, 2012).
Leaks at the Fukushima site continue to worsen. Despite its denials, Tepco recently admitted it had underestimated certain radiation releases by a factor of 500 percent. A new report indicates that particles of radioactive Cesium 134 from Fukushima have been detected in the ocean off the west coast of North America. 

But if this new evidence holds true, it means that the Navy knew the Ronald Reagan was being plastered with serious radioactive fallout and it casts the accident in a light even more sinister than previously believed.
The stricken sailors are barred from suing the Navy, and their case against Tepco will depend on a series of complex international challenges.
But one thing is certain: neither they nor the global community have been getting anything near the full truth about Fukushima.

12-16-2013
Fifty-one crew members of the USS Ronald Reagan say they are suffering from a variety of cancers as a direct result of their involvement in Operation Tomodachi, a U.S. rescue mission in Fukushima after the nuclear disaster in March 2011. The affected sailors are suing Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), alleging that the utility mishandled the crisis and did not adequately warn the crew of the risk of participating in the earthquake relief efforts.

Crew members, many of whom are in their 20s, have been diagnosed with conditions including thyroid cancer, testicular cancer and leukemia. The Department of Defense says the Navy took "proactive measures" in order to "mitigate the levels of Fukushima-related contamination on U.S. Navy ships and aircraft” and that crew members were not exposed to dangerous radiation levels.

The levels were incredibly dangerous and at one point, the radiation in the air measured 300 times higher than what was considered safe, Sebourn told The Post.
The fallout of those four days spent off the Fukushima coast has been tragic to many of the 5,000 sailors who were there.
At least 70 have been stricken with some form of radiation sickness, and of those, “at least half . . . are suffering from some form of cancer,” their lawyer, Paul Garner, told The Post Saturday.
“We’re seeing leukemia, testicular cancer and unremitting gynecological bleeding requiring transfusions and other intervention,”

“What we say is this: The TEPCO people knew what was happening there,” Garner told Navy Times. “They certainly knew the severity of what was happening, because now you have radiological releases into the environment ... and the tsunami just washed it all in, and washed it all out, and the Reagan was in the backwash.”

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."

DECEPTION, DENIAL, AND ALL THE WHILE OUR MILITARY CAN COUNT ON ONE THING...THEY CANNOT COUNT ON OUR AMERICAN GOVERNMENT TO BE ON THEIR SIDE...THEY CAN'T SUE THE NAVY AND TEPCO IS BEYOND BANKRUPT.
THESE SAILORS ARE SUFFERING AND NO ONE WANTS TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.
SAD STATE OF AFFAIRS!