FUKUSHIMA EMITS MORE RADIATION DAILY THAN ATOM BOMBS OF WORLD WAR II

SHINZO ABE WANTS TO BUILD A BOMB?

HE HAS A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT THAT'S FAR MORE DEADLY.

JAPAN WAS CREATING PURE, WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM YEARS AGO AND THE WORLD ALLOWED IT.  

THEN CAME THE EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI.

TODAY, ABE "DROPS BOMBS" ON ALL THE WORLD, OVER AND OVER AGAIN.  

ABOVE: Radiation's Pathway into the Human Body. Please note that bio-accumulation occurs at all levels as each species consumes other radiated species causing levels to rise each step up the food chain.

Japan's military is growing by leaps and bounds with Shinzo Abe allocating ever more funds for expanding Japan's "new" military for the past 6 years. This trend is very troubling to South Korea and China, in particular.    

North Korea Rouses Neighbors to Reconsider Nuclear Weapons


"Shigeru Ishiba, who also once served as head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and oversaw efforts to overcome population decline and to vitalize local economies, said he believed Japan should have the ability to develop nuclear weapons, but he did not believe it actually should do so.

"Japan should have the technology to build a nuclear weapon if it wants to do so," Ishiba said during a speech in Tokyo, according to Japan Today."   

Shinzo Abe has signaled his desire for nuclear capability in the face of growing concerns about near-neighbors North Korea and their ally, China.

ALL nations should be troubled by Abe, a known 'hawk', being at the helm.

The above illustration was used in the first month after the 3 (or 4?) reactors blew at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, 2011.
What we see above is the path of a CONTINUAL CYCLE of radioactive contamination by a still-leaking MAN-MADE 'accident'.

The fallout has NOT ceased, it leaks radiation into the air, sea and onto land masses every single day.

The radiation is still being released by the missing corium, the spent fuel rods, some in pools that were not under roof until recently, the flow of water from the hills above the plant after every rain, by the leaks from the metal water storage tanks that were not designed to contain radioactive material and are also leaking, the daily venting and release of  radioactive "steam", release of contaminated water into the Pacific, from open-air burning of radioactive debris, contaminated clothing, etc, used by workers who are charged with decontamination, and the many miles of land mass which can never be decontaminated, trees, rocks, soil that are still showing unsafe levels of radiation. 


As the Washington Post wrote last year, "Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences said medical professionals had never even thought about encountering this level of radiation in their work.  

According to the Kyodo news agency, the institute estimates that exposure to one sievert of radiation could lead to infertility, loss of hair and cataracts, while four sieverts would kill half the people exposed to it.

"We should not be surprised if even higher radiation levels are found there, but only actual measurements will tell."
Could the radiation level be even higher?
"Possibly. The 530 sievert reading was recorded some distance from the melted fuel, so in reality it could be 10 times higher than recorded," said Hideyuki Ban, co-director of Citizens' Nuclear Information Center."

[ALSO NOTE, NEITHER OF THE OTHER TWO REACTORS CAN BE APPROACHED TO MEASURE RADIATION THERE YET. THE CORIUM (MELTED FUEL) HAS NOT BEEN FOUND YET, AND TEPCO ADMITTED THAT THIS PAST FEBRUARY.]

On 2/14/2019, Tepco announced they managed to contact the molten nuclear fuel on the bottom of the Primary Containment Vessel of Reactor 2.

The research was implemented on 2/13/2019. No data about the radiation level has been published.

According to Tepco, the specialized machine contacted the scattered fuel debris at 10 locations of the bottom of pedestal part.

The fuel debris was movable at 5 locations but media coverage is confusing at this moment.

However the exact locations of these 10 points are not defined even by Tepco. The researchable area is reportedly only 2% of the entire pedestal part."

[SEE THE PDF BY TEPCO <HERE>.]

“It’s unbelievable that anyone would want to restart nuclear plants when Japan hasn't learned how and why the Fukushima Dai'ichi accident happened, or learned lessons from it,” Fumiya Tanabe, a nuclear safety expert and former chief research scientist at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, said.

It is indisputable that there is a daily flow of 300 to 600 tons of radioactive contaminated groundwater into the ocean.
Every major news agency on earth has reported those figures many times.

"The figures are something like 80,000 gallons per day of relatively low-level radioactive waste water. Then you’ve got those storage tanks – we’re talking 800,000 tons of HIGHLY radioactive water stored in tanks.

Every day they pour a hundred tons of water on each of these three melted-down cores.
Sometimes they lose those tanks. They leak, they overflow – it is an ongoing catastrophe.

Highly radioactive waste storage pools [remain] that aren’t even inside radiological containment. They don’t have all of that spent nuclear fuel transferred to a safer location in a couple of the units still. If something were to go wrong with that – those would be open air releases of very high-level radioactivity."

JAPAN HAS ONLY 2 OPTIONS, SPEND BILLIONS AND ENLIST INTERNATIONAL HELP TO STOP THE LEAKS OR SIT STILL AND DO NOTHING.
THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT SHOULD CLUE US IN AS TO WHY SO LITTLE PROGRESS IS BEING MADE.  
"The figures of $150 billion to decommission [the Dai'ichi facility] – I have seen figures from a think tank in Japan sided [SIC] by Green Peace Japan up to $600 billion. If you do full cost accounting: where is this high-level radioactive waste going to go? It is going to need a deep geological depository. You have to build that and operate it. That costs a hundred billion or more. So when you do full cost accounting, this catastrophe could cost hundreds of billions of dollars to recover from. We’re just in the beginning."

Japan says it cannot stop the leaks and doesn't know why recent readings in and near the plant are higher than they were right after the triple-meltdown.
They can NEVER decontaminate what is RE-contaminated every time the rains come or the wind blows across miles and miles of contaminated mountains and forests there.

It will be at least 40 years, says TEPCO, before they can hope to begin to stop those leaks...other officials say it will take 100 years or longer.

Above, Just a FEW of the MANY MILLIONS of plastic bags, yes,plastic bags, piled all over northern Japan's Fukushima Prefecture, all containing radioactive soil. They are stacked in school yards, parking lots, around apartments and homes, anywhere they can find more room. Many have already split open and polluted streams and rivers there.


Since 2017, the government has begun to merely spread plastic sheets over enormous piles of this radioactive soil.


IN 2011, 7 YEARS AGO, THE TOKYO TIMES WROTE: 
"The amount of radioactive cesium that has leaked from a tsunami-hit nuclear plant is about equal to 168 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II, Japan’s nuclear agency said Friday.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency supplied the estimate at a parliamentary panel’s request, but it noted a simple comparison between an instantaneous bomb blast and long-term accidental leak is impossible and the results could be irrelevant.

The report estimated for each of the 16 isotopes released from "Little Boy" and 31 of those detected at the Fukushima plant but didn’t provide the total.

The report estimated that Iodine-131, another isotope that accumulates in thyroid gland, and Strontium-90, which has a 28-year half-life and could accumulate in bones, leaked from the plant in amounts about equal to 2.5 of the Hiroshima bombs.

THAT WAS JUST DURING THE FIRST YEAR, IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE EXPLOSIONS.

IN 2013, THE COMPARISON BETWEEN HIROSHIMA AND DAI'ICHI HAD CHANGED DRAMATICALLY AS TEPCO FAILED AND LIED, TIME AND TIME AGAIN.  
Tepco admitted then that the radiation from Fukushima could exceed that from Chernobyl.
A 'Veterans Today' article 3 years ago stated, without sources, that "Fukushima so far is 14.75 Times worse than Chernobyl and growing."
"Fukushima now equals the detonation of 5,910.11 Hiroshima Atomic Bombs or it’s about 6,000 times worse than the A-Bombing of Japan; and, it is still going strong, with no end in sight.
That is equal to 6.45 Hiroshima Atomic Bombs a Day for 916 Days.

At 916 days of growth, Fukushima is 14.75 times bigger than the Chernobyl atomic disaster in 1986. "


The International Atomic Agency (IAEA) stated:

“The accident at Chernobyl was approximately 400 times more potent than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima…”
(See #12 of that report.)

400 TIMES, COMPARED TO 5,910 TIMES! 
At #5, we read, "While iodine is linked to thyroid cancer, Strontium can lead to leukaemia. Caesium is the element that travelled the farthest and lasts the longest. This element affects the entire body and especially can harm the liver and spleen."


REMEMBER, CHERNOBYL, WHICH INVOLVED ONLY ONE REACTOR, WAS CONTAINED, THE CORIUM WAS FOUND, AND THE SARCOPHAGUS WAS IN PLACE, ALL WITHIN 6 MONTHS AFTER IT BLEW... 6 MONTHS, NOT YEARS, MONTHS.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH JAPAN?


An article in the UK's 'Independent' seems to agree that Fukushima is or will be much worse than Chernobyl.

WE ARE NOW PAST YEAR 7.

"There are 1,946 known lethal radioactive isotopes."
"There were over 100 radioactive elements released into the atmosphere when Chernobyl’s reactor exploded."

WHY THE HELL ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT JUST CESIUM?

WHY IS JAPAN STILL AFTER 'THE BOMB'?

THEY DON'T NEED IT ANYMORE.

THEY HAVE FUKUSHIMA.



ABOVE: A bank of centrifuges at a Urenco plant, each being 3 to 5 meters tall and 20 cm diameter. (For Americans, 1 meter still equals about 3.3 feet and a centimeter is about 0.4 inches.)
USEC's ( United States Enrichment Corporation, a subsidiary of Centrus Energy Corp.) American Centrifuges are more than 12 meters tall and 40-50 cm diameter. The Russian centrifuges are less than one meter tall. Chinese ones are larger, but shorter than Urenco's.

To obtain efficient separation of the two isotopes, centrifuges rotate at very high speeds, with the outer wall of the spinning cylinder moving at between 400 and 500 metres per second to give a million times the acceleration of gravity.

Most of the 500 commercial nuclear power reactors operating or under construction in the world today require uranium 'enriched' in the U-235 isotope for their fuel.
The commercial process employed for this enrichment involves gaseous uranium in centrifuges.

Most reactors are light water reactors of two types – PWR or Pressurized Water Reactor, and BWR or Boiling Water Reactor and require uranium to be enriched from 0.7% to 3-5% U-235 in their fuel. This is normal low-enriched uranium (LEU). There is some interest in taking enrichment levels to about 7%, and even close to 20% for certain special power reactor fuels, as high-assay LEU (HALEU).

Although 13 countries have enrichment production capability or near-capability, about 90% of world enrichment capacity is in the five nuclear weapons states, China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States. These plus Germany, the Netherlands and Japan provide toll enrichment services to the commercial market.

Uranium is only weakly radioactive, and its chemical toxicity – especially as UF6 – is more significant than its radiological toxicity."

THE OVERWHELMING AMOUNT OF NUCLEAR WASTE FROM JUST THE DAI'ICHI NUCLEAR POWER PLANT SINCE 2011 BOGGLES THE MIND.
BUT, AT PEAK, JAPAN HAD 54 REACTORS RUNNING AND, BEING A SMALL ISLAND NATION, MUST STRUGGLE TO FIND STORAGE FOR IT ALL.

IN THE MEANTIME, JAPAN WAS CREATING PURE, WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM, EXACTLY WHAT IS USED TO MAKE ATOMIC BOMBS...AN ESTIMATED 40 TONS OF PLUTONIUM.

THERE WAS CONCERN THAT THIS PLUTONIUM WAS ONLY "LIGHTLY GUARDED"


FROM NBC, March 11, 2014:    
"Already, Japan has 9.3 metric tons of plutonium stored at Rokkasho and nine other sites in the island nation, along with around 35 tons of plutonium stored in France and the United Kingdom. Altogether, Japan has the fifth-largest plutonium stockpile of any nation, representing 9 percent of the world’s stocks under civilian control. The figure includes 730 pounds of high-grade plutonium, the kind preferred by weapons designers, that Japan has agreed to send to the United States.Once the Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Center at Rokkasho opens, the size of this stockpile could double in five and a half years.

When the plant is operating at full capacity, it’s supposed to produce 8 metric tons of plutonium annually. That’s enough to make an estimated 2,600 nuclear weapons, each with the explosive force of 20,000 tons of TNT.

A six-and-a-half pound lump of plutonium— enough to make a weapon — is the size of a grapefruit. The point, critics say, is that a thermos full of the metal in the wrong hands could produce a devastating terror attack.
[See also: http://www.publicintegrity.org/national-security/nuclear-waste]

Washington has been lobbying furiously behind the scenes, trying to persuade Japan that terrorists might regard Rokkasho’s new stockpile of plutonium as an irresistible target — and to convince Japanese officials they should better protect this dangerous raw material.

Specifically, U.S. officials have struggled, without success so far, to persuade Japan to create a more capable security force at the plant than the white-gloved, unarmed guards and small police unit stationed here now.

They also have been trying to persuade the privacy-minded Japanese to undertake stringent background checks for the 2,400 workers employed here.It’s been a hard sell for Washington, according to experts and officials in both countries familiar with the diplomatic dialogue.

After a U.S. embassy science officer witnessed a security drill in 2006 at the Mihama nuclear power plant along Japan’s northern shoreline, the officer sent a classified cable back to the State Department noting the typical police presence: “a lightly armored police vehicle with up to six police officers — some of them fast asleep."

“We are in the process of making those changes, but we don’t want to do them all at once because we don’t want people to think that we have been operating them unsafely in the past,” an unnamed Tokyo Electric Power Co. official said. 

TRUTH IS, THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN OPERATING UNSAFELY, AND THEIR RECORD SCREAMS THAT THEY HAVE.


JAPAN COULD FEASIBLY BUILD A NUCLEAR BOMB THIS YEAR, IF IT WANTED TO.

“Japan already has the technical capability [to build a nuclear bomb], and has had it since the 1980s,” said an official. He said that once Japan had more than five to 10 kilograms of plutonium, the amount needed for a single weapon, it had “already gone over the threshold,” and had a nuclear deterrent.

Japan now has 9 tons of plutonium stockpiled at several locations in Japan and another 35 tons stored in France and the U.K. The material is enough to create 5,000 nuclear bombs. The country also has 1.2 tons of enriched uranium."

In fact, many of Japan’s conservative politicians have long supported Japan’s nuclear power program because of its military potential. “The hawks love nuclear weapons, so they like the nuclear power program as the best they can do,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. “They don’t want to give up the idea they have, to use it as a deterrent.”   

WHY STOCKPILE SO MUCH PLUTONIUM, AND WHY BE SO CARELESS WITH IT?

THEY DON'T NEED NEARLY THAT MUCH TO RUN THEIR REACTORS, ACCORDING TO THEIR OWN NUCLEAR AGENCY, WHICH ALSO HAS STATED THAT JAPAN NEEDS TO FIND AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE MORE DANGEROUS PLUTONIUM REACTORS.


.North Korea Says Japan Wants War in 2018 as Both Gather New, More Powerful Weapons
“The rhetoric about ‘threat from surrounding areas’ oft-repeated by Japan is little short of a prelude to a re-invasion aimed to paint their criminal nature of rushing headlong into turning the country into a military giant as ‘legitimate’ and openly come out for overseas expansion,” the commentary read.

In 1947, U.S.-occupied Japan drafted a constitution, vowing to “forever renounce war” and promising that any military with “war potential will never be maintained.”


SHINZO ABE HAS OTHER IDEAS, HE WANTS THE BOMB AND HAS INCREASED MILITARY SPENDING AND GREATLY EXPANDED JAPAN'S MILITARY CAPABILITY FOR SIX CONSECUTIVE YEARS NOW.


AN IMPRESSIVE AMOUNT OF RECENTLY DECLASSIFIED GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS PUBLISHED BY THE WILSON CENTER REVEAL HOW HARD JAPAN PUSHED TO PROCESS WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM WITHOUT RESTRICTIONS DURING THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION AND THE LESS THAN HONEST MEANS USED TO GET AN OKAY FROM THE U.S. AND THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY DRIVE ANY NATION TO DECIDE TO CONTEND WITH SO MUCH NUCLEAR WASTE?

POWER...BUT NOT THE KIND WE GET BY FLIPPING A LIGHT SWITCH.


TERRORIST PLOTS FROM INSIDE JAPAN OFTEN GO UNREPORTED.
"For years Japan resisted taking steps that would have made it possible to share classified information with the United States about nuclear threats, partly out of concern that doing so might weaken public support for nuclear power, according to another U.S. diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks.

Yasuyoshi Komizo, a nonproliferation official in Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told a delegation from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2008 the government worried that “if, for example, the information sharing concerned potential insider threats, that could be interpreted as suggesting that some segment of the Japanese population was a problem,” the cable quoted him as saying.

Most alarming, however, was the long-term obsession of the Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult, with acquiring an atomic weapon. Followers of the cult’s guru, Shoko Asahara, traveled to Russia to buy them and recruit former Soviet weapons scientists. Investigators reported that the group was prepared to pay as much as $15 million for a warhead. In 1993, the group bought a sheep ranch in Australia, where 25 of Asahara’s followers tried to mine uranium to fuel a bomb.

“Japan simply didn’t consider terrorism a possibility here,” said former Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

He said this attitude was widely shared in industry and government, and as a result “Japan almost entirely ignored the advice” of the United States after 9/11.

“And you may ask whether Japan is prepared for such threats. Well, the answer is that it isn’t prepared for such attacks,” Kan said."

Japan Has Nuclear 'Bomb in the Basement,' and China Isn't Happy.  

"Steve Fetter, formerly the Obama White House’s assistant director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, thinks China's concerns are not purely political.
"I've had private discussions with China in which they ask, 'Why does Japan have all this plutonium that they have no possible use for?'

For at least four or five years, said Leonard Spector, deputy director of the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterey, the Japanese plutonium stockpile has been mentioned as a threat in Chinese defense white papers."

THE HAZARDS TO JAPAN'S PEOPLE (TO ANY "ATOMIC" NATION'S PEOPLE) FROM THE AMOUNT OF RADIATION FROM JUST ONE "NUCLEAR ACCIDENT", AS IS SHOWN BELOW, SHOULD DEMONSTRATE THE INSANITY OF USING 'NUCLEAR POWER', BUT, WITHOUT THE NEED FOR FUEL RODS, FOR ENRICHED URANIUM, THERE WOULD BE NO STRONGER ATOMIC POWER...NO BOMBS.


UNSECURED NUCLEAR BIOHAZARDS ALL OVER JAPAN.
The amount of radioactive water at Fukushima is still growing, by at least 150 tons a day.

The reactors are damaged beyond repair, but cooling water must be constantly pumped in to keep them from overheating. That water picks up radioactivity before leaking out of the damaged containment chambers and collecting in the basements.

There, the volume of contaminated water grows, because it mixes with groundwater that has seeped in through cracks in the reactor buildings.

[IN AN ARTICLE IN JAPAN TIMES, MARCH, 2018, WE READ THAT "850 NEW tanks had been built in the southwest part of the facility. They contain 1 million of the 1.1 million-ton total capacity, including 850,000 tons of so-called tritiated water."

Also in that article, we're told that "about 47 percent of 1,000 Tokyoites surveyed online by MRI in August indicated they haven’t received information about Fukushima’s reconstruction since the end of 2013."

The media blackout was supposed to have ended about conditions at Dai'ichi, but obviously has not ended in Japan.]


There is only room to keep storing radioactive water through 2020.

SO THEY WILL RELEASE IT ALL INTO THE PACIFIC, EITHER PUBLICLY,OR IN THE DARK OF NIGHT, LIKE THEY USED TO BURN DEBRIS AT NIGHT ONLY.
PROBABLY BY YEAR'S END THEY WILL HAVE DUMPED THE CONTENTS OF ALL THOSE RUSTY, LEAKING TANKS INTO THE PACIFIC     

I'M ALWAYS A BIT FLABBERGASTED BY THE RESPONSE FROM MOST PEOPLE ON THE SUBJECT OF JAPAN'S ONGOING "SILENT BOMBING" OF THE ENTIRE PLANET.

JUST YESTERDAY, IN RESPONSE TO A QUESTION I HAD ABOUT JAPAN'S 'SECRET' TEST LABS, AN ACQUAINTANCE, WHOM I IMAGINED KNEW BETTER SCOFFED AND SAID, "If Japan wanted to develop nuclear weapons, they could do it very quickly and without fuss...hiding serious radiation problems would be like hiding the sun."
 
REALLY?
THEY SURE AS HELL HID A LOT OF SUN FOR A VERY LONG TIME. 
A reading of 530 sieverts per hour of radiation near the entrance of just one hole under reactor #2 was incorrect, TOO LOW, with a margin of error of 30%, Tepco admitted, due to failure to remove the cover on their robotic device's gauge.

THIS WAS THE HIGHEST READING IN RECORDED HISTORY ANYWHERE ON EARTH.
CHERNOBYL'S PEAK READING OF 300-400 Sieverts per hour PALES IN COMPARISON.

As Reuters reported, "One sievert is enough to cause radiation sickness, infertility and cataracts.

Exposure to 10 sieverts will lead to a human’s death within weeks"


SO, HOW DO YOU HIDE THE SUN?

In a hole in the ground beneath a blown nuclear reactor?

In several holes in the ground near reactor sites?

OR...PUT YOUR HAND OVER YOUR OWN CLOSED EYES AND TELL YOURSELF THE SUN IS GONE?


JAPAN'S OLD RULING CLASS HAS TRIED DESPERATELY SINCE BEFORE THE END OF WW2 TO MAKE 'THE BOMB' AND HAS USED SOME FAIRLY FANCY FOOTWORK TO GET WHAT THEY WANT.

HOW MANY TIMES HAS TEPCO AND THE ABE REGIME BEEN CAUGHT IN LIES SINCE THE TSUNAMI AND THE FUKUSHIMA DISASTER?

DARE WE TRY TO COUNT THAT HIGH?   

ABE WANTS THE BOMB, THE MAJORITY OF JAPANESE CITIZENS DO NOT.

ABE AND HIS CIRCLE OF COHORTS WANT ANOTHER CHANCE TO 'RULE THE WORLD'.

THEY WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO RETURN TO JAPAN'S "GLORY DAYS".
      
MEANWHILE, AS MORE RADIATION THAN 250 HIROSHIMA BOMBS IS RELEASED INTO WATER, SOIL AND AIR EACH DAY WHILE TEPCO AND ABE WHINE ABOUT THE IMPOSSIBILITY AT PRESENT TO STOP IT, AND THEIR NEED TO RELEASE EVEN MORE INTO THE PACIFIC, PEOPLE LIKE MY ACQUAINTANCE FRET OVER 'KRAZY KIMMIE'S' LAUNCH OF A SINGLE NUCLEAR DEVICE.

I CALL THAT ILLOGICAL.


FIVE LONG YEARS AGO, REUTERS REPORTED...

"Containing radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago, more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area.

Each fuel rod assembly weighs about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) and is 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. Spent fuel rods also contain plutonium, one of the most toxic substances in the universe, that gets formed during the later stages of a reactor core's operation. There are 1,331 of the spent fuel assemblies and a further 202 unused assemblies also stored in the pool, Nagai said.

"There is a risk of an inadvertent criticality if the bundles are distorted and get too close to each other. The problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can't stop it. There are no control rods to control it,"

THERE ARE FOUR (KNOWN) REACTORS INVOLVED THERE, NOT JUST ONE.

DO THE MATH?     

FROM PBS NEWS HOUR...

"More than 80 percent of the [INITIAL]radioactivity from the damaged reactors ended up in the Pacific — far more than reached the ocean from Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.

Of this, a small fraction is currently on the seafloor — the rest was swept up by the Kuroshio current, a western Pacific version of the Gulf Stream

This event is unprecedented in its total release of radioactive contamination into the ocean.
It is incorrect to say that Fukushima is under control when levels of radioactivity in the ocean indicate ongoing leaks, caused by groundwater flowing through the site and, we think, enhanced after storms."


HOW MUCH DAILY RADIATION IS 'LEAKED' BY DAI'ICHI?

IT WAS BAD 4 YEARS AGO, BUT WORSE TODAY.


DECEMBER 2014:
CANADIAN SCIENTISTS MONITORING BOTH AIR AND OCEAN RADIATION LEVELS FIND IT DOUBLED.

IN SOME AREAS IT IS "OFF THE CHARTS".


FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, MARCH 11, 2017

RADIOACTIVE WATER.

About 400 tons of water passes through the reactors every day, including groundwater that seeps in. The water picks up radiation in the reactors and then is diverted into a decontamination facility.But the decontamination filters cannot remove all the radioactive material. So for now, all this water is being stored in 1,000 gray, blue and white tanks on the grounds. The tanks already hold 962,000 tons of contaminated water, and Tokyo Electric is installing more tanks.

RADIOACTIVE GEAR.

6,000 cleanup workers at the site put on new protective gear every day. These hazmat suits, face masks, rubber gloves and shoe coverings are thrown out at the end of each shift. The clothing is compressed and stored in 1,000 steel boxes stacked around the site.
   
To date, more than 64,700 cubic meters of gear has been discarded, the equivalent of 17 million one-gallon containers. Tokyo Electric says it will eventually incinerate all this contaminated clothing to reduce the space needed to store it.

INCINERATION WILL SEND IT INTO THE ATMOSPHERE.

RADIOACTIVE TREE AND BRUSH CUTTINGS.

Workers have cleared about 220 acres of trees AT THE DAI'ICHI SITE since the meltdown spewed radiation over them.

Now, piles of branches and tree trunks are stacked all over the site. Officials say there are about 80,000 cubic meters of this waste, and all of it will have to be incinerated and stored someday.

INCINERATION WILL ALSO SEND THAT INTO THE ATMOSPHERE.
   
RADIOACTIVE RUBBLE.

Explosions during the meltdown filled the reactors with rubble. Workers and robots are slowly and carefully trying to remove this tangled mass of crushed concrete, pipes, hoses and metal.

Tokyo Electric estimates that more than 200,400 cubic meters of rubble — all of it radioactive — have been removed so far and stored in custom-made steel boxes. That is the equivalent of about 3,000 standard 40-foot shipping containers.
    
RADIOACTIVE SOIL.

Thousands of plastic garbage bags sit in neat rows in the fields and abandoned towns surrounding the Fukushima plant. They contain soil that was scraped from land that was exposed to radiation in the days after the accident.     

Japan’s Ministry of the Environment estimates that it has bagged 3.5 BILLION gallons of soil, and plans to collect much more. It will eventually INCINERATE some of the soil, but that will only reduce the volume of the radioactive waste, not eliminate it.

The ministry has already begun building a massive, interim storage facility in Fukushima prefecture and negotiating with 2,360 landowners for the thousands of acres needed to complete it. And that is not even a long-term solution: The government says that after 30 years it will need another site — or sites — to store radioactive waste.


RADIOACTIVE SLUDGE.

The process of decontaminating the water leaves radioactive sludge trapped in filters, which are being held in thousands of containers of different sizes.

LETHAL FUEL RODS.
Six of the spent fuel rod pools were located at the top of six reactor buildings.
One “common pool” is at ground level in a separate building.
Each “reactor top” pool holds up to 3450 fuel rod assemblies.
The common pool holds up to 6291 fuel rod assemblies but 6,375 assemblies have been counted there. .

566 fuel assemblies were in place inside reactor #3.

1,573 fuel rod units, each consisting of dozens of fuel rods, in unit #4 .
Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods.

One of these fuel rods has the potential to kill 2.89 billion people.
     
This means the Fukushima Daiichi plant may contain over 600,000 spent fuel rods. The fuel rods once stored atop reactor 3 are no longer there: one of the several explosions at the Fukushima reactors damaged that pool.

A significant problem in tracking radioactive release was that 23 out of the 24 radiation monitoring stations on the plant site were disabled by the tsunami.
There is some uncertainty about the amount and exact sources of radioactive releases to air.

FROM THE UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS, FUKUSHIMA FACTS:

"It is important to note that spent fuel pools are not as isolated from the environment as the reactor core, because the pools are located outside the primary containment structure. So even if the total amount of radiation released by damaged fuel rods in a spent fuel pool is less than that released by similarly damaged fuel rods in the reactor core, the fraction of that radiation that escapes into the atmosphere from the spent fuel pools is likely to be much higher.

In early April, levels of radioactive iodine-131 and cesium-137 in seawater off the coast of Japan were reportedly measured at 5 million and 1 million times the legal limit, respectively.

U.S. plants have the same key vulnerability that led to the crisis in Japan. The basic problem is that the Japanese reactors lost both their normal and back-up power supplies, which are used to cool fuel rods and the reactor core."      

-CHERNOBYL DID NOT HAVE A TRIPLE MELTDOWN.

-THE SINGLE CORIUM AT CHERNOBYL WAS FOUND.

-CHERNOBYL WASTE WATER WAS NOT DUMPED INTO THE SEA.

-CHERNOBYL DID NOT ENGAGE IN OPEN-AIR BURNING OF WASTE.

-CHERNOBYL HAD A 'PROTECTIVE' SARCOPHAGUS WITHIN LESS THAN A YEAR.

THIS WON'T WORK AT FUKUSHIMA AS IT SITS AT THE EDGE OF THE OCEAN AND DIRECTLY ABOVE A MAJOR AQUIFER.

-CHERNOBYL'S SITE WAS NOT THREATENED BY EARTHQUAKE, TSUNAMI, OR TYPHOON.

-CHERNOBYL DID NOT SEND RADIOACTIVE LEAKS INTO A MAJOR AQUIFER THAT SUPPLIED DRINKING WATER TO A LARGE CITY LIKE TOKYO.

FUKUSHIMA TOPS CHERNOBYL BY MILES.


JAPAN DOESN'T REALLY NEED NUCLEAR ENERGY TO SUSTAIN ITS ENERGY NEEDS, WHICH WAS PROVEN IN 2015.  
"Japan in 2015 produced 1041 TWh of electricity, 409 TWh from natural gas, 343 TWh from coal, 103 TWh from oil, 91 TWh from hydro, 41 TWh from solar and wind, 41 TWh from biofuels and waste, and 9 TWh from nuclear. There were no imports or exports, and final consumption in 2015 was 957 TWh or about 7500 kWh per capita on average. Total installed capacity was about 324 GWe at the end of December 2015."
[SOURCE: Electricity data from International Energy Agency's Electricity Information 2017]


IN APRIL OF 2011, THE NEW YORK TIMES DID AN ARTICLE ON THE "CULTURE OF COMPLICITY TIED TO THE STRICKEN NUCLEAR PLANT".    

"In 2000, Kei Sugaoka, a Japanese-American nuclear inspector who had done work for General Electric at Daiichi, told Japan’s main nuclear regulator about a cracked steam dryer that he believed was being concealed. If exposed, the revelations could have forced the operator, Tokyo Electric Power, to do what utilities least want to do: undertake costly repairs.

What happened next was an example, critics have since said, of the collusive ties that bind the nation’s nuclear power companies, regulators and politicians.

Despite a new law shielding whistle-blowers, the regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, divulged Mr. Sugaoka’s identity to Tokyo Electric, effectively blackballing him from the industry. Instead of immediately deploying its own investigators to Daiichi, the agency instructed the company to inspect its own reactors. Regulators allowed the company to keep operating its reactors for the next two years even though, an investigation ultimately revealed, its executives had actually hidden other, far more serious problems, including cracks in the shrouds that cover reactor cores.

Investigators may take months or years to decide to what extent safety problems or weak regulation contributed to the disaster at Daiichi, the worst of its kind since Chernobyl. But as troubles at the plant and fears over radiation continue to rattle the nation, the Japanese are increasingly raising the possibility that a culture of complicity made the plant especially vulnerable to the natural disaster that struck the country on March 11."

BOTTOM LINE? IN JAPAN, HERE IN AMERICA, EVERYWHERE, THERE IS INDEED A "CULTURE OF COMPLICITY" AS WHAT ARE SUPPOSED TO BE REGULATORY AGENCIES, 'PROTECTION' AGENCIES, ALL SIDE WITH 'BIG NUKE', WITH THE VERY ONES WHO PUT THE WORLD AT RISK WITH FAILING, LEAKING NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS, SIMPLY BECAUSE OF THE POLITICAL CLOUT, THE CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS, ETC, THAT THOSE GIANTS OF THE NUCLEAR ENERGY WORLD ARE ABLE TO PAY SO THEY CAN PAY WITH OUR VERY LIVES. 
WE CAN CONTINUE TO ALLOW THIS OR WE CAN DEMAND BETTER SAFETY MEASURES, EVEN AN END TO THIS NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE, AT LAST.

ONLY THE VOICES OF MILLIONS, RAISED AS ONE VOICE, WILL SHAKE THE FOUNDATIONS OF COLLUSION AND COMPLICITY.

...




_____________________

Further reading and a few sources not cited above:

~ WORLD NUCLEAR ASSOCIATION, FUKUSHIMA.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident.aspx


~ 2018 UPDATE TO THE ABOVE WNA PAGE.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident.aspx


~ JUST FOLLOW ALL THE LINKS IN THIS POST.

http://havacuppahemlock1.blogspot.com/2014/07/fukushima-is-extinction-level-event.html


~ Dying robots and failing hope: Fukushima clean-up falters six years



~ MICHIO KAKU, FUKUSHIMA IS NOT OVER!
"The attempted cover up of the severity of the Fukushima disaster is nothing new. Governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for 50 years, and the basic design for nuclear reactors was not chosen for safety, but because it worked on Navy submarines ... and produced plutonium for the military."


~ The Fukushima Disaster Is Far From Over - Tokyo Review



~ Fairewinds Energy Education Special Reports






//WW

DECONTAMINATION OF JAPANESE VILLAGES IMPOSSIBLE. TOKYO OLMPICS 2020 THREATENS HEALTH OF VISITORS.

ABOVE, OPPENHEIMER ADMITTED WHAT THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS HAD UNLEASHED...

THE WORLD SHOULD HAVE HEEDED HIS AND OTHER SCIENTISTS' WARNINGS. 

IN JAPAN THE TRUTH IS BURIED BY THE REGIME. ABE PUTS THE OLYMPICS ABOVE HUMAN HEALTH.

“I am a newscaster, but I couldn't tell the true story on my news program," says Jun Hori, a former anchor for NHK, the Japanese state broadcaster. 
There was a media gag order with threatened imprisonment for those who reported anything but what the Abe regime wanted reported.

[SEE HIS SPEECH <HERE>]




ABOVE MAP SHOWS THE  PROXIMITY OF EACH VILLAGE/TOWN TO THE LEAKING NUCLEAR POWER PLANT, FUKUSHIMA DAI'ICHI.

REMEMBER THAT THERE IS STILL A 30-KILOMETER (19 MILES) EXCLUSION ZONE AROUND CHERNOBYL, WHICH HAD ONLY ONE AFFECTED REACTOR, AND THINK ABOUT THIS STATEMENT:

"Because of the long-lived radiation in the region surrounding the former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the area won't be safe for human habitation for at least 20,000 years."

Later in 1986, after updated maps of the contaminated areas were produced, the zone was split into three areas to designate further evacuation areas based on the revised dose limit of 100 mSv.

--the "Black Zone" (over 200 µSv·h−1), to which evacuees were never to return.

--the "Red Zone" (50–200 µSv·h−1) where evacuees might return once radiation levels normalized.

--the "Blue Zone" (30–50 µSv·h−1) where children and pregnant women were evacuated starting in the summer of 1986.

The borders were based on soil deposits of strontium-90, caesium-137 and plutonium as well as the calculated dose rate (sieverts/h) as identified by the National Commission for Radiation Protection of Ukraine.

[SEE Environmental Radiation Monitoring in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone - History and Results 25 Years After. US: Savannah River National Laboratory / Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.] 

An area known as 'the Red Forest' was listed as being among the world's most radioactive places; to reduce the hazard, the Red Forest was bulldozed and the highly irradiated wood was buried, though the soil continues to emit SIGNIFICANT radiation. ALMOST 40 YEARS LATER.

JAPAN HAS NOT SHOWN THIS TYPE CONCERN FOR ITS POPULATION, NOR FOR FOREIGN VISITORS WHO ARE COMING TO THE 2020 OLYMPIC GAMES, GAMES WHICH WILL BEGIN IN FUKUSHIMA PREFECTURE, WHERE SOME ATHLETES WILL BE HOUSED.

VISITORS WILL ALSO BE SERVED FOOD PRODUCTS RECENTLY REMOVED FROM A PREVIOUS BAN FROM THAT CONTAMINATED PREFECTURE.
THEY WILL BATHE IN AND DRINK WATER THAT COMES FROM CONTAMINATED GROUNDWATER.

ABE OBVIOUSLY HAS NO CONCERN FOR THE EXPOSURE OF VISITORS OR RESIDENTS TO ONGOING RADIATION LEVELS, LEVELS THAT REMAIN HIGH  BECAUSE THE FORESTS AND MOUNTAINS THERE CANNOT BE DECONTAMINATED AND THEY RECONTAMINATE THE AREA EVERY TIME IT RAINS.

LET US REMEMBER ALSO THAT THE HIGHEST READINGS OF RADIATION IN AN AREA TO DATE HAS BEEN BEACHES LOCATED 60 MILES FROM THE CRIPPLED PLANT. IN OCTOBER 2017.
THIS FACT WAS DISCOVERED COMPLETELY BY ACCIDENT. 
HOW MANY MORE HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE AREAS ARE THERE YET UNDISCOVERED?




ABOVE MAP: The Japanese government has announced that it is lifting evacuation orders in the green and orange zones on March 31, 2017. This image is taken from the website of Fukushima Prefecture.

In April 2013, two years after the disaster, the Japanese government changed the limit of radioactive exposure dose from one milli-sievert per year (mSv/yr) or 0.23 micro-sievert per hour (μSv/h) to 20 mSv/yr or 3.8 μSv/h.
This standard was roughly 6 times higher than that for “Radiation Controlled Areas.”
The Labor standards act prohibits those under the age of 18 from working under these conditions.

This new standard has been used only in Fukushima for determining evacuation zones as well as school grounds, buildings, and residential areas. This irrational and hazardous 'zoning policy' left over 260 “spots” in areas such as Minamisōma city, Date city, and Kōzu village whose radiation levels EXCEEDED 20 mSv/yr.

The government initially announced that the new standard would be used as an emergency measure and would soon be lifted. Contrary to this announcement, however, 20 mSv/yr has virtually become the new standard for safety measure and return policies 7 years now after the disaster.

Anyone can see the Abe regime's plan is to keep this high level for the duration of this disaster, which is NOT over, which is ONGOING and likely will remain ongoing for at least 40 to 100 years.
By doing so, the government and TEPCO will not be responsible to any citizens within the high radiation villages for compensation of their loss of homes, livelihood or health and the government will from this period onward REFUSE to provide any assistance to those who REFUSE to voluntarily return to these radioactive villages, villages that cannot possibly be decontaminated due to constant runoff after rains from the highly radioactive mountains and forests behind or near their homes.

Abe also does not address or admit that the fallout continues from the still-leaking crippled Dai'ichi nuclear plant, and has spiked to phenomenal, historically high levels just this year (2018) and from his orders to continue open-air burning of radioactive debris from these hardest-hit areas and materials used by workers in useless decontamination efforts.

On December 28, 2014, just 3 years after the multiple explosions and initial fallout, the Japanese government removed 142 areas from the 'Radiation Controlled Areas' list, noting that annual radiation exposure had fallen below the 20 mSv/yr threshold.

On April 17, 2015, some 530 residents of Minamisōma filed a lawsuit demanding that the government revoke a decision to remove their districts from a list of radiation hot spots. This decision meant the ending of their entitlement to receive support in the form of subsidized medical treatment and “consolation” money.

The plaintiffs argued that by international standards, the upper limit for radiation exposure was 1 mSv/yr, and thus the government’s decision to de-list the hot spots based on a 20 mSv/yr standard betrayed its responsibility for protecting the safety of citizens.
The ICRP’s recommendations and laws such as Japan’s Nuclear Reactor Regulation Law stipulate a public radiation exposure limit of 1 mSv PER YEAR.

The calculation of how much radiation these residents will be exposed to is based on a government approved formula which assumes that people will be exposed to 3.8 μSv per hour only for 8 hours per day when they are outside the house. It is assumed that they will be indoors for 16 hours per day and the screening effect will reduce the exposure rate to 1.52 μSv per hour. On a yearly basis, this calculates to SLIGHTLY less than 20 mSv per year.

The government insisted that its decision was based on sound scientific findings.
The government is now carrying out the return policies based on the same faulty rationale.

Evacuees who have lived in areas that are barely under 20 mSv/yr and expressed concerns about safety are regarded as “voluntary evacuees” and thus will receive very little or no financial support and compensation.

With the lifting of evacuation orders in parts of Namie, Ōkuma, Iitate, and Tomioka at the end of March, 2017, evacuees will not be allowed to stay in temporary housing.
Even those who were originally ordered to evacuate will be considered “voluntary” after March 31, 2017, losing Fukushima prefecture’s financial aid for housing.

Many critics refer to the government’s return policy as “forced return policy” as well as “kimin seisaku” or the “policy of abandoning people.”

[See more details, Hino Kōsuke, Genpatsu Kimin (原発棄民), Tokyo: Mainichi News Press, 2016]

Below is a photo of some of the homes of Namie, showing the closeness of surrounding forests, hills and mountains, all of which cannot possibly be decontaminated.

After every rain the water runs off into the town, re-contaminating streets, homes, wells, everything, over and over again.

Not addressed by Japanese officials in the Abe regime is the fact that fallout still rises from the crippled plant just 7 miles away, that leaks in storage tanks, leaks from enormous piles of an estimated 7.5 million plastic bags with radioactive soil in them that are scattered all across the Fukushima prefecture, and leaks from the three destroyed reactors will not be stopped for decades, if ever.

HOW CAN ANYONE DECONTAMINATE SOMETHING THAT IS RECONTAMINATED EVERY DAY?

HOW DARE ANYONE SAY A HUMAN BEING IS SAFE IN SUCH CONSTANT RADIATION AND FORCE THEM TO LIVE THERE?


In the summer of 2016, a group of researchers from Niigata University measured the radiation level in some backyards and a forest area as ranging from 5~10 microsieverts PER HOUR.

Once radiation falls, it stays put, is taken up by soils and plants so that there is a long-term source and higher direct exposure to people.

Suzuki Yūichi (age 56 at time of interview) was born to a farming family in Namie, Fukushima in 1960.

Namie was one of the areas most devastated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, as well as the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011.

At the time of the nuclear accident, Mr. Suzuki was working in the Citizens’ Affairs Division of Namie and was immediately assigned to the Disaster Management Division established to assist citizens in finding missing family members, locating temporary housing, and evacuating families.

Suzuki was subsequently responsible for decontamination efforts, return policies, and establishing clinics for prospective returnees.

In the summer and the winter of 2016, Katsuya Hirano, an Associate Professor of History, UCLA. visited Namie with colleagues Professor Yoshihiro Amaya of Niigata University and Yoh Kawano, a PhD candidate at UCLA, and interviewed Mr. Suzuki.
That interview was published in the Asia Pacific Journal <HERE>.
Hirano has done a remarkable job bringing the facts and the hard road that evacuees face into the public eye.
To say that the Tea Room salutes him is an understatement.

FROM THAT INTERVIEW:  
Mr. Suzuki contends that the majority of former residents of Namie are unlikely to return to the town even after the Japanese government lifts the restriction on residency in certain areas on March 31, 2017.

As a city official who led decontamination efforts and return policy, Suzuki remains skeptical of Japanese government programs for “reconstruction” or “revival” of the affected areas. He anticipates that the area will become a “no man’s land” after the elderly returnees pass away.

Namie’s population was 21,400 at the time of the nuclear accident. He estimates that 10 percent or less will return. The interview is an important testament to the ongoing rift and dissonance between Tokyo and Fukushima over the policies and slogans of “reconstruction” and “return”.

SUZUKI: Well, I have to say, we can’t decontaminate forest areas. That would require cutting down all the trees and then scraping up all the topsoil. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see any effect. But as far as areas around houses are concerned, all the soil has been stripped away, so the radiation level has dropped significantly. For example, my parents’ house is in a so-called “zone in preparation for lifting the evacuation order.” At first the radiation level was 3.0 microsieverts per hour, but after decontamination, it has dropped to less than 0.5.

HIRANO: I see. But the entire contaminated region in Fukushima is richly forested– it’s all surrounded by forest, not just Namie. If it is impossible to decontaminate forest areas, it means that radioactive material could easily blow in from the forest, causing radiation levels to increase in decontaminated areas. Some residents say that the radiation level has in fact RISEN since the decontamination. So does it mean that decontamination is effective only in urban areas where there are few forests? In other words, there is a gap between places where decontamination has been working well and places where it has not.

SUZUKI: It is okay in areas where the soil has been properly stripped away, but nobody has done anything in mountain areas behind homes（urayama, 裏山）. We town officials have been asking the Ministry of the Environment to decontaminate such areas properly as well, since they are not just nameless wooded hills. Rather, they are Satoyama (里山), wooded areas surrounding people’s homes that are a part of their everyday lives. We’ve said that if we don’t decontaminate those areas we wouldn’t be able to bring people back home.

HIRANO: What the media has been saying is that for Namie, in particular, after lifting its evacuation orders, full-scale reconstruction can begin. I feel that what the Japanese government is trying to do is to send the message that the nuclear crisis in Fukushima has been finally settled.
The government believes that it is necessary to do so in order to create an image of Japan rising like a phoenix from the ashes at the Tokyo Olympics of 2020. That’s what it hopes to achieve by putting aside the thorny predicament of more than 100,000 evacuees and the difficulty of rebuilding communities.

I don’t feel that the Japanese government is looking at reality from the standpoint of the locals. That’s why they simply can’t accept how much the pre-accident life in Namie has fundamentally been destroyed, as you described earlier, and that, even for residents wishing to return, the current situation here is far from ready for them to come back and that there is no way to fix the situation.
Mr. Suzuki, how do you feel about this sense that the government has conveyed that the situation in Fukushima is now under control, that reconstruction has been going well, and the return policy has been successful?

SUZUKI: Well, I don’t think it will be possible for the reconstruction to be completely finished even 100 years from now. We can say the reconstruction is 100% complete only when everything has been restored to the way it used to be before the evacuation.
But of course, there is no way to really restore the life we had before.

If it is really true that it is now safe to return and restart life, as the central government has said, the Japanese government should build national facilities in the evacuation areas, in Namie and elsewhere. Then former residents will be assured that the government decision to build indicates the safety of the area. But in reality there no government facilities have been built in this town. Since the accident, not a single facility has been built here. That leads residents to think that it is still not safe to live here, especially with Fukushima Daiichi not yet decommissioned. They feel that the absence of government facilities confirms this.

HIRANO: It makes sense. If the central government insists that it is safe to return, if Prime Minister Abe’s pledge that Fukushima is under control is true, they need to take the initiative to show people that in fact it is now a safe place to live. Otherwise residents won’t be convinced.

SUZUKI: Exactly. They should buy land from the town and actively start building government facilities to conduct research or to work on developmental plans. They should build housing for national government employees. Residents would then be reassured.

Their attitude is “we’ve heard you enough, and we’ve dealt with you enough during the concentrated reconstruction period. (2011~2015) What else do you want? More money?”
You might remember a cabinet member (Ishihara Nobuteru) saying, “the bottom line is they want money.”

Also I feel that people who haven’t been the victim of a disaster, including politicians and bureaucrats, won’t be able to understand the predicament of the evacuees who were forced to flee. Here we thought that victims of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995 must have resumed normal lives after a few years of living in temporary housing.7 To me that was just something that happened far away in the Kansai area. Unless you experience it yourself, it’s difficult to understand what it’s really like."

HIRANO, IN HIS NOTES:
The so-called “damages created by rumors” have become a major point of political contention since the nuclear disaster. Many farmers and businesses, not only in relatively unaffected areas of Fukushima but in other prefectures in northeastern Japan, have suffered substantial financial loss due to widespread concerns about being exposed to radiation. On the other hand, Liberal Democratic Party politicians and conservative media outlets have used the “rumor-caused damage” charge to silence criticism, warning against discussion of the real danger of external and internal radioactive exposure. Residents of Fukushima continue to live under the pressure of being accused of encouraging rumor-caused damage even though their concerns are legitimate and their efforts to raise awareness about radiation should be taken very seriously. Some right-wing internet bloggers call those who raise concerns about radiation “unpatriotic” or “anti-Japanese.
In 2016, the Abe administration has decided to use taxpayer money for decontaminating affected areas in Fukushima. The decision marks a fundamental shift from the current policy that obliges TEPCO to pay for the decontamination work. The 2017 decontamination work is estimated to cost 30 billion yen. Behind the adminstration’s decision for the use of taxpayer money is the rapidly expanding expense of decontamination, with the latest estimate rising from the original 2.5 trillion yen to 4 trillion. This estimate does not include the no-return zones. The government expects the planned work in those areas to cost roughly 300 billion yen over five years. The Abe administration’s decision not only increase people’s financial burden but also blur TEPCO’s responsibility for the irretrievable damages it caused."
IN JAPAN, AS IN ALL NATIONS WITH NUCLEAR FACILITIES, YOU WON'T FIND NATIONAL GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS LIVING ANYWHERE NEAR NUCLEAR REACTORS, NOR WILL YOU FIND THE RICH LIVING IN THOSE AREAS. THEIR CHILDREN WILL NOT ATTEND SCHOOLS IN THOSE AREAS NOR WILL THEY WORK NEAR THEM.
THOSE WHO OWN SUCH FACILITIES ALSO LIVE FAR AWAY AND DON'T EVEN DIGNIFY THE SITUATION BY ISSUING "VENTING" SCHEDULES SO LOCAL RESIDENTS CAN AT LEAST STAY INSIDE WHILE EACH PLANT EMITS RADIOACTIVE STEAM OR COOLING WATER.
WHY DON'T THESE FACTS ALONE DEMONSTRATE TO THE WORLD THAT NUCLEAR ENERGY IS NOT AT ALL SAFE?

THE FUTURE OF THE CHILDREN IS GRIM.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) study, girls exposed as infants to radioactivity in the most contaminated regions of Fukushima Prefecture, where estimated doses ranged from 12 to 25 millisieverts for the first year, faced a 70% higher risk of developing thyroid cancer than what would normally be expected.

Well, children born there today, next year, a decade from now will still face radiation doses of barely under 20 millisieverts per year in zones where the forests and mountains remain.

No one can decontaminate a rock, the trees, the rain.


NO ONE CAN STOP RADIATION, PERIOD.
ONCE RELEASED,IT IS WITH US FOR UP TO BILLIONS OF YEARS AND CIRCULATES ACROSS THE GLOBE, OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

SHINZO ABE AND ALL INVOLVED IN THIS MAN-MADE DISASTER CAN NOW SAY WITH OPPENHEIMER,

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."




____________________________

FURTHER READING, SOURCES:

~ SEE the JAPAN TIMES brave article from 2011 about the deception the Abe regime has been guilty of,


"This tradition of lying has a long history. Government omerta and omission kept the nation ignorant about the most basic facts — including reactor meltdowns — for months!
Post-Fukushima Japan must realize that public acceptance of lying got us into this radioactive mess in the first place.

For radiation has no media cycle. It lingers and poisons the land and food chain. Statistics may be obfuscated or suppressed as usual. But radiation’s half-life is longer than the typical attention span or sustainable degree of public outrage.

As the public — possibly worldwide — sickens over time, the truth will leak out."


~ SEE 'THE ECOLOGIST' article,
"Japan and IAEA risk Fukushima victims' lives with forced return"


~ SEE ALSO NUCLEAR NEWS' TAKE ON THIS ALONG WITH SEVERAL OTHER RELATED ARTICLES <HERE>.  

~ An interesting PDF titled “No Return to Normal”, 2017

~ The Guardian, UK, article "
Thousands who fled 2011 disaster must choose between financial hardship or return to homes they believe are unsafe

~ SEE "Japanese journalists are revolting."
"Japanese journalists did what Yasuhiko Tajima, a professor of media studies at Tokyo's Sophia University, calls "announcement journalism" in reporting on the crisis. He says they were reporting the press releases of big companies and the people in power. And he's not the only one who thinks so.

Former NHK anchor Jun Hori speaks at a TEDx event in Kyoto, Japan, about opening Japanese journalism to non-traditional sources.






//WW

UNSTOPPABLE RADIATION IN AMERICA. COVER-UPS AND LIES.

These two drawings were done by survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan that closed World War Two.
They are from a book of similar drawings titled "UNFORGETTABLE FIRE".

Above, caption from the book: "As I fearfully crossed the railroad bridge, I saw red, blue, green, and purple corpses swollen three or four times floating under it".
--Toshiko Kihara, Age 17 at time of bombing, 47 at time of drawing.     

"THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SAFE DOSE OF RADIATION."
-- BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS [BAS]
"Worldwide, an unknowing and unsuspecting public is being randomly exposed to radiation without any opportunity for informed consent. People can choose whether or not to have x-rays, to reduce the radon exposure in their homes, or to fly. However, the public has no choice, and certainly inadequate knowledge, about radiation exposure from nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
The trend throughout the nuclear age has been a growing recognition that there is no “safe” or “harmless” dose of radiation."

In 2006 the National Academies’ National Research Council published a comprehensive report, “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII – Phase 2)” stating that radiation exposure has a linear relationship to the development of cancer. The report concluded that even low doses of ionizing radiation are likely to pose some health risks; there is no threshold of exposure below which the risk drops to zero."
Radioactive contamination can enter the body through ingestion, inhalation, absorption, or injection. This will result in a committed dose of radiation.

The ICRP [International Commission on Radiological Protection] states "Radionuclides incorporated in the human body irradiate the tissues over time periods determined by their physical half-life and their biological retention within the body.
Thus they may give rise to doses to body tissues for many months or years AFTER the intake.
Intake of radioactive materials into the body tends to increase the risk of cancer, and possibly other stochastic effects."

A Google search of the phrase "no safe dose of radiation" in ONLY 'scholarly journals' returned "About 494,000 results (0.09 sec)".

"The real issue is that the use of nuclear power and nuclear weapons is forcing humankind, and indeed the whole ecosystem, to participate in a particularly cruel and totally uncontrolled experiment.

Given the scientific evidence that there is no safe dose of radiation, this is an experiment that has already gone awry. Indeed, if this were a true scientific experiment, it would have been halted a long time ago.

The real question is whether we, as a human race, can afford in good conscience to risk annihilation with our continued reliance on nuclear technology. Can we continue to despoil our environment with long-lived radioactive materials that are scattered to the wind and embedded in our precious soil, randomly exposing large populations, and foisting health impacts on unsuspecting future generations who have no choice in this matter?

We must choose to halt this process. To do this we need to quickly abolish all nuclear weapons, and make a dramatic and rapid retreat from the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. Only then will we demonstrate that we recognize and appreciate the true meaning of Einstein’s prophetic words: “The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking. Thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”    

WHO ARE 'THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS'?
THEY WERE MEN WHO ONCE WORKED WITHOUT THOUGHT OF WHAT RADIATION FROM NUCLEAR TESTING FALLOUT OR FROM PLUTONIUM AND ENRICHED URANIUM WOULD DO TO ALL HUMANITY, MEN WHO BUILT THE BOMB,  WHO THEN DECIDED TO SPEAK OUT ABOUT THE 'BROKEN', OFTEN CORRUPT 'NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION' (NRC), THE REAL DANGERS OF  ALL/ANY RADIATION AND THE LONG, ONGOING COVER-UPS BY THE U.S., INTERNATIONAL AND EUROPEAN ATOMIC ENERGY ORGANIZATIONS, AND BY THE CIA.

THEIR 'BULLETIN' IS AN AWARD-WINNING, INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNIZED, DEDICATED PIECE OF WORK, AND WITH THEIR CONTACTS AND CREDENTIALS, THEY CERTAINLY KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT.
THERE IS NOTHING SAFE ABOUT RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS OR NUCLEAR FISSION.

"A recent report of a task force formed by the NRC to examine its OWN safety regulations, however, reached the troubling conclusion that the existing system of public regulation is, as a PDF article shows us, a “patchwork” with serious “gaps” that needed an overarching framework."

What the NRC mainly "regulates" is the TRUTH, which they often bend over backward to conceal from the public.
Rather than shine a spotlight on the failures and intentional disregard of 'regulations' by the nuclear energy giants and our federal government, the NRC merely imposes a fine here and there, often not even collecting payment of those fines from Big Nuke, and turns its back on violations, known corruption within the industry and bribes and pay-offs to many elected and non-elected 'officials'.

"The nuclear power industry exists only because governments agreed to take on the risk of accidents. One legitimate reaction to this uneconomic state of affairs would be to shut the industry down, or dramatically scale back reliance on nuclear power. In theory, reducing the number of reactors lowers the risk of accidents, and reducing the number to zero eliminates the risk.
Any firm attempting to build a new nuclear plant would then be forced to confront the real risk of nuclear accidents, which means it would be forced to spend enough on safety to reduce the risk to the level that made the reactors insurable — if such a risk level is achievable."

NRC 'inspections' are a joke.
Ask a nuclear power plant employee.
They don't get much 'protection' from the NRC, either.

Another source of facts and databases of problems with, failures and hazards of nuclear power plants can be found at "Nuclear Power Plant Database FAQ: Background information on the most common safety-related issues at U.S. nuclear power plants."

That website is maintained by 'The Union of Concerned Scientists'.

One article there tells the story of an intruder who drove into the Three Mile Island nuclear facility at 6:53 am on February 7, 1993. Workers responded to the unauthorized entry by locking the doors to the control room and declaring a Site Area Emergency—the second most serious emergency of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) four classifications. The intruder was found more than four hours later hiding in the turbine building.

IN AN ARTICLE A FEW DAYS AGO, THE BULLETIN AND OTHERS TRIED TO CALL ATTENTION TO THE WIPP FACILITY FAILURES IN NEW MEXICO AND TO LOS ALAMOS' PART IN IT.

"Waste makes haste: How a campaign to speed up nuclear waste shipments shut down the WIPP long-term repository."
June 28, 2018

"Just before midnight on Valentine’s Day 2014, a nuclear waste canister burst open deep in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) underground repository in Carlsbad, New Mexico – the final resting place for the United States’ transuranic military wastes.

The drum had been shipped to WIPP from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the US Energy Department lab famous for building the Manhattan Project’s first atomic bombs.
WIPP was contaminated and closed for nearly 35 months.
Waste shipments to the repository from across the country were backed up.

The Energy Department’s accident investigators concluded that the scientific cause of the “drum breach” at WIPP was something called thermal runaway: the buildup of heat and pressure in waste drum #68,660 due to exothermic reactions between its nitrate salt waste contents and the wheat-based kitty litter, Swheat Scoop, not the inorganic zeolite clay kitty litter recommended to them, that had been added to it at Los Alamos’ Waste Characterization, Reduction, and Repackaging Facility (WCRRF) in 2013.

Nine days earlier, a truck used for hauling salt caught on fire underground at WIPP.

It was the Los Conchas wildfires in 2000 that came within three-and-a-half miles of Area G, where Los Alamos lab stored transuranic radioactive waste – in some cases, in above-ground tents -- had taken the homes of hundreds of local families and damaged laboratory buildings.
The fires had prompted the lab to develop “Quick to WIPP,” a project for accelerating the shipment of transuranic waste to the Carlsbad repository.
In short, a perfect storm was brewing."

THEY PUSHED THINGS TOO QUICKLY, BUT AS THE ARTICLE STATES, NO MATTER WHAT, "The show must go on."

MEN LIKE OPPENHEIMER CAME TO VIEW WHAT THEY HAD DONE AS MORALLY WRONG, BUT THEY WERE ALSO THE VERY ONES WHO HAD CONDUCTED SECRET EXPERIMENTS USING OUR MILITARY AND AMERICAN CITIZENS LIKE LAB RATS.

WHO BETTER TO KNOW WHERE TO LOOK FOR COVER-UPS, FOR LOOPHOLES TO EXPOSE WHAT GOES ON BEHIND CLOSED DOORS?

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jan. 1958, page 22:
Geneticists are convinced there is NO dose too low to produce mutations in human cells...i.e., ALL radiation will cause genetic/DNA damage, which will appear within the first generation after exposure, or can appear all the way up to hundreds of generations later on.

REALIZATION, TOO LATE ...
Many of those atomic scientists, who were the very ones who worked so hard to give us the atomic bomb, realized their mistake and began to publish their "Bulletin" to enlighten the American public.
Early on, in 1958, they noted that 'natural radiation' is NOT the cause of the vast number of mutations seen today, NOT the cause of so many radiation-induced cancers, disorders, etc, worldwide, but that MANKIND's use of radioactive materials, in bombs or otherwise, has been THE cause of this rise.

They note that NUCLEAR FALLOUT, no matter the source, is, in fact, damaging and life-threatening to present and future generations.

In the Bulletin from 1958 cited above, they stated,
"We can be SURE that a large number of persons yet to be born WILL DIE, or be deformed, or diseased, or otherwise impaired by bomb-testing.
If ALL the victims could be identified and assembled in one place at the same time, we would all regard it as a horrible tragedy."

They spoke from experience when they stated...
"THE MORE IMPORTANT THE ISSUE, THE GREATER THE SECRECY."

"NUCLEAR SAFEGUARDS PROGRAMS PROVIDE NEITHER TIMELY WARNINGS NOR SANCTIONS."  

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May, 1995, page 34:
"It would take $230 Billion just to stabilize, [NOT clean up], the nuclear weapons testing complex sites."

At the time that was written, 3/4ths of those sites had not even been evaluated for cleanup yet!
It was estimated then, in 1995, that it would take at least 70 years to assess the leaks and bio-hazards from all those testing sites.

NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS WERE NOT PART OF THE ESTIMATED COST, EITHER.
ONE CAN'T STABILIZE SOMETHING THAT LEAKS AND THAT MUST RELEASE SOME RADIATION EVERY SINGLE DAY.

"THERE IS NO KNOWN REMEDY OR TECHNIQUE FOR DECONTAMINATING GROUNDWATER."
In 1995, just from test sites alone, we were trying to come up with ways to dispose of over 106 million gallons of HIGH-level radioactive waste, 260 metric tons of spent fuel, 107,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste, 1,800,000 cubic meters of "low-level" nuclear waste, and 780,000 cubic meters of "mixed" (chemicals plus radioactive) waste.

OMITTED FROM THE BUDGET, OMITTED FROM PROPOSED STABILIZATION AND/OR CLEANUP COSTS WERE THE COLUMBIA RIVER SYSTEM'S HANFORD NUCLEAR FACILITY IN WASHINGTON STATE, THE CLINCH RIVER (OAK RIDGE) SITE IN TENNESSEE, AND SAVANNAH RIVER SITE IN SOUTH CAROLINA.

[SEE: Radioactivity lingers at Oak Ridge]

[SEE "Deadly legacy: Savannah River site"]

WHY WERE THESE 3 'MEGA-SITES' IGNORED?

SIMPLE...THEY ARE JUDGED IMPOSSIBLE TO 'REMEDIATE', THERE IS NO 'FIX' , THERE IS NO WAY TO DESTROY RADIONUCLIDES IN THE ENVIRONMENT, SO THE EXTENT OF POLLUTION AND CONTINUAL LEAKING IS JUST TOO GREAT TO IMAGINE THEM EVER BEING STABILIZED OR CLEANED UP.

THOSE RIVER SYSTEMS, THOSE AREAS OF THE COUNTRY ARE SIMPLY DOOMED TO REMAIN AS UNENDING RADIOACTIVE NIGHTMARES.

SO SAY THE VERY SCIENTISTS WHO GAVE US NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

Every stage of removal technology produces ADDITIONAL waste and contamination.
EACH gram of plutonium, each container of enriched uranium produced at any point in time will remain with us forever.
They must be completely and safely isolated for hundreds of centuries.
NO way currently exists to accomplish that.

"Stored" wastes still produce more waste, still remain radioactive, are still considered toxic contaminants.

The last significant assessment of the potential cost of major accidents in the United States was made soon after Three Mile Island.
NOTHING is said about the cost in human lives.

BETWEEN 1943 AND 1970, NUCLEAR WASTE WAS HANDLED LIKE ANY OTHER WASTE, MUCH WAS SIMPLY DUMPED INTO THE EARTH OR RIVERS OR HOLDING PONDS, PUMPED INTO FLIMSY UNLABELED CONTAINERS THAT WERE NEVER DESIGNED TO CONTAIN THE RADIATION. WE DON'T HAVE ANY IDEA WHERE ALL THE WASTE FROM THOSE 27 YEARS IS.
[SEE PGS 35-41]     

ALL NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS LEAK OR 'VENT' RADIATION EVERY SINGLE DAY...
FROM THE NRC, THE ADMISSION..
"Nuclear power plants release varying amounts of tritium, depending on the amount of liquid waste discharged via normal and abnormal release discharge paths and the type of reactor.
At individual U.S. nuclear power plants, the amount of Sr-90 released is low... usually at or below the minimum detectable activity of sensitive detection equipment.
As with any industrial facility, a nuclear power plant may deviate from normal operation with a spill or leak of liquid material.

In the U.S., nuclear reactor operators have the AUTHORITY, given by the NRC, to vent radioactive steam or hydrogen gas as conditions warrant.

HOW SAFE ARE OUR AGING REACTORS?
The "safety disadvantages" of the Mark I boiling water reactors, the same type that exploded in Japan's Fukushima meltdowns, were highlighted in an internal memo at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission —the precursor to the NRC—as far back as 1972. The NRC nonetheless permits their use and has not forced compliance of the rule to "harden" those vents.

WHAT ABOUT SPENT FUEL CELLS?
In the U.S., because of a lack of a long-term plan for dealing with such nuclear waste, spent-fuel pools are even more densely packed than those at Fukushima's plant, making it easier for a meltdown to occur in the event of a loss of water.

IN 2011:
Radioactive leaks found at 75% of US nuke sites - CBS News

THEY WERE LOOKING FOR TRITIUM AND DID NOT ANALYZE DAILY "ALLOWABLE VENTINGS" INTO THE ATMOSPHERE AT THE NUKE SITES.
THERE ARE OVER 100 RADIOACTIVE GASES/CHEMICALS EMITTED BY NUCLEAR REACTORS.
TRITIUM WAS FOUND IN LOCAL DRINKING WATER SOURCES AT 75% OF PLANTS.

Since the 2011 investigation, other leaks have been discovered at nuke plants and medical and/or storage facilities in Illinois, New York, Florida, California, New Mexico, Alabama, Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Tennessee.

U.S. NEWS, March 15, 2016,
"Nuclear Plants Leak Radiation, and Regulator Faces Scrutiny"

At the same time, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has repeatedly weakened federal regulations to allow plants to keep operating, despite THOUSANDS of problems ranging from corroded pipes to cracked concrete and radioactive leaks.

Late last month, seven NRC engineers went public with a petition urging the agency to fix a critical design flaw in the electrical systems of all but one of the nation's nuclear plants – a highly unusual move for federal employees.

Since finalizing new standards, the NRC has reportedly inspected and approved just two of the country's 61 plants for compliance: one in Tennessee, the other in Virginia, Bloomberg BNA found.

It's also unclear whether new equipment for maintaining power at the plant during a prolonged outage will even work, experts say

Types of nuclear waste generated from nuclear power station:

"When the radioactivity of the waste [at nuclear power plants] has diminished to a very low level, it would be released to the environment on condition that it would not exceed the permissible limit.
The gaseous waste is released to the environment after treatment via the stack.
The liquid waste is mixed and diluted with the effluent from the plant after treatment before discharging into the sea." 

WHO MONITORS AND REPORTS RESULTS OF THESE 'PERMISSIBLE RELEASES'?
THE OWNERS OF THE POWER PLANTS, THEIR EMPLOYEES.

DO YOU SEE THE POSSIBILITY FOR FALSE REPORTS?
I DO.
LOCAL CITIZENS DON'T EVEN HAVE TO BE INFORMED THAT THE VENTINGS TOOK PLACE. 
THEY MAY FIND OUT IN OTHER WAYS, AS SHOWN BELOW...

"In California, the average Strontium-90 level found in baby teeth has risen with time, increasing 50.2 percent for children born in 1994-97 from the levels found in children born in 1986-89.
After the halt of above-ground atom bomb testing in 1963, the average Strontium-90 levels fell, but they began to rise again in the 1980s and ’90s.

And, according to the Academy study, there is only one source of this isotope not found in nature: the federally-permitted radioactive emissions from all operating US reactors.
“This should be a concern for any nuclear reactor and its health risks, whether it’s been operating for a day or 30 or 40 years because these reactors create over 100 cancer-causing chemicals; much of it is stored as waste at the plant, but a portion of it is released into the environment and gets into human bodies through the food chain," said the study's author.

The Academy study cites previous research conducted from 1996 to 2006 by RPHP, which remains the only analysis of radioactivity levels within the bodies of Americans who live close to nuclear reactors.

RPHP tested about 5,000 baby teeth and found consistent elevation levels of Strontium-90 in the teeth of children born in counties closest to nuclear reactors and a consistent rise in these levels over time."

NRC ADMITS 'SERIOUS GAPS'...
A recent report of a task force formed by the NRC to examine its safety regulations, however, reached the troubling conclusion that the existing system of public regulation is a “patchwork” with serious “gaps” that needed an overarching framework.

ALSO, the US Energy Department’s Accident Investigation Board accident report of the WIPP accident in 2014 criticized how Los Alamos’ execution of the 3706 Campaign was marked by “high workload and time stress” and “focused on budget, financial and schedule performance versus operational oversight”
(SEE: Energy Department 2015 Energy Department. 2015. “Accident Investigation Report, Phase 2: Radiological Release Event at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, February 14, 2014.” Office of Environmental Management, April. http://www.wipp.energy.gov/Special/AIB_WIPP%20Rad_Event%20Report_Phase%20II.pdf [Google Scholar]).

It noted how a June 2013 Energy Department assessment concluded that “in relation to the 3706 campaign [at Los Alamos], the team’s observation of work at times appeared harried.” But the DOE's coverage of 3706 was extremely limited. The campaign was mentioned zero times in the AIB’s 18-page Executive Summary. In the 394-page pdf document, the number 3706 appeared only ten times.
The campaign was left out of its “Conclusions and Judgments of Need” table. It was first broached in a short paragraph under “Relevant LANL and WIPP History” on Page 19 – the pdf’s 55th page. Casting the 3706 Campaign as an infrequently mentioned sideline item, the AIB failed to identify it as a “local root,” “systemic root,” or “contributing” cause of the accident.

Had the Energy Department requested an independent investigation – one that included political analysts, behavioral economists, anthropologists, or sociologists – the 3706 Campaign’s crucial social, political and financial details would not have been treated as [mere] noise in the system, but rather as central to its analysis. This could have taught important lessons.

What is certain, though, is that in failing to grasp how the 3706 Campaign’s self-described “regulatory partnership” became a self-defeating regulatory breakdown, the Energy Department may not have learned difficult lessons that could, someday, help prevent similar accidents. It may pay the price for this in the future."

IT WON'T BE THE ENERGY DEPARTMENT'S PEOPLE IN HARM'S WAY NEXT TIME, NEXT DISASTER, NEXT 'ACCIDENT'.

THERE WILL BE A NEXT TIME...FOREVER.

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE COVER-UPS.

In 1951, when the general manager of the Eastman Kodak Company called the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to complain about high levels of radiation detected at the Kodak plant in Rochester, New York, during a snowstorm. Kodak executives were concerned that radiation could damage their film. The AEC confirmed that a nuclear test had taken place two days earlier in Nevada, and offered to send Kodak warnings before future tests, including maps predicting where the heaviest fallout would occur.

Meanwhile, the AEC failed to give any warning to farmers, families with children who would drink contaminated milk, or pregnant mothers — and instead released a statement to the Associated Press that “there is no possibility of harm to humans or animals.”

Other gross examples include the cover-up of the Kyshtym disaster by the US and the Soviet Union, and the failure to inform the general public of the Chernobyl crisis during the first three days that it was happening.

IN "SECRECY AND NUCLEAR POWER " WE  READ...
November, 1968, the Liberian freighter 'Scheersburg', was allegedly hijacked at sea and its cargo of 200 tons of uranium 'disappeared'.

EURATOM (the European community's 'nuclear agency') DID NOT REPORT THIS TO ANYONE FOR ALMOST A YEAR!
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was the last informed, December, 1969.
Mossad was named suspect in the hijack, but why would Israel hijack a shipment of ore that they could have easily purchased from France?

Why didn't the U.S.or other nations make a media circus of it at the time?
Complicity?  
Also in that issue of the Bulletin (pg. 38), read about the finding of a U.S. Senator in 1977 that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) covered up for at least a decade how impossible they found it to trace diversions of nuclear material from bulk handling facilities. That investigation also uncovered evidence of how American and European governments assisted Pakistan in obtaining nuclear capability.  
In 1977, the New York Times offered its guess as to what happened regarding the Scheersburg.   
    
In yet another 'mystery of missing nuclear material', there is NUMEC.

From the website 'Foreign Policy', March, 2015: 
The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), located in Apollo, Pennsyvania, just 33 miles down the road from Pittsburgh, was the site at which the Westinghouse Corporation had helped construct the world’s first nuclear submarine, and in Apollo, NUMEC consequently manufactured the requisite nuclear fuel.
NUMEC closed its doors in 1983, and in the mid-1990s, the federal government swooped in and declared several city blocks contaminated.
Various agencies rolled in with bulldozers, razed the plant, and carted off the radioactive pieces, barrel by barrel, for disposal.
Ever since, Apollo’s residents have been grappling with fears that NUMEC poisoned their town. 

Beginning in the early 1960s, investigators from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the agency that regulated U.S. nuclear facilities at the time, began to question how large amounts of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium had gone missing from NUMEC in Apollo.
Between 1952 and 1968, lax standards at 20 of the country’s commercial nuclear sites resulted in an apparent loss of 995 kilograms (2,194 pounds) of uranium-235.

But investigators found that at NUMEC, hundreds of pounds went missing, more than at any other plant.

Fifty years after investigations began—they have involved, at various times, the AEC and its successors, Congress, the FBI, the CIA, and other government agencies—NUMEC remains one of the most confounding puzzles of the nuclear era.

The residents of Apollo have suffered from various cancers: lung, thyroid, prostate, brain. They have argued that years of radiation soaking into their soil, air, water, clothes, and homes had led to their afflictions. To date, owners of the NUMEC property have shelled out tens of millions of dollars in compensation to locals who’ve filed suit.  

After all those years, suddenly one day in September 2011, several SUVs, with blue U.S. Homeland Security decals emblazoned on their sides stationed armed men on the road just five miles north, in Parks Township.
In Parks, PA, a second NUMEC facility had produced plutonium starting in 1960, but it also had served another purpose: nuclear disposal.
From 1961 to 1970, the corporation dug at least 10 shallow trenches, spread across about 44 acres, into which it dumped radioactive waste; some locals speculate that other companies around the country shipped their waste to Parks to be buried too.

Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) had been put in charge of cleaning up the site in 2002, under congressional authorization, the process didn’t begin until almost a decade later—right before the madness on the road into Parks.

The following year, the USACE uncovered an unexpected variety of “complex” radioactive contaminants in the ground, but it didn’t say what all it had found or how much of it.
In a December 2014 report, the USACE noted that among the contaminants it expects to find are several “radionuclides of concern,” including americium-241, radium-228, uranium-235, and various types of plutonium, which, under the right conditions, could be used as ingredients for a dirty bomb.
It seems the material buried at Parks is more dangerous than anyone had previously imagined. 
The USACE immediately ceased the excavation and established a 24-hour patrolled security perimeter that’s still in effect today."

Just 6 years ago headlines blared the reality of lax security again at Oak Ridge...

"Nuclear site ends security contract following nun's break-in | Reuters"

"The government’s “Fort Knox” of weapons-grade uranium storage has ended a contract with a unit of an international security firm two months after an 82-year-old nun and other nuclear activists broke into the site." 

THERE ARE NO REAL 'SAFEGUARDS' FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY OR WEAPONS...THAT IS A LIE, A MYTH USED TO PERSUADE A GULLIBLE PUBLIC THAT EVERYTHING NUCLEAR IS 'SAFE'.

THE CIA's PART IN ONGOING AND PAST COVER-UPS REGARDING NUCLEAR WEAPONS CAPABILITY OF SEVERAL OTHER NATIONS WAS ALSO REVEALED IN 1978 BY A CIA CLERICAL ERROR.

THE DIRECTOR OF THE DIVISION OF SAFEGUARDS WAS BUSTED IN A BLATANT LIE, THAT ALL U.S. 15 WEAPONS FACILITIES HANDLING NUCLEAR MATERIAL WERE SAFE.

THE TRUTH WAS THAT NINE OF THE 15 HAD BEEN CLEARLY FOUND TO BE NOT SECURE AND COULD EASILY BE BREACHED BY MEN ARMED WITH MERE HANDGUNS.

THIS DID NOT STOP CONGRESS FROM THEN RULING THAT 'IMPROVEMENTS TO SECURITY HAVE BEEN MADE AT ALL SITES AND SO EMERGENCY SAFEGUARDS ARE UNWARRANTED".

As the authors stated, all that it reported in that entire issue on SECRECY within the nuclear industry merely scratched the tip of the iceberg of coverups and deceptions.

HOW BIG IS THAT ICEBERG?
WE MAY NEVER KNOW.






_______________________________

FURTHER READING: 

-- Unheeded cybersecurity threat leaves nuclear power stations open to attack...

There has been a rising number of security breaches at nuclear power plants over the past few years, according to a new Chatham House report which highlights how important systems at plants were not properly secured or isolated from the internet.


-- US Nuclear Weapons Site in Europe Breached


-- Report finds many nuclear power plant systems “insecure by design


-- Nuclear Plant Leak Threatens Drinking Water Wells in Florida


//WW