"A March 6 Department of Biological Sciences study conducted at California State Long Beach found that kelp along the coast of California was heavily impacted by radioactive Iodine-131 one month after the meltdowns began. The virulent and deadly isotope was detected at 250 times levels the researchers said were normal in the kelp before the disaster.
An alarming rise in cesium-137 in Cal Poly San Luis Obispo dairy farm milk beginning June 14, 2011, when it tested 2.95 picocuries per liter (pCi/l) and steadily rising in four subsequent tests until it was 5.91 pCi/l. The hot milk was at twice the allowable amount of this radionuclide in drinking water, according to the EPA’s 3.0 pCi/l limit.
After that report, the testing suddenly stopped.
Radioactive fallout in St. Louis, Mo., rainfall, which has been monitored at Potrblog.com since the crisis began, has been repeatedly so hot that levels have been reached that make it unsafe for children and pregnant women.
Special tests revealed elevated radiation in Bryce Canyon and Grand Canyon rain. Southwest Michigan rain samples were hot. Santa Monica and Los Angeles rain and mist were also high. An Oct.17, 2011, St. Louis rainstorm was measured on video at 2.76 millirems per hour, or more than 270 times background levels." --Michael Collins Report
JOHN W. GOFMAN was a medical physicist, the first Director of the Biomedical Research Division of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory from 1963-65 and one of nine Associate Directors at the Lab from 1963-1969. He was involved in the Manhattan Project and is a co-discoverer of Uranium-232, Plutonium-232, Uranium-233, and Plutonium-233, and of slow and fast neutron fissionability of Uranium-233. He also was a co-inventor of the uranyl acetate and columbium oxide processes for plutonium separation.
He stated:
"Licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random premeditated murder. First of all, when you license a plant, you know what you're doing—so it's premeditated. You can't say, "I didn't know." Second, the evidence on radiation-producing cancer is beyond doubt. I've worked fifteen years on it [as of 1982], and so have many others. It is not a question any more: radiation produces cancer, and the evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses."
[TO MY READERS: PLEASE IF YOU CHOOSE TO READ ONLY SOME OF THIS POST, SCROLL DOWN TO ***HE SAID AND READ WHAT THE MANHATTAN PROJECT GENIUS, JOHN GOFMAN HAD TO SAY ABOUT ALL THIS. IT IS THE INTERVIEW OF A LIFETIME! ]
CAUTION TO THE WIND AND TO HELL WITH THE CONSEQUENCES, SOMEONE NEEDS TO WAKE AMERICA AND THE REST OF THE WORLD UP TO FACTS!
FUKUSHIMA IS PERHAPS SHINZO ABE'S PRIVATE SILENT NUCLEAR WAR AGAINST THE REST OF THE WORLD AND IT'S GOING TO KILL MILLIONS!
ALL OF THE ABOVE CAN ENLIGHTEN THOSE WHO WISH TO KNOW THE TRUTH AND CAN FACE IT.
BUT CURSES TO REUTERS, ET AL, FOR MAKING LIGHT OF THIS NEWEST REPORT THAT CAME OUT 2 DAYS AGO AND WHO CONTINUE TO HIDE THE FACTS!
"Radioactive contamination from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant hit by a tsunami in 2011 has drifted as far north as waters off a remote Alaska island in the Bering Strait, scientists said on Wednesday.
Analysis of seawater collected last year near St. Lawrence Island revealed a slight elevation in levels of radioactive cesium-137 attributable to the Fukushima disaster, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Sea Grant program said.
“This is the northern edge of the plume,” said Gay Sheffield, a Sea Grant marine advisory agent based in the Bering Sea town of Nome, Alaska.
The newly detected Fukushima radiation was minute. The level of cesium-137, a byproduct of nuclear fission, in seawater was just four-tenths as high as traces of the isotope naturally found in the Pacific Ocean.
Water was sampled for several years by Eddie Ungott, a resident of Gambell village on the northwestern tip of St. Lawrence Island. The island, though part of the state of Alaska, is physically closer to Russia than to the Alaska mainland, and residents are mostly Siberian Yupik with relatives in Russia.
Fukushima-linked radionuclides have been found as far away as Pacific waters off the U.S. West Coast, British Columbia and in the Gulf of Alaska.
Until the most recent St. Lawrence Island sample was tested by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the only other known sign of Fukushima radiation in the Bering Sea was detected in 2014 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NOAA scientists found trace amounts of Fukushima-linked radionuclides in muscle tissue of fur seals on Alaska’s St. Paul Island in the southern Bering Sea. There was no testing of the water there, Sheffield said.
“The way the currents work does bring the water up from the south.”
Fukushima Radiation Concerns in Alaska
The Division of Environmental Health (DEH) has been coordinating with the Department of Health & Social Services (DHSS) Division of Public Health as well as other state and Federal agencies, the Pacific states, and Canada to continuously assess the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant and address radiation-related concerns in Alaska.
[COLLUSION! LET'S CALL IT WHAT IT IS, IT'S COLLUSION TO "AVOID PANIC"!]
DEC, in conjunction with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services and other state, federal, and international agencies, has been testing Alaska seafood for any potential impacts resulting from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. Testing results have shown no detectable levels of Fukushima-related radionuclides. DEC continues to collaborate with other government agencies and researchers monitoring the marine environment. DEC, in cooperation with its partners, currently deems fish and shellfish from Alaska waters unaffected by the nuclear reactor damage in Japan. However, the public is cautioned to be aware that fish and shellfish are still subject to local toxins
“Radioactivity can be dangerous, and we should be carefully monitoring the oceans after what is certainly the largest accidental release of radioactive contaminants to the oceans in history,” said Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist at WHOI who has been measuring levels of radioactivity in seawater samples from across the Pacific since 2011. “However, the levels we detected in Ucluelet are extremely low.”
TALK TO US ABOUT BIOACCUMULATION, BIOCONCENTRATION AND BIOMAGNIFICATION, KENNY, YOU SPINELESS, GUTLESS WONDER, YOU SOLD-OUT MEDIA WHORE!
The longer the biological half-life of a toxic substance, the greater the risk of chronic poisoning, even if environmental levels of the toxin are not very high.
[SOURCE: Bioaccumulation of Marine Pollutants [and Discussion], by G. W. Bryan, M. Waldichuk, R. J. Pentreath and Ann Darracott Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences.]
Strontium-90, found in nuclear fallout (such as we have each day from Fukushima!), is chemically similar enough to calcium that it is utilized in osteogenesis, where its radiation can cause damage for a long, long time.
Bioconcentration refers to uptake and accumulation of a substance from water alone.
Water, as in ocean water, right? Yes.
And biomagnification, also known as bioamplification or biological magnification, is the increasing concentration of a substance, such as a toxic chemical or RADIATION, in the tissues of organisms at successively higher levels in a food chain.
MAN IS AT THE TOP OF ALL FOOD CHAINS, ISN'T HE? YES!
TELL US ABOUT URANIUM 'BUCKYBALLS', KEN!
From the Pasadena Weekly, July 5,2012, back when the media was still telling us SOME truth:
"According to a recent UC Davis study, these uranium-filled nanospheres were created from the millions of tons of fresh and salt water used to try to cool down three molten cores of the stricken reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The tiny and tough buckyballs are shaped like soccer balls.
Water hitting the incredibly hot and radioactive, primarily uranium-oxide fuel turns it into peroxide. In this goo mix, buckyballs are formed, loaded with uranium and able to move quickly through water without disintegrating.
High radiation readings in Santa Monica and Los Angeles air during a 42-day period from late December to late January strongly suggest that radiation is increasing in the region including along the coast in Ventura County."
Both stations registered more than 5.3 times the normal amount, though the methods of sampling and detection differed. The videotaped Santa Monica sampling and testing allowed for the detection of alpha and beta radiation, while the sensitive EPA instrument detected beta only, according to the government Web site.
A windy Alaskan storm front sweeping down the coast the morning of March 31 slammed Southern California with huge breakers, a choppy sea with 30-foot waves and winds gusting to 50 mph. A low-hanging marine layer infused with sea spray made aloft from the chop and carried on the winds that blew inland over the Los Angeles Basin for several miles, bringing with it the highest radiation this reporter has detected in hot rain since the meltdowns began.
Scientific studies from the United Kingdom and Europe show that sea water infused with radiation of the sort spewing out of Fukushima can travel inland from the coast up to 300 kilometers. These mobile poisons include cesium-137 and plutonium-239, the latter of which has a half-life of 24,400 years.
Despite the fact that University of California and this reporter’s tests show high radiation in the air, water, food and dairy products in this state, the state and federal governments cut off special testing for Fukushima radionuclides more than half a year ago.
North America is directly downwind of Japan, where the government is having 560,000 tons of irradiated rubble incinerated with the ash dumped in Tokyo Bay. The burning began last October and is scheduled to continue through March 2014, enraging American activists for this unwitting double dose.
Greg Wetherbee, a chemist with USGS, told the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper,
“In the United States, cesium-134 and cesium-137 wet dispersion values were higher than for Chernobyl fallout, in part due to the US being further downwind. With Chernobyl, there was more opportunity for plume dispersion.”
Radioactive sea spray has been shown to blow hundreds of kilometers inland in tests conducted in the United Kingdom by British and European researchers. As anyone who has ever smelled the salty ocean air miles from the ocean might expect, salt in sea spray can travel a significant distance. The same holds true for radioactive particles floating in the sea, even if in addition to U60 buckyballs.
In the 2008 report “Sea to land transfer of radionuclides in Cumbria and North Wales,” the greatest average concentration of cesium-137 and plutonium-239 in soil at a depth of 0 to 15 centimeters was found 10 kilometers from the coast. The highest average amounts found at 15 to 30 centimeters deep were 5 kilometers away from the sea illustrating the unpredictability of radiation fallout.
A 62-page UK study released in December 2011 found that sea spray and marine aerosols created from bubbles forming and popping when the sea is choppy or waves break have increased concentrations of radioactive “actinides.”
Actinides are chemically alike radioactive metallic elements and include uranium and plutonium. One actinide infused the spray with an 812 times greater concentration of americium-241 than normal amounts of Am-241 in ambient seawater.
The report cited information that sea-spray-blown cesium 137 was found 200 kilometers from the discharge source in the New Hebrides Islands in northern Scotland.
STOP YAPPING ABOUT CESIUM CESIUM,CESIUM AND LIST FOR US THE OTHER RADIOACTIVE CONTAMINANTS OUT THERE IN THE OLD DYING PACIFIC, KENNETH!
THERE'S PLENTY OF IODINE-131, STRONTIUM-90 AND PLUTONIUM-239 IN THAT MIX, RIGHT, BOY?
TELL US WHAT LIES BELOW IN OCEAN SEDIMENT THAT GETS STIRRED UP OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND ENTERS THE FOOD CHAIN!
WHAT'S FALLING ON US FROM ABOVE, KENNY BOY?
"A Feb. 28 report by the Meteorological Research Institute, just released at a scientific symposium in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, says that 40,000 trillion becquerels, double the amount previously thought, have escaped from the Unit 1 reactor alone. This has resulted in fallout around the globe that especially impacts the Pacific and parts of America and Canada — two countries downwind of Japan on the jet stream. British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, Midwest and Ontario have been hit especially hard by rain, sleet and snow, in some cases with dizzying amounts of high radiation."
BUT YOU KEEP TALKING JUST CESIUM, KEN, BECAUSE THAT'S ALL YOU'RE ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT BY YOUR HANDLERS, OR WHAT?
"Scientists at WHOI are analyzing samples for two forms of radioactive cesium that can only come from human sources. Cesium-137, the “legacy” cesium that remains after atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, is found in all the world's oceans because of its relatively long, 30-year half-life. This means it takes 30 years for one-half of the cesium-137 in a sample to decay. The Fukushima reactors added unprecedented amounts of cesium-137 into the ocean, as well as equal amounts of cesium-134. Because cesium-134 has a two-year half-life, any cesium-134 detected in the ocean today can only have been added recently—and the only recent source of cesium-134 has been Fukushima."
THERE IS NO INDEPENDENT STUDY BY NON-GOVERNMENT/NUCLEAR ENERGY INDUSTRY INDEPENDENT AGENCIES TODAY CONDUCTING ONGOING MONITORING AND ANALYSIS OF WHAT'S OUT THERE AND WHAT IS INSIDE THE MARINE LIFE WHO SWIM IN THAT RADIOACTIVE CRAP ALL DAY EVERY DAY AND WHICH ARE WASHING UP DEAD ON EVERY SHORE ALL AROUND THE PACIFIC RIM!
BUT KENNY THINKS A SWIM IS FINE.
"The Ucluelet sample contained 1.4 Becquerels per cubic meter (Bq/m3) (the number of decay events per second per 260 gallons of water) of cesium-134, a telltale sign of having come from Fukushima, and 5.8 Bq/m3 of cesium-137. These levels are comparable to those measured 100 miles off the coast of Northern California last summer. If someone were to swim for 6 hours a day every day of the year in water that contained levels of cesium twice as high as the Ucluelet sample, the radiation dose they would receive would still be more than one thousand times less than that of a single dental x-ray."
HAVEN'T OB/GYNs CAUTIONED PREGNANT WOMEN TO AVOID X-RAYS IF POSSIBLE, KENNY?
YES, YES THEY HAVE!
DO WE KNOW THAT XRAYS AND EVEN FREQUENT FLYING THAT EXPOSES WOMEN TO GREATER RADIATION LEVELS CAN CAUSE FETAL ABNORMALITIES?
YES, WE KNOW THAT, TOO!
WILL ANYONE AT WOODS HOLE SPOON-FEED A BABY TISSUE KNOWN TO BE CONTAMINATED BY EITHER CESIUM 134 OR 137, KEN?
WILL ANYONE FEED A BABY JUST A TINY BIT OF STRONTIUM, URANIUM, AMERICIUM, POLONIUM, PLUTONIUM, TRITIUM...PUT IT IN WATER AND RUB IT ONTO A BABY'S EYES OR SKIN 24 HOURS A DAY, FOR EVEN ONE DAY?
IN A PREVIOUS BLOG, THE TEA ROOM INVITED ANYONE TO SWIM THE PACIFIC OCEAN FOR 24 HOURS A DAY, EVERY DAY FOR JUST A SHORT TIME.
THERE WERE NO VOLUNTEERS TO DO SO.
"Buesseler has had to rely on a crowd-funding and citizen-science initiative known as "Our Radioactive Ocean" to collect samples because no U.S. federal agency is responsible for monitoring radiation in coastal waters.
GIVE ME THE TOOLS AND A BOAT AND I'LL GET RIGHT ON IT!
IF ONE ALREADY HAS THE TOOLS AND A BOAT, HOW MUCH SHOULD IT REALLY COST FOR FUEL TO RUN ABOUT AND TEST THE LEVELS, KEN?
HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO TURN THOSE NUMBERS OVER TO ANY AMERICAN MEDIA?
THERE ARE SEVERAL GROUPS WHO ARE CHOMPING AT THE BIT TO GET THEIR HANDS ON SUCH READINGS, WHO WOULD GLADLY PAY FOR INDEPENDENT ANALYSIS.
THAT'S WHAT THE NUCLEAR ENERGY BOYS ARE AFRAID OF, ISN'T IT, THAT THE TRUTH WILL COME OUT?
THAT PEOPLE WHO LEARN THE TRUTH WILL DEMAND AN END TO THIS NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE?
HOW ABOUT YOUR BOSSES, KENNY?
WHO DO THEY WORK FOR?
KEN ALSO SAID:
“We expect more of the sites will show detectable levels of cesium-134 in coming months, but ocean currents and exchange between offshore and coastal waters is quite complex,” said Buesseler, “Predicting the spread of radiation becomes more complex the closer it gets to the coast and we need the public’s help to continue this sampling network.”
Recent partnerships between Buesseler's group and a Canadian-funded program called InFORM, led by Jay Cullen at the University of Victoria, Canada, has added more than a dozen monitoring stations along the coast of British Columbia. In addition, upcoming cruises with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, will add more than 10 new sampling sites offshore. Also in 2015, a National Science Foundation-sponsored project led by WHOI physical oceanographer Alison Macdonald includes funding to analyze more than 250 seawater samples collected on a research ship travelling this May between Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands, Alaska.
DID MAINSTREAM MEDIA GET THOSE RESULTS?
WERE THEY SKEWED AT ALL, OR FALSE IN ANY WAY?
WHERE ARE THE DAMNED RESULTS?!
SHOW US!
THE LEVELS OF RADIATION ARE NOT THE SAME ALL ACROSS THE PACIFIC!
THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE!
THERE ARE VAST AREAS OF CONCENTRATED PARTICLES/CONTAMINATION AND NOAA, THE EPA, THE GOVERNMENTS OF JAPAN AND AMERICA KNOW THAT.
WHY LIE OR MISLEAD?
TELL US, WHAT DID THE ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION SAY WAS A "SAFE LEVEL" OF RADIATION?
OH, THEY SAID THERE WASN'T ANY SUCH THING AS A SAFE LEVEL, REMEMBER, WOODS HOLE KENNY?
OPPENHEIMER HIMSELF SAID THAT!
WHAT DID THE EARLIEST NUCLEAR PHYSICISTS SAY?
THE SAME THING, RIGHT?
REMEMBER?
OPENHEIMER SAID THEY HAD BECOME DEATH!
AND GOFMAN?
***HE SAID, "By the way, medical radiation, from x-ray machines, is roughly twice as harmful per unit dose as Hiroshima-Nagasaki radiation."
John William Gofman in an interview with University of California's student magazine, 'Synapse', Volume 38, Number 16, January 20, 1994:
GOFMAN: The [DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY] DOE is one of the worst organizations in the history of our government. Unless it's cleaned out we're going to have worse things in the future. The human experimentation that has been done is bad, and it's good that that's being cleared away. But for 25 years the DOE has not shown any concern for the health of Americans. Their concern has been for the health of the DOE. Their falsehoods concerning the hazards of ionizing radiation have put not thousands of people at risk, not millions of people, but billions of people.
Ever since its inception, the Atomic Energy Commission — then called ERDA, then called DOE — has had one thing in mind: "Our program is sacrosanct." And they recognize, as I've recognized, that their entire program will live or die based upon one thing. If the public should come to learn the truth about ionizing radiation, nuclear energy and the atomic energy program of DOE is going to be dead. Because the people of this country — and other countries — are not going to tolerate what it implies. The key thing — it's everything in the DOE program — is: "We must prove that low doses of radiation are not harmful." They have been conducting a Josef Goebels propaganda war, saying there's a safe dose when there has never been any valid evidence for a safe dose of radiation. Yet the DOE and others continue to talk about their "zero-risk model."
After Chernobyl, I estimated that there were going to be 475,000 fatal cancers throughout Europe — with another 475,000 cancers that are not fatal. That estimate was based on the dose released on the various countries of fallout from Cesium-137.
How would a safe level of radiation come about? It could come about in theory if the biological repair mechanisms — which exist and which will repair DNA and chromosomes — work perfectly. Then a low dose of radiation might be totally repaired. The problem, though, is that the repair mechanisms don't work perfectly. There are those lesions in DNA and chromosomes that are unrepairable. There are those where the repair mechanisms don't get to the site and so they go unrepaired. And there are those lesions where the repair mechanisms simply cause misrepair.
But I looked very carefully in 1986 for any studies that could shed light on that all-important question [as you go down to very low doses — a rad, or a tenth of a rad — is that going to produce cancer?]. And I presented that evidence at the American Chemical Society meeting in Anaheim.
The answer is this: ionizing radiation is not like a poison out of a bottle where you can dilute it and dilute it. The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can't have a fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn't. So I said "What evidence do we have concerning one, or two or three or four or six or 10 tracks?" And I came up with nine studies of cancer being produced where we're dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks per cell. Four involved breast cancer. With those studies, as far as I'm concerned, it's not a question of "We don't know." The DOE has never refuted this evidence. They just ignore it, because it's inconvenient. We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder.
What other things does the DOE use as crutches? "Well, maybe if you give the radiation slowly it won't hurt as much as if you give it all at once." Now if you have one track through a cell producing cancer, what is the meaning of 'slowly?' You have the track or you don't. It comes in on Tuesday or it comes in on Saturday. To talk about slow delivery of one track through the nucleus is ludicrous. But they do it anyway.
There is a more radical fringe that says, "A little radiation is good for you. And all this stuff about radiation causing harm is bad for society because it's going to prevent the program we think should be instituted, and that program is to give everybody in the country radiation every day as a new vitamin." This program is called hormesis. "A little radiation will give your immune system a kick and help you resist cancer and infectious disease." The chief exponent is a man named Thomas Luckey, formerly of the University of Missouri. He bemoans the fact that we can't get this program into high gear.
The idea is manifestly absurd. But that didn't prevent the DOE from helping to sponsor a conference in 1985 in Oakland on the beneficial effects of radiation, hormesis. And the nuclear enterprise is really at it all the time. They had another such conference in 1987, and another in 1992.
You won't have to bury [nuclear waste] in these fancy vaults. You won't have to worry about transport. You can even dispose of it in ordinary landfills. That will be the result. That's what the future will be. If low doses don't matter, the workers can get more and their families can get more by being in the vicinity. That's what we face.
By the way, medical radiation, from x-ray machines, is roughly twice as harmful per unit dose as Hiroshima-Nagasaki radiation.
It's the effect of linear energy transfer.
When gamma rays or x-rays set electrons in motion, the electrons are traveling at a lower speed than the electrons coming out of Cesium-137. And as a result, when they're traveling at a lower speed, they interact much more with each micrometer of path they travel. Therefore the local harm is much greater. So medical x-rays set in motion electrons that are traveling at a lower speed and hence producing about twice the linear energy transfer, and hence twice the biological effect. That's why alpha particles from radium or plutonium are so much more devastating than beta rays set in motion from x-rays. The alpha particles, with their heavy mass and plus-2 charge, just rip through tissue so strenuously that they don't go very far.
A deception of the crassest sort are the lectures by pro-nuclear people showing a plutonium or radium source and putting up a piece of paper and showing that the alpha-particle radiation on the other side is zero. "You see, a piece of paper will stop those alpha particles, folks, there's no problem with plutonium." Except when that alpha particle is lodged next to an endosteal cell in the bone and producing a horrendous amount of interaction. Or that alpha particle is lodging on the surface of the bronchi — that's why we've got an epidemic of lung cancer among the uranium miners! The fact that they don't travel far is because they interact like hell!
Synapse: Do you think medical professionals really appreciate how much potential there is for damage? Regardless of who you are, you go into the hospital and you get a chest x-ray as a routine diagnostic procedure.
Gofman: I'm sad to say, I don't think 90% of doctors in this country know a goddamned thing about ionizing radiation and its effect. Somebody polled some pediatricians recently and said, "Do you believe there's a safe dose of radiation?" And 45% said, "Yes." They weren't asked, "What papers have you ever read on this subject that led you to conclude there's a safe dose?" I think medical education on the hazard of radiation is atrocious. What have they taught you in radiology?
If you ask me, "Do you stand against medical x-rays?" the answer is no. And I've written a book with Egan O'Connor on the health effects of common exams. We take the position: if there's a diagnostic gain for you — something that can really make a difference in your health and your life — then don't forego the x-ray. But there's another part of the picture.
Up until recently — it may be a little better now than it was — government studies show that most hospitals and most offices of radiologists didn't have the foggiest notion of what dose they were giving you for a procedure. Nor did they know that the procedure could be accomplished with a third or a tenth of the dose.
Joel Gray, a health physicist at the Mayo Clinic, said there are places giving you 20 times the dose needed for a given picture. And, he said, "If you ask those people and they can't answer, you can be fairly confident that they're giving you a bigger dose than necessary."
So Egan and I, in The Health Effects of Common Exams, took the data on what the average doses were in the United States, versus what has been accomplished by some elegant work in Toronto to reduce the dose to one-third of what was the average practice in 1984, and found that about 50,000 fatal cancers per year could be prevented. That' s a million and a half in a generation! So what is this stuff about "Most procedures don't hurt you, they're small?"
There was a time, 20 to 30 years ago, when there were mobile x-ray units that gave x-rays of the chest. They didn't give the 20 millirads [a 50th of a rad] that is possible today. They gave about five rads. Children went through those things by the thousands. And we just say, "We don't know why this cancer epidemic is taking place now." Nobody's taken account of it. It's hard to know how many children got it and who they were and follow them up. But you know that a certain number of people are having cancers now as a result of what was done 15, 20 years ago.
But the medical profession has to be regarded as culpable, along with the DOE. They both have the same conflict of interest: their work exposes people to radiation. For the DOE there have been all kinds of people of shady character in all kinds of government posts. But damn it, the medical profession shouldn't be shady and corrupt. I'd like to see them really apply the Hippocratic oath to this field.
Synapse: Could you describe your work regarding the retroactive tampering with databases?
Gofman: For years I've tried to believe that what was going on in Hiroshima-Nagasaki in what was called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission — subsequently renamed the Radiation Effects Research Foundation — was the only place where we had a huge body of data that addressed the question of what happens to people who have been exposed to varying doses. If there is an event like Chernobyl, or Hiroshima, we have to insist on the sacred meaning of collecting an honest database concerning what happens to people — (A) doing the very best job of determining what dose they got, and (B) doing a follow-up study that is beyond reproach. That is an obligation to humanity that is virtually sacred. If you do anything less than the best in that kind of endeavor, you're a scoundrel. So all this time I wanted to believe in the work that was being done in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki studies. In 1986, because of some questions about what the neutron dose was relative to the other forms of radiation — gamma rays, primarily — they did a revision of the doses. Now I don't have any objection to the revision of doses, provided that you obey the cardinal rules of medical research. The first cardinal rule of medical research is: never, but never change the input data once you know what the follow-up shows. So because they had this idea of changing the doses, they didn't just change the doses, they shuffled all the people from one dose category to another, with a new dose. So there was no continuity with everything that had been done up to 1986.
Synapse: Who's 'they?'
Gofman: The Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Japan. The director is Itsuzo Shigematsu. The associate director is a guy by the name of Joop Thiessen, who's from the DOE. It's a DOE-sponsored endeavor — DOE and the Japanese Ministry of Health. There couldn't be a worse set of sponsors.
Synapse: The Japanese have the same kind of commitment to nuclear energy?
Gofman: Absolutely. So I said, "You can't do this. You want a new dosage, keep the old groupings and just assign the new dose and study [the results]." I call that "constant cohort, dual dosimetry." So I wrote a letter to Shigematsu and said, "This is a violation of the cardinal rules of research. There is a way to do this correctly, and you can keep changing doses all your life, provided you just stick them alongside what you've done originally." Shigematsu's reply is in my book. [Radiation-Induced Cancer from Low-Dose Exposure, 1990] It's simple. He said, "Trust us." Well, the reason for the cardinal rule of research is, nobody ever has to say, "Trust me." Because you set things up with blinding, with appropriate procedures, so that your database is immaculate. You don't go changing things and say, "Well we did it objectively." I said, "Report in the old way — the old dosage — and the new way." They said, "We won't do that. But we'll consider it. And we will give you the data in the old way for three more years." What's the shape of the cancer curve with the latest data from Hiroshima-Nagasaki? If I use the old data, it's like this (diagonal, rising line). What's the shape of the curve with their new dosimetry? It's like this (slowly rising line that then goes up abruptly).
Synapse: Making it look as if the low-level of radiation is acceptable?
Gofman: Exactly. Their ultimate goal is fulfilled.
Synapse: How did they determine who received what dosage at the time of the explosion? Was it based on how far away people were from ground zero?
Gofman: Distance was the biggest factor, but also whether you were outdoors or indoors, whether you were in a concrete or wooden structure. They tried to do a lot of that. And they shouldn't keep changing the placement of people! You take people with cancer and say, "Well, I guess the dose they originally got must have been a lot higher. We'll put that person here [in this dose category] and this one there." And with that sort of approach, you can make truth whatever you want it to be. And there's a very important additional lesson. Humanity needs to insist on the immaculate construction of databases concerning any accident or major event. If a crook makes the database, Einstein will get the wrong answer out of it. And then what happens? The Einsteins, with the best credentials, using this lousy, fabricated, false database, will put their findings in the medical journals. And then they get into the textbooks. And then it's taught to medical students for the next 100 years. And what happens? Hundreds of millions of people will suffer from cancer and genetic diseases because the answer will be wrong. The key thing is getting an honest database.
Synapse: How did you make the transition from being a respectable member of the `radiation community' to being an independent critic?
Gofman: I was criticized and denounced by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) for one thing. I said that radiation was more harmful than was previously thought.
Synapse: When was that?
Gofman: In 1969 — after they had given me $3 million a year for seven years to take time off from my teaching and set up a biomedical division at Livermore. One week after I gave the talk! If you say something they don't want to hear, they make a pariah out of you.
Synapse: They certainly managed to marginalize Linus Pauling. Way back in the 1950s he was describing the effects of fallout, Strontium-90 in the milk, the dangers to the people of Nevada and Utah.
Gofman: Linus's 1954 estimates were all pretty near to the mark...
Synapse: Are we getting honest data about Chernobyl?
Gofman: Evgeny Chasov, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, made a public statement that nobody has been harmed in the population at large. He obviously wasn't referring to the people who got killed immediately. There've been all kinds of statements to the that effect.
Alla Yaroshinskaya, a journalist in Zhitomirsk, a small city in the Ukraine, became very suspicious of the sort of things that were being said. She found out that some of the people who were being moved had been moved to a place that was even hotter sometimes — it was all just for show! Her paper wouldn't publish her investigation, and they told her she'd be in big trouble... But she persisted, and she got Izvestia to publish it, and she became well known. She got elected to the Supreme Soviet. And she demanded to see the protocols of government meetings on the Chernobyl situation. She managed to get all 40 protocols, and she wrote an article, which is now in book form in Russian and, there's a French edition: "The 40 Protocols of the Wise Men of the Kremlin." And it shows that at every one of their meetings, what they were saying internally was the exact opposite of what they were saying publicly...
[Yaroshinskaya is now vice minister of mass media in Russia and a personal advisor to Boris Yeltsin. Gofman has written the introduction to an English-language edition of her book. For their work on the longterm health effects of Chernobyl, Gofman and Yaroshinskaya shared the 1992 "Right Livelihood Award," given by a Swedish foundation. In his acceptance speech, Gofman proposed that a network of scientists who don't have to answer to government serve as "watchdogs" and participate in every stage of the construction of the Chernobyl data base.]
Synapse: Did anybody pick up on the watchdog idea?
Gofman: I met with Yuri Shcherbak, the minister for the environment for the Ukraine. Yuri was a journalist and a physician, who also had revealed some of the things that had been going on with the Chernobyl data. In the new government in Ukraine he was made minister of the environment. He liked the watchdog concept, but he said, "If I'm going to propose that to the Ukrainian government, could you get some more scientists who would endorse it?" So I wrote letters to about 50 people around the world, and about 47 said they would serve on a commission to set this up in Ukraine. And I sent this off to Yuri, but I never heard back. One of his aides was in town and called me up with a message from Yuri. He said, "As soon as Yuri got back from seeing you, the Ukrainian government set up a special division to handle Chernobyl, and that was moved out of Yuri's environmental department." And a little later Yuri was moved over to become the ambassador to Israel — it might have been to the North Pole. So that died. I have some hopes that Alla might be able to get the idea through in Russia, but the nuclear mafia in Russia is very strong. They're proposing to go gung ho on nuclear power. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are members of the nationalist group around Zhirinovsky.
Synapse: How would the watchdog concept work in the United States?
Gofman: What I'm proposing is that if the Department of Energy spends $100 million on health-related activities — and they have their fingers in every university department of statistics and radiology — $10 million should go to a grass roots organization of scientists to make sure that the studies being carried out are honest.
Take the worker population in America. Do you believe what the DOE says about the doses workers are getting? I don't. I think a lot of scientists would be interested and willing to do that work, if it were honored rather than — you know, you get thrown out for saying something. The scientists who were funded by the DOE at Los Alamos, Livermore, Berkeley, Brookhaven — they're self-censored. They know what's okay to say, and they know what's not okay. They know my history. And they're not about to repeat it. Which brings us back to where we started. When I saw Hazel O'Leary come an the scene, I just got the impression that this lady is for real. She faces a tremendous task — just on the human experimentation, the suggestion that people be made whole and receive apologies. I'd like to see this lady get 100 million Americans behind her so that she can't be weakened. I think there's a chance that in her administration the watchdog idea could fly. If we don't get it through in her administration, I thinly DOE will go back to just what it was before. And then there's not much hope for humanity.
Synapse: Could you comment on the human experimentation that was conducted?
Gofman: I think it was unethical. And I think that any statements such as, "But the doses were low" — that's a fraud. The doses in Cal 1, Cal 2, and Cal 3 [the three people who received injections of plutonium at UC Med Center] were very high — 11,000 rems to the bone for Albert Stevenson [Cal 1]. Albert Stevenson was injected with a huge dose of plutonium at UC Hospital because he had a supposed cancer of the stomach. Now some are saying, "Well, we didn't know whether plutonium could hurt anybody." They should watch out, because they're going to be caught in a lie of profound proportions.
The radiations that we have are x-rays, gamma rays, beta rays, alpha particles, and neutrons. Neutrons you only get near a bomb or a reactor. Alpha particles are emitted by many elements high in the periodic table as you get up above lead: uranium, thorium, protoactinium, neptunium, plutonium — all are alpha particle emitters. An alpha particle is a plus-2 charged helium atom in high-speed motion. We describe them by how much energy they're carrying off from the emission. Four and a half million electron-volts — 4.7, 5.2 — the various alpha emitters are all in that range. And you can say that what one alpha emitter does, any alpha emitter will do if it gets to the same place. So for somebody to say, "We didn't know about the alpha particles from plutonium." It's the same as saying "We know how it works in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, but what about Peoria?"
In the '20s we had a radium-dial painting industry to paint the dials of wristwatches and clocks. Women sat at tables with a little pot of radium paint, painting these dials by hand. Their brushes would get diffuse and they'd take the brush and twirl it in their mouths to get a fine tip to paint with. And these women came up with the most horrible bone destruction due to the alpha particles from radium in their bone. Osteogenic sarcomas. It was all written up by 1929, by Harrison Martland, the coroner in New Jersey who examined their bodies. The whole world knew that alpha particles from radium had done this to humans. Now an alpha particle, really, doesn't ask who its mother or father was. An alpha particle is an alpha particle.
In Germany and Czechoslovakia there are regions where it was long known that 50 to 75 percent of the miners died of what was called "mountain sickness." In the late 19th century Hartung and Hesse discovered that this mountain disease was lung cancer. In the 1930s, Peller and another group determined that the reason for the lung cancer in the miners was breathing radon with alpha particles from the uranium in the mines. So alpha particles had been proven to produce cancer. So to say that the effects of alpha particles from plutonium were unknown — it's just not true.
The AEC, which approved of some of that experimentation, knew precisely what the results would be.
Merril Eisenbund, a pro-nuclear environmentalist, was working for the AEC in 1947. He went out west to inspect what was going on in the uranium mines in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. He came back and wrote a report saying the mines are not being ventilated, and if we don't get them ventilated, we're going to have a lung-cancer epidemic worse than Germany and Czechoslovakia. He was told to move over to another division, never to say anything more about the mining situation in Colorado. The mine operators were not informed, the mine workers were not informed, and we had the lung-cancer epidemic that had been predicted.
The AEC knew all this. Can you tell me there's any evidence that the AEC, ERDA or DOE ever gave a damn about human health? They were the same people who approved the human experimentation. And to try to justify it in the name of the Cold War and things like that, that's ridiculous. The Cold War did not require knowing where plutonium went in people's bodies!
Synapse: Do you think the mechanisms that are in place today, such as the human subject committees, are sufficient to keep this kind of research from taking place?
Gofman: I think they're better than having no committees, and that [unethical experimentation] is not as likely now. But it just seems to me that when grants are involved, and the prestige of the institution is involved, if some research is exciting but maybe off-color, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the committees would overlook it. I'm not impressed by the integrity and forthrightness of the medical establishment. I wouldn't have said this 10, 15 years ago, but today, when I look at an article in a medical journal — peer review means nothing to me, that's just an old boys' club — I say to myself, "Why should I believe this?" I've watched stuff get in that was peer reviewed that was absolute rubbish, and they had to know that it was absolute rubbish.
I just have lost my confidence in their integrity. A case in point. I recently read a study that if you treat breast cancer by lumpectomy and radiation, that's better than without the radiation. How carefully was that study set up? Who oversaw the choice of people and the outcomes? It's a very important issue. If you irradiate the chest of women who've had lumpectomies, with the kind of doses they're giving, you will produce a lot of cancers in the future. Not necessarily the cancer they had, but you're going to produce new cancers. Those new cancers are going to come 10, 15 years from now. If indeed the radiation prevents [patients] from dying of the original cancer, which would have killed them in a year or two, then I say, with their fully informed knowledge, they may choose to take the radiation therapy. But I really want to be sure that the data collected on this benefit is right. So my answer to your question is: I hope it's better; I think it's better than it was; I would like to see better mechanisms still, that didn't involve grants and the prestige of the university when the university passes on whether research is okay.
Synapse: What do you know about the release of radiation at Hanford, Washington that, it now turns out, was many times worse than Three Mile Island?
Gofman: When it became known that there had been these big releases, the government finally promised to own up. So a big study is in process now, it's called the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, fully funded by the government. And they're trying to involve the Indian tribes, and various downwinders. The amount of iodine released at Three Mile Island was estimated at 15 curies — Iodine-131. The amount of iodine first estimated on this Hanford reconstruction was 425,000 curies. The most recent estimate has it up to 725,000 curies. I calculated the true release of radioiodine from Chernobyl at 12.3 million curies. So the amount that was released at Hanford can cause a lot of trouble.
Synapse: What kind of trouble? What does radioiodine do?
Gofman: In big enough doses it produces thyroid cancer and severe hypothyroidism. In 1992, Kazakov, Demidchik, and Astaskhova of Minsk put out a paper in Nature saying, "We have 131 cases of thyroid cancer in Byelorus alone (since Chernobyl). The curve started up in '89-'90, and the curve is staying up there." This has now been confirmed in Ukraine. After the paper in Nature came out, a UN team went there to check their diagnoses, and confirmed that they were right in 102 out of 104 cases. And still, Shigematsu and Thiessen (of the Japanese-DOE Radiation Effects Research Foundation), had a letter in the next issue of Nature saying "We can't really trust this, these cases are coming up too soon, they're not really thyroid cancer. Maybe they're looking harder now..." And in the Journal of Nuclear Medicare some of the nuclear pundits ridiculed the word from Byelorus. These people never stop!...
There will inevitably be thyroid cancer from the releases at Hanford, Washington. Whether they'll be able to reconstruct it and admit it I don't know...
There's an investigator named Holm at a Swedish hospital. They've done 38,000 radioiodine scans to test thyroid function. He wrote a series of papers showing that even though people got 50 rads to the thyroid, there was no excess of thyroid cancer. When I first heard about it I thought, "Wow, you can give 50 rads to the thyroid and cause no cancers? Does it mean I'm wrong?" And this was trumpeted an over the United Nations Atomic Effects Committee and everybody in the establishment cites it. Well, I analyzed those papers — I devoted a chapter to it in my 1990 book (Radiation-Induced Cancer from Low-Dose Exposure). And you know what this guy did?
He threw 135 cancers out of the study, because they occurred before five years had elapsed. He said, "We know they can't occur before five years." The evidence in Byelorus is that they're coming in four, five, six years after the exposure. If you take the 135 cases and add them back, you've got a big effect from radioiodine.
That's what's being said about radioiodine: not to worry, no problem.
Synapse: How do they refute your analysis?
Gofman: They're smart — they don't refer to it.
NEITHER DOES MAINSTREAM MEDIA, THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY OR THOSE SELL-OUTS LIKE BUESSLER.
OBVIOUSLY, THE BASTARDS ARE STILL LYING ABOUT FUKUSHIMA RADIATION.
THE TRUTH, THE FACTS ARE OUT THERE FOR ANYONE WHO TRULY WANTS THEM, EVEN AFTER 8 YEARS OF COVER-UPS.
___________________________
UPDATE, JUNE 11, 2019
ABE'S 6-MINUTES AT FUKUSHIMA.
ASAHI SHIMBUN EXPOSES HIS DISHONESTY AND THE CONTINUING COVER-UPS.
"Abe pushing idea that Fukushima nuclear disaster is ‘under control"
Without special protection against radiation, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stood on elevated ground about 100 meters from the three melted-down reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
“I was finally able to see the view just wearing a normal suit without having to wear protective clothing and a mask (for radiation),” he said on April 14 after hearing explanations from Tokyo Electric Power Co. officials. “The decommissioning work has been making progress in earnest.”
An act of bravado, perhaps.
But radiation levels in certain areas of the plant are still lethal with extended exposure. The problem of storing water contaminated in the reactors continues.
And only recently was TEPCO able to make contact with melted nuclear fuel in the reactors through a robot. The means to extract the fuel has yet to be decided.
[NOTE: TEPCO CONSTATLY STATES IT WILL TAKE AT LEAST 40 YEARS TO STOP THE LEAKS AND DECOMMISSION THE REACTORS. FUKUHIMA WILL NEVER BE OVER WITH BECAUSE THE WORLD ALLOWS ABE TO CONTINUE THE LIES, STALLING AND HIS DISREGARD FOR HUMAN LIFE.]
However, the government keeps touting progress in the reconstruction effort, using evacuee statistics, which critics say are misleading, to underscore its message.
Abe’s previous visit to the nuclear plant was in September 2013.
Officials in Abe’s circle acknowledged that they wanted to “appeal the progress of reconstruction” by letting the media cover the prime minister’s “unprotected” visit to the site.
The inspection ground where Abe stood, 35 meters above sea level, and the insides of buses are the only places in the area where protective clothing and masks are not required.
His visit in a business suit was possible largely because the ground was covered in mortar and other materials that prevent the spread of radioactive substances, not because decommissioning work has lowered radiation levels as a whole.
The radiation level at the elevated inspection ground still exceeds 100 microsieverts per hour, making it dangerous for people who remain there for extended periods.
Abe’s inspection ended in six minutes.
[DON'T THEY MEAN MILLISIEVERTS?***]
According to the Reconstruction Agency, the number of people who evacuated in and outside of Fukushima Prefecture, including those who were under no orders to leave, peaked at about 160,000. But the initial evacuation orders for 11 municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture have been gradually lifted, and the agency now puts the total number at about 40,000. [NOTE: THIS NUMBER IS INCORRECT, AS ASAHI POINTS OUT.]
About 71,000 people were officially registered as residents of areas that were ordered to evacuate. Now, only about 11,000 people live in those zones.
This means that about 60,000 people have not returned to the homes where they were living before the nuclear accident unfolded in March 2011.
Many people bought homes in new locations during their prolonged evacuations although they still hope to return to their hometowns in the disaster area.
Yumiko Yamazaki, 52, has a house in Okuma in a “difficult-to-return” zone.
But because she moved to public restoration housing outside of the town, she is not considered an evacuee by the agency and the prefecture.
“I had to leave my town although I didn’t want to,” Yamazaki said. “It is so obvious that the government wants to make the surface appearance look good by reducing the number of evacuees.”
“I can’t allow them to try to pretend the evacuation never happened,” Yamazaki said.
Critics say the central government’s emphasis of positive aspects and the downplaying of inconvenient truths in the evacuee statistics have much in common with its response to the suspected nepotism scandals involving school operator Moritomo Gakuen and the Kake Educational Institution.
“This is an act to socially hide the real number of evacuees, which could lead to a cover-up of the seriousness of the incident,” said Akira Imai, chief researcher of the Japan Research Institute for Local Government who has conducted surveys among evacuees. The current situation should be reflected properly in the numbers."
---end article---
The reactors are releasing particles of Plutonium, Cesium-137 and Strontium-90.
If one should inhale or ingest a particle into the body, the immediate tissue surrounding the particle is irradiated at one trillion times the safe dosage.
___________________________
SEE ALSO:
NUCLEAR WITNESSES:
https://ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/nwJWG.html
Committee For Nuclear Responsibility
https://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/
THE PLOWBOY INTERVIEW WITH GOFMAN
https://ratical.org/radiation/CNR/PlowboyIntrv.html
"So a kind of secrecy curtain came down, and people working with nuclear radiation suddenly quit talking about their experiments.
The government soon became interested in developing an atomic bomb, and began funding research through the Manhattan Project. In connection with that study--again at Glenn Seaborg's suggestion--I began to work with Art Wahl on the chemistry of elements 93 and 94: neptunium and plutonium.
By 1942 I'd become head of a group, in Berkeley, which was developing methods of isolating plutonium from uranium atoms that had been bombarded with neutrons. At the time there was so little plutonium that our research team had never even seen the element. But we were assuming that the proposed atomic reactors would indeed work . . . in which case there'd be a good bit of plutonium created, and there would be a need for methods to isolate enough to fuel a bomb.
There was a war on, and I didn't see any immediate prospects of going back into medical school, so I was actually quite happy to be able to work on the Manhattan Project. Then Art Wahl asked me whether I'd like to join the group of scientists who were going--with physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer--to Los Alamos, New Mexico . . . to work on building the actual bomb. I approached Oppenheimer about the matter, and he said, "We'd be delighted to have you as a chemist on this project, but I have to tell you one thing: Because of the enormous secrecy of this work, anyone who goes with us to Los Alamos will be cut off from communication with the outside world for the duration of the war."
MANY, MANY MORE SUCH ARTICLES:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fratical.org%2Fradiation%2FCNR%2FRIC%2FcontentsF.html%23section5&t=ffsb&ia=web
The Alaska Dispatch reports:
Scores of dead and sick ringed seals — some with open wounds, unusual hair loss and internal ulcers — … began washing up in summer 2011 in Western Alaska.
Even today, a few seals continue to trickle ashore, biologists said. But the cause of the illness remains a mystery, despite an international effort to identify it. Some people believe radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in Japan in March 2011 is a factor. That’s never been proven. It hasn’t been disqualified, either.
A lack of radiation sampling in remote regions after the explosion means no one knows how much airborne radiation fell into the Bering Sea ice, or whether seals were in the vicinity of any fallout, said Doug Dasher, a researcher with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
If the seals did ingest radiation, much of it would have been excreted out of the body before the testing of the carcasses that occurred several months after the incident, he said. Such testing found radiation levels similar to those found in the mid 1990s.
SEE THE PHOTOS OF THOSE ON ONE OF MY OTHER BLOGS, <HERE>.
***The sievert unit quantifies the amount of radiation absorbed by human tissues.
One sievert is 1,000 millisieverts (mSv). One millisievert is 1,000 microsieverts.
A typical dental x-ray emits about 10 microsieverts.
A chest X-ray gives off 400 to 600 microsieverts of radiation.
A whole body CT scan gives a much higher radiation dose – about 15 to 20 millisieverts, while a single organ CT involves a dose of about 10 millisieverts.
100 millisieverts a year is the lowest level at which any increase in cancer risk is CLEARLY evident.
A cumulative 1,000 mSv over a LIFETIME would be expected to cause a fatal cancer many years later in five out of every 100 persons with that kind of exposure.
Flying at 40,000 feet, meanwhile, exposes one to radiation of between 3 and 9 microsieverts per hour.
//WW
