--Photograph: Sutton-Hibbert
“It’s a real shame that the authorities hide the truth from the whole world, from the UN. We need to admit that actually many people are dying. We are not allowed to say that, but TEPCO employees also are dying. But they keep mum about it.”
(Source: Katsutaka Idogawa, former mayor of Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture in "Fukushima Disaster: Tokyo Hides Truth as Children Die, Become Ill from Radiation" – Ex-Mayor, RT News, April 21, 2014)
“The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in a town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers; others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains. They were simply labeled “decontamination troops” — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside.”
(Source: Mari Yamaguchi, Fukushima ‘Decontamination Troops’ Often Exploited, Shunned, AP & ABC News, Minamisona, Japan, March 10, 2016)
For inexplicable reasons (actually explicable but a long story), nuclear accidents are given 'Get Out Jail Free' cards by the world’s press and associated governmental orgs and NGOs.
Yet, over time, the truth comes out, and when it does it’s dreadfully atrocious.
Of course, it is important to take note of how “wordsmiths” describe the death numbers, i.e., “died as an immediate result of Chernobyl (Fukushima, Three Mile, Hanford, etc) ” can only include someone standing at the site when it happened, leaving out all cases of radiation exposure that kills and cripples over subsequent days, months, and years.
Belarus had 99,693 cleanup workers in 1986. Thousands have since died from their work there.
By 2008 in Belarus alone 40,049 liquidators or cleanup workers of Chernobyl were registered with cancer, and ONLY 5% of cleanup survivors are "healthy", according to the Russian Academy of Sciences AND Ukranian authorities.
WHY THE HELL CAN'T JAPAN BE EVEN HALF THAT HONEST?
AS THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTE SAID IN 2011,
"So far, Japan’s government has exhibited lack of leadership and largely failed to manage the crisis effectively.
It is a matter of record that in 2002 TEPCO admitted to falsifying the results of safety tests on reactor one’s containment vessel.
In previous decades, the company had doctored reactor shroud safety records.
In 2003, TEPCO prohibited inspectors from visiting reactors and later acknowledged that it systematically covered-up inspection data that showed cracks in reactors.
Following a relatively small earthquake in 2007, a fire ensued at another nuclear plant, and TEPCO masked the fact that hundreds of gallons of radioactive water leaked out.
Making matters worse, TEPCO’s response to the ongoing nuclear crisis has been seriously flawed.
Regulatory Failure: The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant crisis is exposing the extent to which Japan’s powerful nuclear industry has been subject to lax oversight, or worse.
Lax oversight of existing regulations is also to blame.
In 2004, five workers were killed at a nuclear plant when super-heated steam punctured a pipe. It was later discovered that the pipe had not been inspected in 28 years.
In 2007, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) forced companies to reveal unreported safety breaches.
Ultimately, seven out of 12 public utilities admitted to falsifying records."
NOTHING HAS CHANGED IN ALMOST 9 LONG YEARS, EXCEPT THINGS HAVE GOTTEN MUCH WORSE.
From the South Korean News Agency 'Arirang News', Updated: 2019-10-18:
Japanese media report that traces of radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant have been found in various places following the season's strongest typhoon, Hagibis.
The Tokyo Shimbun reported Friday that ten bags that had contained radioactive waste were found empty along the Furumichi River, indicating that the contents had spilled out.
Those are understood to be some of the bags that the nearby city of Tamura said earlier this week were swept away by the storm's heavy rain.
Meanwhile, two other villages in Fukushima Prefecture, Kawauchi and Nihonmatsu, say they found a total of 33 bags downstream and two of them were empty.
The Japanese government had collected about 30 million tons of radioactive debris after the nuclear disaster in March 2011.
The Tokyo Shimbun also pointed out that the authorities had not managed the nuclear waste facilities properly.
According to local media, four of the temporary storage units in Gunma and Fukushima Prefectures have been made inaccessible because of landslides and floods, so workers cannot even inspect them.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened.
In 2015, around 240 bags of contaminated waste from the Fukushima plant went missing in similar circumstances when the region was hit by torrential rain.
WHY DON'T THEY EVER LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES?
THOSE WHO MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES CONTINUOUSLY CANNOT BE TRUSTED.
THEY EVEN ALLOWED ENTIRE BULLET TRAINS TO REMAIN IN A KNOWN FLOOD-PRONE AREA AND BE LOST, WHEN THEY COULD HAVE BEEN MOVED TO HIGHER GROUND.
Reported from Tokyo, Oct. 15, 2019:
"East Japan Railway Co. said its Hokuriku Shinkansen bullet train services connecting Tokyo and Kanazawa were reduced because of flooding of six trains at its railyard in Nagano.
The trains sat in a pool of muddy water that was up to their windows.
Questions have been raised about the site of the rail yard, which sits in an area noted on a prefectural hazard map as a flood area.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the operator's preparedness should be investigated later but the priority is to get the trains out of the water. Some water has been pumped out, but more than half of the rail yard is still underwater.
In Fukushima, 11 bags containing radioactive soil and debris removed as part of decontamination efforts from the 2011 meltdown of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant were washed from two outdoor temporary storage sites and found downstream, the Environment Ministry said.
A massive number of such bags are still being kept at 760 similar sites across Fukushima. Their transfer to a longer-term storage facility near the plant is expected to be completed by March 2022.
Some 34,000 homes were without power and 110,000 lacked running water.
More than 30,000 people were still at shelters as of late Monday, according to the Cabinet Office's latest tally.
Kyodo News agency, citing its own tally, put the death toll at 69."
SCORCHING HEAT AND RADIATION FOR THE OLYMPICS
OCTOBER 18, 2019
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be held from July 24th to August 9th next year.
At that time of the year, highs in the Japanese capital can hit a sweltering 40 degrees Celsius.
During the same period this year, around 50 people died due to the intense heat and thousands were hospitalized.
In order to protect athletes from the scorching heat, the International Olympic Committee has announced plans to shift the location of the marathon and the walking races to Sapporo, Hokkaido, a cooler northern island in Japan.
Some 800 kilometers north of Tokyo, the region is, on average, five degrees Celsius cooler than the capital.
The IOC's sudden announcement is causing headaches for the 2020 organizers as they had already scheduled tours taking in spots along the original marathon course and had been preparing to promote it worldwide.
"The plan to move those events from Tokyo to Sapporo was a bit of surprise. To be honest, we only received this news several days ago."
There are also growing concerns about radiation.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe previously insisted the crippled Fukushima power plant was nothing to worry about when Tokyo was bidding for the Games in 2013.
However, with Typhoon Hagibis striking Fukushima, Japan's poor management of the contaminated waste was laid bare.
Despite forecasts predicting torrential downpours, storage was not sufficient to stop an unknown number of bags containing contaminated waste from floating away and disappearing.
Local officials insist the incident will not affect the environment, but half of the bags that were retrieved were found to be empty.
THE BIGGEST LIE?
Updated: FEB. 10, 2017
Based on analysis of the images from robot-mounted cameras, the radiation reading inside the No. 2 reaction at the No. 1 nuclear plant was 650 sieverts an hour.
[NOTE: TEPCO LATER ADMITTED THAT THE SHIELDING WAS CLOSED ON THE CAMERA AND THAT THIS READING WAS "LIKELY" HIGHER. THE ROBOT WAS SUPPOSEDLY DESIGNED TO WITHSTAND RADIATION LEVELS UP TO 1000 SIEVERTS AN HOUR. RADIATION HAD TO HAVE EXCEEDED THAT AS THE ROBOT FAILED IN UNDER 2 HOURS.]
During a similar probe late last month (January, 2017), Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) estimated the radiation in the primary containment vessel to be 530 sieverts an hour.
The robot entered the reactor on Thursday for the first time since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami …to inspect and clean a passage before further examinations.
Despite the off-the-chart figures, which can kill a person almost instantly, TEPCO officials insist radiation is not leaking outside of the utility."
Getting basic data about where the nuclear fuel is located, however, is critical to beginning the 40-year decommissioning process in earnest. “Confirming the conditions inside the reactor is a first step toward decommissioning,” Hiroshige Seko Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry said in a news conference.
[WHAT HE'S SAYING IS THAT WE CAN ALL EXPECT AT LEAST ANOTHER 40 YEARS OF RADIATION LEAKS, ERRORS, WITHHELD FACTS, FAILURES, EXCUSES AND LIES.]
In an earlier article in The Guardian, Justin McCurry reported that three previous attempts to place a robot inside reactor No 2 failed when radiation fried the gadgets.
The previous high in the reactor was 73 sieverts an hour, recorded in 2012, reported The Japan Times.
Japan Times also stated that "The actual condition of the melted fuel remains unknown because the radiation is too high to check it.
"Similar remote investigations are being planned for Daiichi Units 1 and 3.
We should not be surprised if even higher radiation levels are found there, but only actual measurements will tell."
One sievert—the international measurement of radiation exposure—is enough to cause radiation sickness, infertility and cataracts.
[NOTE: STUDIES THAT COVER DECADES IN JAPAN HAVE SHOWN A STEEP DECLINE IN BIRTH RATE AND DECREASED FERTILITY. "The Japan Ageing Research Centre in Tokyo predicted that the nation's total fertility rate will fall to 1.16 in 2020."
COULD SO MANY NUCLEAR REACTORS, SO MUCH LEAKED RADIATION FROM VENTING, 'RECYCLED' COOLING WATER AND UNREVEALED LEAKS HAVE CAUSED THIS CRISIS?
IS IT A 'GLITCH' IN THEIR DNA HANDED DOWN FROM HIROSHIMA/NAGASAKI?
WE MAY NEVER KNOW.]
Exposure to 10 sieverts will lead to a person’s death within weeks, McCurry reported."
THE PROBLEM WITH THAT IS THAT NEITHER TEPCO NOR THE ABE GOVERNMENT IS ALLOWING FOREIGN RESEARCHERS OR REPORTERS ONSITE WITHOUT TEPCO AT THEIR SIDES.
HOW WILL WE EVER KNOW THE TRUTH?
THAT LEVELS ROSE FROM A LETHAL 73 SIEVERTS TO AT LEAST 650 SIEVERTS DIDN'T SEEM TO PHASE JAPANESE OFFICIALS AT ALL. THEY MADE LIGHT OF IT.
THEY ALSO BADGERED INTERNATIONAL NEWS AGENCIES TO EDIT THESE NEW FINDINGS TO SAY THAT IT DOES NOT 'NECESSARILY' MEAN RADIATION IS STEADILY INCREASING AT THE REACTOR SITES.
I CALL A LOUD "B-S" ON THAT!
OF COURSE THEY'RE CONSTANTLY RISING.
THE DAMNABLE CORIUM ISN'T GOING TO STOP EMITTING RADIATION JUST BECAUSE ABE AND TEPCO WISH IT WOULD!
EVERYTHING NEAR THOSE MELTED PILES OF FUEL IS DAILY ABSORBING AND SPREADING RADIATION.
ALL OFFICIALS THERE NEED A HEFTY DOSE OF HARSH REALITY...AND INTERVENTION BY AN INTERNATIONAL TEAM THAT CAN DO SOMETHING TO FIND AND CONTAIN WHAT IS NOW OUT OF CONTAINMENT.
ABE'S SILENT NUCLEAR WAR NEEDS TO BE ENDED BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.
CBS NEWS
NOV. 25, 2018
Three reactors melted down, creating up to 3,000 tons of deadly radioactive fuel and debris that lays in the plant’s ruins.
Daiichi can’t be encased in concrete, like Chernobyl, says Barrett, because the potential for another earthquake or tsunami that could compromise the structure is too high.
Humans can’t get near the material; it will remain deadly for thousands of years.
Authorities hope specially designed robots will find, remove and secure the toxic material in special containment vessels.
But it could take 50 years and cost an estimated $200 billion.
Lesley Stahl: Why not just bury this place? Why not do what they did at Chernobyl? Just cover it up, bury it, and just leave it here all-- you know, enclosed?
Lake Barrett: Number one this is right next to the sea. We're 100 yards from the ocean. We have typhoons here in Japan. This is also a high earthquake zone. And there's gonna be future earthquakes. So these are unknowns that the Japanese and no one wants to deal with.
Lesley Stahl: How many tons of radioactive waste was developed here?
Lake Barrett: Probably 500 to 1,000 tons in each building.
Lesley Stahl: So how long will it be lethal?
Lake Barrett: It will be lethal for thousands of years.
Lesley Stahl: What we're talking about really is three meltdowns?
Lake Barrett: Yes. It was truly Hell on Earth.
At the plant they're capturing contaminated groundwater, about 150 tons a day, and storing it in tanks, as far as the eye can see.
Lake Barrett: Water is always the major challenge here. And it's going to remain a major challenge until the entire cores are removed.
One robot, called the Scorpion for its ability to raise its camera-carrying tail, struck debris and became stuck only ten feet into its $100 million mission.
We went with a team of TEPCO workers to unit three, one of the reactors that melted down on that March day, seven years ago, that the Japanese call, simply 3/11.
AS THEY STEP INTO UNIT 3...
Lake Barrett: These are shield plates (on the floor) because there's cesium in the ground.
Lesley Stahl: There's this number I've been seeing, 566.
Lake Barrett: Right. That's telling you the radiation level that we're in. It's fairly high here. That's why we're gonna be here a short time.
Lesley Stahl: How close are you and I, right this minute, to the core?
Lake Barrett: The-- the melted cores are about 70 feet that way.
Lesley Stahl: Seventy from here--
Lake Barrett: Correct, that's right over in here. We don't know quite where other than it fell down into the floor.
Lesley Stahl: So if you sent a worker in right now to find it, how long would they survive?
Lake Barrett: No one is gonna send a worker in there because they'd be overexposed in just a matter of seconds.
Lesley Stahl: This is gonna take you said decades with an "S." How many decades?
Lake Barrett: We don't know for sure. The goal here is 40-- 30-- 40 years. You know, I personally think it may be even 50-- 60, but it's--
Lesley Stahl: Oh, maybe longer.
Lake Barrett: It, well, it may be longer.
AND IT MAY BE NEVER.
WHARTON UNIVERSITY ASSESSMENT, OCT. 3, 2013: FUKUSHIMA'S ACCIDENT WAS MAN-MADE.
"Three widely cited investigations of the Fukushima disaster — one by the Japanese government, one by an independent team of experts in Japan and a third by The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — have now concluded that the nuclear disaster of March 2011 was not, as it first seemed, the inevitable result of events no one could have predicted.
“It was a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented,” said Kiyoshi Kurokawa, chairman of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, established by the National Diet of Japan.
In the midst of chaos, leaders should stop looking for control and start looking for answers."
JAPAN'S GOVERNMENT HAS MANAGED TO WHINE, BULLY, PLAY THE VICTIM, LIE AND COERCE ITS WAY OUT OF TOTAL ACCOUNTABILITY AND SHOWS NO REAL, CONSISTENT CONCERN FOR CLEANING UP ITS HUMAN-CAUSED DISASTER, ITS FAILURE TO SAFEGUARD THE WORLD'S PEOPLE FROM A NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST.
WHO WILL HAVE THE INTESTINAL FORTITUDE TO FINALLY CALL ABE AND TEPCO TO TASK AND INTERVENE, ON BEHALF OF ALL HUMANITY, TO END THIS NIGHTMARE?
OBVIOUSLY, THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND ITS "PROTECTION' AGENCIES (NRC, EPA, FDA, ETC) DON'T INTEND TO DO ANYTHING BUT HAND OUT EXCUSES FOR THE CONTINUED POISONING OF EARTH'S ENVIRONMENT.
I HAVE TO IMAGINE THAT RUSSIA JUST MIGHT HAVE SOME REAL SOLUTIONS, OR THAT EVEN CHINA AND SOUTH KOREA, SO NEAR THAT AREA, CAN FIND BETTER WAYS TO END IT.
I LOOK INTO THE FACES OF MY GRANDCHILDREN AND GREAT-GRANDCHILD AND AM IN DAILY ANGUISH AS TO WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR THEM WHEN THIS UNHEARD-OF LEVEL OF RADIATION CONTINUES FOR DECADES, BIOACCUMULATING IN THE WORLD'S FOOD CHAIN, RAINING DOWN ON US FROM THE ATMOSPHERE, SENT ALOFT OVER AND OVER AGAIN FROM OPEN-AIR BURNING OF RADIOACTIVE WASTE MATERIAL, FROM THOSE MILLIONS OF BAGS OF WASTE, FROM SOIL AND FORESTS AND MOUNTAINS THAT CAN NEVER, EVER BE "DECONTAMINATED", FROM THE CURSED NUCLEAR PLANT ITSELF, ALL DAY, EVERY DAY.
IT GRIEVES ME TO MY CORE THAT NOTHING MORE IS BEING DONE.
WHAT IF ALL OF US WITH CHILDREN, GRANDCHILDREN, LOVED ONES SHOUTED TO ABE AND HIS TROUPE, "FIX IT NOW, DAMN YOU! CANCEL THE OLYMPICS, CANCEL EVERYTHING EXCEPT ENDING THIS NOW, OR WE WILL, BYALLTHEGODS, TAKE MATTERS INTO OUR OWN HANDS!"
TEPCO AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS REFUSE TO LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES, REFUSE TO BE HONEST, REFUSE TO ALLOW OUTSIDE INSPECTIONS OF THE SITE WITHOUT ACCOMPANIMENT BY JAPANESE OFFICIALS.
THE ENTIRE WORLD SHOULD BOYCOTT, SANCTION, STAND UP TO JAPAN AND CEASE MAKING EXCUSES FOR THE REPEATED FAILURES.
MAYBE THAT WOULD CAUSE THE PEOPLE OF JAPAN TO DEMAND FOREIGN SOLUTIONS TO THIS DISASTER, NO MATTER WHAT THE COST.
THE ABE REGIME SHOULD NOT BE REWARDED FOR POISONING THE PLANET AND FOR USING A NUCLEAR PLANT AS A STATIONARY NUCLEAR WEAPON OF WAR!
_____________________________
FURTHER READING:
-- LIES ABOUT DEATHS AND CANCER RATES
By 2008 in Belarus alone 40,049 liquidators or cleanup workers of Chernobyl were registered with cancer.
As of January 2018, 1.8 million people in Ukraine, including 377,589 children, carried a status of 'victims of the disaster', according to Sushko and his colleagues.
According to a USA Today article – Chernobyl’s Legacy: Kids With Bodies Ravaged by Disaster, April 17, 2016: “There are 2,397,863 people registered with Ukraine’s health ministry to receive ongoing Chernobyl-related health care.
Of these, 453,391 are children — none born at the time of the accident.
Their parents were children in 1986.
These children have a range of illnesses: respiratory, digestive, musculoskeletal, eye diseases, blood diseases, cancer, congenital malformations, genetic abnormalities, trauma.” Many of the children are hidden away deep in the forested countryside in orphanages in Belarus.
Today, after Fukushima, there are numerous instances of governmental meddling to hide the truth, starting with passage of the 2013 government secrecy act, The State Secrecy Law, aka: Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets (SDS), Act No. 108, which says that civil servants or others who “leak secrets” will face up to 10 years in prison, and those who “instigate leaks,” especially journalists, will be subject to a prison term of up to 5 years.
Subsequently, Japan fell below Serbia and Botswana in the Reporters Without Borders 2014 World Press Freedom Index.
Horrifically, at the end of the day, when nuclear goes bad, it takes everyone along on a daunting trip for years and years and more years, outliving life spans but continuing generation after generation, like the 453,391 Chernobyl-radiated-influence children born after the nuclear blowout in 1986. Chernobyl altered their genes before they were born
FUKUSHIMA WILL NOT BE 'OVER' FOR CENTURIES, IF EVER, AND WE HAVE NOT BEGUN TO SEE ITS DEVASTATION ON OUR CHILDREN, AND THEIRS.
-- The overall radiation release from the plant is staggering – 770,000 terabecquerels in the wake of the accident and a billion becquerels still being added each day while engineers struggle to seal the broken containment structure.
There is not much the people can do about it. Full-body scans – promised by the government – will take time. Checking the radiation in every item of food is almost impossible, but one group is trying to help out. The Citizen's Radiation Monitoring Station in Fukushima – which has been set up by the journalist Ryuichi Hirokawa – offers free grocery checks. It is a slow process. Each item must be peeled, ground or grated, bagged and then placed in an LB 200 Becquerel Monitor for 20 minutes.
Akiko Sakuma drove from two hours away to test the potatoes in her allotment. "It's terrifying. I think about the radiation every day," she says and shows me a notebook in which she meticulously records the doses to which she is exposed. When it snowed after the explosion on 15 March, the level was over 100 microsieverts per hour – equivalent to 1 x-ray. She said she suffered headaches and nosebleeds. "I want to run away to Tokyo, but there is no work. I could never understand why people in Chernobyl didn't flee, but now I'm in the same situation."
WHAT DO THE UNBORN FACE?
Due to give birth next month, Mari Ishimori, another pregnant evacuee in Tokyo, is now alone.
She avoids eating fish, meat or eggs, and is deeply skeptical about official safety assurances. "I don't trust anything they say. Tokyo Electric and the government have told us so many lies."
"I love my husband, but I will never return to Fukushima," she says over a coffee. "I want my child to have a normal childhood. But if we are in Fukushima, I will have to say, 'You can't touch the ground or touch the leaves or go in the river.' I want my child to grow up without worrying about that, just as I did. That's hard. I'm not sure if my husband and I will live together again."
-- I HOPE YOU WILL READ AN ARTICLE ABOUT AN INDEPENDENT STUDY LED BY A FORMER EDITOR OF ONE OF JAPAN'S MOST POPULAR NEWS AGENCIES AND SEE WHAT HIS RESEARCH FOUND.
The culture of Japan's "nuclear village."
Yoichi Funabashi, a former journalist who once headed one of Japan's leading news organizations, decided what was needed was a truly independent investigation.
In its months of interviews and inquiries, the commission found plenty of failures of design and performance behind the meltdowns. But, Funabashi says, the biggest problem the commission identified wasn't with technology — it was with the culture of Japan's "nuclear village."
It was a culture, Funabashi says, in which “regulators pretended to regulate, [and] operators pretended to be regulated.”
Funabashi describes this "nuclear village" as a closed world of nuclear power plant operators and regulators in Japan — impervious to public scrutiny and accountability within Japan, and resistant to innovations and new safety technologies from elsewhere.
Within this bubble, he says, the Japanese nuclear village built up a myth of the absolute safety of the country's plants, and the firm belief that the country’s reactors were the safest and most advanced in the world.
“I think they actually have found themselves caught in their own trap,” says Funabashi."
-- An extensively updated and expanded version of the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident report published in English by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) cautions that Japan has not yet fully learned the lessons of the Fukushima reactor disaster, particularly the several ways in which the “human factor” played a major role paving the way for the crisis and worsening its aftermath.
Concluding with the warning that “Fukushima must never be forgotten,” the new book – “The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Disaster: Investigating the Myth and Reality” was issued on March 11, 2014, the third anniversary of the Fukushima disaster.
https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/updated-fukushima-civilian-panel-report-highlights-largely-unaddressed-human-factors-as-important-as-earthquake-and-tsunami-in-2011-reactor-disaster/
//WW
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