The global Cover-up Of The Worlds Worst Nuclear Disaster

Japan, this week, will switch on a nuclear reactor for the first time since the 2011 Fukushima disaster despite massive public opposition amid government censoring and a campaign to deceive it’s own citizens and the rest of the world in favour of profit against the environment.

The restart of Reactor No. 1 at the Sendai nuclear plant, about 620 miles southwest of Tokyo, comes four and a half years after an earthquake-triggered tsunami caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, leading to the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. In the aftermath of the Fukushima crisis, which led to the displacement of more than 100,000 people, all 43 of the country’s operable commercial nuclear reactors were taken offline.

Fukushima will likely go down, in the end as the biggest cover-up of the 21st Century. Governments and corporations are not leveling with citizens across the world about the risks and dangers that are now emerging.

Two weeks after the Fukushima accident, it was reported that the government responded to the nuclear accident by trying to raise acceptable radiation levels and pretending that radiation is good for you.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government pushed through a state secrets act that curtailed public access to information on the Fukushima nuclear crisis. The new law dramatically expanded the definition of official secrets and journalists convicted under it could be jailed for up to five years as could any state officials, employees of TEPco and whistleblowers.

As an example of how media fails to deal with disaster blowback, here are some Chernobyl facts that have not received enough widespread news coverage:

• Over one million people have already died from Chernobyl’s fallout.
• Additionally, the Rechitsa Orphanage in Belarus has been caring for a very large population of deathly sick and deformed children. Children are 10 to 20 times more sensitive to radiation than adults.
• Zhuravichi Children’s Home is another institution, among many, for the Chernobyl-stricken: “The home is hidden deep in the countryside and, even today, the majority of people in Belarus are not aware of the existence of such institutions” (Source: Chernobyl Children’s Project-UK).
• Approximately seven million people in the Chernobyl vicinity were hit with one of the most potent exposures to radiation in the history of the Atomic Age – how many more will die?
• The exclusion zone around Chernobyl is known as “Death Valley.” It has been increased from 30 to 70 square kilometres. No humans will ever be able to live in the zone again. It is a permanent “dead zone.”

In the meantime. back in the US, some are accusing the Obama administration of downplaying the dangers from Japan in order to avoid the fact that 23 reactors in the US are the same allegedly faulty General Electric model that failed in Fukushima.

Until now, it’s been somewhat of a secret that General Electric designed the six nuclear reactors that were damaged and melted down in Fukushima in 2011. In fact, GE actually manufactured three of the six, while Toshiba built two and Hitachi produced one. This is one of the reasons why the mainstream establishment press has failed to cover this story adequately.

Last autumn, the Sendai reactors became the first to clear safety hurdles imposed by a revamped Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), established after Fukushima. More than two dozen other reactors have applied for a restart. All are now subject to the NRA’s safety checks before they can come back online.

Tuesday’s restart represents a victory for pro-nuclear Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who insists that the Japanese economy needs nuclear energy to supplant expensive oil and gas imports. Earlier this year, the Japanese government set a goal for nuclear power to provide more than 20 percent of the country’s energy needs by 2030. Abe’s approval ratings have collapsed.

News reports have appeared with about 2,000 protesters marching around the heavily guarded Sendai plant to voice their opposition to the reactor restart.

“Past arguments that nuclear plants were safe and nuclear energy was cheap were all shown to be lies,” said writer Satoshi Kamata, one of the demonstration organizers.

He is right. The tragedy at the Fukushima nuclear plant will cost 11.08 trillion yen ($105 billion), twice as much as Japanese authorities predicted at the end of 2011, says a major study. The expenses include radiation clean-up and compensation to residents.

“The costs for the accident are designed to be borne by the people through taxes and utility bills,” said two professors of environment policy at Osaka City University who complied the study.

The shaky political consensus both in Japan, the U.S. and Western Europe is that the crisis at Fukushima has been contained.

The truth is otherwise. Known and documented, the ongoing dumping of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a trigger to a process of global radioactive contamination.

There is some good news though. In Germany, 8 of the country’s 17 nuclear reactors closed by the end of 2012, with all of Germany’s nuclear energy capability scheduled to be turned off by 2022. Italy held a public referendum, where 94 percent of all that voted blocked the building of new nuclear plants. In France, it has been announced that nuclear energy proliferation will be reduced by one-third and in the United States, where nuclear plant development has virtually ceased since the Three Mile Island disaster, discussions to develop new plants virtually stopped after the Fukushima accident.

Why have a number of western countries decided to stop the production of energy by nuclear reactors?

The Japanese government has been obliged to acknowledge that “the severity rating of its nuclear crisis is resulting in a process of global nuclear radiation and contamination. “While Chernobyl was an enormous unprecedented disaster, it only occurred at one reactor and rapidly melted down. Once cooled, it was able to be covered with a concrete sarcophagus that was constructed with 100,000 workers. There are a staggering 4400 tons of nuclear fuel rods at Fukushima, which greatly dwarfs the total size of radiation sources at Chernobyl.”

Fukushima is at least 400 per cent worse than the disaster at Chernobyl and by one estimate is 72,000 times worse than the bombing of Hiroshima.

Japan as a nation state has been destroyed. Its landmass and territorial waters are contaminated. Part of the country is uninhabitable. High levels of radiation have been recorded in the Tokyo metropolitan area, which has a population of 39 million (more than the population of Canada, circa 34 million (2010). There are indications that the food chain is contaminated throughout Japan.

This is the reason why western governments have started rethinking their nuclear policy. We have two examples of a nuclear meltdown. The first killed a million people. The second will kill a lot more.

The crisis in Japan has also brought into the open the unspoken relationship between nuclear energy and nuclear war.

Nuclear energy is not a civilian economic activity. It is an appendage of the nuclear weapons industry which is controlled by the so-called defense contractors. The powerful corporate interests behind nuclear energy and nuclear weapons overlap.

In Japan at the height of the disaster, “the nuclear industry and government agencies were scrambling to prevent the discovery of atomic-bomb research facilities hidden inside Japan’s civilian nuclear power plants”, Fukushima being one of them.

As far as the wider global contamination is concerned – according to a report published in the International Journal of Health, large amounts of airborne radioactivity has been spread throughout other nations and there could have been more than 14,000 deaths in US related to Fukushima already.

The report states that “Some samples of radioactivity in precipitation, air, water, and milk, taken by the U.S. government, showed levels hundreds of times above normal. Yet, the US Food and Drug Administration has done little to stop contaminated food being consumed by it’s citizens.

TEPCO, the Japanese and American authorities along with the nuclear industry more widely, governments worldwide and the mainstream press have conspired to deceive the world in what must now surely be one of the greatest cover-ups in human history for which we will all pay the price. The tactics of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda have been deployed to maximum effect over this appalling event that the entire human species should be working towards redressing.

Article by Graham Vanbergen for TruePublica

 

---