A follow-up to the diary:
Japan Passes Draconian Secrecy Law
Today the East Bay Express newspaper featured an article entitled Fukushima Panic, a thinly-veiled take-down of activists and citizens concerned about radioactive contamination from the Fukushima disaster heading in towards the western coast of North America, and that which has already arrived.
After portraying the activists' concerns with a derisive mention of "blog posts with scary headlines," the reporter [Sam Levin] goes straight to UC Berkeley's Department of Nuclear Engineering to get the pablum-of-the-day dismissals from the usual suspects...
"I haven't seen a single record of anything that would be of concern." [Prof. Edward Morse]
Morse goes on to lob the standard, long-discredited denials that nuclear WMD and reactor meltdown isotopes pose no danger at all to humans and other life forms. Same old same, likening exposures to stray gamma in an airliner and K40 in bananas. Ignoring, as always, the fact that contaminates like cesium and strontium bioaccumulate up the food chain, concentrating up to a thousand times the levels present in the wider environment. And not even mentioning the fact that internal beta/gamma (and even alpha) bombardment of sensitive tissues point blank by isotopes that are uptaken as if they were essential nutrients such as potassium or calcium is known to cause significant biological damage and sometimes lead to soft and hard tissue cancers that stray gamma rays at 30,000 feet don't generally do.
The kindly professor even went so far as to brag about advising a man whose wife was concerned to starve her. Not a nice guy.
He also claims he has no conflicts of interest on the funding end, since he only takes money from DHS [Homeland Security] and the Department of Energy rather than from the nuclear industry directly. How very reassuring. Not.
Control of information to the public about the nuclear disaster and its continuing dangers started early in Japan, according to an article at SKS - Japan's Major Newspapers Have Timely "Scoops" on Government "Suppression". In late March of 2011, while four reactor plants at Daiichi were busy melting, burning and blowing sky high, a government document entitled "For the revival of nuclear power" was produced by officials in the promotional/regulatory divisions reasserting Japan's total dedication to the use and export of nuclear power no matter what the people of Japan think.
The executive summary leads with the statement, "There is no stable energy supply without nuclear power," and "This is to declare the renewed determination by the national government to continue nuclear power." The document was classified even at the time, according to the Asahi Shinbun, which published the story. The emphasis is on the revival of the industry and its bureaucratic promoters/regulators in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry [METI].
The Mainichi Shinbun [via Yahoo News] got hold of a 30-page document from the Cabinet Office via an information disclosure request. The document reports the findings of delegations that spent a few days in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia in February - early March of 2012, as the Diet was drafting the "Children and Disaster Victims Support Act" which was passed in June of that year. That law ostensibly promised support and compensation to all citizens in highly contaminated regions as well as ongoing medical care, but has since been scaled way back so as to leave tens of thousands of displaced and exposed citizens without support. The justification for those scale-backs came from this Cabinet Office document.
It claimed that exposure limits around Chernobyl were "too strict" and that compensation and support systems would serve only to enable a social welfare 'scheme' without benefit to the nation. It was not made public at the time, but was distributed to opponents of the Support Act in the Japanese legislature in an effort to stop the Act from being passed.
The head of the Cabinet Office team was Ikuro Sugawara, Director of General Economic and Industrial Policy Bureau at METI. Sugawara used the report to argue that "...the health effects were exaggerated. So we explained to people by showing the report that the psychological care was more important [than medical care]." Citing once again the Big Lie invented and propagated after the accident at Three Mile Island (7 years before Chernobyl) that any and all health effects that may have 'mimicked' those known to result from radiation exposure were entirely due to the 'stress' of knowing that the accident occurred. Though no medical research in all the past 35 (or 50 or 75) years has ever established the slightest inkling of a correlation between, say, worry about iodine-131 exposure and the later development of thyroid cancer. Which IS known to actually be caused by iodine-131 exposure.
Of course all of the current multi-pronged propaganda efforts and informational crack-downs share the purpose of preventing any possible disruptions in present and future trade alliances that might be caused by public rejection of products from any given TPP national party or the world nuclear industry. Which still rates highly on the 'National Security Interests' scale from its beginnings as a way to make Big Profits while producing and supplying the voracious hunger for plutonium of the nuclear WMD infrastructure(s). Which operated under the acronym "MAD," for Mutual Assured Destruction.
And assured it was, as at its height just the WMDs we were allowed to know about in our own arsenal were enough to kill every man, woman and child more than 400 times over. Giving extra-special meaning to the term "overkill." Compared to that MADness, the ability and eager willingness to render humanity extinct with the push of a button on a moment's notice, the 'problem' of what to do with a high level waste stream positively deadly for 250,000 years was never considered much of a 'problem'. The only reason it's a 'problem' now is that there's no more room in the spent fuel pools, and they still haven't got a 'safer', more remote place to stash it while they keep right on producing more.
Given the willingness to launch extinction of our (and god only knows how many other) species with this technology, it should surprise no one that the world industry and its pet governments are perfectly willing to sacrifice untold numbers of citizens just so they can keep the Death-and-Money machinery going awhile longer. It's a cost-benefit analysis, and the citizens lost to the higher level (much more exclusive) beneficiaries. They just want you not to be 'stressed' about it, since there's nothing they'll allow you to do to change anything. So this time they'll fund the distribution of anti-depressants to the dumped-upon population. Next time they may well simply clamp shut the censorship jaws and not bother to tell you about a disaster in the first place. That way you won't even know enough to get 'stressed' into leukemia or thyroid cancer or liver cancer or lung cancer or... well, you get the hi-def picture.
As the authoritarian information clamp-down takes effect and serves to severely limit what the public is told about... well, pretty much anything governments don't want you to know... the public is best advised to keep in mind that whatever you ARE told about situations of concern is only what the authoritarians have decided to let you know.
Caveat: None of this is to assert that there are any significant short-term dangers to residents of the west coast of North America from the Fuku water plumes. Particularly for those who are willing to avoid fish and other seafood items that bioaccumulate radionuclides in their tissues up to a thousand times the levels in surrounding water. Also bear in mind that the U.S. EPA's arbitrarily (and regularly raised) 'limits' for exposures are 10+ times what Japan's limits are. Nor are they testing Pacific seafood any more carefully than they're testing hamburger for Mad Cow, so don't presume what you're getting has somehow passed muster. We've known for a couple of years already that tuna and kelp harvested off California are contaminated.
Low level atmospheric exposures (higher in rain or snow) from the airborne plumes still circling the globe every 40 days or so will be with us for many years. No concern for iodine at this point apart from your local nuke's dumping, but there's still a lot of other crap up there, occasionally falling out to be inhaled or become part of our food supplies. Practice good health physics housekeeping (dust is NOT your friend) and avoid precipitation, fogs and mists when you can. Most of us will luck out and die of something else before succumbing to cancers/conditions caused by low-level radiation exposures.
Bottom line is that there is good reason supported by facts and historical precedent to distrust 'official' pronouncements about the relative dangers of radioactivity in our air, food and water supplies. Anyone who is concerned for themselves and their loved ones should learn ways to limit exposures, and make those into habitual routines. Those who are not concerned, or who choose to buy whatever self-interested governmental or industry lies are offered, should ignore the whole thing and accept the consequences - if there are any. None of us lives forever, right?
Oh... and no. Concern about exposure to iodine, cesium, strontium, americium, or even plutonium (et al.) does NOT cause radiospecific cancers.