8/17/2012 Radiation Danger Covered Up Ever Since Nuclear Weapons Invented

Source: Washington's Blog
Date: 8/17/2012

Government Has Been Covering up Radiation Danger for 67 Years

The U.S. and other governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for fifty years to protect the nuclear power industry.
It turns out that the U.S. tried to cover up the destructive nature of radiation produced by nuclear weapons 67 years ago. As Democracy Now reports:

The army was well aware in 1943 of the enormous potential for radiation dangers to civilians and military personnel as a result of the use of radioactive weapons ….
[The New York Times] was essentially putting out the official government narrative [regarding the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki], which is that atomic radiation is not harmful, is not a major byproduct of the nuclear weapons program. You know, it’s only the blast that has essentially a very short impact. The reason that this has importance is that for really a half century, this narrative became the government’s response to all protests against nuclear power, the nuclear weapons programs of the 1950s and 1960s and the Cold War. So, [The New York Times] essentially set the table that the government was to occupy for the next half century as they disputed any attempt to rein in, you know, the rapid acceleration of nuclear weapons and power programs.

Nothing has changed. Governments worldwide continue to this day to cover up the amount – and health effects – of radiation released by military and energy facilities.
And the same considerations which drove the cover up in 1945 are still driving it. The archaic uranium reactor designs developed more than 40 years ago are good for making bombs.

8/20/2012 Nuclear Cover-Up Threatens Great Lakes Region [Davis Besse, Palisades]

Source: Counterpunch
Date: August 20, 2012
by: MICHAEL LEONARDI

A CounterPunch Special Report on NRC Collusion With Utilities to Conceal Grave Safety Problems at Davis Besse and Palisades Reactors
According to recent reports from the nuclear watchdog Beyond Nuclear and several Great Lakes environmental organizations, the NRC is up to its usual practices as an industry captured agency.  Collusion and flagrant cover-ups at the Davis Besse nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Erie and at the Palisades nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Michigan have drawn the ire of Congressmen Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Ed Markey of Massachusetts who have called on the NRC’s investigator general to investigate NRC region 3 practices and motivations of the NRC in allowing these plants to operate with grave safety concerns.
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6/27/2012 Fukushima report prompts anger at TEPCO meeting

Source: ABC Radio Australia
Date: 27 June 2012, 11:53 AEST

In its report, TEPCO denies ever hiding information, blames the government for confusion and delays, and rejects suggestions it ever downplayed the seriousness of the meltdowns. (Credit: Reuters)

Anger against the company has intensified, after it released an in-house report into the disaster, in which it denies ever hiding information and blames the Japanese Government for confusion and delays.
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8/21/2011 NY Times: Large Area Of Japan To Be Declared Indefinitely Uninhabitable, Perhaps For Decades

Source: Alexander Higgins Blog
Date: 8/21/2011

In a deceitful article that downplays the extent and severity of the radiation contamination, the NY Times has announced that Japan is expected officially declare a large area of Japan surrounding Fukushima indefinitely uninhabitable, perhaps for decades.
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8/17/2011 U.S. Knew Within Days that Fukushima Had Melted Down

Source: Washington's Blog
Date: Wednesday, August 17, 2011

I noted in May that that International Atomic Energy Agency knew within weeks of the Japanese earthquake that the reactors had melted down ... but the public was not told for a month and a half.
I pointed out in June:

As the prestigious scientific journal Nature notes:

Shortly after a massive tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on 11 March, an unmanned monitoring station on the outskirts of Takasaki, Japan, logged a rise in radiation levels. Within 72 hours, scientists had analysed samples taken from the air and transmitted their analysis to Vienna, Austria — the headquarters of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), an international body set up to monitor nuclear weapons tests.
It was just the start of a flood of data collected about the accident by the CTBTO's global network of 63 radiation monitoring stations. In the following weeks, the data were shared with governments around the world, but not with academics or the public.

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

(Indeed, the government's response to every crisis appears to be to try to cover it up; and see this.)

Today, Yomiuri Shinbun reports (Google translation) that the U.S. knew within days that Fukushima had melted down:

The subject of evacuating the US citizens was raised in the early hours on March 16 (local time). The US ... already knew about the unusually high temperature of the reactors from the Global Hawk data, and determined that “the fuel has already melted”.

***

The US high-ranking officials wanted to evacuate the US citizens [Tokyo] but the local officials including Maher objected, as “it would severely undermine the US-Japan alliance”

(The Global Hawk is an unmanned aerial aircraft).

8/14/2011 Nuclear Expert: Radioactive Rain-Outs Will Continue For a Year - Even In Western U.S. and Canada - Because Japanese Are Burning Radioactive Materials

Source: Washington's Blog
Date: Sunday, August 14, 2011

Nuclear Expert: Radioactive Rain-Outs Will Continue For a Year - Even In Western U.S. and Canada - Because Japanese Are Burning Radioactive Materials

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen says in a new interview that the Japanese are burning radioactive materials. The radioactivity originated from Fukushima, but various prefectures are burning radioactive materials in their terroritories.
Gundersen says that this radioactivity ends up not only in neighboring prefectures, but in Hawaii, British Columbia, Oregon, Washington and California.
He notes that radioactive rain-outs were documented recently in British Columbia and Oklahoma with geiger counters.
Gundersen says that well see another year of radioactive rain-outs, as the Japanese continue to burn radioactive materials.

Cover Up By American and Canadian Governments

Gundersen has a high-level contact in the State Department who says that the U.S. government has decided - within various agencies, including the State Department, FDA, and other agencies - to downplay the dangers from Fukushima. Because of this policy decision, the government is not really testing for radiation.
Gundersen is working with scientists who will publish a paper in the near future definitively debunking Canadian and American health officials' claims that only harmless levels of radiation are being released.
Click here to listen to the interview.
See this or background.

8/9/2011 Fukushima Update–Information Suppressed, Health Unmonitored

Source: The Paltry Sapien
Date: August 9, 2011
by: Matthew Payne

A Child of Chernobyl'; Is the Japanese Government Ensuring the Same for Fukushima Kids?

First off, it should be noted the number of meltdowns at Fukushima may be four, not three.  It seems that Reactor Three experienced a second meltdown after TEPCo failed to keep the core covered ten days after the first meltdown.  This is hardly simply an academic argument since if the core did meltdown twice, it is quite likely TEPCo is measuring its temperature incorrectly and thus will be unable to reach “cold shutdown” quickly.
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7/26/2011 Radiation turns up in all kinds of food products in Japan

Source: RT News
Date: 7/26/2011

After visiting the Fukushima nuclear plant and meeting with Japan's prime minister, the head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, has promised to provide all necessary expertise to complete the second phase of containing the crisis by early next year. For more on what's happening in Japan RT's joined live from Hiroshima by nuclear energy expert Doctor Robert Jacobs.

7/12/2011 Radiation Coverups And Dangers Exposed Worldwide

Source: The Intel Hub
Date: 7/12/2011
by: Alex Thomas

King 5 News: High levels of radiation detected in Northwest rainwater

The data is not new, but what this report illustrates is the under-reporting (or non-reporting) of dangerous radiation levels.

The nuclear industry and nuclear regulators worldwide, as well as specifically in the United States, have continually covered up disasters and radiation releases as if they never happened or posed no danger to the public.

To begin to understand the corruption of the nuclear power industry and the danger we are in because of it, you must first realize that they actually fund their regulators, The NRC in the United States and the IAEA for the world.
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7/9/2011 The Bear-trap

Source: DiaNuke.org
Date: July 10, 2011 9:10 am
by: Ray Masalas

Ray Marsalas, artist and frequent contributor at Glowing Conversations

Did you ever accidently step into a bear-trap, while walking in the woods? I’m an artist. My wife and I live in small town, Ontario, Canada. On March 11th 2011 I was happily working on a portrait of two darling young sisters, when the earth shook in Japan. I put down my brushes, and went to the computer to investigate. I haven’t been back to my portrait, yet. The Jaws of Fukushima had me. The media kept concentrating on the earthquake and Tsunami, saying very little on the condition of their reactors at several nuclear plants. It soon became apparent that the reactor:”Fukushima 1”, was in the most trouble.

The 4 explosions at the reactors and spent fuel pools came next, but we have only been shown film of reactors number 1 and number 3 exploding. Film of explosions at reactors number 2 and 4 have never been released to us “the public”. There have been problems with reactors 5 and 6, but the state of danger is unreleased. We stocked up on food, water and other supplies.
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7/2/2011 Fukushima Update–Lies, Damned Lies and the Big Lie.

Source: The Paltry Sapien
Date: 7/2/2011
by: Matthew Payne

Baby Being Checked out for Radiation (c/o The Guardian)

UPDATE (7/3): The post below discusses what I see as the all-pervading mendacity surrounding the Fukushima accident, but The Atlantic Wire has an extremely important story, based on eye-witness interviews, that finally breaks TEPC0′s and the various governments’ blockades on what precipitated the accident (h/t to Joieau at Daily Kos for highlighting this story). We now know the standard story, that of a recovering plant being knocked out by tsunami wave taking out its emergency electrical generators, is the biggest lie. As the authors of the piece, Jake Adelstein and David McNeill note the truth may have been something very different:

But what if recirculation pipes and cooling pipes, burst, snapped, leaked, and broke completely after the earthquake — long before the tidal wave reached the facilities, long before the electricity went out?

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6/12/2011 | Fukushima Update–Three Meltdowns and Cooling Pool #4 in Peril

Source: The Paltry Sapien
Date: June 12, 2011
by: Matthew Payne

This is an excellent summary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis by Matthew Payne in case you do not have the time to parse through a dozen or so articles:

 Fukushima Schematic; The Fuel Storage Pool is #5 (c/o Wikipedia)

Folks in the establishment media seem far more interested in congress-critters crotch shots or the violence in Syria (Yemen, not so much. . .), but some retrospectives at the three-month mark of the Fukushima FUBAR have been published and some clarity is possible on these events.

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5/14/2011 JST | TEPCO concealed radiation data before explosion at No. 3 reactor

Source: asahi.com
Date: 2011/05/14 JST

Tokyo Electric Power Co. concealed data showing spikes in radiation levels at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in March, one day before a hydrogen explosion injured seven workers.
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