"I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors," wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dr. Joseph Oehmen on March 13. "By 'significant' I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on -- say -- a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation."So begins a recent U.S. business sector article titled You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster in Japan -- Here's Why, published four days after the earthquake struck in Japan. It has already proved false. Properly understood for what it is -- a childish, myopic, arrogant attempt to belittle the truth and influence public opinion -- the article provides an apt example of the rampant industry disinformation that is sweeping aside rational and compassionate and precautionary assessments with irrational jingoism, simplistic emotional appeals, and wrong-headed thinking. The post went viral and was republished widely.

How do we define apocalypse?  EARTHQUAKE + TSUNAMI  + AGED NUKE PLANT  + LOSS-OF-COOLANTS + PLUTONIUM + FIRES + DISINFORMATION + GREED + DENIAL + FEAR + POLITICS + SECRECY + MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION(S) + MILITARY PRIORITIES = APOCALYPSE.

How many nuke plants are involved? We don't really know. Not that we have not been told, we have. There are six reactors at the Fukushima site, one reactor at the Tokai nuclear facility and three reactors at the stricken Onagawa nuclear complex. There are toxic chemical spills, petroleum refinery fires, gas fires, dangerous debris and human pathogens from the thousands of dead people and animals. The place is an apocalyptic nightmare, to be sure, but from the beginning the most important facts regarding the status of the nuclear plants and their components, their functioning or failing systems, the operability of the control rooms or integrity of the reactor containment structures, were being denied to the public. Now we are seeing some damage control by the U.S., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the media.

It is simultaneously as though we are believed to be incapable of even the most rudimentary understanding of what is going on, while also being denied the truth in keeping with more than sixty years of secrecy and denial by the cult of the atom and its incestuous cult of intelligence.



The question is: what can we believe to be true? Look at the photo of the explosion (below). Are we stupid enough to believe that no radiation has been released from this reactor's primary or secondary containment systems? On Wednesday March 16 we were finally told that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had ordered its remaining staff to evacuate areas of the Fukushima plant after radiation levels spiked and plumes of white vapour "were seen pouring from what authorities identified as [emphasis added] the station's No. 3 reactor.

The language about white vapors "seen pouring from what authorities identified as the stations No. 3 reactor" does not inspire confidence that 'authorities' had any clue about the status of things. Indeed, they are not in the control room, obviously, or anywhere near it, or anywhere near 'the station's No. 3 reactor' because they are standing back trying to identify what they are seeing, to see what is going on, and where it is going on. The reactor's are too hot: this is radiation: this is the nightmare scenario we were told could not happen. Radiation is contaminating air, soil, ocean, people.

The You Can Stop Worrying "article" first appeared as a reader's comment posted following the Business Insider journal story Japan Death Toll Climbs Astronomically As Nuclear Crises Intensifies, which was itself a republished and retitled New York Times feature of Monday March 13. At first glance, the two Business Insider stories couldn't be further apart in their general themes: You Can Stop Worrying, which translates to, calm down, don't get hysterical, pay no attention to those anti-nuclear fanatics who think that even microwave ovens will kill you, versus the Death Toll Climbs Astronomically feature, which for all practical purposes we can translate to Holy shit, brother! Run for your life! Duck and Cover!

However, both stories serve as part of the unraveling global media disinformation campaign about the ongoing nuclear catastrophe in Japan. The primary imperatives of this campaign are economic. In other words, most of the reportage out there about what is happening in Japan -- so far -- has been anchored in western epistemological frameworks based in money, greed, private profits and loss. The loss should not be interpreted to mean that people (mostly we are talking about people NOT affected by the apocalypse in Japan) care about who lives or dies, but rather that their primary concerns are their financial balance sheets, their corporate images, their personal retirement portfolios, and the fall of the Nikkei Index and Dow Jones trading they drool over.

Sadly, the attitudes of many "news" writers (and their readers), government officials, energy consultants, corporate executives, nuclear experts and technicians, western humanitarian relief professionals (such as World Vision careerists), or of environmentalists for nuclear power --  like scientist James Lovelock -- and many other people who, for one reason or another, have had something to say about the nukes crisis in Japan, or about how Japan's nuclear misfortune can never become a Chernobyl, or how Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone, or why the events in Japan, no matter how alarming, should not be allowed to interrupt the "nuclear renaissance" touted by U.S. President Barrack Obama, or something about the beauty of some nuke somewhere else, are all based in self-interest, not the altruistic and compassionate concerns of all humanity, of environmental stewardship or the preservation of all life on earth, but in a self-righteous, arrogant and ignorant selfishness of the kind that author David Ehrenfeld elaborated in his monumental work, The Arrogance of Humanism. We could also call this technological utopianism. However, the nuclear complex pushes us inexorably down a dystopian rabbit hole.

Japanese are technical geniuses. The rail system and subways were precise to the minute: you could set your watch by them. In 2003, their advanced magnetic levitation Shinkansen bullet trains performed at 581 kilometers per hour (361 mph). Ever try to get somewhere on America's clunker AMTRAK? If the Japanese can't do it, no one can. Yet today Japan is on fire -- the epicenter of deadly radiation now emanating out of that sizable island. This is not about Japan, folks, or national borders: its about all of us, everywhere.


While the absence of cooling water facilitated the nuclear crises in Japan, most likely some major reactor components (proven unsafe) also failed under the seismic stresses of the 9.0 quake. Key components likely cracked or shattered. The tsunami and huge aftershocks advanced the chaos. These factors were complicated by the loss of offsite electrical power (an electrical BLACKOUT), the failure of emergency diesel generators, and the subsequent loss-of-coolant (water).

Embrittlement of nickel-based superalloys that comprise reactor internals was flagged as a major safety issue as early as the 1960s, yet such problems were bureaucratically dismissed, covered over, buried in paperwork and regulatory studies produced by the NRC ("NUREG" documents), and ignored. Intergranular stress corrosion cracking of BWR core shrouds is another major safety issue in GE designed BWRs built by Hitachi at Fukushima -- and  core shroud cracking plagues every BWR reactor in the U.S.

We don't know, however, and for many days we were offered the standard industry refrain: no need to worry, no threat to public health and safety. BWR core shroud cracking (NUREG-1544), reactor pressure vessel cracking (NUREG-1511), embrittled components and aging (NUREG/CR-5939), cooling system failures (NUREG/CR-6087), reactor containment isolation systems failures (NUREG/CR-6339) -- all thoroughly documented. Ditto for the Pressurized Water Reactors, a Westinghouse Corporation specialty. PWRs are equally frightening boondogles with cracking steam generators (NUREG/CR-5117).

The redundancy and ever-touted 'defense-in-depth' systems failed at Fukushima. All over the U.S. such systems have been routinely disabled to minimize electricity-generating outages, increase output power and maximize corporate profits. There are as many possibilities of failures outside what we have been spoon-fed -- the official sequence of events -- as there are dead people.




Amongst the most troubling and most deeply underplayed questions of the entire crisis concern the Fukushima Spent Fuel Pools. These rectangular basins are packed with tons of irradiated fuel rods that need to be cooled. One of the major postulated accident scenarios involves a Loss-of-Coolant Accident (LOCA) to the reactor core, but a LOCA event can also occur with a spent fuel pool. It has. Fires and explosions in Japan. The spent fuel pools at the six Fukushima reactors are NOT inside primary containment. They are exposed. Burning. About to burn. Burning means dispersing waves and particles of invisible radiation in all directions.

Reactors No. 4, 5, and 6 at Fukushima were shutdown when the earthquake struck. After the water drained and the spent fuel became exposed, the pool at reactor No. 4 caught fire, and continues to burn, as of Thursday March 17, releasing massive amounts of radiation into the environment. The status of the other six spent fuel pools at Fukushima is unknown.

A courageous U.S. journalist Rachel Maddow explored the spent fuel pool issue with a former government official. The most important, critical point made by Princeton professor Frank Von Hippel occurs at minute 14:19 (where Rachel Maddow is talking over him): these are LONG-LIFE RADIONUCLIDES being emitted from the spent fuel pool(s). Isotopes of cesium: Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years and will be around and hot for decades.

How much disaster are we talking about? The atomic bomb that exploded at Hiroshima created about 2000 curies of radioactivity. The spent fuel pools at Vermont Yankee Nuclear Station (U.S.) are believed to hold about 75,000,000 curies. There are six spent fuel pools at Fukushima, but the numbers of tons of fuel rods in each have not been made public.

But where is the spent fuel pool for Fukushima Reactor No. 3? Looking at the newly released photograph showing the rubble that was once Reactor No. 3's secondary containment building next to Reactor No. 4's building -- and it is spent fuel pool No. 4 that everyone is talking about. If the spent fuel pool was located inside No. 3's building next to No. 3 reactor it appears to something of a small worry -- but certainly there is no threat to the public [sic].



The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) did the math: If Fukushima's Reactor No. 4 operated for 35 years and produced 30 tons of irradiated fuel per year and each ton is equivalent to 24 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, then each fuel pool could contain on the order of 24,000 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, if all the produced irradiated fuel remains in the fuel pool. At Fukushima, we are talking about six spent fuel pools?



So, no, we are not talking about six spent fuel pools at Fukushima, we are talking about seven. Additionally, what happened to the the spent fuel that was held in dry cask storage? Are these casks intact? It is curious that the table registers 6,375 assemblies in storage in the shared fuel pool, which is an awful lot of spent fuel, and it does not register the other data for the shared spent fuel pool, such as heat generation, which must be phenomenal. On Tuesday March 22, officials in Japan were reporting radiation emissions from unknown sources continued.


Nuclear stupidity No. 1: the Fukushima reactor buildings are square (not circular) and had to absorb the force of the tsunami wave straight on. Stupidity No. 2: six reactors clustered too close together. Stupidity No. 3: no shoreline protection against a tsunami. Stupidity No. 4: reactors sited on earthquake faults. Stupidity No. 5: assumptions and calculations proving that the reactor, prior to its construction, could withstand anything that nature threw at it. Stupidity No. 6: it didn't begin in Japan: the industry, with all its corruptions, false assumptions and technological hubris, was born in secrecy in the United States of America.

Stupidity No. 125: spent fuel pools are packed too tightly, as is well-established by industry documents, for economic reasons, discarding safety concerns. Stupidity No. 458: the Spent Fuel Pools at Fukushima are suspended up high inside the reactor buildings secondary containment -- the same buildings whose roofs are blowing off! Are we to believe that the massive explosions that were captured on film, and others that were not, did not damage these elevated time bombs?

How many stupidities do we need to admit before we admit that it can happen in the United States and Europe and Canada too? Imagine those courageous Japanese nuclear workers at Fukushima -- sacrificing their lives! -- trying to save their families, Japan and the rest of us from our unprecedented stupidity!

During World War II they were called kamikazis and we have always portrayed them as terrorists: they were soldiers and pilots sacrificing their lives for the sake of their nation. Well, these heroic men and women sacrificing themselves at Fukushima have my deepest respect.

There is an ocean adjacent to the Fukushima complex, and yet the reactors and fuel pools cannot be kept cool. Impossible. The huge heat sink necessary to cool the melting fuel is not available. This is not about earthquakes and tsunamis -- it is about loss of off-site power, backup generators and emergency systems that occur in a blackout. Do electrical outages and blackouts occur anywhere else? Blizzards? Tornadoes? Hurricanes? The world is seeing more and more extreme and unpredictable weather. Claims that a serious nuclear 'accident' cannot happen in the U.S., Europe or Canada are false, and nuclear executives know it. That is why corporations refused at first to get into the nuclear power business, until the U.S. Government indemnified them with Gore Bill of 1956 -- later renamed the Price-Anderson Act -- championed by U.S. Senator Albert Gore (Sr.). (An inconvenient truth, indeed: the Gore family is decidedly pro-nuclear.) Of course, the Price Anderson Act indemnifies nuclear utilities and reactor operators from all lawsuits, financial liability or executive responsibility. Nuke operators are subsidized from bright idea (let's boil water with an atomic bomb!) to brain tumor (radiation killed Madame Curie!), and corporations lose nothing if they screw-up and meltdown.

"What this [Fukushima] station suffered was a station blackout," says Deb Katz of the Citizen's Awareness Network, who helped shut down the dangerous Yankee Atomic Power Station, "and the backup safety systems that were supposed to keep it operational -- the backup diesel generators -- failed. This can happen without an earthquake. A midwest [U.S.] power company caused the northeast grid to fail a few years ago; a flood or a terrorist attack could do the same. We could then experience a similar slow motion catastrophe though not on the grand scale of the Japanese site with its 6 nukes."

Given all the official assurances about how earthquake plus tsunami scenarios can't possibly happen in the United States or Canada, it's very interesting that the U.S. government is spending so much taxpayer money to characterize and quantify the tsunami threat to North American nuclear plants. Earthquake, tsunami, tornado, blizzard, human error the biggest threat is from a BLACKOUT power scenario of some kind, as occurred in Japan.


Like the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japanese officials have a long history of covering up ugly nuclear realities. In a recent WikiLeaks diplomatic cable, politician Taro Kono, a high-profile member of Japan's lower house, told U.S. diplomats that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (MITI) -- the Japanese government department responsible for nuclear energy -- has been "covering up nuclear accidents and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry." In 2002 "the chairman and four executives of TEPCO, the company that owns the stricken Fukushima plant, resigned after reports that safety records were falsified."

Such singular but remarkable events follow a pattern of wholesale U.S. cover-ups that define the industry as secretive and criminal, and they involve shoddy equipment, human incompetence, unsafe designs, inadequate safety measures, and economic decisions that have occurred since the very beginining of Japan's nuclear power era -- which itself was born out of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with U.S.-made weapons of mass destruction.




In the 1960's, TEPCO planned to build a reactor outside Kashiwazaki city: nuclear officials told the local community, for example, that radioactivity from the plant would increase rice cultivation and the coloring of the carp (a delicacy): seven reactors were eventually built there. In June 1973, radioactive waste water leaked from a storage tank at Fukushima's reactor No. 1. In July 1974, Kansai Electric asked Westinghouse Corporation to replace the steam generator of one of Kansai's two Mihama reactors after Mihama I experienced four major shutdowns in less than four years.

In September 1974, following the emergency shutdown of 21 of the then 55 U.S. reactors due to radioactive leaks at the Illinois Dresden Reactor No. 1, Japanese officials inspected their six Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs), similar to the Dresden BWR, and they found similar defects at Fukushima I and Hamaoka. Ditto, 1975: emergency shutdown's in the U.S. prompted inspections that discovered Emergency Core Cooling System  (ECCS) problems at the Fukushima I and Tsuruga BWR reactors. Japan's Mihama reactors were plagued with radioactive 'leaks' and faulty equipment that prompted Kansai officials to demand a refund from U.S. contractor Westinghouse Corporation. The Mihama Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) have been scrammed and shutdown and leaked. The accident at the Mihama Reactor No. 3 on 9 August 2004 was previously considered Japan's worst nuclear accident: there was no tsunami, and no earthquake.

Japan's fleet of white elephant nukes only grew more problematic. From April to September 1977, six of Japan's fourteen reactors were shutdown. Japanese corporations joined with Westinghouse and General Electric in the 1980's to export their destructive technology to other countries, mostly targeting the so-called Third World. Before 1979 there were some 25 reactors under construction or completed in Japan, and until last week there were 55 operating reactors. In 2006, GE and Hitachi Corporation teamed up to create three joint venture nuclear companies to expand nukes in North America.

General Electric is 60% owner of the GE-Hitachi joint nuclear venture. The six Fukushima nukes were operated by TEPCO, but the reactors were built by: GE {No. 1}, GE-Toshiba {No.s 2 & 6}; Toshiba {No. 3 & No. 5}; and Hitachi {No. 4}. Will these corporations and their executive directors be held accountable?

One fact is certain: we have already been massively lied to about a massive and still unfolding nuclear disaster. The radiation releases from some four to six nuclear reactors in collapse are already known to be excessive, described by reputable experts as "worse than Three Mile Island but not as bad as Chernobyl." It may be worse than Chernobyl yet.

Additional radiation has been reported at the Onagawa complex, but this was explained away as wind-blown radioactivity from the Fukushima complex. Meanwhile, in the same reports, officials said that radiation was not leaking from Fukushima, or it was minimal, and there was no cause for alarm.



Of course, technology gurus and corporate executives and financial consultants are hysterical, claiming there were no deaths from Three Mile Island and that deaths at Chernobyl are exaggerated by the mass media. These claims are false. The new book, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment provides irrefutable evidence of massive loss of life.

"The book is solidly based -- on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports -- some 5,000 in al," says journalist Karl Grossman. "It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow."




James Lovelock, author of the renowned GAIA Hypothesis, is a celebrated environmentalist for nuclear energy peddling nuclear power as a clean, green, renewable energy source of the future. However, Lovelock has a long history working for NASA -- the outer-space division of the Pentagon -- and is deeply enmeshed in the western epistemological framework.

Commenting on Japan's nuclear crisis, Lovelock said that people were 'prejudiced' against nuclear power unreasonably. "It is very safe," he said. Chernobyl, for instance, was "an idiotic mess-up that could only have occurred in the Soviet Union", and "according to UN estimates had killed only about 56 people. More people are routinely killed in oil refineries and coal mines, he pointed out."

James Lovelock's Chernobyl statement should immediately discredit him as a quack: Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is unwilling to go on record claiming anything less than many, many deaths. Further, Lovelock's comment about the 'idiotic mess-up' by Russians is inherently racist: the Russians were the first to put a satellite (Sputnik) into orbit, for example, and NASA collaborated with the Russian MIR Space Station, which broke all kinds of records.

 "There is a monstrous myth about nuclear power," Lovelock continued. "I would make a strong guess that of the tens of thousands of people killed in Japan, none of them will be from nuclear power."

Lovelock suggests that nuclear reactors are our only hope to curtail global climate change, and that this may involve, for example, the 'suspension of democracy'. However, democracy has long since been suspended for many of the earths people and species -- forced to live and die with our burgeoning wastes, consumption and exploitation. Lovelock's analysis is patently false -- contaminated by his own inability to see beyond his privilege and self-interests.

Not convinced? Lovelock has also reportedly stated, wrongheadedly: "One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War."

Tell this to the mutant babies, weak-spined and deformed children, and three-headed calves from the Chernobyl killing zones, chronicled in Russian filmmaker Vladimir Kuznetsov's, "While We Are Still Alive, and to the people of Bikini Atoll whose stolen island is officially acknowledged to be highly contaminated. Savannah River is another SUPERFUND site.

The nuclear power cycle involves disease, despair and death from the uranium mining to daily operations to the nuclear waste "'dumping'. Uranium mines in Niger that have built France's entire nuclear complex are toxic wastelands spreading radiotoxins across north and sub-Saharan Africa. The Tuareg and Toubou nomads have been completely shattered by the confiscation, exploitation and irradiation of their lands by the nuclear complex. Native Americans continue to suffer massive epidemics of disease, contamination and confiscation of lands in the Secret Nuclear War at the American Ground Zero: the nuclear complex has compounded the native American genocide begun in 1492. Every nuclear reactor, every nuclear weapon, every spaceship and tank and submarine and oil rig needs the element cobalt for the superalloys: war crimes in Central Africa (1930-2011) is due in part to the industrial demand for cobalt from the Congo-Zambian copperbelt. Of course, Congo's Shinkalobwe mine provided the uranium that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.


 
Daily contamination releases into water, soil and air occur at every operating nuclear reactor in the world. The so-called low-level radio waste product TRITIUM is another threat of 'normal' reactor operation, and another threat downplayed and dismissed by the industry and the billion dollar cancer establishment. There is no 'disposal' of deadly nuclear toxins that now exist to perpetuity, and yet wastes are typically dumped on poor communities like Barnwell, South Carolina, or native American lands.

Out of sight, out of mind: nuclear poisons are colorless, odorless, and deadly. Oh, and, by the way: Dr. James Lovelock left NASA and went to work for Shell Oil in Britain, but before long he was running a top secret laboratory for MI5, the British secret service.



The proponents of nuclear power have used all kinds of disinformation and tactics to protect the industry -- compelling the nuclear complex to arm guards to 'protect' these secrets and to 'protect' civilian reactors. It is not only 'terrorists' that the nuclear establishment seeks to protect us from: the armed guards and classified documents are to prevent the public from learning the truth about the destruction of documents, the disappearing of evidence, the falsification of reports and records, the calculated fudging of risk and safety assessments. There have been countless exposes, such as Daniel Ford's 1982 book The Cult of the Atom: The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission.



The original New York Times story, Death Toll Estimate in Japan Soars as Relief Efforts Intensify (retitled by Business Insider, commented on by Dr. Joseph Oehmen), follows the patterns of the media and government begun on DAY ONE, wherein authorities offered false assurances, premature evaluations, and outright lies. These officials -- and the media that quoted them -- repeatedly reiterated that there was no cause to worry. At first, no radiation was released, we were told, over and over, even though, admittedly, there were some slight reactor problems here and there. Then there were explosions, but still the radiation levels were normal, or, well, maybe there was a puff of steam, which we were told was a hydrogen blast, but radiation monitors showed nothing, and there was no threat to the public health or safety.


For example, on November 23, 2009, a radioactive contamination at Three Mile Island led to a Reuters news report titled Federal Officials: Radiation Leak At Three Mile Island No Threat to Public Safety. Like the 'news reportage' coming out of Japan, the Three Mile Island leak story was bereft of any discussion, analysis, counterpoint or critique from anyone. Journalists who collaborate with the western English-language news-consuming media have no comprehension of the technological issues, the industry cover-ups, the deceptions, the bureaucratic inertia or the radiological poisons produced and the concomitant epidemics of disease clustered around nukes. They have swallowed the industry slogans and green-washing for so long that their capacity to provide comprehensive, informed, investigative reportage is less than zero. Hence we find innocent [sic] people like CNN's Anderson Cooper (360) reporting from 100 kilometers north of Fukushima and then freaking out and running for their lives from the invisible killer: radiation. Meanwhile, CNN cuts back-and-forth from Cooper to Jim Walsh -- 'our nuclear expert and CNN contributor' -- who arrogantly reassures the increasingly anxious Anderson Cooper that everything is under control and the blasts and white smoke are of no concern.

 

"We had an explosion," MIT's Dr. Jim Walsh reports, the Boston, Massachusetts skyline and the Prudential Center skyscrapers glimmering brightly behind him. "It turned out that explosion did not compromise the [nuclear] core facility," he guesses (minute 29). Walsh immediately betrays his speculation a few minutes later (minute 59). "Hopefully [emphasis added], it's just the outer structure, and has left unaffected the reactor, and unaffected the containment vessel. Because if it were to affect those things...uh... that would be bad news..."

Suddenly, Anderson Cooper wakes up to his predicament. "The subtext here is Should I Get Out of Here?" he interrupts, in the live on-the-air broadcast. Of course, from this point on the western press increasingly focuses the public's attention on the trials and tribulations and death-defying escape of the courageous [white] investigative reporter, Anderson Cooper.

"I hear you Anderson," responds expert Jim Walsh, chuckling. "I want to err on the side of caution for you here, Anderson." Walsh is barely able to contain his laughter as he sells Cooper out. "Uh, ah, my guess is that you are O.K. But I don't want you to sue me if I am wrong. But, uh, I'm inclined that you're O.K."

Anderson Cooper might think about a lawsuit for his company, CNN, putting him in danger and publicly downplaying that danger at the moment of truth.

"There have been release of..uh..uh...I guess a gas," Cooper continues, "and correct me, I flunked science... There have been releases out over the ocean...why were they doing these controlled releases?"

Dr. Jim Walsh then pontificates that radiation releases that ostensibly drift out over the ocean -- releases questioned by the ill-prepared and uneducated Cooper -- are 'mildly radioactive', unwanted but not dangerous, in any case, that they are being screened for dangerous radonuclides by the Japanese reactor experts, and "it's not going to be a major health threat."

Of course, according to his own biography, CNN's nuclear consultant, Dr. Jim Walsh, an expert in international security and a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program (SSP) -- which also shares U.S. special forces as 'research fellows'. He is published and selected as the chosen expert by the major U.S. and European media. Dr. Jim Walsh is the former Executive Director of the Managing the Atom project at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- one of our Department of Energy SUPERFUND sites, deep down the dark [nuclear] rabbit hole. Dr. Jim Walsh is another government spook.

For another example, "[T]he most urgent worries concerned the failures at two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant," the New York Times wrote, in Death Toll Estimate in Japan Soars as Relief Efforts Intensify, "where engineers were still struggling to avert meltdowns and where some radiation had already leaked. An explosion at one of the reactors on Monday did not appear to have harmed it, Japanese officials said."

In one sentence we are told that a nuclear meltdown may be imminent, and in the next sentence, same paragraph, Japanese officials assured the public (and the unquestioning  New York Times backed them up) that an explosion occurred but the reactor was not harmed. Is this believable? When the Japanese nuke experts took the drastic measure of pumping seawater into the reactors they knew that the reactors would be ruined forever. Given the economics of such a choice -- billions upon billions of Japanese yen destroyed forever -- we can infer that the situation is beyond grave: the Fukushima area is now a permanent sacrifice zone: people, wildlife, land has been sacrificed to the Gods of nuclear technology.

"We have no evidence of harmful radiation," deputy Cabinet secretary Noriyuki Shikata told reporters after one of the recent reactor building explosions.

Environmental activists in the area of the Fukushima reactors began to cry foul after finding that radiation monitoring stations were not operating. At the top of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Monitoring Website it said "monitoring goes on around the clock year round" and at the bottom it said "THIS SYSTEM IS CURRENTLY SHUTDOWN." Activists believed that TEPCO was downplaying radioactive releases. At the same time, TEPCO was announcing that it planned to vent the containment [vessel] to relieve the pressure, which caused releases of radioactivity into the air.




On Wednesday March 16, National Public Radio reported that "the chief of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that all the water is gone from one of the spent fuel pools at Japan's most troubled nuclear plant, but Japanese officials denied it." Of course, National Public Radio has been heavily subsidized by the nuclear power industry and has consistently advanced the nuclear industry agenda.

More nonsense: Radiation from Japan's troubled nuclear reactors has virtually no chance of reaching the U.S. -- the West Coast, Alaska or other locations -- the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Tuesday March 15. (Note that they don't want to disturb the tourist industry, so they say nothing about Hawaii.) The statement from the NRC said that "the 'small' radiation releases so far [sic] from the Japanese reactors has been blown out to sea, away from populated areas."



NBC News on Wednesday evening (March 16) ran several short 'news' clips about Japan's nuclear crises. One of these was clearly intended to distance General Electric and the nuclear Regulatory Commission from Japan, a sort of betrayal of the culture of secrecy and their historically incestuous relationship. Why? To perform damage control, improve investor confidence, assuage public fears of a similar catastrophe at one of the 104 (operating) reactors in the U.S.

The NBC broadcast began by pointing out that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had advised U.S. citizens who are within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Fukushima reactors to evacuate or stay indoors. The U.S. set a higher standard than Japan's 12 miles (20 kms), and the news went on to promote the idea that Japanese officialdom cannot be trusted but U.S. officialdom can.

Then the NBC News reporter, Lester Holt, was shown being scanned for radiation after returning from the Sendai area: no contamination on his body, but his "shoe bottoms [soles] contained slightly elevated amounts of radiation, but of no danger to us," he said. Again, the standard tactic of reporting that contamination has occurred -- this time it is on his shoes -- but that it is of no danger. Furthering the myths about radioactivity and its deadly means of spreading disease, the shoe bottom problem was nothing a little soap and elbow grease couldn't fix. And so, later in the hour, they showed the shoes being scrubbed and everything being returned to [business as] normal.

NBC followed the news tidbits about radioactive shoes with pictures of Fukushima reactors -- buildings with their roofs blown apart -- accompanied with assertions that there is a POSSIBLE breach of containment at the Fukushima Reactor No. 2, and that a breach of Reactor No. 3 containment vessel is CONFIRMED.





Cut to the U.S. Congress, where NBC brings us a very, very short clip from a special U.S. Senate Hearing on the Japan Nuclear Crises on Wednesday March 16. Suddenly the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is awake, and they care, and they are telling an equally awake and suddenly concerned U.S. Congress that they believe that Japan has covered up the extent of the nuclear disaster.

"Radiation levels are extremely high," proclaims NRC chief Dr. Gregory B. Jaczko. The spent fuel pools are dry. Secondary containment at the reactor [No. 3] has been breached, but Tokyo is denying this."

A few months ago, President Barrack Obama signed some 8.5 billion dollar loan guarantees for a nuclear reactor construction project for U.S. nuclear corporation Southern Company, in partnership with the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). On March 16, the U.S. government about-faced and told U.S. citizens in Japan listen to U.S., not Japan for your own safety.

Everything suggests that it will be business as usual. Destabilization, destruction, war and catastrophe have always been turned into a big business for the United States of America. Across the ocean tens of thousands of people are protesting in Germany and France and Briton. Here, even the discussion is off course. The wrong questions are being asked and the wrong people are answering them. Instead of talking about limits to growth, the focus is on expansion, profits, trade and so-called progress. Why would this situation be any different? As Senator Barbara Boxer eventually said: we should be humbled.

Perhaps the worst horror of all is that people trapped in the contaminated zones are now being shunned by outsiders, including aid organizations. Radiation fears, mingled with a sick sense of abandonment, reported the Los Angeles Times, as people are afraid to help them. People in the evacuation zones - elders and those without fuel or transport -- are geting no help, and no information. We should be humbled.

Reprinting & republishing with proper attribution to:
keith harmon snow & www.ConsciousBeingAlliance.com

keith harmon snow is a war correspondent, photographer and independent investigator, and a four time (2003, 2006, 2007, 2010) Project Censored award winner. He is also the 2009 Regent's Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work, outside of academia, contesting official narratives on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide while also working as a genocide investigator for the United Nations and other bodies. From 1985 to 1989, he worked as Engineer, and then Manager, GE Aerospace Electronics Laboratories, Syracuse NY. He has three papers published in the journals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).