PREFACE NOTE:  Following are several articles on the radiation crisis which is being virtually blacked out of mainstream news. By orders of magnitude, the multiple meltdowns at Fukushima are now far worse than Chernobyl, and on-going.  Based on the million+ deaths from Chernobyl fallout, we will likely see millions die from this radiation in America over decades.  ~CR

"This is one of the most monstrous cover-up in the history of medicine...
the greatest public health hazard the public has ever witnessed..."
~ Recent press conference by Dr. Helen Caldicott, March 18, 2011, in Montreal
[MUST SEE:  YouTube video of Dr. Caldicott's exposure of the real danger
at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmaduq-5bw.

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Five Articles Follow: 

The first million is the hardest...
Ace Hoffman
April 26th, 2011

Today is the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl. Today, a quarter century ago, the ruthless murder of a million people began. And the cover-up.
How quickly we forget! How destined we are to repeat!

Today's commemorations around the world might have gone practically unnoticed by the mainstream media, save perhaps for a 60-second spot about a decaying sarcophagus, were it not for Fukushima.

Today we honor and remember the already-dead from Chernobyl:

1) The "liquidators" who helped clean it up (about 800,000 young men) who now die like flies of cancer, leukemia, and a thousand other stranger ailments.

2) The local citizens who were not told for a week or more that anything was wrong, even while the rest of the world knew because a nuclear reactor power company in Sweden had alerted the "free" public (that is, the Western media) several days after Chernobyl exploded, after the ill winds tripped their own monitors.

3) The people around the world who also MUST have died, in addition to the million who lived nearer the plant or were among the liquidators.

4) The descendents, for at least seven generations, of all these people -- that's how far the DNA is likely to show damage, perhaps even further down the line.

"The million" are only the ones that were reasonably easy to count. I use the term "easy" very relatively: WHO wouldn't count them -- for five years they didn't even start to take a half-hearted look. IAEA wouldn't count them (and probably prevented WHO from doing so). It would be bad for the promotion of nuclear power, their mandate and perceived mission. The nuclear industry didn't want them counted. The nuke-loving cash-strapped secretive militaristic Russian government certainly didn't want them counted. Nobody wanted them counted.

So they weren't counted. Not easily, unless the term is relative. People halfway around the world, not under Soviet censorship, propaganda, or oppression, were NEVER counted by anyone. Billions of Curies, tens of thousands of terabecquerels... didn't just disappear. Many of them were breathed in by someone. They killed people all over the world, and still do. So will Fukushima Daiichi.

Cover-ups and lies hide the million-dead from the ongoing Chernobyl horror. Some say it's only tens of thousands, some say "merely" thousands, and some -- the nuclear industry in America, for instance-- just three or four dozen.

Nobody says, "nobody died at Chernobyl" like they (lie) and say about Three Mile Island.

Until last month Chernobyl was the worst industrial accident in human history -- unless you believe the lies.

New pictures have reportedly been released of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 -- the MOX reactor -- indicating the reactor pressure vessel itself had exploded last month (see Jeff's article, below).

The nuclear industry represents a small fraction of 1% of the human work force, even in America or France. These people could all be building wind turbines, except for those people who will have to guard the waste -- a cost society must incur forevermore, and which keeps getting more and more costly, and will continue to do so, at least until we stop making more waste every day.

It's time to stop the assault on human and other life. It's time to turn off the nukes.
Forced down our throats, and paid well to work there, society gave it a try.

 

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when
his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
~ Upton Sinclair

Nuclear power has failed miserably. It's not enough to prevent new reactors, or even to prevent relicensing -- one unit at Fukushima had just been relicensed for another ten years just weeks before the catastrophe began. It's not enough to wait months and months for the "lessons learned" from Fukushima. It's not enough to be promised improvements, changes, more and better backup systems. All those are nice. But we need to close the reactors down forever.

Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author. 54. has, like you, seen far too many nuclear disasters (one is too many). Visit his web site: www.acehoffman.org to read his book online or as a free download: "The Code Killers", about the many ways the nuclear industry destroys humanity.

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Nuclear Power Can Never Be Made Safe
Karl Grossman
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/26-2

With the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe having arrived, and with the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear complex still unfolding and radioactivity continuing to spew from those plants some people are asking: can nuclear power be made safe?

The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.

This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the "father" of the U.S. nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power and urged that "we outlaw nuclear reactors."

The basic problem: radioactivity.

"I'll be philosophical," testified Rickover. "Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn't have any life fish or anything." This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. "Gradually," said Rickover, "about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planetreduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin."

"Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible," he said. "Every time you produce radiation" a "horrible force" is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. "And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself," Rickover stated.

This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.

The problem is radioactivity unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn't matter whether it's a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the "new, improved" nuclear plants being touted by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist and zealous promoter of nuclear technology. All nuclear power plants produce radiation as well as radioactive poisons like the Cesium-137, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 that have been and continue to be--spewed from the Fukushima plants.

Upon contact with life, these toxins destroy life. So from the time they're produced in a nuclear plant to when they're taken out as hotly radioactive "nuclear waste," they must be isolated from life for thousands for some millions of years.

In the nuclear process, mildly radioactive uranium is taken from the ground and bombarded by neutrons and that part of the uranium which can split, is "fissile," Uranium-235, is transformed into radioactive twins of safe and stable elements in nature: There are hundreds of these "fission products." The human body doesn't know the difference between these lethal twins and safe and stable elements. Also produced are alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, all radioactive.

In addition, much of the larger part of uranium, Uranium-238, which cannot split, grabs on to neutrons and turns into Plutonium-239, the most radioactive substance known.

In this atom-splitting, too, heat is produced which is used to boil water. Nuclear power plants are simply the most dangerous way to boil water ever conceived.

Why use this toxic process to boil water and generate electricity? It has far less to do with science than with politics and economics from the aftermath of the Manhattan Project to today During the World War II Manhattan Project, scientists working at laboratories secretly set up across the U.S. built atomic weapons. By 1945, it employed 600,000 people and billions of dollars were spent. Two bombs were dropped on Japan. And, with the war's end, the Manhattan Project became the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and more nuclear weapons were built. But what else could be done with nuclear technology to perpetuate the nuclear undertaking?

Many of the scientists and government officials didn't want to see their jobs end; corporations which were Manhattan Project contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse, didn't want to see their contracts ended. As James Kunetka writes in his book City of Fire about Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the war over there were problems of "job placement, work continuitymore free time than workhardly enough to keep everyone busy."

Nuclear weapons don't lend themselves to commercial spinoff. What else could be done with atomic technology to keep the nuclear establishment going? Schemes advanced included using nuclear devices as substitutes for dynamite to blast huge holes in the ground including stringing 125 atomic devices across the isthmus of Panama and setting them off to create the "Panatomic Canal," utilizing radioactivity to zap food so it could seemingly be stored for years; building nuclear-powered airplanes (this didn't go far because of the weight of the lead shielding needed to protect the pilots) and using the heat built up by the nuclear reaction to boil water to produce electricity.

All along, the nuclear scientists such as Chu now attempted to minimize, indeed deny, the lethal danger of radioactivity and, like Nuclear Pinocchios, they pushed their technology.

Nuclear power plants all 443 on the earth today should be closed and no new ones built. As Rickover declared, nuclear reactors must be outlawed.

During the Bill Clinton campaign years ago, the slogan was, "It's the economy, stupid." With nuclear power plants, "It's the radioactivity" inherent in the process and deadly.

Instead we must fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies like solar, wind (now the fastest growing energy source and cheaper than nuclear) and geothermal and all the rest which, major studies have concluded, can provide all the energy the world needs energy without lethal radioactivity, energy we can live with.

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, has long specialized in doing investigative reporting on nuclear technology. He is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. He is the host of the nationally aired TV program, Enviro Close-Up (envirovideo.com).

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What is Bioaccumulation?
http://lucaswhitefieldhixson.com/bioaccumulation-why-fukushima-matters

Simply Stated -

All living organisms are connected to each other through a food chain. It takes more organisms in the beginning of a food chain to support a smaller number of organisms at the end of the chain. Where bioaccumulation refers to how pollutants enter a food chain; biomagnification refers to the tendency of pollutants to concentrate as they move from one trophic level to the next, up the "food chain."

Bioaccumulation refers to how pollutants enter a food chain.
Biomagnification refers to the tendency of pollutants to concentrate.

Biomagnification is illustrated by a study of DDT which showed that where soil levels were 10 parts per million (ppm), DDT reached a concentration of 141 ppm in earthworms and 444 ppm in robins. DDT which has a half-life of 15 years, Strontium 90 which has been shown in EPA testing results in the United States has a half-life of 28.9 years, Cesium 137 has also been found which has a half life of 30 years. Through biomagnification, the concentration of a chemical in the animal at the top of the food chain may be high enough to cause death or adverse effects on behavior, reproduction, or disease resistance and thus endanger that species, even when levels in the water, air, or soil are low.

We must be concerned about these phenomena because together they mean that even small concentrations of toxic substances in the environment can find their way into organisms in high enough dosages to cause problems. If a chemical is short-lived, it generally will be broken down before it can become dangerous. However, even if short-lived chemicals are exposed to the environment for long periods of time in heavy doses, they too can become dangerous. Bioaccumulation is affected by the length of time between uptake and elimination of chemicals. If the environmental concentration of the chemical increases, the amount inside the organism will increase until it reaches a new equilibrium. Exposure to large amounts of a chemical for a long period of time, however, may overwhelm the equilibrium (ie, overflowing a bathtub) potentially causing harmful effects.

The easiest way to prevent biomagnification is to lower/remove the pollutants from the environment, or remove those effected from the polluted area.

How do you prevent Biomagnification if you cannot control the length of exposure, or the amount of radiation introduced into the environment?

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Investigator: Fukushima Blast Was Nuclear Explosion
Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
http://www.prisonplanet.com/investigator-fukushima-blast-was-nuclear-explosion.html

British scientist Christopher Busby, a researcher on the negative health effects of ionizing radiation, told Russia Today that one of the explosions at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan was a nuclear explosion, not a hydrogen explosion as widely reported in the media.

Busby said the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 was also a nuclear explosion. The Chernobyl nuclear accident dispersed large quantities of radioactive fuel and core materials into the atmosphere. Busby told RT the crisis at Fukushima is far worse than Chernobyl.

He said the explosion did not originate in the reactor core, but the tanks where spent plutonium MOX fuel rods are stored. MOX fuel contains plutonium blended with natural uranium, reprocessed uranium, or depleted uranium. The explosion vaporized the plutonium rods and ejected a large amount of radiation into the atmosphere.

Takeshi Tokuda, a member of the Lower House of the Japanese Diet, also believes the first explosion at Fukushima was nuclear. Tokuda talked with a doctor Oikawa of the Minami Soma City General Hospital. Oikawa told the government representative that materials ejected from the plant after the explosion registered high radiation levels.

"When the hospital checked the radiation level on the people who escaped from around the nuke plant after the explosion, there were more than 10 people whose radiation level exceeded 100,000 cpm [counts per minute], beyond what could be measured by the geiger counter the hospital had," Tokuda wrote. "100,000 cpm is the new level that the Japanese government set that requires decontamination. Before the Fukushima accident, the level was 6,000 cpm."

The EPA has attempted to downplay the fact that plutonium is now bombarding the United States and much of the Northern Hemisphere. According to Lucas Hixton Whitefield, an EPA RADNet report shows increased levels of plutonium in the atmosphere. Whitefield found information on the plutonium in a RADnet dataset.

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Greg Palast's investigative report on BBC Television Newsnight

EXCERPTS:

As radiation wafts across the Pacific from Japan, it is clear that threats to health and safety do not respect national borders. What happens in Fukushima affects lives and property in the USA.

"Regulation" has become a dirty word in US politics. Corporations have convinced the public to fear little bureaucrats with thick rulebooks. But let us remember why government began to regulate these creatures. As Andrew Jackson said, "Corporations have neither bodies to kick nor souls to damn."

Kicking and damning have no effect, but rules do. And after all, when international regulation protects profits, as in the case of patents and copyrights, corporate America is all for it.

International corporations should be required to disclose events that threaten people and the environment, not just the price of their stock.

Our regulators of resource industries must impose an affirmative requirement to tell all, especially when people, not just song lyrics or stock offerings, are in mortal danger.

Greg Palast directed the fraud investigation of BP and Exxon in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. Palast's investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight. See them at www.GregPalast.com.

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