Fukushima: are the public being kept in the dark?

FUKUSHIMA’S DEADLY SECRET

Are the public being kept in the dark?

WORDS BY IAN WISHART

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in recent weeks, a viral email on the Fukushima nuclear disaster may have crossed your path:

“I’m interrupting our normal email schedule to bring you an urgent alert that makes everything else seem insignificant by comparison. The issues of GMOs, fluoride, food freedom and vaccines won’t matter at all if we don’t solve this far bigger issue that threatens human civilization: Fukushima reactor No. 4.

“Right now, the reactor’s spent fuel pool is just one earthquake away from a structural failure that could set off a chain of events leading to the release of anywhere from 10 times to 85 times the Cesium-137 released in the Chernobyl disaster.

“Such circumstances caused one of Japan’s former ambassadors to make the following extraordinary statement:

” ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of Japan and the whole world depends on No. 4 reactor.’ – Mitsuhei Murata, Former Japanese Ambassador to Switzerland and Senegal, Executive Director, the Japan Society for Global System and Ethics.

“A failure of the reactor — and the subsequent catastrophic release of Cesium-137 — would decimate human life across North America, killing off crops, polluting groundwater, causing widespread infant stillbirths and unleashing an explosion in cancer rates. North America could become uninhabitable by humans for centuries.

“Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years, meaning that if North America is blanketed with a layer of radioactive dust in 2012, that radioactivity will still be half as strong in the year 2042. It will drop by half again by the year 2072. By the year 2102, it might be low enough to where humans could start to re-colonize the continent, but even then, rates of cancer and birth defects would likely be off the charts.

“Yet, as we speak, the mainstream media is running a total media blackout on this story. Governments are pretending there is no problem, and the corporations that built these nuclear facilities (like GE) are quietly running disinfo campaigns to convince everybody there is no problem.”

The words in bold were added by the emailer for effect, but if the substance of the email is true, little emphasis is actually needed.

Numerous Investigate readers have asked the magazine to look into the issue, and we have: the threat appears to be real, but there are differing views on the severity of the threat.

Canada’s state-owed CTV published a story late May, warning “the worst nuclear storm the world has ever seen could be just one earthquake away from reality. The troubled Reactor 4 at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant is at the centre of this potential catastrophe.”

The Canadian TV report is anchored on comments from US-based nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, who has visited Fukushima and argues that 1,535 spent fuel rods in Reactor 4 are in danger of being exposed to air and catching fire. The nuclear heat would set off, he says, a chain reaction causing what CTV described as “a massive oxygen-eating radiological fire that could not be extinguished with water.”

As Gundersen describes it, “The health consequences of that are beyond where science has ever gone…

[story continues in latest Investigate magazine]