Fukushima out of the headlines

"A Cone of Silence has descended over Fukushima Daiichi and we continue to read virtually nothing in the MSM leading up to the 3 Anniversary which is now little more than a month away"

'Syndrome of denying radiation damage': Fukushima disappears from global headlines

Voice of Russia,

4 February, 2014

The aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been severely underestimated, according to the Global Research center. The article posted on its website cites 50 reasons why - quote – ‘we should fear the worst from Fukushima’. It was penned by Harvey Wasserman, an American journalist and advocate for renewable energy. The Voice of Russia talked to Harvey Wasserman – an American journalist and advocate for renewable energy, editor of http://www.nukefree.org/

The author maintains that Japan’s harsh dictatorial censorship coupled with a global media blackout is aimed at keeping Fukushima out of the public eye.

The impacts of these emissions on human and ecological health are unknown primarily because the nuclear industry has resolutely refused to study them, Mr.Wasserman writes.

He further states that this mindset described as ‘see no evil, pay no damages’ dates from the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The bombings killed tens of thousands of people, with many dying later from radiation.

The article says the US military initially denied that there was any radioactive fallout or that it could do any damage. Nevertheless, the victims, including a group of US prisoners of war, were officially discredited and scorned.

The author points out that numerous attempts to draw public attention to the hazards of nuclear radiation have met with resistance from the nuclear and medical establishments. He goes on to say that by refusing to provide emission assessment, the industry systematically hides harmful health impacts at Chernobyl, Fukushima and other nuclear facilities, forcing victims to rely on isolated independent studies that are deemed ‘discredited’.

The authorities in Japan and other countries are trying to keep the Fukushima issue out of the public eye. Have these efforts been successful, in your opinion? Is it possible to conceal this kind of information?

Yes, Japan of course has passed the State Secrets Act and there are very-very serious penalties now for publishing information that Japan considers a breach to its national security, which includes Fukushima. In the middle of a very dangerous bring-down of spent-fuel from the pool at the Unit 4, the process was suspended.

We haven’t heard\seen any coverage of that whatsoever. And so, with the cooperation of the corporate media Fukushima has all but disappeared from the global headlines, but the situation there is still very dire.

Why does the nuclear industry refuse to study the impact of radioactive emissions?

This is a 70-year phenomenon dating back really to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the American military initially denied any radioactive fallout at all and they denied any health impacts of people who showed that they have been harmed by radiation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were essentially scorned by the military until the scientists went in and made it an irrefutable situation.

This syndrome of denying any radiation damage has stretched to the nuclear bomb tests, to medical X-rays and of course to the entire history of the nuclear power industry. For many years, really, until Fukushima the nuclear industry denied that the commercial reactor could explode.

Of course, Chernobyl exploded, but they said – well, that was a Soviet reactor. Now we’ve had four general electric reactors that have exploded at Fukushima. 

There are 400 reactors worldwide and we know now that they are all in danger of blowing up. The industry wants to continue building new reactors, they are terrified of renewable. And so, it is in their interest to keep out any news about health dangers.

If you are going to introduce a new drug, for example, you have to test it out and make sure that it is safe. But no one has ever done that for nuclear power and we have 400 these reactors in our ecosphere. So, the industry has done one thing very well over the past 70 years – it’s refused to establish a medical or epidemiological database for the impact of atomic radiation and that of course continues.

With that thought in mind, the official reports tend to downplay the effects of the Fukushima disaster. Do you think people believe them?

I don’t know what people believe. But you are exactly right, they have more than downplayed. They’ve denied pretty much any possible impacts from Fukushima. We actually have people running around saying – no one is going to be harmed by the radiation from Fukushima – even though it is many-many times greater than what came out of Chernobyl.

And we know of course what those impacts from Chernobyl have been and of course the industry denies that as well. I mean, the evidence coming from Ukraine and Belarus, especially among children, has been horrifying. And we expect more of the same from Fukushima.

Much of the radiation at Fukushima has been going into the ocean. 300 tons of radioactive water are pouring into the Pacific Ocean every day at Fukushima, and yet the industry is of course saying that this is miniscule and won’t have any impact.

We have to remember that the initial finding in 1956 by Dr. Alice Stewart that a single X-ray to a pregnant woman could double the leukemia rate among the children born. The most important finding of all is that essentially there is no safe dose of radiation.

Of course, today we do not X-ray pregnant women, even though the industry argued for 30 years that it is actually harmless. And we wear a bib when we have a dental X-ray and the X-ray technician leaves the room. And yet the industry wants us to believe that pouring in huge quantities of radiation is not going to harm anybody. It is just not credible.

In your opinion, do you feel that those 300 tons of wastes that are being dumped into the Pacific Ocean might have anything to do with the numerous reports of wildlife that is dying off in the west coast of America?

Yes, I believe that, first of all, we are having serious global warming problems and of course there is a lot of pollution in our oceans today, much of the water is very toxic. But the last thing you want to do is add in yet another lethal poison, which is the radiation. And when you add radiation into a situation where there already is bad pollution, you are really upping the ante.

And that’s what we believe is happening here. It is impossible to measure these impacts very precisely but we know that over time the radiation is going to add significantly to the damage being done by all the other forms of pollution in the oceans.

And we have to remember, of course, actually it has only been three years ago, on March 11th . And these radioactive materials that are pouring into the Pacific are going to be deadly for decades, if not hundreds of years. And we really won’t be able to understand the full impacts of this radiation for many-many years. Radiation causes cancers that don’t surface for 10-20-30 years.

Do you think people in Japan or elsewhere are aware of the health risks posed by Fukushima?

I think many are, but also think that the industry has done a very powerful counterattack, as it has done for 70 years by covering up the true damages. This is a phenomenon that we’ve lived with for many-many decades. The industry does not study the health impacts, it does not build epidemiological databases to follow the health of the people. They didn’t do it at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they don’t want to do it at Chernobyl and they will not do it at Fukushima.

So, it is a “see no evil, pay no damages” strategy. And that’s what we are seeing again at Fukushima. They are not even maintaining a database of people in the near area and they are not following the radiation that’s been released. And then, they turn around and say – well, there is no proof of any damage. If there is no proof, that’s because they not only do not look for proof but have attacked the people who are providing the proof.

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