(Credit: CC-BY-NC-SA by Surian Soosay)
I thought Chernobyl was bad,until I saw this. Here’s a time lapse map of the 2,053 nuclear explosions that have taken place between 1945 to1998. It starts slowly but skip to 1962 and the buildup becomes overwhelming before the world seemingly comes to its senses.
But now let’s deal with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1987 when a simple experiment to see if the steam turbines could power the coolant pumps if there was a loss of power, led quickly to a nuclear disaster on the night of April 26, 1986. A disaster that nearly poisoned the world with a dose of lethal radiation. [Seconds From Disaster – Meltdown at Chernobyl]
Today, we have Arnie Gundersen putting up a new video on the upcoming fuel rod removal at the ongoing radiation disaster of Fukushima, and it cuts to the core of the worldwide radiation danger we now face at Fukushima. EPCO has produced a reassuring short video describing how the fuel removal process is supposed to go, mixing animation and documentary footage to soothe away any viewer’s worries. Arnie Gunderson calls it a “fantasy cartoon” and shows excerpts from the TEPCO production followed by his own explanations of how TEPCO is misleading the world.
The nuclear power industry is an accident waiting to happen and only populist direct action, as demonstrated in Germany, can free a world that is now being held hostage by the nuclear power global corporate elite.
Meanwhile,in the partly evacuated Fukushima Prefecture, local officials are confirming an increase in thyroid cancer in children.The rate is more than 7 times higher than for the general population and reflects a similar pattern experienced around Chernobyl after the accident there.
A key to Germany’s anti-nuclear success is the persistent and uncompromising environmental movement that has used civil resistance and protest as well as independent electoral politics to achieve its goals. PopularResistance.org just featured a must read article on What the US Can Learn From Germany’s Stunning Environmental Movement. Here is a critical excerpt:
Anti-nuclear protests, a staple of German environmentalism since the 1970s, had been heating up in the years preceding Fukushima. In early 2010, a full year before the tragedy, 120,000 Germans had formed a 75-mile human chain between two active nuclear plants.The day after the Fukushima tsunami hit, tens of thousands formed a similar chain across parts of southern Germany. Within three days of the meltdown, some 110,000 demonstrators had staged nearly 500 events in as many towns across the country. By the end of the month, massive rallies had engulfed Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich.National uproar continued as March led to April, and it was only in late May, after 25,000 protesters had converged on their party headquarters, that Chancellor Merkel and her government agreed to a ban. See article here.
It’s time for action, not just words, for our very existence and survival is at stake.
“Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed. This power becomes available to you just as you can change your beliefs.”Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
—
Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and transformational counselor Allen L Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private Skype consultations at allen@allenroland.com. He shares a daily political and social commentary on his web log and website allenroland.com.He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK onwww.conscioustalk.net.
“…world-wide radiation danger”? How so? This is another example of the attempt to conflate nuclear weapons with nuclear power plants and to frighten the public so that the anti-nuclear power movement can accomplish its goal. There has been no significant radiation danger beyond the borders of the Prefecture since the earthquake-tsunami of 2011 at Fukushima damaged three nuclear reactors. Of course radioactivity can be detected, one atom at a time. But the amount of radioactivity released in the air and the ocean is vastly diluted when it is distributed ‘world-wide’.The spent fuel pool has about the same amount of radioactivity as in the three reactors. There is no mechanism for distributing that radioactivity world-wide to any dangerous level as we have already learned since the accident began in 2011. The danger decreases with each passing day as the remaining radioactivity declines according to the physical laws of decay. So don’t buy into the scaremongering. I hope Tikkun will not join this campaign as it discredits it should it do so.
Sorry for the duplication, I meant to type “Prefecture”, not “plant”.
Another misleading statement alluded to in the headline as well is the “Dark shadow of Chernobyl” about which the author wrote:
“A disaster that nearly poisoned the world with a dose of lethal radiation.” In fact that reactor, due to a faulty design choice, did go ‘prompt critical’ and blew a substantial fraction of its core into the stratosphere where it dispersed all over Europe. Nothing like that can happen at Fukushima now or could have happened then in 2011. Even so, there was no poisoning of the world with a “dose of lethal radiation”. Three dozen emergency responders that explosion did die. But no prompt lethal radiation occurred to the public. So far there is no detectable increase in cancer rates (other than thyroid Ca) 27 years since Chernobyl, though no doubt extra cases have and will occur. But the population-wide doses from Fukushima will never be like those from Chernobyl.
The emptying of the spent fuel pool at Fukushima #4 began on Monday and so far has been uneventful. The possible consequences of a severe accident in that process have been evaluated by the U.S, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NUREG-1738) which shows the health effects would be limited to a distance of 10 miles from the plant.
“…our very existence and survival” is not at stake.
I am a retired health physicist (radiation protection), trained at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center.