Let's take some examples:
the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches.
“Washing up” at about 1Bq per cubic meter. This is newsworthy?
Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific.
So? Water isn’t a problem… it’s the radioactive materials in the water that we care about, and those amounts are tiny. Far smaller than the amount of material disappearing naturally.
At least three extremely volatile fuel assemblies are stuck high in the air at Unit 4.
I imagine that he thought that made sense. He (along with most of the fukunuts) love to add modifying adjectives to anything related to Fukushima that doesn’t seem scary enough. How much radiation is leaking? It’s tiny… but nobody knows (or can know) the exact figure… so let’s call it “immeasurable” or “uncountable”. That sounds scarier.
Three fuel assemblies that were damaged prior to the 2011 events can’t be moved using the method that’s currently working fine for the other 1500+ assemblies. Let’s claim that they’re “stuck” there! (someone’s bound to think that we knew what we were talking about when we said that it was like a crushed pack of cigarettes!) Nah… that’s not scary enough. I know! We’ll say that they’re stuck and “extremely volatile”. Yeah… that’s the ticket!
Of course, they aren’t “extremely volatile” or “stuck”… but why does that matter?
nobody knows exactly where the melted cores from Units 1, 2 and 3 might be
Gotta be careful to phrase it that way. Gotta leave the fukunuts with the impression that it’s still possible that the cores melted through all containment and are somewhere in the ground. Of course, the reality is that they do know where the cores are (within a narrow range of possibilities). But since they don’t know exactly where each is… we can get away with the lie.
Amid a dicey cleanup infiltrated by organized crime, still more massive radiation releases are a real possibility at any time.
Can’t quite tell what the connection is between Japanese organized crime (always an issue with any large project) and this nonsensical claim that released larger than 2011 are still “a real possibility at any time”. I suppose this is just Wasserman whistling past the I-was-clueless graveyard and pretending that his “Humankind's Most Dangerous Moment” claim had some connection to reality (it didn’t).
Meanwhile, children nearby are dying.
Not from Fukushima radiation they aren’t.
The rate of thyroid cancers among some 250,000 area young people is more than 40 times normal.
Nope. In fact, there’s no evidence of an increase in cancers at all.
According to health expert Joe Mangano
Did he really just use the words “health expert” in the same sentence as Mangano? Where was my “not safe for drinking soda” warning!? Now I have to clean my keyboard.
In Fukushima’s wake, the Japanese public has become far more anti-nuclear.
They did in 2011… and have slowly started to shift back over time.
Anti-nuclear candidates have been dividing the vote in recent elections, but the movement may be unifying and could eventually overwhelm the Abe administration.
May be unifying? Could overwhelm the administration? Wishful thinking there. And let’s keep in mind that even in some recent races where the anti-nuclear candidates “split” some of the vote… the pro-nuclear candidate (in Tokyo for instance) won more votes than both of them combined. What Wasserman fails to appreciate is that while a solid number of people in Japan have become anti-nuclear, too few of them put the issue high enough up on their list to vote against candidates who they support on almost every other issue. They're also anti-high-electricity-prices and anti-extreme-fossil-imports.
According to nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, the bring-down of the assemblies in Unit 4 may have hit a serious snag. Gundersen says that beginning in November 2013, Tokyo Electric Power removed about half of the suspended rods there. But at least three assemblies may be stuck.
Again with the “may”? There’s no evidence at all of a “snag”. All of the evidence to date (despite Gundersen and Wasserman fantasies to the contrary) is that the removal of fuel from SFP #4 has been going off smoothly. They'll hit the 2/3 point in the next couple weeks.
The more difficult half of the pile remains.
An entirely invented reality (even if the math were corrected - resumably it's the "more difficult third" now). Let’s return to Wasserman’s I-was-clueless graveyard. He wants to hold out hope beyond hope that something in there will make him (and Arnie) seem less foolish. Other than the three already-damaged assemblies, we’ve seen zero evidence that any of the assemblies are easier or harder to remove than others.
could result in significant radiation releases, which have already far exceeded those from Chernobyl and from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is entirely false. One wonders whether Wasserman is selling that line… or simply bought it himself and is reselling it. But you’ve got to be pretty clueless to look at a report that says Fukushima released more of a particular element (cesium) than Hiroshima… and translate that to the lie that the total radiation released was larger.
heavily contaminated Fukushima water still pour daily into the Pacific. Hundreds more tons are backed up on site Tepco apologists advocating they be dumped directly into the ocean without decontamination.
Also untrue. Nobody has proposed dumping “heavily contaminated” water “without decontamination”.
Little of this has made its way into the American corporate media.
To their credit… since it was largely a tissue of lies.
an explosion and highly significant radiation release at the pilot project last month has contaminated local residents
This guy has an active imagination. “Explosion” is extreme hyperbole… “highly significant” goes well beyond that to flat dishonesty… let along “contaminated local residents”.
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