Real nuclear scientists are not sugar-coating the Fukushima meltdowns.

JackRiddler

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Fri Apr-08-11 03:16 PM
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Real nuclear scientists are not sugar-coating the Fukushima meltdowns.

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Unfortunately I can only give you four paragraphs from two long pieces, one in the New York Times last week, so consider these a taste and follow the links:

From Afar, a Vivid Picture of Japan Crisis
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: April 2, 2011

For the clearest picture of what is happening at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, talk to scientists thousands of miles away.

SNIP

For example, an analysis by a French energy company revealed far more about the condition of the plant’s reactors than the Japanese have ever described: water levels at the reactor cores dropping by as much as three-quarters, and temperatures in those cores soaring to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to burn and melt the zirconium casings that protect the fuel rods.

SNIP

“They don’t want to go there,” said Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert who, from 1993 to 1999, was a policy adviser to the secretary of energy. “The spin is all about reassurance.” If events in Japan unfold as they did at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the forensic modeling could go on for some time. It took more than three years before engineers lowered a camera to visually inspect the damaged core of the Pennsylvania reactor, and another year to map the extent of the destruction. The core turned out to be about half melted.

SNIP

“Clearly, there’s no access to the core,” the official said. “The Japanese are honestly blind.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/science/03meltdown.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

Dr. Janette Sherman who edited the translated 5,000 European studies said:

SNIP

"On the 20th Anniversary of Chernobyl WHO and the IAEA published the Chernobyl Forum Report, mentioning only 350 sources, mainly from the English literature while in reality there are more than 30,000 publications and up to 170,000 sources that address the consequences of Chernobyl."
(Sherman, 2011)

Just how does the United Nations IAEA manage to ignore half a million to a million dead Eurasians? It just so happens I've been going through some of the aforementioned excluded studies, and I found some interesting commentary pertaining to just that question.

"These findings indicate that the spectrum of developmental defects generated by incorporated radioactivity in humans may be much greater than derived by international radiation committees from the follow-up of Japanese A-bomb survivors. The findings are compatible with a particularly high radiosensitivity of the fetus... In contrast to this, the International Commission on Radiological Protection ICRP has postulated a threshold dose as high as 100 mSv in Publication 90 of 2003 for effects after prenatal exposure. They and other committees exclude radiation effects by Chernobyl fallout referring to the very low doses which were derived for the population."
(Wolfgang Hoffmann, Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake: Malformations, Perinatal Deaths and Childhood Morbidity after In Utero Exposure by Chernobyl Fallout. Observations in Europe and Turkey, Institut f�r Community Medicine, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universit�t, Greifswald and Universit�t Bremen, Fachbereich Physik und Elektrotechnik (i.R.), 2006)

http://counterpunch.org/giambrone04012011.html

Don't let anyone intimidate you with reassuring "expert" propaganda about the risks and the horrific harm already brought into the world by nuclear power. The majority of scientists are not on TV carefully limiting what they say or pretending that they're talking to four-year-olds who will panic and jump off a bridge if they hear the full range of risk possibilities.

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