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While the Rest of the World Is Abandoning Unsafe Nuclear Designs, America Will Build New Unsafe Reactors

The geniuses at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have given the green light for new nuclear power plants in the U.S. … which don’t include safety upgrades which were demonstrated vital by the Fukushima meltdown.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution notes:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Thursday approved Southern Co.’s plan to build two reactors at Plant Vogtle, south of Augusta — though the decision was not without dissent.

Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the five-member NRC, cast a lone vote against issuing a license for the project. He said he wanted but had not gotten a binding commitment from Southern that it would incorporate changes stemming from last year’s nuclear disaster in Japan.

“Significant safety enhancements have already been recommended as a result of learning the lessons from Fukushima,” Jaczko said, referring to the plant on Japan’s coast that was devastated by an earthquake and tidal wave, “and there is still more work ahead of us. Knowing this, I cannot support issuing these licenses as if Fukushima never happened.”

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The NRC’s 4-1 vote directs the agency staff to prepare the construction and operating license needed to start major work on the two reactors, which are expected to start producing electricity in 2016 and 2017.

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The last new reactors were approved in 1978, the year before a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. After that, increased regulatory scrutiny and skyrocketing costs halted expansion. Plant Vogtle’s two existing nuclear reactors, Units 1 and 2, ran over budget by $8 billion and took 16 years to build.

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The U.S. remains without a long-term plan to store nuclear waste.

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“The U.S. is approving new reactors before the full suite of lessons from Japan has been learned and before new safety regulations that were recommended by a task force established after the meltdown crisis at Fukushima have been implemented,” said Allison Fisher, Outreach Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program.

How Could This Happen?

As I noted last December:

New US plant designs are very near being licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission without any Fukushima modifications.

Now we know why.

Congressman Markey wrote yesterday:

As part of his ongoing investigation into U.S. nuclear safety since the Fukushima meltdowns, today Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) … released a blockbuster new report that details how four Commissioners at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) colluded to prevent and then delay the work of the NRC Near-Term Task Force on Fukushima, the entity tasked with making recommendations for improvement to NRC regulations and processes after the Fukushima meltdowns ….

Rep. Markey’s office reviewed thousands of pages of documents, including emails, correspondence, meeting minutes and voting records, and found a concerted effort by Commissioners William Magwood, Kristine Svinicki, William Ostendorff and George Apostolakis to undermine the efforts of the Fukushima Task Force with request for endless additional study in an effort to delay the release and implementation of the task force’s final recommendations. Documents also show open hostility on the part of the four Commissioners toward efforts of NRC Chairman Greg Jaczko to fully and quickly implement the recommendations of the Task Force, despite efforts on the part of the Chairman to keep the other four NRC Commissioners fully informed regarding the Japanese emergency.

“The actions of these four Commissioners since the Fukushima nuclear disaster has caused a regulatory meltdown that has left America’s nuclear fleet and the general public at risk,” said Rep. Markey. “Instead of doing what they have been sworn to do, these four Commissioners have attempted a coup on the Chairman and have abdicated their responsibility to the American public to assure the safety of America’s nuclear industry. I call on these four Commissioners to stop the obstruction, do their jobs and quickly move to fully implement the lessons learned from the Fukushima disaster.”

A copy of the report “Regulatory Meltdown: How Four Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners Conspired to Delay and Weaken Nuclear Reactor Safety in the Wake of Fukushima” can be found HERE.

Major findings in the new report include:

• Four NRC Commissioners attempted to delay and otherwise impede the creation of the NRC Near-Term Task Force on Fukushima;
• Four NRC Commissioners conspired, with each other and with senior NRC staff, to delay the release of and alter the NRC Near-Term Task Force report on Fukushima;
• The other NRC Commissioners attempted to slow down or otherwise impede the adoption of the safety recommendations made by the NRC Near-Term Task Force on Fukushima ….
• The consideration of the Fukushima safety upgrades is not the only safety-related issue that the other NRC Commissioners have opposed.

The Hill’s energy and environment blog reported yesterday:

[The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko] believes the commission “has taken an approach that is not as protective of public health and safety as I believe is necessary.”

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The commission has disagreed in recent months over how to deal with the recommendations of a task force assigned to reevaluate the country’s nuclear safety regulations in light of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.

The report called on the commission to make sweeping improvements to NRC’s “existing patchwork of regulatory requirements and other safety initiatives.”

Jaczko called on the commission to quickly evaluate the report and implement the necessary recommendations. But the commissioners initially resisted Jaczko’s call for swift action.

It turns out the leader of the group of commissioners which Jaczco is fighting was a consultant for Tepco – the company which operates Fukushima.

***

Because Obama’s top adviser and top funders are connected with the nuclear power industry, the White House has also aggressively pushed four new nuclear power plants in the U.S., even though virtually all of the current nuclear reactors in the U.S. are of the same archaic design as those at Fukushima, and this design was not chosen for safety reasons, but because it worked in Navy submarines, and produced plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. And even though the same folks who built and run Fukushima will build and operate the new U.S. facilities.

Note: Nuclear power could be safe, if designed and operated correctly. But neither the nuclear industry or government regulators care about safety.

This post originally appeared at Treehugger.com on February 7, 2012.

- by Brian Merchant

For decades now, fossil fuel company executives and D.C. politicians have worked together to ensure that coal and oil prices stay low enough to keep the American people hooked. In his new book Greedy Bastards, Dylan Ratigan explains how “vampire industries” like oil and coal have forged “an unholy alliance with government based not just on the money that they contribute to political campaigns and spend on lobbying, but on their ability to hypnotize us with false prices.”

Industry gets tax breaks, subsidies, military support in volatile regions, the right to use our air and water like a sewer, and assurance that the government will clean up its environmental messes. Politicians get campaign contributions, a steady flow of dirty energy, and a talking point to brandish about how they kept gas affordable.

But the American public just gets screwed.

We get stuck with a dirty, polluting energy regime; one that enriches a few one percenters while making the public sick and hobbling American innovation. As Ratigan puts it in his book, a handful of greedy bastards are fleecing Americans with a “Very Bad Deal”. Fossil fuels seem cheap and convenient now, but when we get hit with the true costs—of a spoiled environment, of missing out on vital future industries like clean energy, of a mounting public health burden, of possible war—we’ll see we were had.

The Rigged Market for Fossil Fuels

Just how rigged is the fossil fuels market? In a word, overwhelmingly.

Experts believe that oil companies alone receive $10-40 billion in handouts yearly. A conservative study from the Environmental Law Institute found that from 2002-2008, oil companies received $72 billion of taxpayer’s hard-earned cash. Another report from Management Information Systems, Inc found that between 1950 and 2010, $594 billion was spent directly subsidizing fossil fuels—and the lion’s share of that, almost two thirds, went to the oil industry. Coal, too, receives billions of dollars in annual federal handouts.

Clearly, government assistance distorts the price of fossil fuels, making them artificially cheaper. But those direct subsidies are nothing compared to the enormous costs the public indirectly pays for fossil fuels.

For one, our taxpayer dollars fund the cleanup of the industry’s accidents and disasters. In an interview, Dylan Ratigan told me that greedy bastards in the energy world are “masters” of transferring the long tail risk in their businesses to the public:

“They transfer that two tenths of a percent chance that the nuke melts down or the oil spill happens, or whatever the abomination is, to the state. The state takes that risk, and allows the limited regulation and all of the profits from the extraction of the energy resources to go to the energy companies, because they fund the politicians.”

Mining, transporting, and burning oil, gas, and coal also inflicts major damage to the environment and public health—and we pick up the tab. A 2009 report from the National Research Council showed that fossil fuels impose $120 billion of annual costs on the public every year. Air pollution takes a massive toll on public health—it causes respiratory problems, widespread illness and death, and leads to a huge number of missed work days. The prognosis from a Harvard study, the first to analyze the full life-cycle impact of coal, is even bleaker.

That report’s lead author, the late Dr. Paul Epstein, told me in an interview that “Between the land disturbance, the mountaintop removal, the processing … and the combustion, we estimate that this is costing the American public somewhere between a third to half a trillion dollars in health costs and deaths.”

Yes, that’s ‘trillion’ with a ‘T’. Every year.

In fact, coal is so economically disastrous that the mainstream journal American Economics Review found that the electricity generated from coal actually does more damage to the economy than the electricity is worth. Grist’s David Roberts notes that “Coal-fired power is a net value-subtracting industry. A parasite, you might say. A gigantic, blood-sucking parasite that’s enriching a few executives and shareholders at the public’s expense.”

Finally, taxpayer-funded military expeditions have played a crucial role in securing fossil fuel supplies and transport routes—a cost to the public registered not just in billions of dollars but in American lives.

According to Ratigan’s calculations, the price of gasoline is around $10 too cheap per gallon when all unaccounted-for costs are included. Other projections put the figure even larger. And there are a wide range of estimates of the “true” cost of coal: Depending on how you factor in the costs of climate change, it could be between a few additional cents per kWh to a whopping ¢26.89 extra per kilowatt hour—the high-end estimate from the Harvard study. By way of comparison, the average American paid ¢11.54 per kWh on their residential electric bills last year. In other words, if prices accurately reflected all of the actual costs of burning coal, coal-fired power plants would be dead in the water.

Using the example of oil, Ratigan writes that such distortion results in a situation where “the free market can’t help [us] decide if it’s worth switching from gas to another fuel, because the market isn’t free, it’s rigged.” Similarly, investors, homeowners, and utilities can’t decide whether it will pay off to invest in clean energy and efficiency when the price of burning coal, which still supplies nearly half the nation with electricity, is so cheap.

Which is why we’ve got to restore price integrity to commodities like oil and coal—we’ve got to prevent fossil fuel companies from dumping their costs on us, level the playing field for clean energy technologies, and give Americans the choice they deserve over what powers their lives. Which means we’ve got to increase the price of gasoline and coal-fired electricity.

Restoring Price Integrity: Fee and Dividend

Lower your pitchforks for a second, hold back with the tar and feathers. What if there was a way to make fossil fuels companies pay their fair share—while putting extra cash in American pockets?

It’s called ‘Fee and Dividend’. The plan is simple: charge oil, gas and coal companies a small, annually increasing fee on fossil fuels sales—then collect the fees and evenly distribute them amongst the American people. The idea has the support of not just environmentalists, but scientists, politicians, and free-market conservatives.

Jim DiPeso, the Republicans for Environmental Protection’s Vice President for Policy and Communications, sings its praises: “Transparent. Market-based. Does not enlarge government. Leaves energy decisions to individual choices … Sounds like a conservative climate plan.”

Dr. James Hansen

NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, one of the world’s top climate scientists, also advocates this approach. Hansen describes it as a “flat, across-the-board rising fee on carbon emissions” that would be levied on fossil fuels at a domestic mine or port of entry. Hansen wrote to me to explain the impact fee and dividend would have:

“The price of fossil fuel energy will rise, but with today’s fossil fuel uses, over 60 percent of the people will get more in their dividend than they pay in increased energy prices. People who have several houses or fly around the world all the time will have costs that increase more than their dividend. People will tend to make consumer and lifestyle choices that minimize their carbon emissions—this will happen naturally via the prices that they see.”

That way, when fuel prices rise to reflect their true costs, the public will have a buffer—in fact, the majority of Americans will earn money from the policy. And they’ll earn even more if they use less fossil fuels. A public website could be created to track the fees collected on fossil fuels, and Americans could see exactly how much they stand to earn.

As DiPeso explains, “Those who wish to use carbon-based energy with abandon would be free to do so – knowing up front that they would pay the environmental and other costs of using lots of carbon-based energy rather than shift those costs onto their fellow citizens.”

It’s a win-win. Not just for individual Americans, but our economy at large: Nonpolluting industries will benefit from a leveled playing field, American innovation will be unleashed, and jobs will grow in the clean energy sector.

“The carbon fee should rise over time to a level that covers the full cost of fossil fuels to society—by the time it gets there we will have generated better energy technologies and improved energy efficiency,” Hansen says.

Now, it’s not a perfect solution—farmers and folks who live in rural areas would be hit harder than those in urban areas, who already rely less on fossil fuels. A fair way to help cover those costs—perhaps tax breaks for energy efficient machinery upgrades—must be worked out with citizens in fossil fuel-dependent regions and occupations.

From Securing Oil to Securing Our Future

We also need to eliminate the massive fossil fuel subsides for coal, oil, and gas companies. This too has widespread bipartisan support. Obama calls to repeal oil subsidies just about every year, and Republicans, Independents, and Democrats alike support ending the handouts—but the unholy alliance between industry execs and the politicians they finance keeps them in place.

And, of course, we’d have to tackle what’s perhaps the biggest oil subsidy of all: U.S. military assistance to fossil fuel companies. This is a deeply entrenched system, and no single piece of legislation could likely disrupt the long-standing symbiosis between Big Oil and the military.

But we could start by launching a jobs program designed to help vets get work in the energy efficiency and clean energy sector. A group called Operation Free is already fighting a battle along those lines: Founded by veterans, it helps other vets organize to fight for clean energy policies that will lead to true energy independence, to ensure that their children won’t have to fight the same oil-tinged wars that they did.

In many European nations, where the oil industry doesn’t have as powerful a grip on politics, gasoline routinely costs two or three times as much. Governments levy gas taxes that better reflect the true cost of oil, which then spurs industry to develop cleaner, more efficient cars. This leads to less pollution, healthier communities, job transference to more productive industries, and a more competitive economy. We could do the same in the United States—in fact, we’ve got to.

Now, plenty of skeptics will insist that these ideas aren’t “politically feasible”. The plan is too ambitious, it will never pass the dysfunctional Congress, it’s too … yawn. Over the last year, we’ve watched as brand new spaces for novel approaches to politics have been blown wide open—Occupy Wall Street suddenly brought the nation face to face with its own income inequality and the safe-housing of corporate greed. The same could happen for energy and pollution. In a recent discussion, former US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson told me we need an “Arab Spring for the environment”. Indeed, across the nation, concerned citizens are beginning to rally against the cushy alliance between D.C. and the fossil fuels industry. Who can blame them?

Americans are paying through the nose on their tax returns and health bills to help Big Oil and the political elite maintain the illusion that cheap, dirty energy is a bargain. But enough is enough, and time is of the essence. We’re paying for wars, pollution and handouts to massive multinationals—instead of allowing the free market to reward the innovators and industries that will lead us to energy security. To stop the vicious cycle, we must unravel and reset the rigged market for oil and coal, revealing their true costs once and for all. We must loose the nation from the stranglehold of its aging, fossil-fueled energy regime.

As Ratigan says, “There’s no greater path to freedom than energy independence.”

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Instead of Protecting People, Governments Cover Up by Raising “Safe” Radiation Levels

American and Canadian authorities have virtually stopped monitoring airborne radiation.

Neither American nor Canadian authorities are testing fish for radioactivity.

Does that mean that we don’t have to worry about radiation from Fukushima?

It is a little hard to know, given that what is deemed a “safe level” of radiation is determined by politics … rather than science. For example, current safety standards are based on the ridiculous assumption that everyone exposed is a healthy man in his 20s – and that radioactive particles ingested into the body cause no more damage than radiation hitting the outside of the body.

And one of the main advisors to the Japanese government on Fukushima announced:

If you smile, the radiation will not affect you.

(Here’s the video.)

In the real world, however, even low doses of radiation can cause cancer. Moreover, small particles of radiation – called “internal emitters” – which get inside the body are much more dangerous than general exposures to radiation. See this and this. And radiation affects small children much more than full-grown adults.

Indeed, instead of doing much to try to protect their citizens from Fukushima, Japan, the U.S. and the EU all just raised the radiation levels they deem “safe”.

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen says that high-level friends in the State Department told him that Hillary Clinton signed a pact with her counterpart in Japan agreeing that the U.S. will continue buying seafood from Japan, despite that food not being tested for radioactive materials.

And the Department of Energy is trying to replace the scientifically accepted model of the dangers of low dose radiation based on voodoo science. Specifically, DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley Labs used a mutant line of human cells in a petri dish which was able to repair damage from low doses of radiation, and extrapolated to the unsupported conclusion that everyone is immune to low doses of radiation:

In reality, not only is there overwhelming evidence that low doses of radiation can cause cancer, but there is some evidence that low doses can – in certain circumstances cause more damage than higher doses.

As I pointed out in April:

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reported that one of the best-known scientists of the 20th century – Dr. John Gofman – also believed that chronic low level radiation is more dangerous than acute exposure to high doses. Gofman was a doctor of nuclear and physical chemistry and a medical doctor who worked on the Manhattan Project, co-discovered uranium-232 and -233 and other radioactive isotopes and proved their fissionability, helped discover how to extract plutonium, led the team that discovered and characterized lipoproteins in the causation of heart disease, served as a Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California Berkeley, served as Associate Director of the Livermore National Laboratory, was asked by the Atomic Energy Commission to undertake a series of long range studies on potential dangers that might arise from the “peaceful uses of the atom”, and wrote four scholarly books on radiation health effects.

And see this, this and this.

Tepco Admits that Radiation Levels from Fukushima Are RISING

JiJi Press – one of Japan’s largest news sources – reports:

Tokyo Electric Power Co. on Monday reported an increase in radioactive materials leaking from damaged nuclear reactors at the Fukushima … plant.

The total amount of radioactive cesium that leaked from the containment vessels of the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors reached 70 million becquerels per hour, up 12 million becquerels from the December level, the power firm said.

It seems that radioactive dusts were stirred up because plant workers went inside reactor buildings and removed rubble, TEPCO officials said.

While it is possible that the increased radiation is simply due to dust being stirred up, there is some evidence that the increase in radiation corresponds with recent earthquakes.

Or it could be due to the possible escape of nuclear fuel from the nuclear container vessels.

Indeed, a Fukushima whistleblower allegedly claims that radioactive fuel is coming out from beneath the containment building:

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These [highly-radioactive] yellow concrete slags come out from under the building one after one. It means that the container vessel is melting like honeycomb at least – doesn’t it? Otherwise why would metal uranium comes out of there ?

And see this.

“The Government Can No Longer Pull the Wool Over the Public’s Eyes”

As I’ve pointed out since day one, the Japanese government and Tepco have covered up the extent of the radiation released by Fukushima and its health effects on the Japanese and others. See this and this.

The New York Times notes:

The government inspectors declared Onami’s rice safe for consumption after testing just two of its 154 rice farms.

Then … more than a dozen [farmers] found unsafe levels of cesium. An ensuing panic forced the Japanese government to intervene, with promises to test more than 25,000 rice farms in eastern Fukushima Prefecture, where the plant is located.

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The repeated failures have done more than raise concerns that some Japanese may have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation in their food, as regrettable as that is. They have also had a corrosive effect on public confidence in the food-monitoring efforts, with a growing segment of the public and even many experts coming to believe that officials have understated or even covered up the true extent of the public health risk in order to limit both the economic damage and the size of potential compensation payments.

Critics say … the government can no longer pull the wool over the public’s eyes, as they contend it has done routinely in the past.

“Since the accident, the government has tried to continue its business-as-usual approach of understating the severity of the accident and insisting that it knows best,” said Mitsuhiro Fukao, an economics professor at Keio University in Tokyo who has written about the loss of trust in government. “But the people are learning from the blogs, Twitter and Facebook that the government’s food-monitoring system is simply not credible.”

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“No one trusts the national government’s safety standards,” said Ichio Muto, 59, who farms organic mushrooms in Nihonmatsu, 25 miles northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The Japan Times reports:

The government buried a worst-case scenario for the Fukushima nuclear crisis that was drafted last March and kept it under wraps until the end of last year, sources in the administration said Saturday.

After the document was shown to a small, select group of senior government officials at the prime minister’s office in late March, the administration of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan decided to quietly bury it, the sources said.

“When the document was presented (in March), a discussion ensued about keeping its existence secret,” a government source said.

In order to deny its existence, the government treated it as a personal document of Japan Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Shunsuke Kondo, who authored it, until the end of December, the sources said.

It was only then that it was actually recognized as an official government document, they said.

“The content was so shocking that we decided to treat it as if it didn’t exist,” a senior government official said.

Major Japanese broadcaster NHK purportedly stopped a reporter in mid-sentence on March 12th as he was discussing the exposure of the nuclear fuel rods above the cooling pool, telling him:

They say you mustn’t read this draft.

Finally, the Economist and Boing Boing note that a Canadian journalist was grilled about who he spoke with at Fukushima, and:

Held, threatened, and shaken down for bribes before being detained without counsel or a phone call. He says he was eventually deported, though not before being ordered to sign a falsified confession and being threatened by an official at gunpoint.

(Many journalists and nuclear experts are alleged to have been monitored, harassed or blocked by the Japanese government.)

January 17, 2012
FRONTLINE travels to three continents to explore the debate about nuclear power: Is it safe? What are the alternatives? And could a Fukushima-style disaster happen in the U.S.?

Watch Nuclear Aftershocks on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Read the rest of this entry »

Very informative graphic from the E.I.A. on what we’re paying for at the pump.   Note the loss in refining.   See our post,  U.S. Gasoline Consumption Tanks in 2011,  illustrating the collapse in gasoline consumption in 2011.

Click on chart to enlarge image and for better resolution.

(click here if chart is not observable)

I listed these two articles in the morning reads, but I am so delighted over this that I had to make sure you did not miss this: Congress has apparently failed to extend the corn ethanol subsidy, a terrible energy idea that has subsidized the burning of food/corn for 30-years.

It is unclear whether this has simply lapsed, and has not been renewed yet or if the wasteful, engine damaging, negative-net-energy Corn Ethanol nightmare is finally over.

Here is the Detroit News:

The United States has ended a 30-year tax subsidy for corn-based ethanol that cost taxpayers $6 billion annually, and ended a tariff on imported Brazilian ethanol.

Congress adjourned for the year on Friday, failing to extend the tax break that’s drawn a wide variety of critics on Capitol Hill, including Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Critics also have included environmentalists, frozen food producers, ranchers and others.

The policies have helped shift millions of tons of corn from feedlots, dinner tables and other products into gas tanks.

What this means is that the domain “ihatecornethanol.com” is now for sale . . .

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Source:
Congress ends corn ethanol subsidy; Trade group expects industry to ‘survive’
David Shepardson
The Detroit News, December 24, 2011  
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20111224/AUTO01/112240320/1148/rss25

30-year-old corn ethanol subsidy nixed by Washington
Dan Roth
Autoblog, Dec 27th 2011 11:31AM 
http://www.autoblog.com/2011/12/27/30-year-old-corn-ethanol-subsidy-nixed-by-washington/

Canadian Medical Association Journal: Japanese Response to Fukushima Even Worse than Communist Russian Response to Chernobyl … “The Japanese Government Was Lying Through Its Teeth”

“Unconscionable” Failure Of Government … a “Culture of Coverup”

The peer-reviewed Journal of the Canadian Medical Association – a 144 year-old national association – slammed the Japanese government for lying about Fukushima:

A “culture of coverup” and inadequate cleanup efforts have combined to leave Japanese people exposed to “unconscionable” health risks nine months after last year’s meltdown of nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, health experts say.

Although the Japanese government has declared the plant virtually stable, some experts are calling for evacuation of people from a wider area, which they say is contaminated with radioactive fallout.

They’re also calling for the Japanese government to reinstate internationally-approved radiation exposure limits for members of the public and are slagging government officials for “extreme lack of transparent, timely and comprehensive communication.”

***

The government may soon allow some of the more than 100 000 evacuees from the area around the plant to return to their homes.

***

The plant is still badly damaged and leaking radiation, says Tilman Ruff, chair of the Medical Association for Prevention of Nuclear War, who visited the Fukushima prefecture in August. “There are major issues of contamination on the site. Aftershocks have been continuing and are expected to continue for many months, and some of those are quite large, potentially causing further damage to structures that are already unstable and weakened. And we know that there’s about 120 000 tons of highly contaminated water in the base of the plant, and there’s been significant and ongoing leakage into the ocean.”

The full extent of contamination across the country is even less clear, says Ira Hefland, a member of the board of directors for Physicians for Social Responsibility. “We still don’t know exactly what radiation doses people were exposed to [in the immediate aftermath of the disaster] or what ongoing doses people are being exposed to. Most of the information we’re getting at this point is a series of contradictory statements where the government assures the people that everything’s okay and private citizens doing their own radiation monitoring come up with higher readings than the government says they should be finding.”

Japanese officials in Tokyo have documented elevated levels of cesium — a radioactive material with a half-life of 30 years that can cause leukemia and other cancers — more than 200 kilometres away from the plant, equal to the levels in the 20 kilometre exclusion zone, says Robert Gould, another member of the board of directors for Physicians for Social Responsibility.

International authorities have urged Japan to expand the exclusion zone around the plant to 80 kilometres but the government has instead opted to “define the problem out of existence” by raising the permissible level of radiation exposure for members of the public to 20 millisieverts per year, considerably higher than the international standard of one millisievert per year, Gould adds.

This “arbitrary increase” in the maximum permissible dose of radiation is an “unconscionable” failure of government, contends Ruff. “Subject a class of 30 children to 20 millisieverts of radiation for five years and you’re talking an increased risk of cancer to the order of about 1 in 30, which is completely unacceptable. I’m not aware of any other government in recent decades that’s been willing to accept such a high level of radiation-related risk for its population.”

Following the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, “clear targets were set so that anybody anticipated to receive more than five millisieverts in a year were evacuated, no question,” Ruff explains. In areas with levels between one and five millisieverts, measures were taken to mitigate the risk of ingesting radioactive materials, including bans on local food consumption, and residents were offered the option of relocating. Exposures below one millisievert were still considered worth monitoring.

In comparison, the Japanese government has implemented a campaign to encourage the public to buy produce from the Fukushima area, Ruff added. “That response [in Chernobyl] 25 years ago in that much less technically sophisticated, much less open or democratic context, was, from a public health point of view, much more responsible than what’s being done in modern Japan this year.”

Were Japan to impose similar strictures, officials would have to evacuate some 1800 square kilometres and impose restrictions on food produced in another 11 100 square kilometres, according to estimates of the contamination presented by Dr. Kozo Tatara for the Japan Public Health Association at the American Public Health Association’s 139th annual meeting and exposition in November in Washington, District of Columbia.

***

The Japanese government is essentially contending that the higher dose is “not dangerous,” explains Hefland. “However, since the accident, it’s become clear the Japanese government was lying through its teeth, doing everything it possible could to minimize public concern, even when that meant denying the public information needed to make informed decisions, and probably still is.”

“It’s now clear they knew within a day or so there had been a meltdown at the plant, yet they didn’t disclose that for weeks, and only with great prodding from the outside,” Hefland adds. “And at the same moment he was assuring people there was no public health disaster, the Prime Minister now concedes that he thought Tokyo would have to be evacuated but was doing nothing to bring that about.”

Ruff similarly charges that the government has mismanaged the file and provided the public with misinformation. As an example, he cites early reports that stable iodine had been distributed to children and had worked effectively, when, “in fact, iodine wasn’t given to anyone.”

Public distrust is at a level that communities have taken cleanup and monitoring efforts into their own hands as the government response to the crisis has been “woefully inadequate” and officials have been slow to respond to public reports of radioactive hotspots, Gould says. “That’s led to the cleanup of some affected areas, but there are also reports of people scattering contaminated soil willy-nilly in forests and areas surrounding those towns.”

“In some places, you can see mounds of contaminated soil that have just been aggregated under blue tarps,” he adds.

Many other health and nuclear experts agree. See this and this.

Of course, in this culture of coverup permeating Japan and the rest of the world, Tepco is hiding information from the Japanese government, the Japanese government is trying to hide the truth from foreign government agencies such as the NRC, and other countries – like the U.S. – are hiding the truth from their own people.

Well, today is December 22nd. It is, in the Northern hemisphere, the shortest day of the year.

A perfect time to think about Solar energy:

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Home Solar Power Discounts – One Block Off the Grid