Fukushima and the Nuclear Establishment

The Big Lies Fly High

Fukushima and the Nuclear Establishment

By KARL GROSSMAN

The global nuclear industry and its allies in government are making a
desperate effort to cover up the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear disaster. "The big lie flies high," comments Kevin Kamps of the
organization Beyond Nuclear.

Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the
Fukushima catastrophe has not happened-going so far as to claim that there
will be "no health effects" as a result of it-but it is moving forward on a
"nuclear renaissance," its scheme to build more nuclear plants.

Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day "Special Summit on New Nuclear
Energy" will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power
plants-including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima
plants-and U.S. government officials.

Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations
have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean,
renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is
continuing its insistence on nuclear power.

Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what,
indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time-that no one
will die as a result of Fukushima?

Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?

Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still
streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that
meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as
it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading
worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to
nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.

"No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the
events at Fukushima," the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry
trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press conference in
Washington last week.

"They're lying," says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing
editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People
and the Environment published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009.
Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of
European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the
radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

The Fukushima disaster will have a comparable toll, expects Dr. Sherman, who
has conducted research into the consequences of radiation for decades.
"People living closest to the plants who receive the biggest doses will get
sick sooner. Those who are farther away and receive lesser doses will get
sick at a slower rate," she says.

"We've known about radioactive isotopes for decades," says Dr. Sherman. "I
worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and we knew about the
effects then. To ignore the biology is to our peril. This is not new
science. Cesium-137 goes to soft tissue. Strontium-90 goes to the bones and
teeth. Iodine-131 goes to the thyroid gland." All have been released in
large amounts in the Fukushima disaster since it began on March 11.

There will inevitably be cancer and other illnesses-as well as genetic
effects-as a result of the substantial discharges of radioactivity released
from Fukushima, says Dr. Sherman. "People in Japan will be the most impacted
but the radiation has been spreading worldwide and will impact life
worldwide."

The American Nuclear Society, made up of what its website says are
"professionals" in the nuclear field, is also deep in the Fukushima denial
camp. "Radiation risks to people living in Japan are very low, and no public
ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident," it declares on its
website. As to the U.S., the Illinois-based organization adds: "There is no
health risk of radiation from the Fukushima incident to people in the United
States."

Acknowledging that "radiation from Fukushima has been detected within the
United States," the American Nuclear Society asserts that's because we are
able to detect very small amounts of radiation. Through the use of extremely
sensitive equipment, U.S. laboratories have been able to detect very minute
quantities of radioactive isotopes in air, precipitation, milk, and drinking
water due to the Fukushima incident.The radiation from Fukushima, though
detectable, is nowhere near the level of public health concern."

Says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health
Project, "The absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is
perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by
nuclear officials in industry and government."

The World Health Organization has added its voice to the denial group. "For
anyone outside Japan there is currently no health risk from radiation
leaking from the nuclear power plant," Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, has
insisted. "We know that there have been measurements in maybe up to about 30
countries [and] these measurements are miniscule, often below levels of
background radiation.and they do not constitute a public health risk."

WHO, not too incidentally, has a formal arrangement with the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in place since both were established at the UN
in the 1950s, to say nothing about issues involving radiation without
clearing it with the IAEA, which was set up to specifically promote atomic
energy. On Chernobyl, together in an initiative called the "Chernobyl
Forum," they have claimed that "less than 50 deaths have been directly
attributed" to that disaster and "a total of up to 4,000 people could
eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant
accident." That nuclear Big Lie precedes the new nuclear deception involving
the impacts of Fukushima.

As to background radiation, Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president
of Physicians for Social Responsibility and professor emeritus at the
University of Wisconsin's School of Public Health, says: "We do live with
background radiation-but it does cause cancer." That's why there is concern,
he notes, about radon gas being emitted in homes from a breakdown of uranium
in some soils. "That's background [radiation] but it's not safe. There are
absolutely no safe levels of radiation" and adding more radiation "adds to
the health impacts."

"There has been a cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity
since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology," says Dr.
Patterson. Meanwhile, with the Fukushima disaster, "large populations of
people are being randomly exposed to radiation that they didn't ask for,
they didn't agree to."

Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist who has specialized in the effects of
radioactivity at the School of Public Health of the University of North
Carolina in Chapel Hill, said: "The generally accepted thinking about the
safe dose is that, no, there is no safe dose in terms of the cancer or
genetic effects of radiation. The assumption of most people is that there's
a linear, no-threshold dose response relationship and that just means that
as the dose goes down the risk goes down, but it never disappears."

Of the claims of "no threat to health" from the radioactivity emitted from
Fukushima, that "just flies in the face of all the standard models and all
the studies that have been done over a long period of time of radiation and
cancer."

"As the radiation clouds move away from Fukushima and move far away to other
continents and around the world, the doses are spread out," notes Dr. Wing.
"But it's important for people to know that spreading out a given amount of
radiation dose among more people, although it reduces each person's
individual risk, it doesn't reduce the number of cancers that result from
that amount of radiation. So having millions and millions of people exposed
to a very small dose could produce just as much cancer as a thousand or a
few thousand people exposed to that same dose."

He believes "we should be focusing on putting pressure on people in
government and the energy industry to come up with an energy policy that
minimizes harm," is a "sane energy policy." Those who have "led us into this
situation" have caused "big problems."

And they are still at it-even with radioactivity still coming out at
Fukushima and expected to for months. On Tuesday and Wednesday in
Washington, the "Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy" will be held,
organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council.

Council members include General Electric, since 2006 in partnership in its
nuclear plant manufacturing business with the Japanese corporation Hitachi.

Other members of the council, notes its information on the summit, include
the Nuclear Energy Institute; Babcock & Wilcox, the manufacturer of the
Three Mile Island nuclear plant which underwent a partial meltdown in 1979;
Duke Energy, a U.S. utility long a booster of nuclear power; the Tennessee
Valley Authority, a U.S. government-created public power company heavily
committed to nuclear power; Uranium Producers of America; and AREVA, the
French government-financed nuclear power company that has been moving to
expand into the U.S. and worldwide.

Also participating in the summit as speakers will be John Kelly, an Obama
administration Department of Energy deputy assistant for nuclear reactor
technologies; William Magwood, a nuclear power advocate who is a member of
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Matthew Milazzo representing an entity
called the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future set up by the
Obama administration; and Congressmen Mike Simpson of Idaho, chairman of the
House Appropriations Subcommittee Interior & Environment and Ed Whitfield of
Kentucky, chairman of the House Energy & Power Subcommittee, both staunch
nuclear power supporters.

Other participants, according to the program for the event, will be "senior
executives and thought leaders from the who's who of the U.S. new nuclear
community." Bruce Llewelyn, who hosts "White House Chronicle" on PBS
television, is listed as the summit's "moderator."

There will be programs on the "State of the Renaissance," "China, India &
Emerging Global Nuclear Markets," "Advancing Nuclear Technology" and
"Lessons from Fukushima."

As the nuclear Pinocchios lie, the nuclear promoters push ahead.

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New
York/College at Old Westbury, has focused on investigative reporting on
energy and environmental issues for more than 40 years. He is the host of
the nationally-aired TV program Enviro Close-Up ( www.envirovideo.com) and
the author of numerous books.