Fukushima

Forget about radioactive fallout… look here, the Queen is visiting Ireland

Two months on and no end in sight, yes this is the current state of affairs when it comes to the painful issue of the ongoing nuclear radiation spills in Japan. Yet very little facts of the true extent of this global catastrophe trickles down to the forefront of the mass media and the collective consciousness at large.

Surprisingly the public who pay and will continue to pay the price with hard earned cash and the consequence to their health, seems quite content feeding on a diet of ready dished out trivia such as which Royal is wearing what hat? Who was not invited and who did not… Some sense of priorities we have?!

In the same token; While so many Irish people are evacuated from their own streets to make way for a contentious Royal visit, not enough Japanese people are evacuated from their own homes to protect them from the uncontrolled crisis of nuclear radiation, which will plague their environment and ours for many millennia to come…

Are the man in charge reading my blog?

On the 7th of April in post title Fukushima – Is the truth being diluted in sea water too? I signed off writing: “I am surprised though, that in such technologically advanced country like Japan, remotely operated robots are not deployed to boldly go where radiation may be to high for humans to bear. Or maybe they do and we just don’t hear about it.”

Few days later and a US remote controlled helicopter was used to probe the nuclear plant on a mission to collect information on the buildings at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi 4 nuclear reactors.

In post published yesterday titled ‘Fukushima – Lifting the lead on radiation levels’, I discussed how the Japanese government and some nuclear industry companies with everything to gain or lose, have raised the bar when it comes to the levels of permitted radiation for workers, lifting exposure limit from 100 millisieverts to 250 millisieverts. When contested by companies contracted by TEPCO supplying workers to deal with this crisis, the government argued back justifying their action saying they are following the ‘International Commission on Radiological Protection’ guide lines, which sets the upper limit in an emergency situation to a dose of 500-1,000 millisieverts.

But it is now clearly evident that those levels are nothing but safe, and are way way too high. Workers exposed to much lower levels suffer the consequence as reported by CNN

“One worker fell ill during the work on Sunday, the company said. The man, in his 30s, was placing hoses for collecting the contaminated water from reactor No. 2 when he became ill, nearly two hours into his shift.

It is funny how rulers, oops… ‘democratic leaders’ of the developed world, present themselves as defenders of FREEDOM every time they wish to drive public opinion to support going to war defending other nations’ FREEDOM. Yet for all the talk of FREEDOM, at home we are living in a society where FREEDOM is highly regulated. To illustrate how ridiculous it can get, take England for example; working in an office, you will be forbidden to change a light bulb UNLESS, you have done a training course on how to climb a ladder and have the certificate to prove it.

Yes there are laws, regulations, and guide lines for every aspect of our lives, and we are told it is for our own good and benefit, it is there to protect us from ourselves, others, and harms way in general.

However often when delving into the nitty-gritty of these regulation, one can’t but help find hypocrisy every step of the way, especially when it comes to regulations concerning people’s health and environmental pollution. We are told that such regulations are based on scientific facts, setting safe limits of exposure to harmful substances and are there to protect human health, society, and the environment we live in, but more often then not, laws, regulations, and guide lines are written in such a vague way, as to allow total disregard to those safe limits when it’s deemed suitable.

Raising the levels of permitted radiation for workers

This is why, I made the following comment in a previous post : “Are we going to see permissible radiation levels elevated to fit a reality of growing radiation with no end in sight?” As it happened I was not wrong, it came as no surprise when I spotted the Kyodo News headline yesterday: “TEPCO contractors reject higher radiation dose limit for workers”

“Arnie Gundersen discusses inconstancies between what the NRC, TEPCo, and the Nuclear Industry are saying privately and publicly. Documents from the French nuclear firm, Areva, and the NRC reveal what the industry knows about the Fukushima disaster.”
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Fukushima – Lifting the lid on radiation levels

Fukushima – Is the truth being diluted in sea water too?