From Nuclear News
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From Nuclear News
From the Ecologist
L’ACROnique de Fukushima & Hervé Courtois
10th March 2017
IAEA technicians examine Unit 4 of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, the only one of four reactors to be stabilised – because it was defuelled at the time of the earthquake and tsunami. Photo: IAEA Imagebank via Flickr (CC BY-SA).
The 2011 Fukushima catastrophe is an ongoing disaster whose end only gets more remote as time passes. The government is desperate to get evacuees back into their homes for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but the problems on the ground, and in the breached reactor vessels, are only getting more serious and costly, as unbelievable volumes of radiation contaminate land, air and ocean.
If Fukushima taught us one thing it is that people should not expect the government to protect them – nor will corporations be held responsible in time of nuclear disaster.
Six years after the catastrophe at Fukushima, the situation is still far from being resolved, still ongoing.
Three reactor core meltdowns still releasing radioactive nanoparticles into the open skies, contaminated water is still leaking continuously into the Pacific ocean, and partially decontaminated water is being dumped into the ocean.
All available information and figures are controlled by Tepco and the Japanese government, with no independent party allowed to verify the veracity of the given information.
A massive public relations campaign of disinformation and denial is under way, to brainwash the Japanese population and the whole world that everything is now under control and OK. Systematic denial of the radiation risks for the people’s health is the rule, economics being the Japanese government priority, not public health protection.
Evacuated persons are coerced to return to live with high radiation in their previously evacuated townships so that Japan may seem safe, clean and beautiful to welcome the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
If Fukushima taught us one thing it is that people should not expect the government to protect them – nor will corporations be held responsible in time of nuclear disaster.
This article that follows is based on officially released data by Tepco and the Japanese government. All the figures and claims should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt. Always bear in mind that the officially released information does not really teach us the essential truths about the still ongoing catastrophe, and about its victims getting more abandoned than ever.
As we approach the sixth anniversary of the disaster, here are some key figures as they appear in the media and official sites.
The earthquake struck at 2:46 pm Japan Time (0546 GMT) .
From Fukushima Response
San Francisco Bay Area, California:
Day of Remembrance
Saturday, March 11, 2017
10AM to 2PM
Putnam Plaza, Petaluma CA
(129 Petaluma Blvd N)
Russian Historical Society has published a report of the Soviet ambassador to Japan on the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the Archive of Foreign Policy of Russia in time for the 70-th anniversary of the attacks. The report was recorded a month after the attacks.
The following is an audio reading of highlights of the report, read by journalist Maurice Herman:
The following are the highlights of the report:
Some areas were not affected by the rays, suggesting that the energy was expelled unequally by bursts. Some people who where close to the injured did not receive any burns. This pertains to sections significantly removed from the impact.
Everything alive was destroyed in the radius of one kilometer.
The sound and the flash were heard and seen 50 kilometers away.
On person reported seeing a flash and feeling a touch of a warm stream on his cheek and a needle pinch.
Many people only had injuries from shattered glass.
Burns were mainly on the face, arms and legs.
A doctor reported seeing three bombs dropped on parachutes, two of which did not explode and were collected by the military. The doctor experienced diarrhea after drinking the water. Other rescuers got sick after 36 hours. The doctor said that in those affected the white blood cell count reduced from 8000 per cubic centimeter to 3,000, 1,000 and even 300, which causes bleeding from nose, throat, eyes, and from the uterus in females. The injured die after 3-4 days.
The injured, who are evacuated heal faster. Those who drank or rinsed with water in the impact area died thereafter.
After a month it was considered safe to stay in the impact zone, however it was still not conclusive.
According to the doctor, rubber clothing offered protection against uranium, as well as any material which is a conductor of electricity.
A girl who visited the area a few days after the blast got sick in 1-2 weeks and died 3 days after.
Nagasaki is divided into two sections by a mountain. The section sheltered from the blast by a mountain had much less destruction.
Japanese driver in Nagasaki said no rescue work was done on the day of the bombing, because the city was engulfed in fire.
Nagasaki bomb was dropped over a university hospital in Urakami district (near a Mitsubishi plant), all the patients and the staff of the hospital died.
The driver said, some children who were up on the trees [playing?] survived, but those on the ground died.
Most people in Hiroshima said the bomb was dropped on a parachute and detonated 500-600 feet above the ground.
The head of the sanitary service of the 5th American fleet, commander Willkatts said that no parachutes were used in the dropping of the bombs. He also said no bomb could fall without detonating.
He said after the bombing the zone of impact is safe and the Japanese are exaggerating the effects of a nuclear bomb.
(The pictures above are from the online sources, and not from the report)