| Radioactive Ocean Day: Japan
earthquake hits world’s largest nuke plant |
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| by
Leuren Moret |
| Wednesday, 18 July 2007
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“With a magnitude 8 or greater earthquake
in Japan every 5 years, Japan is playing a deadly game of nuclear
roulette.” – Leuren Moret, Japan Times, May 23, 2004
A
magnitude 6.8 earthquake hit the east coast of Japan at 10:13 a.m.
on Monday, July 16, damaging the largest nuclear power plant in
Japan – and the world. At least 10 people died in the earthquake in
Niigata Prefecture in central Japan.
Tarnished by years of
cover-ups of accidents and falsified safety records, Tokyo Electric
Power Co. (TEPCO) first reported that the Kashiwazaki Kariwa plant
was “not seriously damaged” but eventually admitted multiple
radioactive leaks had occurred. TEPCO reluctantly reported a day
later that over 50 cases of malfunctioning at the plant had been
discovered as earthquake damage was assessed.
More complete
details were reported in multiple news stories pouring into the
media from all over the world – burst pipes, water leaks,
radioactive waste spillage, fires, spilled waste drums and a damaged
radioactive exhaust stack. More candid than TEPCO, the news stories
at first revealed that 100 drums of radioactive contaminated waste
had fallen over, spilling liquids onto the ground when the lids came
off. TEPCO corrected itself two days later to 400 drums.
Fires in one of the reactors burned for three hours because
water pressure was so low there was not enough water available for
firemen to put the fires out in what should have taken less than an
hour. The transformer building completely burned, but that was
barely mentioned.
A damaged exhaust stack was underreported
to have released Cobalt 60 and Chromium 51 into the atmosphere.
Unfortunately these are just two of more than 300 radioactive
isotopes released daily from nuclear power plants into the
atmosphere, poisoning nearby communities within 100 miles and
contaminating dairies, food crops and water supplies nearby.
TEPCO at first revealed that 1.5 liters of liquid
radioactive waste spilled, but it later was reported that 1,200
liters had escaped from a reactor building. Two days after the
quake, TEPCO admitted they had reported only 50 percent of the
radiation released in the liquid, which was washed into the ocean …
making it Radioactive Ocean Day!
The increasing cascade of
news stories from all over the world and statements by the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Wednesday, indicates
a growing global concern about the longer term implications of this
very serious nuclear power plant accident in Japan. The “safety
concern” of IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei is a thinly veiled fear
about the global impact it will have on the proposed efforts to
proliferate nuclear power around the world. The collision of nuclear
power with earthquakes could not have happened in a better country
than the tectonic setting of Japan.
Two days after the quake
disaster, Akira Fukushima, the deputy director general of Japan’s
Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said no irregularities had
been found in critical areas of the plant but added: “It is possible
that the epicenter fault line does run beneath the power plant. Our
decision on what to do in the future will depend on the report we
got from TEPCO.”
Of course, TEPCO knew that four faults were
there when they built the plant but conveniently labeled them
“inactive.” Sitting in the most unstable tectonic setting in the
world, perched on the junction of four tectonic plates, Japan is
being subducted under the China plate. How could any fault in Japan
possibly be called “inactive”?
No wonder the Kashiwazaki
Kariwa plant was damaged by the 6.8 earthquake. It was built in the
1970s under lax safety standards that only required Japanese nuke
plants to withstand a 6.5 earthquake. Three years ago, an earthquake
there killed 67 people, and in 2001 radiation leaked in a turbine
room of one of the reactors.
In 2005 a lawsuit was filed by
33 residents concerned with a bad track record on safety issues at
the plant and the danger of nearby faults, but it was thrown out by
the judge. The same things are happening in the nuclear power fight
by Japanese citizens that American citizens have fought for decades,
against a government agenda they do not support.
The reason
is that 85 percent of commercial nuclear power plants around the
world are built on GE or Westinghouse designs. The Japanese decision
makers are bribed and coached by the American sellers and economic
hit men of this obsolete and dangerous technology.
The
largest nuke plant in the world, Kashiwazaki Kariwa produces 8.2
million kW/year. Japan relies for 30 percent of its electricity on
55 operating nuclear power plants and plans to increase nuclear
power generated electricity to 40 percent.
Yet Japanese
anti-nuclear activists have demonstrated that if all the nuclear
power plants in Japan were turned off, there would be no shortage of
electricity. That actually happened several years ago when Kei
Sugaoka, an American GE nuclear power plant inspector, blew the
whistle on TEPCO and shut down a large part of the nuclear power
industry in Japan, the equivalent of eight Diablo Canyon,
California, nukes.
Ten years ago farmers in the tiny village
(2,000 population) of Kuzumaki in Iwate Prefecture got off the grid
and started producing their own energy from biomass, solar and wind
power. Now they are selling 60 percent of what they produce in
violation of Japanese laws that prohibit any private electricity
production by citizens.
The fiscal reality of nuclear power
is that when the economics are penciled out, the only way it can
survive is on government subsidies – our taxpayer dollars – because
it is the most expensive energy source of all. And the full cycle
cost in terms of greenhouse gases released from uranium mining,
enrichment, construction and operation of plants, and trucking
around nuclear waste, makes it the worst greenhouse gas polluter of
all existing energy sources.
It is no answer to global
warning despite what Al Gore is selling. It is another hoax of the
New World Order agenda.
So who is nuclear power popular
with? The Queen of England owns the mineral rights to Australia,
Canada and some African countries, making her the Uranium Queen of
the world and Planet Earth the Queen’s Death Star. These are the
three regions in the world where the largest uranium deposits are
located – until recently, when it was revealed on mining industry
websites that Kazakhstan and Afghanistan will out-produce all other
countries. Is that what 911 was really about?
The
Rockefellers also own vast uranium deposits, as well as GE and
Westinghouse through holding companies. The Rothschilds and London
Money Power control uranium supplies and prices globally and own the
nuclear power industry through holding companies. The Rothschilds
also serve as the Queen’s business manager, and the two families
intermarry. The mother of Princess Diana was a Rothschild. How many
trillions does a family need to get by?
Nuclear power in
reality is a poison pill and the kiss of death. When Rancho Seco
nuclear power plant was shut down in Sacramento in 1989, within two
years cancer in children and infant mortality both declined nearly
23 percent in the five counties surrounding the plant. Ninety-five
percent of radioactive emissions from Rancho Seco were rained and
snowed out into the Sierra Nevada mountains, which supply much of
the drinking water for the Bay Area.
Within two years of
shutdown, health improved and disease mortality declined 5 percent
for all diseases and races except Blacks in San Francisco County.
Because state milk boards ship the most radioactive milk from
dairies around nuclear power plants into inner city Black
communities across the nation, Black communities continue to have
the highest infant mortality, cancer, asthma, diabetes and other
chronic illnesses.
Dr. Ernest Sternglass, who testified for
President Kennedy in 1963 and helped to convince the Senate to sign
the Partial Test Ban Treaty, calls it an official government policy
of “Black American genocide.” The damage to the developing brain and
the future health of the unborn is the greatest impact.
Africa has the lowest diabetes rates in the world, so
diabetes cannot be genetic in Black communities, because “if it’s an
epidemic, it’s not genetic.” The U.S. government, however, loves to
blame the victim. Victimization in the U.S. is more American than
democracy.
According to Centers for Disease Control data, two
thirds of all breast cancer deaths occurring between 1985 and 1989
in the United States occurred within 100 miles of nuclear power
plants and nuclear weapons laboratories. It’s pretty clear when
those government numbers are put on maps and graphs that nuclear
technologies are incompatible with a healthy environment and good
public health.
Who would know that better than the San
Francisco Bayview Hunters Point community, located at one of the
U.S. Navy’s most radioactive polluted sites in the world? It’s time
to get a citizen Geiger counter movement going here. It’s time for
us to conduct our own radiation monitoring program, instead of the
government agencies and elected officials who have been poisoning us
in order to protect the military and the corporations.
We
can fight back with our own data tracking and data base, which
proves that officials have been deliberately violating laws and
poisoning our babies, our children, our elderly – the most
vulnerable in our communities, and the rest of us too!
We
have no other choice; silence is the sanction of the victim. We can
remain silent and silently die or we can empower ourselves, organize
community and hold officials’ feet to the fire. Public health and
the health of the environment are the most effective and important
community organizing issues.
The success and empowerment of
the Hawaii Geiger counter movement is rocking the world and
intimidating the Pentagon and the establishment. Let’s turn on our
Geiger counters and rock the Bay
Area!
References
“Japan’s deadly game of
nuclear roulette,” www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/
getarticle.pl5?fl20040523x2.htm
Global Disaster Alert and
Coordination System: Kashiwazaki Kariwa plant disaster updates,
http://www.gdacs.org/reports.asp?eventType=EQ&ID=28733&system=news&location=JPN&alertlevel=Green&glide_no=&TsID=421&datetime=20070716
“Ex-Worker’s
Careful Notes Triggered Nuclear Reform,”
http://modelminority.com/printout696.html
“Breast cancer
meeting fails people of Hunters Point,”
www.sfbayview.com
KITV ABCTV “Geiger Counter” news story in
Honolulu April 29-30, 2007,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=L94IUSw54pQ
“AIRBORNE: The lowdown on
depleted uranium in Hawai’i,”
http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/2007/06/airborne/
“RADIOACTIVE
US,” http://hawaiiislandjournal.com/
“Depleted Uranium,
Death and Destruction: Then why is Leuren Moret smiling?”
http://www.bpmnews.org/Archives/2007_July_August.pdf
Leuren
Moret is president of Scientists for Indigenous People, a former
City of Berkeley environmental commissioner and past president of
the Association for Women Geoscientists. Email her at
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