Now we learn from MSNBC (at 5PM Friday) that the radioactive water could make the recovery process at the plant impossible. Some reports suggested the workers had been exposed to deadly levels of full-body gamma radiation.
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QUEEN’S COMMENTS
A seemingly thoughtful article on the topic is titled “Lifting the Veil of Nuclear Catastrophe” written by Keith Harmon Snow. The article made many very interesting points. Among other things, unlike Ann Coulter, he believes that the situation is apocalyptic and getting worse–that this is one of the most serious challenges humanity has ever faced.
NOTE ON THE AUTHOR: Keith Harmon Snow is an independent journalist, war correspondent and photographer. He has also worked as a genocide investigator and consultant to the United Nations and other international bodies. He has won three Project Censored awards for his Central Africa reportage, is a member of the Asiana Press Agency (www.Asiana-Press-Agency.com), and he also recently worked in Afghanistan. Snow has worked in varying capacities in some 16 countries in Asia, Latin America and Europe, and 14 countries in Africa. A human rights investigator [formerly] working with Genocide Watch and Survivor’s Rights International, he attended the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and has testified at a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C.”
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A few excerpts from Snow’s article.
Intentional efforts to downplay or dismiss this catastrophe reveal the immaturity of western civilization and some of our most acute human pathologies, including our worship of technology and our psychopathology of denial. The widespread distortion and cover-ups to protect private profits, national and corporate interests, to fool and betray the people, are unacceptable. Here are some of the deeper whats and whys and hows — some technical issues and the kinds of questions people need to ask — about the nuclear apocalypse unfolding on planet earth. Prayers are not enough. It’s time to question everything, to put politics aside, to take personal action to halt nuclear expansion and defend ourselves from this industrial juggernaut.
“I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors,” wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dr. Joseph Oehmen on March 13. “By ‘significant’ I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on — say — a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.” So begins a recent U.S. business sector article titled You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster in Japan — Here’s Why, published four days after the earthquake struck in Japan. It has already proved false. Properly understood for what it is — a childish, myopic, arrogant attempt to belittle the truth and influence public opinion — the article provides an apt example of the rampant industry disinformation that is sweeping aside rational and compassionate and precautionary assessments with irrational jingoism, simplistic emotional appeals, and wrong-headed thinking. The post went viral and was republished widely.
The Nuclear Industry has A LONG HISTORY OF DECEPTION
Like the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japanese officials have a long history of covering up ugly nuclear realities. In a recent WikiLeaks diplomatic cable, politician Taro Kono, a high-profile member of Japan’s lower house, told U.S. diplomats that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (MITI) — the Japanese government department responsible for nuclear energy — has been “covering up nuclear accidents and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry.” In 2002 “the chairman and four executives of TEPCO, the company that owns the stricken Fukushima plant, resigned after reports that safety records were falsified.”
Such singular but remarkable events follow a pattern of wholesale U.S. cover-ups that define the industry as secretive and criminal, and they involve shoddy equipment, human incompetence, unsafe designs, inadequate safety measures, and economic decisions that have occurred since the very beginning of Japan’s nuclear power era — which itself was born out of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with U.S.-made weapons of mass destruction.
READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE AND THEN TRY TO HAVE A RESTFUL SLEEP TONIGHT
