We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel goes under.

— Martin Van Creveld, Professor of Military History at Israel’s Hebrew University, September 2003, in Dutch weekly, Elsevier

Iran: we have been here before. The year prior to the assault on, and near destruction of, unarmed neighbouring Iraq, George W. Bush, of course, declared the “Axis of Evil”, Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

But it was the man now hailed “peacemaker”, former President Jimmy Carter, who, in his State of the Union Address on 23 January 1980, made the most chilling statement  – until the current political psychopathy – regarding a possible nuclear strike on Iran.

Very simplisticly put, the then Soviet Union supported Afghanistan’s leftist government, and eventually invaded the country in their defence, against challenges by the traditionalist, conservative Muslim majority and (US backed) Mujahideen.

The Carter Administration at the time seemed not too bothered by the invasion.  A few trade sanctions were imposed here and there, but no more. The plight of Afghanistan’s people was of little consequence. However, neighbouring Iran, with its vast oil reserves and the threat to Western oil supplies being shipped through the Straits of Hormuz, then, as now, was a different matter.

An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America … such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.¹

Later, a US Defence Department Report, seemingly leaked by the Administration, stated that should the Soviet Union invade Northern Iran, the use of nuclear weapons would be considered.

However, the Soviet Union too had nuclear weapons, so in those now ironically safer seeming days of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (“MAD”), the US simply contented itself with arming the Afghan Mujahideen – which it is now slaughtering, droning, taking body parts of as trophies – and urinating on.

The Carter Administration simply contented itself with building a Rapid Deployment Force, expanding the US naval presence in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.

That Deployment Force eventually became Centcom.

Carter won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his work: “to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts.”

Further ironically, the United States, in 1957, had embarked on a civil nuclear policy with Iran, as part of the “Atoms for Peace” programme.

In September 1967, the US supplied 5,545 kgs of enriched uranium to Iran, the majority of which (5,165 kgs) contained fissile isotopes for fuelling a research reactor, research Iran says it is undertaking, which the US now threatens to bomb.  At the same time, the US supplied 112 g of plutonium, of which 104 gs  were also for start up of a research reactor.

In the 1970s the US supported the building of up to twenty nuclear power plants throughout Iran. Contracts were signed with a number of  other Western countries.

In 1975, Iran signed a contract with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology  (M.IT) for training of Iran’s nuclear engineers.

Incidentally, Iran ratified both the Partial Nuclear Test Ban treaty of 1963 and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. Israel, another of the sabre rattlers, has signed neither.

Bombing nuclear reactors is beyond even the actions of the certifiably insane. On 26 April 1986, the world’s worst nuclear disaster, until 2011 and Fukushima, was Chernobyl.

When an explosion blasted a hole in the roof of the plant, tons of radioactive material were blown into the atmosphere and traversed the world. To this day there are hill farmers in the UK whose sheep are still found to be too radioactive from the resultant fallout — nearly 2,000 miles away 26 years ago — to sell for meat.

The people in the Chernobyl region were exposed to radiation about 100 times greater than that from the Hiroshima bomb. Since then thousands have become ill and died of cancers and other diseases.

Over 400,000 people had to leave their homes. The water of Ukraine and Belarus is still affected, the ground in which they plant still contaminated.

There have been a litany of nuclear accidents over the years, the first, which remained the worst until Chernobyl, was at the Windscale plant on the UK’s (western) Cumbria Coast. The British responded by changing its name to Sellafield.

When Pan Am Flight 103, was blown up over Lockerbie, on 21 December 1988, hearing the news flash, I picked up a UK atlas. It was close enough for wreckage to have fallen on and damaged the plant. A call to a shaken operative at Sellafield within minutes of the crash, caught him off guard, they were, he said: “combing the (vast) compounds for debris and damage right now …”

The wreckage from Pan Am’s tragedy was strewn 1,000 square miles.  Sellafield was just 48 miles away under the main trans-Atlantic air route. Depending on the exact route of the flight potentially a few minutes later the disaster could potentially have been even more appalling, by orders of unimaginable magnitude.

The route, incidentally, has not been changed.

Whilst somewhat off topic, this tragedy illustrates what has been repeatedly studied – and ignored: “Nuclear plant operators have normally considered accident sequences (called ‘beyond design basis’ events) so unlikely that they have not built in (sufficient) safeguards.”  These include tsunamis, earthquakes, air crashes, terrorist attacks – and deliberate bombings.

These stark vulnerabilities are hardly likely to have escaped Pentagon planners.

In an article published in the early 1980s, as valid now as then (see i., p 60-61) Dr Kosta Tsipsis of MIT and Steven Fetter, wrote in Scientific American on “Catastrophic Releases of Radioactivity.”

A one-megaton nuclear weapon on a one-gigawatt nuclear power plant would vaporise the plant’s radioactive contents, along with everything (and everyone) in the vicinity. The remains would be carried on the wind in a mushroom cloud, falling out to poison people, fauna, flora, where the wind blew. Some 1700 square miles would be uninhabitable immediately due to potentially  lethal radiation levels.

“The destruction of a nuclear reactor with a nuclear weapon, even of a relatively small yield … would represent a national catastrophe of lasting consequences”, Tsipsis and Fetter wrote in an earlier paper.

Further, in a more extensive attack:

If anyone hid (themselves) deep enough under the earth and stayed there long enough to survive, (they) would emerge to a dying natural environment … there is no hole big enough to hide all of nature …

I have witnessed those affected by a reactor bombing, just a small experimental one, part of Baghdad University prior to the invasion. It was bombed by British or American planes three times in spite of having been permitted by the UN weapons inspectors. The childhood deformities in the area were epidemic. One clinic specialized in treating the young victims. This is what I wrote, a decade ago:

Six month old Yacoub Yusif, with his small hand twisted at right angle, with no thumb on his foreshortened right arm, was comparatively lucky.

Six year old Mustafa Ahmed, with his bright, intelligent face and great dark eyes had gross deformities of his stick-like legs and arms, of his facial bones. His hands were pathetically turned.

Sitting on the examination table like a frail broken doll, he said: “I can write.” Hunched over, a tiny piece of pencil (pencils are vetoed by the Sanctions Committee, since they contain graphite) and minute square of paper (also vetoed) he wrote, the stub clutched between his knuckles, in beautiful Arabic, laughing with triumph at his achievement.

Ali Samir, seven, shuffled in like a tiny, bird-like old man, the expression in his eyes was of one who has seen all the trials of the world.

He was covered with head to toe ulcerations which, as they healed tightened his skin – or ruptured. His fingers were turned inwards, seared in to his palms. He had no toes.

When his gay ‘Route 97′ top was lifted up, the terrible ulcerations on his back brought tears to the eyes. ‘Surgery is counter-indicated, since he won’t heal – this is a genetic malformation caused by environmental changes in pregnancy’, said Consultant, Dr. Harith, with commendable undersatement.

The Zafaranya district of Baghdad where he – all of them – lived, was bombed relentlessly in the 1991 Gulf War and a nuclear reactor reportedly hit. It was bombed again in 1993, and Ali was still recovering from this terror in December 1998, when the district – and believed the reactor, was hit again. He too could write and did so with evident pride – but he was unable to express it – he had no tongue.

And what of the fear now being inflicted on the children of Iran, the Middle East, this Damoclesian sword hanging over them?

I thought again of the late, great John E. Mack, psychiatrist of renown, who studied under Robert Jay Lifton, who has made the psychology of war and violence his distinguished lifetime’s work.

Before the Berlin Wall came down, when children in school were taught what to do if “the bomb” fell in government fantasy world instruction booklets, Mack received a call from the frantic mother of a five year old.

The little boy, apparently happy, well adjusted and without a care, stood as she cooked supper. Suddenly he asked her: “When the bomb drops, will the rabbit in the garden die too?”

How many more generations of children is nuclear insanity going to terrorize?

As this is being written, on 17 January, the 21st anniversary of the first near destruction of Iraq in “Desert Storm”, another US President and Nobel Peace Prize winner seems to be taking the world to the brink.

In Strasbourg in 1979 Earl Mountbatten of Burma told an audience, “In the event of nuclear war there will be no chances, there will be no survivors—all will be obliterated.”

The world needs no further wake up calls, from Windscale to Baghdad’s Zafaraniya, Chernobyl to Fukushima, from Falluja’s  radiation affected population, the forgotten affected of the Pacific Island tests over fifty years ago, and world wide – enough.

1. Jonathan Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth”, is as valid now as when written in 1982. A quote from Studs Terkel’s review, on the back cover, reads: “There have been books that have changed our lives, this one may save our lives … It’s more than a book, it’s a bell in the night.”

I had become gravely ill on July 26, 2006, a month and a half prior to the summit, and could barely sit up in bed. Many of the most distinguished leaders who participated in the event were kind enough to visit me. Chavez and Evo visited me several times. One afternoon four visitors came by whom I will always remember: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; an old friend, Abdelaziz Buteflika, the president of Algeria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran; and the vice minister of Foreign Affairs and current Foreign Minister of China, Yang Jiechi, on behalf of the leader of the Communist Party and the president of China, Hu Jintao. It was really an important time for me; I was in the midst of intense physiotherapy on my right hand that I had seriously injured when I fell in Santa Clara.

With all four I spoke about some of the difficulties facing the world at the time; problems that have become progressively more complex.

During our meeting yesterday, I noted that the Iranian president was absolutely calm and tranquil, completely unconcerned about the Yankee threats and, fully confident in the capacity of his people to confront any aggression and in the effectiveness of their arms —which, in large part, they produce themselves— to inflict an unpayable price on its aggressors.

In reality, we hardly spoke about the topic of war. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was focused on the ideas he had presented at the Main Hall of the University of Havana during his conference on the struggle of humankind:

Moving towards reaching and achieving peace, security, respect and human dignity as a fundamental desire of all human beings throughout history.

I am convinced that Iran will not commit any rash actions that might contribute to setting off a war. If a war were to be unleashed, it would inevitably be completely as a result of the recklessness and congenital irresponsibility of the Yankee Empire.

I believe that the political situation surrounding Iran and the associated risks of a nuclear war that involves us all —regardless of whether one possess nuclear weapons— are extremely delicate because they threaten the very existence of our species. The Middle East has become the most troubled region on the planet, the same region that produces the energy resources vital for the world’s economy.

The destructive power and the mass sufferings caused by some of the weapons used in World War Two led to a strong movement to ban weapons such as asphyxiating gas and others. Nevertheless, conflicting interests and the huge profits made by arms manufacturers led to the production of crueler and more destructive weapons; modern technology has now added the means and material to build weapons that if used in a world war would lead to extinction.

I support the opinion, undoubtedly shared by all those with a basic sense of responsibility, that no country big or small has the right to possess nuclear weapons.

They never should have been used to attack two defenseless cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and irradiating with horrible and long-lasting effects hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, in a country that had already been militarily defeated.

If fascism indeed forced the allied nations against Nazism to compete with this enemy of humanity in the production of such weapons, once the war ended and the United Nations was created, the first duty of this organization should have been to prohibit nuclear weapons without exception.

However, the United States, the strongest and richest power, forced the rest of the world to follow its lead. Today, they have hundreds of satellites that spy and monitor the entire world from outer space. Their naval, air and land forces are equipped with thousands of nuclear weapons; and they control the world’s finances and investments at their whim via the International Monetary Fund.

Analyzing the history of each Latin American nation, from Mexico to Patagonia, by way of Santo Domingo and Haiti, one can observe that each and every country, without exception, have suffered for 200 years, from the beginning of the 19th century up until today. And, in one way or another, they are increasingly suffering the worst crimes that power and force can commit against the rights of a people. Brilliant Latin American writers are emerging in an increasing number. One of them, Eduardo Galeano, author of the book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent that describes the aforementioned, has just been invited to open the prestigious Casa de Las Americas Awards as a recognition to his outstanding body of work.

Events happen incredibly fast; but technologies report them to the public even faster. On any given day, like today, important news comes out a dizzying pace. A cable report dated from January 11 states:

The Danish presidency of the European Union confirmed on Wednesday that a new series of more severe European sanctions against Iran, because of its nuclear program, will be discussed on January 23. The new sanctions will not only target the oil industry but also the Central Bank.

During a meeting with international journalists, Danish Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal said that “We will increase sanctions against the oil industry in addition to sanctions against financial structures.” This clearly demonstrates that, in order to impede nuclear proliferation, Israel can go on accumulating hundreds of nuclear warheads while Iran is not allowed to produce 20% enriched uranium.

Another article, from a respected British news agency, states that “China gave no hint on Wednesday of giving ground to U.S. demands to curb Iran’s oil revenues, rejecting Washington’s sanctions on Tehran as overstepping …”

The sheer tranquility with which the United States and civilized Europe carry out this campaign with incredible and systematic acts of terrorism is enough to shock anybody. Just look at these lines reported by another important European news agency:

The murder on Wednesday of Iranian nuclear specialist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan [a scientist at the Natanz nuclear plant] was the fourth attack to kill a leading scientist in the country in almost exactly two years.

On January 12, 2010:

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physics professor at Tehran University is killed when a booby-trapped motorcycle explodes outside his home in the capital.

On November 29, 2010:

Two attacks target leading Iranian nuclear scientists on the same day. Majid Shahriari, a key member of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, is killed in Tehran by a limpet bomb attached to his car. His colleague Fereydoon Abbasi Davani is also targeted by a bomb attached to his car, but escapes.

The car was parked in front of the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran where both men worked as professors.

On July 23, 2011:

Gunmen shoot dead Dariush Rezaei-Nejad, a senior scientist who is reportedly associated with the defense ministry, and wound his wife as they waited for their child outside a Tehran kindergarten.

On January 11, 2012 —the same day that Ahmadinejad travelled from Nicaragua to Cuba to give a conference at the University of Havana—, scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, “a deputy director at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, is killed in a car bomb blast outside the [Allameh Tabatabai] University in east Tehran.” As in previous years “Iran once again accused the United States and Israel.”

The killings represent a systematic and selective slaughter of brilliant Iranian scientists. I have read articles by known Israeli sympathizers who write about crimes carried out by Israeli intelligence services in cooperation with the United States and NATO as if they were the most normal occurrence.

At the same time, Moscow news agencies report that “Russia warned that in Syria a similar scenario is developing as to that in Libya, and added that this time the attack will be launched from neighboring Turkey.

The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said the West wants to ‘punish Damascus not as much for repressing the opposition, but because it is unwilling to sever ties with Tehran.

…NATO members and some Persian Gulf states, operating according to the Libya scenario, intend to move from indirect intervention in Syrian affairs to direct military intervention…This time the main strikes forces will not be provided by France, the U.K. or Italy, but possibly by neighboring Turkey.

Washington and Ankara are now assumed to be negotiating a “no-fly” zone over Syria, where Syrian armed insurgents can be trained and concentrated, added Patrushev.

News is not only coming out of Iran and the Middle East, but also from other parts of Central Asia near the Middle East. These reports show the great complexity of the problems that can arise from this dangerous region.

The United States has been led by its contradictory and absurd imperial policy to get involved in serious problems in countries such as Pakistan, whose borders with Afghanistan were drawn up by the colonialists without taking into account culture or ethnicities.

In Afghanistan, which defended its independence against English colonialism for centuries, drug production has multiplied in the wake of the Yankee invasion. Meanwhile, European soldiers, supported by drone airplanes and armed with sophisticated US weapons, carry out deplorable massacres that increase the people’s hatred and ward off any possibilities of peace. All this and other dirty actions are also reported by Western news agencies.

WASHINGTON, January 12, 2012 – US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called the actions of four U.S. marines who urinated on corpses in Afghanistan “utterly deplorable” The video of the act was circulated in the Internet.

I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable…

This conduct is entirely inappropriate for members of the United States military and does not reflect the standards of values our armed forces are sworn to uphold…

In reality, Panetta neither confirms nor denies the action, and anyone, including the Secretary of Defense himself, may harbor doubt.

But it is also extremely inhumane that men, women and children, or an Afghani combatant fighting against the foreign occupation, be murdered by bombs dropped by drone planes. Another very serious incident: dozens of Pakistani soldiers and officials who safeguarded the country’s borders have been killed by these bombs.

Afghani President Karzai stated that the outrage committed against the bodies was “simply inhumane.” He asked for the US government “to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

Meanwhile Taliban spokespersons declared that “over the last ten years, hundreds of similar acts have been carried out that were not reported…”

One even feels sorry for those soldiers, thousands of kilometers away from their family, friends and country, sent to fight in countries that they might not have even heard of during their school days, where they are assigned the task of killing or dying to enrich transnational companies, arms manufacturers and unscrupulous politicians who each year squander funds needed to feed and educate the uncountable millions of hungry and illiterate people around the world.

Many of these soldiers, victims of the trauma suffered, end up taking their own lives.

Is it an exaggeration to say that world peace is hanging by a thread?

In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA), which forced the USPS to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees, many of whom hadn’t even been hired yet.  Over a mere 10 year period, the USPS was required to prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years, something no other government or private corporation is required to do.  As consumer advocate Ralph Nader observed, if PAEA had never been enacted, USPS would now be facing a $1.5 billion surplus.

The USPS is a profitable, self-funded venture that is not supported by the taxpayers.  It is funded with postage stamps—one of the last vestiges of government-issued money.  Stamps are fungible and can be traded at par; and they are backed, not by mere government “fiat,” but by labor.  One stamp will buy the labor to transport your letter 3000 miles.

The USPS is one of the few businesses the government is allowed to operate in competition with private companies; it is the only U.S. agency that services all its citizens six days per week; and it is perhaps the last form of communication that protects privacy, since tampering with it is against federal law.  In 1999, it employed nearly a million people; and today, it employs over 600,000.  Where are those workers to go, when the post office is no more?

To Downsize or Diversify?

Whatever caused the financial woes of the USPS, there is another way to mitigate the crisis than slashing employee benefits and customer services.  In a December 21 article in Reader Supported News, Tim Fernholz suggested that instead of focusing on cuts, the post office should approach the problem from a business perspective and find a new way to make money.  One way to keep the USPS alive, he says, is for it to include basic banking services in its product line, providing a “public option” in banking:

[R]oughly 9 million Americans don’t have a bank account and 21 million rely largely on fringe financial services like usurious check cashers rather than traditional financial institutions. Giving low-income people access to a safe banking system will firm up their economic futures.

The Proud, Forgotten History of Postal Banking

Banking in post offices is not new.  Many countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand, have a long and successful history of it; and so does the United States.

From 1911 to 1967, the U.S. Postal Savings System provided a safe and efficient place for customers to save and transfer funds.  It issued U.S. Postal Savings Bonds in various denominations that paid annual interest, as well as Postal Savings Certificates and domestic money orders.  The U.S. Postal Savings System was set up early in the 20th century to attract the savings of immigrants accustomed to saving at post offices in their native countries, provide safe depositories for people who had lost confidence in private banks, and furnish more convenient depositories for working people than were provided by private banks.  (Post offices were then open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. six days a week, substantially longer than bankers’ hours.)  The postal system paid two percent interest on deposits annually.  The minimum deposit was $1 and the maximum was $2,500.  Savings in the system spurted to $1.2 billion during the 1930s and jumped again during World War II, peaking in 1947 at almost $3.4 billion.

The U.S. Postal Savings System was shut down in 1967, not because it was inefficient but because it was considered unnecessary after private banks raised their interest rates and offered the same governmental guarantees that the postal savings system had.

The Kiwibank Model: Postal Banks to Serve Local Communities

Postal banks are now thriving in New Zealand, not as a historical artifact but as a popular new innovation.  When they were instituted in 2002, it was not to save the post office but to save New Zealand families and small businesses from big-bank predators.  By 2001, Australian mega-banks controlled some 80% of New Zealand’s retail banking.  Profits went abroad and were maximized by closing less profitable branches, especially in rural areas.  The result was to place hardships on many New Zealand families and small businesses.

The New Zealand government decided to launch a state-owned bank that would compete with the Aussies.  They called their new bank Kiwibank after their national symbol, the kiwi bird.  But the government team planning the new bank faced major challenges.  How could they keep costs low while still providing services in communities throughout New Zealand?

Their solution was to open bank branches in post offices.  Kiwibank was established as a subsidiary of the government-owned New Zealand Post.  The Kiwibank website states:

Back in 2002, we launched with a thought: New Zealand needs a better banking alternative—a bank that provides real value for money, that has Kiwi values at heart, and that keeps Kiwi money where it belongs—right here, in New Zealand.

So we set up shop in PostShops throughout the country, putting us in more locations than any other bank in New Zealand literally overnight (without wasting millions on new premises!).

Suddenly, New Zealanders had a choice in banking.  In an early “move your money” campaign, they voted with their feet.  In an island nation of only 4 million people, in its first five years Kiwibank attracted 500,000 customers away from the big banks.  It consistently earns the nation’s highest customer satisfaction ratings, forcing the Australia-owned banks to improve their service in order to compete.

Postal Banking Japan-style: Funding the Government’s Debt with Its Own Bank

Another interesting model is Japan Post Bank, now the largest publicly-owned bank in the world.  Japan Post is also the largest holder of personal savings, making it the world’s largest credit engine.  Most money today originates as bank loans, and deposits are the magic pool from which this credit-money is generated.  Japan Post uses its excess credit power to buy government bonds.  By 2007, it was the holder of one-fifth of the nation’s debt.  As noted by Joe Weisenthal, writing in Business Insider in February 2010:

Because Japan’s enormous public debt is largely held by its own citizens, the country doesn’t have to worry about foreign investors losing confidence.

If the U.S. Postal Service were to add commercial banking to its product line, it too could use its own bank-generated credit to help relieve its debt problems. The USPS is being forced to fund the health care costs of its employees for 75 years into the future, and a large portion of this unreasonable burden is composed of interest charges.  According to German researcher Margrit Kennedy, interest composes on average about 40% of the cost of all goods and services. That suggests that eliminating interest could reduce the USPS debt by about 40%.  If the USPS became a bank, it could use the credit generated from customer deposits either to service its own debt directly—something that would effectively be interest-free, since it would own the bank and would get the profits back—or by buying interest-bearing government bonds.  The interest earned on the bonds could then be used to pay the interest on the USPS debt.

Other government agencies and local governments could improve their balance sheets in the same way.  Public institutions with sizeable capital and revenues can cut their infrastructure costs by about 40% by establishing their own banks, allowing them to avoid a massive toll in interest to private banker middlemen.

The Post Office Deserves to Be Preserved

The U.S. Postal Service is a venerable institution that is older than the Constitution.  It should be saved, and it can be saved.  One way is to support HR 1351, a bill introduced by Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts to repeal the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act.

Another way is for the post office to combine mail services with teller services, restoring the Postal Savings System of an earlier era.  The result could be not only to save the Post Office but to establish a competitive alternative to a runaway Wall Street banking monopoly that even Congress seems unable to control.

Since March 11, local people, long skilled in farming this verdant and fertile region, have added expert knowledge in radiation to their library of stored knowledge, and the persimmons are deemed unsafe; irradiated by the releases from the stricken nuclear plant at Fukushima-Daiichi, 25km south of here.  I am told the dried fruit, until now a local specialty, has particularly high levels of radioactive contamination.

As we drove through the glistening mountains I watched the readings of the omnipresent dosimeter dangling casually from the rearview mirror of Hiroyuki’s car first oscillate, then grow alarmingly.  Arriving in front of a children’s summer camp, and quietly handed a face mask, an ominous beeping sound began as the readings peaked above 1 micro-sievert per hour, corroborated by a second dosimeter brought by Yuuki to check the calibration.  We pass an old local incinerator at work burning refuse and the numbers spike again.

Once confined to nuclear facilities and university laboratories, the people of Fukushima prefecture have become amateur radiologists, tracking radiation from place to place as wind and rain transport it around in random patterns across the local landscape.

Worried and angry because they have not received accurate information from the Japanese government about the radiation threat and because they want the government to evacuate more affected areas, the people of Fukushima have had to take matters into their own hands.  The government’s own recently released Interim Report on the causes and lessons of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster highlights how poorly information was provided, “The following tendency was observed: transmission and public announcement of information on urgent matter(s) was delayed, press releases were withheld, and explanations were kept ambiguous. Whatever the reasons behind (this), such tendency was hardly appropriate, in view of communication in an emergency.”

According to the people of Fukushima, this tendency is continuing, especially now that Prime Minister Noda announced that the nuclear crisis has “been resolved”.

In Fukushima city the people are organizing to protect and monitor themselves.  In a slightly surreal experience, I am directed to one of the many Meccas to Japanese consumerism that are a feature of every town. But rather than shopping, inside the mall I am taken to the recently set-up Citizens Radioactivity Measuring Station.  Just inside are neatly arranged slippers, children’s toys and a blackboard.  Behind the counter there’s equipment to test food for radiation as well as a whole body counter where children and adults come by daily to check their body’s radiation levels.  It’s run almost entirely by volunteers who have received radiological health training from a French NGO and is free for anyone below the age of 20.

On entering an apartment building in Fukushima city, in contrast to your usual art work, neat hand-written columns of radiation levels are posted in the foyer. Data collected every seven days from the surrounding area shows fluctuating radiation levels; particularly high readings are circled in red.

The cows have been evacuated from here but apparently beyond the 20km compulsory evacuation zone it’s deemed safe for humans, even small and growing ones.  Hiroyuki, an employee at a children’s non-profit turned public health activist, evacuated his wife and four year old daughter first to Tokyo, then Kyoto.  He now sees them just once per month as he has stayed to ensure that the national and regional government takes the health risks of the people here seriously.  He is part of a growing campaign by the newly formed organization Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation, to get the government to reverse its new radiation guidelines, evacuate more people from high radiation levels, especially children, and provide support for those who have voluntarily evacuated.

Radiation from the three severely damaged reactors that suffered explosions and core meltdowns at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant complex has spread far and wide. Apart from evacuating those within a 20 km radius, the government raised the allowable radiation does twenty times, from the internationally recognized 1mSv/year to 20.  This means that anywhere over 0.6 micro sieverts/h, an amount previously limited to people working in “radiologically controlled areas”, is no longer cause for evacuation, radically depressing the numbers of evacuees.

Even though the emergency evacuation centers are said to be “temporary”, it is likely that thousands of the 110,000 people who have been evacuated, in particular those from around Fukushima-Daiichi and downwind of the radioactive plume, will never be able to return to their former homes due to long-lived radioisotopes contaminating the ground, food and water.  Indeed, the Interim Report concludes with “bearing in mind that many people are still obliged to spend restricted life in evacuation for a long period of time, suffering from radiation contamination or fears of health due to exposure, contaminated air, soils, water and food.”

Even before the report, some people I met are now referring to themselves as the “Fukushima Diaspora” rather than “evacuees” because they don’t believe they will ever be able to return.

We arrive in the small community of Isobe on the coast.  Or at least, what remains of Isobe.  We are met by Toshiko Kooriki at her new temporary housing, orderly rows of small prefabricated living quarters.  She takes us to see the stubby concrete remnants of her original house. They jut a couple of feet up from the barren moonscape that was once a small close-knit community of 400 families just inland from where the tsunami hit.  She points out the different rooms and tells us that she comes here from time to time and cries.

Japan, long a study in contrasts, yields another as we meet Hatsumi Terashima, a fisherman for 54 years though he is no longer a fisherman.

Hatsuma Terashima recounts his experience with the tsunami, standing inside all that is left of his house.  The flat expanse of mud in the background is where the rest of the village used to be. He lost two of his grandchildren, a son, his son’s wife and his mother-in-law in the tsunami.

Immediately after the earthquake, he was inside rearranging fallen items when the tsunami struck.  Due to the shape of the land, there is an old saying in Isobe that no tsunami could hit here.  In disbelief, he watched as a dark wall of water rushed toward him and he was dragged 3km inland by the first wave.  His knee broken, a rope caught Hatsumi and he was heaved to safety, unlike five of his family members who were among the 264 who perished.  But he can’t fish because the ocean here is too radioactive.  He passes his time on the sea catching not fish but rubble and other detritus left by the crushing force of the tsunami.

Iatate, a town directly in the path of the radiation plume but outside of the 20km zone, has been evacuated as a high radiation area.  However, this was done only after the heaviest radioactive releases from the initial explosions because the government’s computerized radiation early-warning system, set up specifically for this purpose, the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, (SPEEDI) was down as “communication links were disrupted and inoperative due to the earthquakes, and the SPEEDI could not receive the basic source term information of discharged radioactivity.”

While SPEEDI could have provided some crucial data and helped with a swifter evacuation so that people were not exposed to so much radiation, the information it could have given to local officials and the public to plan evacuations never reached them because

the local NERHQ [Nuclear Emergency Response Head Quarters] lost its functionality, the Government NERHQ or NISA [Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency] should have taken the role of providing the SPEEDI results to the public. But none of them had the idea of making use of this information. MEXT [Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology], the competent ministry for SPEEDI, did not come to realize to providing the SPEEDI information to the public by themselves or through the Government NERHQ.

As we pass through Iatate on our way back from Soma, the town lies silent and dark.  The only lights are from streetlamps and the still occupied old people’s home, housing those too old and vulnerable to be safely moved, cared for by workers on strict shift rotations.

We stop outside the town’s high school.  Inside the car, the readings have ranged from 0.14 micro-sieverts/hour to 1.8.  We step outside and Yuuki and Hiroyuki bend down to train their Geiger counters on the soil; the displays jump to six micro-sieverts per hour.

Despite the devastation and loss of life caused by the earthquake and tsunami, the people I meet in Fukushima prefecture, rather than talk of the those events, discuss radiation levels and how their land has become polluted with an invisible, enduring danger and made the people fearful as the government tries to convince them that it is safe.

Japan is often portrayed abroad as probably the country most capable and prepared to deal with a nuclear accident.  Yet reading the government-ordered Interim Report, I came away with the clear impression that the agencies responsible for emergency planning had made a whole set of false assumptions which led to mistakes that increased the severity of the crisis and people’s exposure to radiation, and there were a series of operational errors at the plant itself as well as communication breakdowns and general lack of planning. It is highly critical of the emergency preparedness, the actions of TEPCO and the improper use of SPEEDI.

Along with many other operational and emergency response failings, according to the report NISA staff, for example, were not even dispatched to TEPCO’s headquarters to gather information in order to report effectively to the prime minister and the country, even though TEPCO is just down the street from METI and NISA offices.  In echoes of the preparedness of BP to cope with the Gulf Oil Spill, measures by TEPCO to protect their nuclear plants from tsunamis were only “voluntary”, so, off course, being a capitalist entity run in the interests of profit rather than safety, they didn’t take them: “TEPCO did not implement measures against tsunami as part of its AM [Roadmap of Accident Management] strategy. Its preparedness for such accident as severe damage at the core of reactor as a result of natural disasters was quite insufficient.”

In a male-dominated society – only 10% of the Japanese Diet is women, strong female leadership of the movement against the government and nuclear utility, TEPCO, is distinctly noticeable.  In one of the many meetings that I attend organized around the radiation and evacuation of children, I spoke with a group of women who have decided to stay for jobs and the stability of their families but who are wracked by anger at the government and frightened of the consequences of their decision to stay.

One woman, who would only give her name as Nihonmatsu, the town she is from, for apprehension of recrimination for continuing to raise the issue of radiation in Fukushima city, has started meetings for people she trusts to talk about their experiences and strategize actions.  She shows me her government issued papers and radiation monitor.  A long and detailed form, she is daily required to fill out the many boxes with the movements and food intake of her daughter.  When complete, she will mail it back to the government for analysis, along with the dosimeter that her daughter is required to keep on her at all times.  Nihonmatsu asks, “If it’s so safe here in Fukushima, why did the government give us these?”

A second woman, Jinko Mera, who gives her age as “about 50” nods in agreement, “We always have to think about how much radiation our food has.  We want to live free from that.  And the healthiest food is from your own region but we can’t dry persimmons, we can’t eat our peaches, we cannot eat our own food.”

At another organizing meeting on Christmas Day, women lead a discussion of the October sit-in outside the ministry of economy, trade and industry, METI, which contains the Japanese nuclear regulatory body, NISA.

Amidst speeches and reminiscences, we watch the 1983 documentary Carry Greenham Home, about the 19 year women’s peace camp and occupation of the US nuclear missile base at Greenham Common, England.  A new generation of women half a world away are inspired by the songs and collective battle of a different type of anti-nuclear struggle.  They want the government to protect them and their families from the immediate nuclear crisis, but they also don’t want anyone else to go through what they are enduring. They are part of a new campaign to permanently close down all 54 nuclear reactors and eradicate nuclear power from Japanese shores.

According to a recent report by Greenpeace (Japan) and the Tokyo-based Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, Japan could generate 43% of its energy requirements from renewable sources by 2020, easily surpassing and making redundant the 30% that is currently provided by nuclear power (though only 6 of the 54 reactors are currently operational).  With Japan in radical population decline, set to shrink from 125 million people to 100 million by 2050, the only impediment to a sane and safe energy policy is therefore political.

The meeting of activists ends with emotional intensity and spirit as attendees gather in a circle to hold hands and sing; evocative of another circle all those years ago, when 30,000 women formed a ring around the nine mile perimeter of Greenham Common air base and said, They Shall Not Pass.  We sing Furosato, a Japanese song of longing and remembrance:

Someday when I have done what I set out to do,
I will return to where I used to have my home.
Lush and green are the mountains of my homeland.
Pure and clear is the water of my old country home.

The next demonstration of the women of Fukushima is already planned, one bus almost full with exhortations to bring friends and fill more.  On the 28th of December, the people of Fukushima will march once more.

So said 64-year-old Chieko Shiina, a member of the group Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and a traditional farmer from Miyagi Prefecture, in reference to nuclear radiation, as I sat inside the tent on the floor across from her on Day 102 of the sit-in.  In years gone by she would have been 100 miles north on her farm tending her crops and doing such things as fermenting rice to make sake, harvesting leaves to make tea or manufacturing tatami mats.  However, her farm, in southern Miyagi Prefecture is just north of Fukushima and so, while Chieko’s farm is not in an evacuation area, it is too heavily contaminated with radiation for her to farm or sell her products: “I cannot let people eat these things.”

The tent encampment where we met is directly outside the Tokyo headquarters of METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) and NISA (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) and began on September 11, the six month anniversary of the combined disasters of the March 11 genpatsu shinsai, a new term that combines a catastrophic quake with a nuclear disaster. Mothers from Fukushima traveled to Tokyo and launched the sit-in with the slogan “We Stood Up to Sit Down,” as they demanded that the Japanese government provide accurate information on the levels of radiation, better protection, and expansion of the evacuation zone for their children.

Over the last three months, the sit-in has become an organizing hub for the anti-nuclear people’s resistance in Japan as well as other protest movements against free trade agreements, the American military base in Okinawa, and the movement to stop any alteration of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution that prevents Japanese troops from being deployed offensively beyond the shores of Japan.  For these reasons, the camp has been regularly targeted for harassment by groups from the Japanese Right.

While large protests of delegations from Fukushima and around the country occur regularly, Chieko is there full-time, braving the elements and frigid temperatures of winter time Tokyo.  She intends to continue the encampment for 10 months and 10 days, the length of time that Japanese traditionally consider that a mother carryies a child as she believes that “the style of fighting should be derived from life” and “that is why it is 10 months and 10 days.”  Emblazoned across the top of one of the many hand-outs at the camp is her slogan: “Women are Pregnant with the Future.”

Another woman I met there, Hisako Tsuruta, told me why she had joined the sit-in: “I am 73 years old, but I can still move and I can still walk.  I need to act before I perish.  I have been building this society of destruction and pollution since the Second World War and I didn’t say anything before, so I am responsible.  Now I must make change.”

Echoing the language of the Occupy Movement, [a large banner at the encampment proclaims “We are the 99%”], Hisako was keen to make broader connections to environmental and social problems that could only be solved by the people acting in unison:

We are all the same, people cannot eat, don’t have jobs, there’s money for war but not people.  Within ourselves we have the power to solve these problems.  With people’s collaboration we can do anything; politicians should leave these problems to us to solve.  People are making the connections and so there is hope in the world.  Before, the image of Fukushima women was quiet, not emotional, now they start to stand up – and sat in.  Even if we lose, we must resist.

The theme of resistance was in the air at a meeting I attended between government representatives of NISA and METI and environmental organizations such as Green Action, Friends of the Earth (Japan) and the Citizens Nuclear Information Center, (CNIC).  Over 150 people, representing 125 organizations had endorsed two demands and were there to grill the government functionaries about cracked pipes between the reactors and the coolant system at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant.

As a result of scheduled maintenance, safety concerns and popular protests, only 8 of the 54 nuclear reactors in Japan are currently operational and producing power.  Due to energy conservation efforts, there are nevertheless no blackouts.  This fact had not escaped the people in the room, who questioned what the need for any nuclear power was if, through a combination of energy conservation and a switch to clean, renewable energy, nuclear power in Japan, which previously supplied over 30% of electrical demand, could easily be made entirely redundant.  The room broke into strong applause when Ryoichi Hattori, Social Democrat member of the House of Representatives, came to the microphone to ask why this summer, rather than restarting any reactors, they couldn’t all be shut down and the Japanese people would see how they could live without any nuclear power.

Despite this, the government and NISA is pushing to restart some of the reactors early next year after completion of “stress tests” that they claim will show that the reactors are safe to operate, even in the event of another earthquake.  Environmental and other concerned citizen groups contend that the stress tests are based on a faulty and potentially fatal premise: that the earthquake itself did not cause pipes to crack and release steam and radiation, even before the tsunami hit.

Activists were there to present their two demands and provide evidence to back up their claim that pipes were indeed damaged by the earthquake, thereby invalidating the basis of the stress tests which are based on reactor earthquake-resistance analysis that rules out pipe damage from the earthquake.  If the stress tests on the reactors that the government wants to restart are without foundation and based on incorrect analysis, then none of the idled nuclear plants should be restarted.

The backdrop to the discussion and contributing to the tension in the air and the intensity of the meeting is the continuing disaster at Fukushima that has so negatively impacted the 80,000 evacuees and led to Chieko being forced from her farm, as well as those who are still trying to live nearby outside the official evacuation area but are scared of the radiation and unsure of whether it’s actually safe for themselves or their children.

Three reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi are now known to have suffered meltdowns of the highly radioactive fuel rods, with the strong possibility of some fuel melting through the inner containment vessel and pooling on the reactor floor.  Elevated radiation levels have shown up in food staples such as rice and milk in Fukushima prefecture, an area known for its agriculture and a significant farming region of Japan as radiation vented to the atmosphere when hydrogen explosions blew the roofs off two of the reactor buildings after the reactors lost electricity and therefore coolant.

Radioactive plutonium, the most toxic element known to humanity and one that does not exist on earth – it is only manufactured inside nuclear reactors as part of the fission of the uranium fuel – [EPA states: "Plutonium is considered a man-made element, although scientists have found trace amounts of naturally occurring plutonium produced under highly unusual geologic circumstances." -- Ed.] has been detected far from the plant itself, indicating beyond doubt that the inner and outer containment structures have been ruptured and the core of at least one reactor has been exposed.  The dumping of vast quantities of radioactively contaminated water into the oceans has also occurred as workers at the plant struggled to prevent further explosions by keeping the fuel rods cool and were forced to release the largest ever amounts of radiation into the sea when they ran out of storage space.  As the plants are still leaking, groundwater continues to become contaminated and because of the extremely high levels of radiation inside the plant and all of the wrecked equipment it’s still impossible to know the full extent of the damage to the cores and how badly melted they are.  Despite this, the new Japanese Prime Minister Noda declared on December 16 that the reactors were now stable and in “cold shutdown” and the nuclear crisis had “been resolved” which brought heavy editorial criticism from the Japan Times under the title “Nuclear Crisis Far From Resolved.”

Hence, the two demands at the meeting were that there should be no publishing of a report on the accident until all of the facts were collected, and secondly, that until the government knows the exact causes of the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi plants, they should not restart any of the inactive nuclear reactors around the country.

Local activist groups are also pushing for an enlarged evacuation zone and better compensation for those forced to relocate and who have lost their jobs along with their homes.  The four hour meeting grew increasingly fractious as it became apparent that the government bureaucrats were not in a position to relay any fresh information or answer any questions from the floor.

The meeting brought strong reminders of a similar meeting in New York in late spring that I attended between community members and the US’s equivalent of NISA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).  At that meeting, 600 attendees grew increasingly enraged by the lack of real information or space for dialogue from NRC representatives until local activists took over the meeting and ran it in a democratic manner where people were allowed to present evidence against the 36 year old Indian Point nuclear power plant and finally have a say in how energy would, or would not, be produced in their community.

After one ministerial representative had repeatedly read aloud the exact same non-answer to people’s questioning, Ryoichi Hattori demanded that he be replaced by someone who could answer the people’s questions as they had the right to be informed.

A lower level bureaucrat was replaced, another quickly came in and eventually it was admitted that the government cannot confirm whether the pipes were cracked by the earthquake, nor can they rule out that the cracks were made worse by the tsunami.  Not at all to the reassurance of anyone there, the new bureaucrat said that this was partly because the government had not yet received all of the necessary information from the plant’s operator and owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the infamous TEPCO, and that they were not sure that they would get all of the information in the future.

In Japan, the term “nuclear energy village” refers to the tight connections between the government, the government’s regulatory body, NISA and nuclear corporations such as TEPCO which, to all intents and purposes, regulate themselves, a point highlighted by a New York Times investigative report detailing the “culture of complicity” and corruption by TEPCO at Fukushima-Daiichi that undermined safety at the plant.

As the Japanese government seeks to sweep the nuclear disaster under the rug, and maintain Japan’s dependence on nuclear energy, continuing to put the Japanese people, who live on a volcanically and geologically active island in tremendous danger, it is clear that only the combined pressure of valiant fighters like Chieko Shiina will force the government to rethink its pro-corporate energy policy and move Japan toward a renewable and safe energy future.  As she told me, “it’s human nature to fight.  And this fight is international.  The actions to change the system make you change.  Both are important and necessary.  This unequal power structure will lead to change, but we must fight”.

Tomorrow, I travel to Fukushima to spend Christmas in the radiation zone, speaking with those most directly affected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.

The leaders of the nine countries that are part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) met at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Hawaii and agreed on the broad outlines of a free trade agreement. The current members include the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Peru and Chile. The TPP has been hailed as a, “landmark, 21st-century trade agreement, setting a new standard for global trade and incorporating next-generation issues.” Key features of the TPP are that it would provide comprehensive market access and be a fully regional agreement designed to facilitate the development of production and supply chains. Various working groups have been discussing issues such as financial services, government procurement, intellectual property, investment, rules of origin, telecommunications and trade remedies. The next round of talks will take place in December and there are hopes of concluding negotiations before the end of 2012. Apart from Canada and Mexico, Japan has also expressed interest in being part of the TPP. The door is also open for other countries to join which is why many consider it to be a building block for an Asia-Pacific free trade zone.

Following the APEC forum, President Barack Obama held a bilateral meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Originally, it was scheduled to be a North American Leaders Summit, but Mexican President Felipe Calderon could not attend due to the death of Interior Minister Francisco Blake Mora. According to a Readout by the Press Secretary, the leaders look forward to a rescheduled trilateral summit. During his meeting with Prime Minister Harper, President Obama, “noted the important progress being made on the Beyond the Border and Regulatory Cooperation initiatives.” He invited Harper to Washington in early December where an action plan that would work towards a North American security perimeter could finally be released. Both leaders also discussed the announcement by the State Department to seek additional information regarding the Keystone XL Pipeline project. A final ruling on the pipeline which would carry oil from western Canada to the gulf coast of Texas will not be made until after the November 2012 presidential election. The move has prompted Canada to further diversify its trade ties and shift its focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

The decision by Japan to begin consultations with TPP countries, followed by the news that Canada and Mexico are also seeking to join negotiations, has given the trade agreement a real boost. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk welcomed their interest and stated, “Along with Japan’s similar announcement this week, the desire of these North American nations to consult with TPP partners demonstrates the broadening momentum and dynamism of this ambitious effort toward economic integration across the Pacific.” Minister of International Trade Ed Fast reaffirmed Canada’s commitment to advancing economic interests in the Asia-Pacific region. He acknowledged, “We recognize the TPP as a means to further strengthen those ties and contribute to what promises to become a broadly-based vehicle for economic integration in the region.” The report, “Canada, China, and Rising Asia: A Strategic Proposal,” released in October, recommended joining the TPP as the most efficient way to deepen integration with other Asian economies, providing that the Canadian government reforms the supply management system.

Canada has previously expressed interest in the TPP, but supply management has proven to be stumbling block. The practice which has been in place for decades sets production quotas for dairy, egg and poultry farmers and protects them with import tariffs. In a recent speech, New Zealand Trade Minister Tim Groser raised questions about Canada’s application to join TPP negotiations. He admitted, “Dairy will be very challenging for Canada. This is a statement of fact. Canada follows a policy that many Governments used to follow but most have moved forward. It is called ‘supply management.’ It is completely inconsistent with tariff elimination.” As far as benchmarks go, Groser confirmed that there are questions that TPP countries will ask when considering new applicants such as whether, “we see clear evidence of a matching commitment to attain a high-quality agreement across all chapters, including the most sensitive matters.” He maintained that, “There is a very strict dress code involved and we are going to be stuffy and old fashioned in enforcing it. When our Leaders said ‘eliminate’ tariffs and other direct barriers to imports, they meant it.” Some have hinted that TPP negotiations could be used to expand NAFTA.

The Harper government maintains that it will promote and defend Canadian interests, but there are concerns that supply management could be used as a bargaining chip to secure a spot in the TPP. In his article, “Is Harper putting dairy and poultry protection on the table in trade talks?,” Steven Chase reported that, “A former senior Canadian trade official said expanding trade with Asia is not the Harper government’s only reason for joining the Trans-Pacific talks.” He goes on to say, “John Weekes, Canada’s chief NAFTA negotiator, said Ottawa can’t afford to be left out of talks that appear to be offering signatories a deeper economic relationship with the U.S. than can be found in the North American free-trade agreement.” Weekes is also quoted as saying, “What we’re talking about here – if it really does become what Obama says it will be – is we’re renegotiating NAFTA in the same way we renegotiated the Canada-U.S. FTA.” Another NAFTA-style agreement poses a serious threat to economic sovereignty. There are fears that U.S. could use the TPP to open up the Canadian telecom market and its banking sector to more foreign financial services.

In his article, “We’re neglecting our North American neighbors,” Robert Pastor described the TPP as a flawed strategy and stressed that the road to completing an agreement would be long. He explained Canada and Mexico’s decision to join the TPP, “as a defensive measure to ensure that they protect what they gained from NAFTA.” He also stated, “Obama should give priority to forging a seamless market with Canada and Mexico. But for the second time in two years, the North American leaders postponed their summit without setting a new date.” Pastor conceded that, “The three leaders have shown little imagination or even interest in dealing with a continental agenda.” He warned how, “the TPP will divert scarce political capital and attention from North America.” Pastor further emphasized that, “The fastest way to create jobs and double exports is for the three governments to work together on continental plans for transportation, education, and infrastructure.” He also added, “If the TPP’s purpose is to put pressure on China to open its market, that won’t work” and instead suggested, “A reinvigorated North America is more likely to get China’s attention.”

Jane Kelsey sheds more light as to the real agenda behind the proposed trade agreement. She acknowledged that it is part of a, “revival of US geopolitical and strategic influence in the Asian region to counter the ascent of China. The US aims to isolate and subordinate China in part through constructing a region-wide legal regime that serves the interests of, and is enforceable by, the US and its corporations.” It is interesting to note that many of the current TPP partners, including new prospective members support U.S. foreign policy initiatives. This ties in nicely with the Obama administration’s plans of expanding alliances and military bases in the Asia-Pacific region in an effort to contain China’s rising power.

The Public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men.

— Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren, 1775

As the sabre rattling against Iran becomes more deafening, week on week, with threats of the nuclear insanity of potentially, deliberately, creating a few Chenobyls or a Fukushima by bombing working nuclear power plants, another potential nuclear madness is planned, geographically “next door.”

The IAEA appears to be behaving in as partisan, shameless way regarding Iran as it did with Iraq. Then accusations, with considerable justification, were that the inspection teams were more about spying than neutral observation. “The way back to (the UN) was via Tel Aviv”, remarked one former inspector, memorably.

Gareth Porter has meticulously, comprehensively trashed the IAEA’s latest Report on Iran, showing disturbing parallels with the tragic Iraq fiasco. Iraq had Ahmed Chalabi, Iyad Allawi and “Curveball”, selling fairy stories. Iran, seemingly, has an expert in nanodiamonds, Vyacheslav Danilenko, apparently doubling as a nuclear weapons expert, and a plethora of unidentified spokespersons for “Member States.” Hardly rigid, verifiable scholarship.

Previous “concerns” expressed have been that Iran has vast oil reserves, so there must be a weapons-related reason to expand nuclear power. However, Iran has been under increasingly stringent sanctions since 14 November 1979, ironically necessitating additional sources of energy – for which it is now being threatened with Iraq’s fate.

Yet headlines in the Middle East warning: “Most volatile region in the world is going nuclear”, one with a helpful map of “volatile” countries with advanced nuclear ambitions,  seem to have escaped IAEA notice. Iran, of course, has no history of belligerence towards its neighbours for decades. Indeed, in 2003, in spite of the terrible cost of the eight year war after the 1980 (Western driven) invasion by Iraq, the world was told by Washington that the country was still a “threat to its neighbours”. Tehran repeatedly responded that it was not.

Consider then the case of Kuwait: “Blessed with an abundance of natural petroleum resources …” (Gulf News 25 February 2011) which has advanced plans for up to four nuclear power stations – two apparently to be built on two islands, Warba and Bubiyan, which have been the source of conflict for nearly a century –  many scholars contend longer – the dispute over which contributed to the disaster of Iraq’s invasion and that country’s subsequent decimation of 2 August 1990.

Theodore Draper outlined the vast complexities in 1993:

The suddenness of the [Iraqi] action [invading Kuwait] and the coverage it has received should not disguise the fact that Iraqi claims to Kuwaiti territory have been pursued with remarkable consistency over the last half-century, through Hashemite and revolutionary rule alike.

There is some justification for the argument (which) predates by a considerable length of time, the accession of Saddam Hussain to the Iraqi Presidency.

These claims will not disappear with a settlement of the present Kuwait Crisis, whether or not this involves a change of regime in Baghdad.

It is necessary to take these historical roots into account because they left such an explosive legacy in the Gulf region—the Iraqi quest for a coastal outlet, the obstruction of the Kuwaiti barrier islands of Warba and Bubiyan, the dispute over Kuwait’s exploitation of the Rumaila oil field, the precarious borders … But as Richard Schofield¹ points out:

Thus there was more to Saddam Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait than one man’s evil character. Whatever may happen to him, the Iraqi grievances will not go away.

For more than two centuries, Kuwait managed to survive by playing off one major power against another. As a nation, it did not have the ancient roots that Iraq has in Mesopotamia.

Throughout the 1930s, Iraq refused to agree to a demarcation of the boundary with Kuwait unless the latter was willing to give up control of the islands, Warba and Bubiyan, and thus secure the narrow Iraqi Persian Gulf coastline. Despite its vulnerability, Kuwait refused to make concessions.

By 1935, Iraqi propaganda openly called for the incorporation of Kuwait. Three years later, Iraq made this claim official, with the same justification used by Saddam Hussein five decades later—that Kuwait had once been attached to the Ottoman province of Basra.

Swimming distance from Iraq, which Patrick Markey has described as  “… a flash point, a country still struggling with violence, sectarianism and pressure from neighbours in an unstable region”, $20 Billion is to be spent on the Warba Island nuclear reactor,  just 500 metres from the nearest Iraqi inhabited area, at the port of Umm Qasr. It is 30 miles from Kuwait. (Bubiyan nestles next to Warba.)

Pointing out that it is on the still disputed border between Iraq and Kuwait arising from further boundary tinkering after the 1991 hostilities, Iraqi parliamentarian Ms Alya Nasif has requested of Prime Minister Nuri Maliki that he demands in the strongest terms that plans be halted.

The main contractors are French giant, AREVA, who, in December 2010 the Kuwaiti Investment Authority invested $794 million and Kuwait acquired a 4.8% stake, making it the third largest investor, the French State being the largest. AREVA has extensive contracts and mutual interests with the United States.

Further, in September last year, Kuwait signed “ … a bilateral agreement with Japan for cooperation on the peaceful use of nuclear energy, covering issues such as expertise exchange, human resource development, nuclear safety, following similar deals with France and the US earlier this year.”

The five year deal with Japan, includes:

  … preparation, planning and promotion of nuclear power development … safety and security.

The scope of the cooperation includes training, human resources and infrastructure development, and the appropriate application of nuclear power generation and related technology.

I wonder if Fukushima’s radioactive air borne or sea borne fallout has reached the Gulf yet.

The UK Foreign Office website states of Kuwait:

There is a general threat from terrorism. Attacks cannot be ruled out and could be indiscriminate.  These include references to attacks on Western interests  … military, oil, transport and aviation interests.

What a prize a nuclear power station would be!

Many areas of the Gulf are highly sensitive, including near maritime boundaries and the islands of Bubiyan and Warbah …

Further, reminds the Foreign Office:

The area in the northern Gulf, between Iran, Iraq and Kuwait has not been demarcated …

It would be hard to find a more volatile place to build a nuclear installation. Oh, and the land is low lying and subject to silting and shifting.\

With the IAEA berating Iran for its nuclear programme, it seems bewildering that the very real and present dangers of these terrifying, madcap projects have passed them by.

Heaven forbid that the fifty years fruitful trade relations between Japan and Kuwait, celebrated in May this year, has tempted Japan’s Mr Yukiya Amano, heading the IAEA, to put country before nuclear madness.

And then there are the potential suicide bombers.

1. Islands and Maritime Boundaries in the Gulf   1798-1960, pub: 1990:  R Schofield. ISBN: (13) 978-1-85207-275-9

Workers first detected an ammonia leak in a water purification system about 3 p.m. Ammonia, when mixed into air, is toxic. The 30 gallons of ammonia were caught in a holding tank and posed no health risk, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC).

During the 1970s and 1980s, at the peak of the nuclear reactor construction, organized groups of protestors mounted dozens of anti-nuke campaigns. They were called Chicken Littles, the establishment media generally ignored their concerns, and the nuclear industry trotted out numerous scientists and engineers from their payrolls to declare nuclear energy to be safe, clean, and inexpensive energy that could reduce America’s dependence upon foreign oil.

Workers at nuclear plants are highly trained, probably far more than workers in any other industry; operating systems are closely regulated and monitored. However, problems caused by human negligence, manufacturing defects, and natural disasters have plagued the nuclear power industry for its six decades.

It isn’t alerts like what happened at San Onofre that are the problem; it’s the level 3 (site area emergencies) and level 4 (general site emergencies) disasters. There have been 99 major disasters, 56 of them in the U.S., since 1952, according to a study conducted by Benjamin K. Sovacool Director of the Energy Justice Program at Institute for Energy and Environment  One-third of all Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant.

At Windscale in northwest England, fire destroyed the core, releasing significant amounts of Iodine-131. At Rocky Flats near Denver, radioactive plutonium and tritium leaked into the environment several times over a two decade period. At Church Rock, New Mexico, more than 90 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Rio Puerco, directly affecting the Navajo nation.

In the grounds of central and northeastern Pennsylvania, in addition to the release of radioactive Cesium-137 and Iodine-121, an excessive level of Strontium-90 was released during the Three Mile Island (TMI) meltdown in 1979, the same year as the Church Rock disaster. To keep waste tanks from overflowing with radioactive waste, the plant’s operator dumped several thousand gallons of radioactive waste into the Susquehanna River. An independent study by Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina revealed the incidence of lung cancer and leukemia downwind of the TMI meltdown within six years of the meltdown was two to ten times that of the rest of the region.

At the Chernobyl meltdown in April 1986, about 50 workers and firefighters died lingering and horrible deaths from radiation poisoning. Because of wind patterns, about 27,000 persons in the northern hemisphere are expected to die of cancer, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. An area of about 18 miles is uninhabitable. The nuclear reactor core is now protected by a crumbling sarcophagus; a replacement is not complete. Even then, the new shield is expected to crumble within a century. The current director at Chernobyl says it could be 20,000 years until the area again becomes habitable.

In March, an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale and the ensuing 50-foot high tsunami wave led to a meltdown of three of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency reported that 31 radioactive isotopes were released. In contrast, 16 radioactive isotopes were released from the A-bomb that hit Hiroshima August 6, 1945.  The agency also reported that radioactive cesium released was almost 170 times the amount of the A-bomb, and that the release of radioactive Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 was about two to three times the level of the A-bomb. The release into the air, water, and ground included about 60,000 tons of contaminated water. The half lives of Sr-90 and Cs-137 are about 30 years each. Full effects may not be known for at least two generations. Twenty-three nuclear reactors in the U.S. have the same design—and same design flaws—as the Daiichi reactor.

About five months after the Daiichi disaster, the North Anna plant in northeastern Virginia declared an alert, following a 5.8 magnitude earthquake that was felt throughout the mid-Atlantic and lower New England states. The earthquake caused building cracks and spent fuel cells in canisters to shift. The North Anna plant was designed to withstand an earthquake of only 5.9–6.2 on the Richter scale. More than 1.9 million persons live within a 50-mile radius of North Anna, according to 2010 census data.

Although nuclear plant security is designed to protect against significant and extended forms of terrorism, the NRC believes as many as one-fourth of the 104 U.S. nuclear plants may need upgrades to withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters, according to an Associated Press investigation. About 20 percent of the world’s 442 nuclear plants are built in earthquake zones, according to data compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The NRC has determined that the leading U.S. plants in the Eastern Coast in danger of being compromised by an earthquake are in the extended metropolitan areas of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chattanooga. Tenn. The highest risk, however, may be California’s San Onofre and Diablo Canyon plants, both built near major fault lines. Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, was even built by workers who misinterpreted the blueprints.

Every nuclear spill affects not just those in the immediate evacuation zone but people throughout the world, as prevailing winds can carry air-borne radiation thousands of miles from the source, and the world’s water systems can put radioactive materials into the drinking supply and agriculture systems of most nations. At every nuclear disaster, the governments eventually declare the immediate area safe. But animals take far longer than humans to return to the area. If they could figure out that radioactivity released into the water, air, and ground are health hazards, certainly humans could also figure it out.

Following the disaster at Daiichi, Germany announced it was closing its 17 nuclear power plants and would expand development of solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources. About the same time, Siemens abandoned financing and building nuclear power plants, leaving only American-based Westinghouse and General Electric, which own, or have constructed, about four-fifths of the world’s nuclear plants, and the French-based Areva.

The life of the first nuclear plants was about 30–40 years; the newer plants have a 40–60 year life. After that time, they become so radioactive that the risk of radiation poison outweighs the benefits of continuing the operation. So the operators seal the plant and abandon it, carefully explaining to the public the myriad safety procedures in place and the federal regulations. The cooling and decommissioning takes 50–100 years until the plant is safe enough for individuals to walk through it without protection. More critical, there still is no safe technology of how to handle spent control rods.

The United States has no plans to abandon nuclear energy. The Obama administration has proposed financial assistance to build the first nuclear plant in three decades, and a $36 billion loan guarantee for the nuclear industry. However, the Congressional Budget Office believes there can be as much as 50 percent default.  Each plant already receives $1–1.3 billion in tax rebates and subsidies. However, in the past three years, plans to build nuclear generators have been abandoned in nine states, mostly because of what the major financiers believe to be a less than desired return on investment and higher than expected construction and maintenance costs.

A Department of Energy analysis revealed the budget for 75 of the first plants was about $45 billion, but cost overruns ran that to $145 billion. The last nuclear power plant completed was the Watts Bar plant in eastern Tennessee. Construction began in 1973 and was completed in 1996. Part of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, the Watts Bar plant cost about $8 billion to produce 1,170 mw of energy from its only reactor. Work on a second reactor was suspended in 1988 because of a lack of need for additional electricity. However, construction was resumed in 2007, with completion expected in 2013. Cost to complete the reactor, which was about 80 percent complete when work was suspended, is estimated to cost an additional $2.5 billion.

The cost to build new power plants is well over $10 billion each, with a proposed cost of about $14 billion to expand the Vogtle plant near Augusta, Ga. The first two units had cost about $9 billion.

Added to the cost of every plant is decommissioning costs, averaging about $300 million to over $1 billion, depending upon the amount of energy the plant is designed to produce. The nuclear industry proudly points to studies that show the cost to produce energy from nuclear reactors is still less expensive than the costs from coal, gas, and oil. The industry also rightly points out that nukes produce about one-fifth all energy, with no emissions, such as those from the fossil fuels.

For more than six decades, this nation essentially sold its soul for what it thought was cheap energy that may not be so cheap, and clean energy that is not so clean.

It is necessary to ask the critical question. Even if there were no human, design, and manufacturing errors; even if there could be assurance there would be no accidental leaks and spills of radioactivity; even if there became a way to safely and efficiently dispose of long-term radioactive waste; even if all of this were possible, can the nation, struggling in a recession while giving subsidies to the nuclear industry, afford to build more nuclear generating plants at the expense of solar, wind, and geothermal energy?

See Part 1, 2, and 3.

See Part 1 and 2.

See Part 1.

If nuclear power is so ‘safe,’ why is it that nuclear power stations are not placed where the power is most needed – in or very near large cities? Because they are dangerous. OK, if they’re dangerous, why is it the operators are not terribly interested in safety measures?

– Tony Boys, Can Do Better Blog¹

Over six months have passed since the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. What progress if any has been made to deal with what is surely one the worst industrial accidents in history?

The situation at the Fukushima No.1 power station site is far from being resolved. Although Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) has said a “cold shutdown” of some of the reactors may be “within reach.”² Although a drastic reduction from the trillions of becquerals of radiation that were released during the darkest days of March, retired nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson who has supplied us with a steady source of reliable analyses, roughly estimates that the damaged reactors are still emitting a billion becquerals per day.³ Recently Professor Hiroaki Koide, a radiation metrology and nuclear safety expert at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, relayed the frightening assessment that:

The nuclear disaster is ongoing…. Without accurate information about what’s happening inside the reactors, there’s a need to consider various scenarios. At present, I believe that there is a possibility that massive amounts of radioactive materials will be released into the environment again. At the No. 1 reactor, there’s a chance that melted fuel has burned through the… floor of the reactor building, and has sunk into the ground. From there, radioactive materials may be seeping into the ocean and groundwater…. Recovering the melted nuclear fuel is another huge challenge. I can’t even imagine how that could be done… there is a possibility that nuclear fuel has fallen into the ground, in which case it will take 10 or 20 years to recover it. We are now head to head with a situation that mankind has never faced before.⁴

Could Professor Koide be worried that the corium (melted fuel) may reach the ground water, resulting in the classic China Syndrome?

Some nuclear experts are more optimistic, stating that “[e]fforts seem to be making smooth progress.” But there is still a catch-22 at work here: “Before the Fukushima crisis can be said contained, the holes and cracks from which the water and fuel are escaping must be located and sealed. But this extremely difficult task could take years because the radiation near the reactors is simply too high to let workers get near them.”⁵

The Japanese government has finally decided to take nuclear safety seriously, as evidenced when the Ground Self-Defense Force held a drill within the evacuation site “in preparation for any further large-scale emission of radioactive materials from the plant.”⁶ Could this be in preparation for Professor Koide’s scenario of possible “massive amounts of radioactive materials”?

Although some people have elected to risk their health and stay inside the evacuation zone,⁷ a 30 km up to 100 km radius around the stricken site looks to be dangerous if not uninhabitable for years to come.⁸ Decontaminating the site would cost billions of dollars and disposing of contaminated soil–estimated now to be at least 100 million cubic meters⁹ — a formidable challenge. Recently it was learned that the “Tokyo Metropolitan government has been dumping [radioactive] sludge from its water purification plants and burned ashes from the sewer sludge from the sludge plants in its landfill in Tokyo Bay at least since late May. The huge landfill is right near the Haneda Airport.”¹⁰

Over 100,000 people have been displaced by the accident and have little hope of returning to their homes¹¹ and “[m]ore than a third of residents of Fukushima Prefecture would move to avoid radiation if they could.” But those 600,000 people who would choose to move do not have the economic means to do so, and the government is not offering help.¹² An example of government schizophrenia is how health and economic issues conflict. While ecologists are studying the extent to which heavily forested Fukushima prefecture is contaminated with radioactive fallout,¹³ at the same time “Seiji Maehara, who lost his bid to become the party leader and the prime minister of Japan, has nonetheless landed on a very powerful party position as the chairman of the DPJ’s [Democratic Party of Japan] policy bureau.” Maehara is trying to promote an “eco forestry” scheme so that the stricken region can regain their economy.¹⁴ How the very area, Iitate, that received the lion’s share of radiation is going to sell “green” timber is puzzling, especially given that up to this point the government’s regime for testing of food and other materials has proven to be superficial and unreliable.

There are a number of maps over recent months that have tracked the deposition of radiation, namely cesium. My assessment from studying various charts, maps and readings from a variety of internet sources is that by far the worst is Fukushima, especially the “red band” northwest of the nuclear site. However, the eastern half of Fukushima; along with large swaths in Miyagi to the north; the eastern corner of Yamagata; most of Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures have been hard hit; with radiation even spread into the beautiful mountains of Nagano. Yet many of these maps are still incomplete as the most likely contaminated areas are being measured first. There have been any number of hot spots located all over the Kanto region, including Saitama, Chiba and Tokyo, and even further to the south. These assessments do not take into account the considerable amount of radiation that went into the ocean (or to North America), both from the airborne explosions and contaminated water.

Recently I spoke with a Japanese housewife who has a five year old child and closely follows the radiation issue on Japanese internet sites. She believes the entire East Coast of Japan in the Pacific Ocean from Hokkaido well down to Shikoku or Kyushu is now contaminated with radiation. This rings true with what Arnie Gunderson said months ago: Don’t eat the fish if it comes from Japan’s Pacific coastal waters. A recent Greenpeace study found a variety of radioactive elements in seaweed 30 km south of Fukushima.¹⁵

The spread of radiation has been documented by the Japanese-American blog hero, “Ex-SKF (ex-skf.blogspot.com),” who by translating Japanese news stories into English has devoted himself to exposing government corruption. The heading at the website in Japanese translates to: “Good luck Japan, don’t give up! Don’t rely on the government!” A perusal of the archives shows a trend of denial and coverup on the part of Tepco, the government and many businesses. For months we have been jarred by one scandal after another, from radioactive green tea to beef being sold all over the country without proper testing.¹⁶

Just the other day Ex-SKF wrote about a typical story:

The willful ignorance, or the determination to carry on with their lives they knew before March 11, of many Japanese is driving me crazy. A nursery school in Akita Prefecture bought turf from Ibaraki Prefecture, which is located south of Fukushima Prefecture and was doused with radioactive materials by downwind from Fukushima I Nuke Plant creating areas with high radiation, in middle of July. Small children were playing on the freshly installed turf. Then the city came and measured the air radiation level. Guess what. It was high. Duh.¹⁷

The extent of radioactive contamination depends on how you define “contaminated,” but as little as one-seventh¹⁸ up to about half of the entire eastern part of Fukushima prefecture has been doused with radiation.
For example, a “survey of 2,200 locations within a 100-kilometer (62-mile) radius of the crippled plant found that those 33 locations had cesium-137 in excess of 1.48 million becquerels per square meter, the level set by the Soviet Union for forced resettlement after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Another 132 locations had a combined amount of cesium 137/134 over 555,000 becquerels per square meter, the level at which the Soviet authorities called for voluntary evacuation and imposed a ban on farming.”¹⁹

Another source found that “[a]n extensive area of more than 8,000 square kilometers has accumulated cesium 137 levels of 30,000 becquerels per square meter or more…. The affected area is one-18th of about 145,000 square kilometers contaminated with cesium 137 levels of 37,000 becquerels per square meter or more following the 1986 Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union. The contaminated area includes about 6,000 square kilometers in Fukushima Prefecture, or nearly half of the prefecture. Fukushima Prefecture, the third largest in Japan, covers 13,782 square kilometers.”²⁰ Although less extensive damage than from Chernobyl, the future of safe farming in Japan’s narrow bread basket is now in question.²¹ Nevertheless, recent news claims that rice grown this season is “below 10 becquerals/kg” and therefore safe to eat.²² But how proper were the tests, and does anyone in their right mind think rice from northwest Fukushima is advisable to eat? How about a mad cow burger and secret cesium sauce with your coke, sir?

North Americans are also worried about unwelcome radiation traveling by wind and ocean currents as a Swiss map based on computer modeling clearly illustrates.²³ In a recent video Arnold Gunderson points out that a “tent” is being built over reactor no. 1 “to reduce the amount of radiation on site.” However, “[t]he radiation inside that tent is still going to have to go somewhere, or else it is going to build up and become lethal. So what is going to have to happen to that radiation, is it is going to be exhausted up the stack.”²⁴ This means radiation will be guided upwards into the wind where it may travel near or great distances: out of sight is out of mind. Since the winds generally blow to the west, a steady stream (for how many months or years?) is going to land in the ocean or in North America. The philosophy is: The Solution To Pollution Is Dilution, but no one can agree on what a safe dose of radiation really is. Most likely, even small doses are harmful.

Which raises the question as to just how much radiation has been, and, is still being released. As Tokyo University Professor Tatsuhiko Kodama famously testified to the Japanese Diet in late July, the radiation released from the Fukushima reactor explosions was equivalent to 20 Hiroshima atom bombs.²⁵ Estimates as to the amount of radiation that have been released vary widely. One mainstream science source has claimed “5–6% of the total from Chernobyl” yet notes that “ ‘there are still more questions than definite answers’…. High radiation levels make it impossible to directly measure damage to the melted reactor cores. Perhaps the greatest uncertainty is exactly how much radiation was released in the first ten days after the accident, when power outages hampered measurements.”²⁶ Tepco recently admitted that the amount of highly radioactive water released into the sea shortly after the accident was three times higher than previously thought.²⁷

A more realistic estimate would put the total releases at 10-20 percent of Chernobyl.²⁸ Yet for many reasons, researchers such as Arnie Gunderson, a former nuclear engineer, and Chris Busby, radiation expert for the European Union, have both said that based on various criteria: “Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl.” If total releases are not has high as Chernobyl (Busby has suggested they may be much higher), other factors such as that the crisis is ongoing; the huge amount of nuclear fuel stored at the site; the power station’s siting which is not far above the ground water and in close vicinity to the ocean; proneness to further earthquakes/tsunamis; and nearby population density are all reasons for grave concern.

Scientific uncertainty, technological ineptness and political cover-up in the case of most nuclear accidents is par for the course, as anyone who has critically examined the history of the nuclear power industries in both the USA and Japan can attest. But as more people find out the truth, government and industry take actions to prevent the unwashed masses from becoming involved in substantive policy decisions.²⁹ Recently pro-nuke politician “(LDP) Secretary-General Nobuteru Ishihara stated, ‘Geiger counters costing between 40,000 and 50,000 yen ($500-600) provide patchy measurements. We have to try and stop citizens from taking their own radiation measurements.’ ”³⁰ The Global Nuclear Crime Syndicate (GNCS) is on the attack warning that “media coverage” about radiation from Fukushima could upsetting to the public. One conference egghead hooted, “[w]e’ve got to stop these sorts of reports coming out.”³¹ Oh dear me. In other words, don’t worry the people over the fact that they or their children may die an early death from cancer due to the carelessness of the GNCS.

On the other hand, I have seen some wildly inaccurate interpretations on the internet, including that “hundreds of millions of people will die” from Fukushima; that “much of northern Japan” is now uninhabitable (please consult a map); or the most crackpot idea to date — that the situation at the Fukushima power station is so serious that we must literally “nuke it” to terminate the problem. Yet, most coverage of the issue, even from many mainstream sources, has been well intentioned if not always perfectly accurate or is overly self censored.

Tepco would be happy for everyone to forget all about Fukushima so they can get back to the business of making lots of money. Their cover-up of important information was made obvious when a Diet science committee received a “heavily censored [redacted] copy of a nuclear accident operating manual for the Fukushima No. 1 power station.”³² Their message is clear: “Fuck you; we own you people and we can get away with bloody murder.”

That Tepco has huge influence and control over the media and politicians is well documented.³³ Their bribes and payoffs are legion, spending hundreds of millions of dollars “on payments known internally [to the company] as ‘funds to deal with local communities.’ ”³⁴ Tepco arrogance and greed knows no bounds, as this Asahi News editorialist writes: they intend “to raise electricity rates by a uniform 15 percent for three years starting next fiscal year [while] its employees are [only] taking a pay cut of 5 percent… I am appalled that the company is also paying bonuses, although the amount is down by half. Once the period of the rate hike is over, it intends to resume paying bonuses in full.”³⁵

In the meantime, although many folks have volunteered to help in the stricken northeast region, the majority of Japanese people have pushed the issue to the back of their minds. The fate of Fukushima residents is just their tough luck– lifestyle consumerism and self preservation take precedence. If given a choice I don’t think the Japanese would have chosen nuclear power as an energy source, that decision was foisted on them in the post WWII period. There is still a hard core group of a few thousand anti-nuke protesters who consistently make their voices heard, and we keep hearing squeaking noises from top politicians that nuclear power must be phased out and renewables phased in — hopefully the sooner the better.³⁶

1. Tony Boys, Can Do Better Blog
2. No. 3 reactor cooling down: Tepco
3. Nuclear Engineer: Fukushima reactors continue to emit significant quantities of radioactive gases
4. Radiation expert says outcome of nuke crisis hard to predict, warns of further dangers
5. Plugging leaks will end crisis, not cold shutdown: analysts
6. GSDF holds emergency evacuation drill near stricken Fukushima nuclear plant
7. Fukushima man opts to be guinea pig
8. Inside Japan’s nuclear ghost zone
9. Fukushima clean-up may require removal of 100 million cubic meters of soil
10. Radioactive Landfill: Tokyo Metropolitan Government Has Been Doing It Since May
11. Over 100,000 Fukushima Prefecture residents can’t return to hometowns
12. A third of Fukushima residents would move if they could
13. Contamination of Fukushima forests being studied
14. Potentially Radioactive Lumber to Be Promoted with “Eco-Point” Incentive?
15. Radioactive manganese-54, silver-110m and cobalt-60 found in seaweed sample 30km south of Fukushima
16. Ex-SKF blog
17. Radioactive Turf in Nursery School in Akita Prefecture
18. Up to one-seventh of Fukushima may be contaminated
19. Survey Finds Radiation Over Wide Area in Japan
20. Fukushima cesium contamination widespread but less than Chernobyl
21. Cesium absorption through roots may have long-term effect on farming
    Effect of contaminated soil on food chain sparks fears
22. Radioactive Rice? ND, Says Fukushima Prefecture
23. “NEW!” atmc.jp now posting Fukushima radiation forecast maps from Swiss Meteorological Bureau
24. New Data Supports Previous Fairewinds Analysis, as Contamination Spreads in Japan and Worldwide
25. Prof. Kodama Angry about Japanese Gov.’s Gross Negligence (Part 1)
26. Fukushima Crisis Is Still Hazy
27. Radioactive release into sea estimated tripled
28. Nuclear Power’s Future In Doubt Amidst Fukushima Crisis
29. Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant Trial Wraps Up
30. Japanese gov’s trying to stop citizen measuring radiation
31. Fukushima media coverage ‘may be harmful’
32. TEPCO submits heavily redacted copy of Fukushima nuke accident manual
33. Censorship in Japan: The Fukushima Cover-up
34. TEPCO quietly paid 40 billion yen to areas near nuclear plants
35. TEPCO doesn’t deserve to be called a public interest company
36. Japan to reduce reliance on nuclear power?

Literally, if we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.

— Michele Bachmann, 1/26/05, testifying against a bill to raise the minimum wage and advocating the elimination of the minimum wage altogether

Dark economic clouds are dissipating into an emerging blue sky of opportunity.

Democracy functions best when we have an active citizenry.

— Rick Perry

Election of poorly equipped persons to highest office reveals a larger problem – a sizable portion of the electorate, possibly fifty percent, subscribe to the simplistic economic thinking that thwarts economic recovery – “It’s the government’s fault,” “Only business can create jobs,” “Get the government out of our lives,” and the latest, “We only have to return to God.”

And what thinketh the other fifty percent? Well, the Wall Street Journal has a huge and trusting readership who use its words to plan their economic futures. Combine Tea Party, Libertarian, and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) subscriptions, and we have, with some overlap, economic thought that defies analysis because there is no thought to analyze.

Tea Party proposals for economic growth are self-refuted due to their lack of depth, slogans and simplistic expressions.

Libertarian economics derives from libertarian philosophy, a single-minded approach to all issues. The economics have been challenged in a previous article by the writer:

How to Create an Economic Downfall, exactly what these miscreants are preparing for their nation.

Close association between Wall Street Journal and barren right wing economic ideologues are revealed in a WSJ editorial. Each line of the editorial is either a self-refutation, an inaccuracy, a distortion, a made-up issue, or an outright deception. Is that serious? Yes, it is serious – the electorate is almost entirely captured by inadequate economic proposals that will sink America. And the politicos think only of catering to the electorate; not educating it with sensible policies, and only interested in winning an election. The United States is moving towards an economic sinkhole in which the Tea Party and Wall Street Journal complement one another.

Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2011 Editorial:

These examples show that China is no ‘miracle.’ Running a trade surplus while accumulating and sterilizing foreign reserves succeeds for a time. But inflation is only deferred, and the more that is stored up, the worse the hangover afterward. Investments that were predicated on the good times lasting forever must then be written off. Subsidized exports must shrink to a more appropriate share of the economy. There is some irony here in that one of the reasons Beijing has refused to change its monetary arrangements is that it doesn’t want to repeat the experience of Japan. That was understandable during the Asian monetary turmoil of the late 1990s and again during the panic of 2008-2009. But in economics what can’t continue won’t. Tokyo pursued a policy of reserve accumulation for too long, making a difficult transition inevitable. Stagflation is a warning to Beijing that it is running out of time to avoid that fate.

— Wall Street Journal (subscription required)

China is no “miracle”.

If we speak of a German miracle and Japanese miracle, then certainly China deserves the expression China miracle. Like all the others, the ‘miracle’ was actually worthwhile economic policies.

Running a trade surplus while accumulating and sterilizing foreign reserves succeeds for a time.

Does the patronizing WSJ believe the Peoples Republic government, which has steered a totally deprived nation to become the second largest economy in only thirty years, doesn’t know the care of foreign reserves? Meanwhile, the country is growing at a rapid rate.

Does China sterilize foreign reserve? Doesn’t the government buy the dollars, increase its money supply and invest the dollars in foreign assets?

Inflation is only deferred, and the more that is stored up, the worse the hangover afterward.

In 1995, China had a 25% inflation rate and a minuscule trade balance. Now it has a 6% inflation rate and a major positive trade balance. A 6% inflation rate is already a relatively high rate and so the government is not storing up anything.

Subsidized exports must shrink to a more appropriate share of the economy.

Does China subsidize exports more than other nations?

“According to the GATT/WTO trade agreements, a country with a value added tax (VAT) such as China can legally rebate to its exporters the VAT taxes they pay on exports. US manufacturers face this problem when competing with the Chinese, but also with the Europeans, Japanese, South Koreans and many other nations.”

Charging China with manipulating its currency in order to favor exports is not easily proven. The moderately high six percent inflation rate offsets other factors that push the Renminbi to an increased value. Nevertheless, the Renminbi is still not an international currency whose value can be comfortably compared with other currencies. As for, general subsidies, they are no more than the U.S. subsidies for its agricultural industry, which floods the world market with foodstuffs, which are competitive due to the subsidies.

Economist Eswar Prasad of Cornell University argues that cheap credit and subsidized land and energy further enhance the price competitiveness of Chinese exports.

Cheap credit? Has Eswar Prasad confused nations?

Similar to the policies of other industrialized nations during the economic slowdown, Beijing originated stimulus plans with easier credit to invigorate the economy. Unlike other industrialized nations, the Chinese stimulus maintained a low unemployment rate (4.5%) and an escalated GDP growth (9%).

The benchmark interest rate in China was last reported at 6.56 percent.

The benchmark interest rate in the United States was last reported at 0.25 percent.

The Cornell university economist is comparing a minor green technology trade dispute with the United States, which Beijing has settled by agreeing to stop subsidizing wind power firms that use domestic parts at the expense of imports,

Examine the U.S. government assistance to the energy sector.

U.S. government support for renewable energy may plunge from record levels, setting back the use of wind and solar power before they can compete on their own with oil, gas and coal. Written into the federal tax code are benefits valued at $24.2 billion for renewable energy and efficiency incentives through 2014, compared with an estimated $17.9 billion for the oil, gas, and coal industries, according to a December report by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

Direct spending, tax breaks and research funding pushed federal renewable-energy subsidies to $14.7 billion in 2010, according to Alan Beamon, director of the Energy Information Administration Office of Electric, Coal, Nuclear and Renewables Analysis. Project developers are lining up for subsidies approved in the 2009 stimulus bill as incentives expire and the deficit-reduction deal dims prospects for future backing of solar panels and wind farms.

…an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.

According to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, released in 2005, capital investments like oil field leases and drilling equipment are taxed at an effective rate of 9 percent, significantly lower than the overall rate of 25 percent for businesses in general and lower than virtually any other industry.

There is some irony here in that one of the reasons Beijing has refused to change its monetary arrangements is that it doesn’t want to repeat the experience of Japan.

What “experience of Japan?” From 2008, until the Tsunami crippled its production, Japan’s GDP rose from $4.3 trillion to $5.5 trillion. During the same interval, U.S. GDP rose from $14 trillion to $14.3 trillion with a slight dip in 2010. Has the WSJ been told this reason by Chinese officials, or is it originating this thought, and using a reference to Beijing to confirm it? The economic development of China is much different than that of already developed Japan; why should policies be similar?

In economics what can’t continue won’t.

Profound statement, similar to those of Michelle Bachmann.

Tokyo pursued a policy of reserve accumulation for too long, making a difficult transition inevitable.

Japan is a resource deficient nation, which needs to export to obtain funds to import raw materials and energy supplies. Foreign competition forced its corporations, similar to those in the United States, to move production offshore. External production limits domestic money supply and domestic consumption. Japan incorporated is doing what it has to do and not what the WSJ wants it to do, and doing it successfully. Nothing wrong with having the third largest economy in the world.

Stagflation is a warning to Beijing that it is running out of time to avoid that fate.

Stagflation is when the economy experiences slow GDP growth (stagnation) with high inflation. Japan, to whom the WSJ is telling China it might soon resemble, has exhibited moderate GDP growth with deflation.

Meanwhile the U.S. retains slow economic growth with slow inflation and exhibits characteristics that tend to no growth and hyperinflation.

Does one editorial from the Wall Street Journal mean much? The WSJ influences a significant portion of the shakers and makers in America. Every editorial characterizes its approach to the economic dilemma. Prevarications, deceptive remarks, illogical reasoning, and distorting facts to advance an agenda skew the dialogue. Although the Bush administration’s policies headed the nation towards an obvious economic downfall, the WSJ never presented any alarm. Now it’s warning the People’s Republic it’s going to soon be in trouble. The editorial implication is that all is right in America, and if it isn’t, it’s China’s fault.

The reality: Measures needed to reduce unemployment to acceptable levels and provide sufficient economic growth refute the slogans that guide the population’s concepts of a beneficial economic system. Unfortunately, these measures invite more government intervention in the economy, which means they will neither be advanced by hypocritical politicians nor accepted by a disillusioned electorate. Popular economic media, together with the Tea and Libertarian Parties, drive the population to politicians whose policies create consistent high unemployment and perpetual stagflation to the U.S. economy. The confused population will continue to rail against the predicament and blame the government and China.

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T.  It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

When Truman lied to America that Hiroshima was a military base rather than a city full of civilians, people no doubt wanted to believe him. Who would want the shame of belonging to the nation that commits a whole new kind of atrocity? (Will naming lower Manhattan “ground zero” erase the guilt?)  And when we learned the truth, we wanted and still want desperately to believe that war is peace, that violence is salvation, that our government dropped nuclear bombs in order to save lives, or at least to save American lives.

We tell each other that the bombs shortened the war and saved more lives than the some 200,000 they took away. And yet, weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan’s codes and read the telegram. Truman referred in his diary to “the telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” Truman had been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs fell, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor.

Presidential advisor James Byrnes had told Truman that dropping the bombs would allow the United States to “dictate the terms of ending the war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in his diary that Byrnes was “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” Truman wrote in his diary that the Soviets were preparing to march against Japan and “Fini Japs when that comes about.” Truman ordered the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th and another type of bomb, a plutonium bomb, which the military also wanted to test and demonstrate, on Nagasaki on August 9th. Also on August 9th, the Soviets attacked the Japanese. During the next two weeks, the Soviets killed 84,000 Japanese while losing 12,000 of their own soldiers, and the United States continued bombing Japan with non-nuclear weapons. Then the Japanese surrendered.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, “… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”  One dissenter who had expressed this same view to the Secretary of War prior to the bombings was General Dwight Eisenhower. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy agreed: “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Whatever dropping the bombs might possibly have contributed to ending the war, it is curious that the approach of threatening to drop them, the approach used during a half-century of Cold War to follow, was never tried.  An explanation may perhaps be found in Truman’s comments suggesting the motive of revenge:

“Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, and against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international law of warfare.”

Truman could not, incidentally, have chosen Tokyo as a target — not because it was a city, but because we had already reduced it to rubble.

The nuclear catastrophes may have been not the ending of a World War, but the theatrical opening of the Cold War, aimed at sending a message to the Soviets. Many low and high ranking officials in the U.S. military, including commanders in chief, have been tempted to nuke more cities ever since, beginning with Truman threatening to nuke China in 1950. The myth developed, in fact, that Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for nuking China led to the rapid conclusion of the Korean War. Belief in that myth led President Richard Nixon, decades later, to imagine he could end the Vietnam War by pretending to be crazy enough to use nuclear bombs. Even more disturbingly, he actually was crazy enough. “The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? … I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes,” Nixon said to Henry Kissinger in discussing options for Vietnam.

President George W. Bush oversaw the development of smaller nuclear weapons that might be used more readily, as well as much larger non-nuclear bombs, blurring the line between the two. President Barack Obama established in 2010 that the United States might strike first with nuclear weapons, but only against Iran or North Korea. The United States alleged, without evidence, that Iran was not complying with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), even though the clearest violation of that treaty is the United States’ own failure to work on disarmament and the United States’ Mutual Defense Agreement with the United Kingdom, by which the two countries share nuclear weapons in violation of Article 1 of the NPT, and even though the United States’ first strike nuclear weapons policy violates yet another treaty: the U.N. Charter.

Americans may never admit what was done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but our country had been in some measure prepared for it. After Germany had invaded Poland, Britain and France had declared war on Germany.  Britain in 1940 had broken an agreement with Germany not to bomb civilians, before Germany retaliated in the same manner against England — although Germany had itself bombed Guernica, Spain, in 1937, and Warsaw, Poland, in 1939, and Japan meanwhile was bombing civilians in China. Then, for years, Britain and Germany had bombed each other’s cities before the United States joined in, bombing German and Japanese cities in a spree of destruction unlike anything ever previously witnessed. When we were firebombing Japanese cities, Life magazine printed a photo of a Japanese person burning to death and commented “This is the only way.”

By the time of the Vietnam War, such images were highly controversial. By the time of the 2003 War on Iraq, such images were not shown, just as enemy bodies were no longer counted. That development, arguably a form of progress, still leaves us far from the day when atrocities will be displayed with the caption “There has to be another way.”

Combating evil is what peace activists do. It is not what wars do. And it is not, at least not obviously, what motivates the masters of war, those who plan the wars and bring them into being. But it is tempting to think so. It is very noble to make brave sacrifices, even the ultimate sacrifice of one’s life, in order to end evil. It is perhaps even noble to use other people’s children to vicariously put an end to evil, which is all that most war supporters do.  It is righteous to become part of something bigger than oneself. It can be thrilling to revel in patriotism. It can be momentarily pleasurable I’m sure, if less righteous and noble, to indulge in hatred, racism, and other group prejudices. It’s nice to imagine that your group is superior to someone else’s. And the patriotism, racism, and other isms that divide you from the enemy can thrillingly unite you, for once, with all of your neighbors and compatriots across the now meaningless boundaries that usually hold sway.

If you are frustrated and angry, if you long to feel important, powerful, and dominating, if you crave the license to lash out in revenge either verbally or physically, you may cheer for a government that announces a vacation from morality and open permission to hate and to kill. You’ll notice that the most enthusiastic war supporters sometimes want nonviolent war opponents killed and tortured along with the vicious and dreaded enemy; the hatred is far more important than its object. If your religious beliefs tell you that war is good, then you’ve really gone big time. Now you’re part of God’s plan. You’ll live after death, and perhaps we’ll all be better off if you bring on the death of us all.

But simplistic beliefs in good and evil don’t match up well with the real world, no matter how many people share them unquestioningly. They do not make you a master of the universe. On the contrary, they place control of your fate in the hands of people cynically manipulating you with war lies.

And the hatred and bigotry don’t provide lasting satisfaction, but instead breed bitter resentment.

• This article is excerpted from “War Is A Lie“

He who is most noble is he who raises his voice for those silenced by oppression.
– Jonathan Azaziah¹

…the public wants what the public gets
– The Jam²

Twenty years ago when I first arrived in Japan I taught English to a Tokyo University associate professor in engineering. The young and normally reserved man sometimes complained about his boss who was a professor in nuclear engineering and gave him troublesome tasks at the office. I once asked him what he thought about earthquake-prone Japan using nuclear power and he replied, “it’s crazy.” Of course, Tokyo University is the hub of Japan’s nuclear power industry and most executives for TEPCO are graduates (as are many top politicians) from Japan’s most elite university.

Today, “four out of five Japanese want to see Tokyo abandon nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima atomic crisis…”³ But any professional in industry, government or media would have no chance of career advancement if they spoke out against nuclear power. This problem is well documented in an article from Speigel, the German news magazine, which details the insidious and poisonous nuclear tentacles that penetrate the most important aspects of Japanese society.⁴

As a recent Japanese news editorial points out, a small cabal of criminals think they literally own the country and will not allow democracy or the free market to interfere with their aims to control the energy system:

[I]n adopting a scheme for paying damages to the victims of the accidents at Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the government has ended up guaranteeing the survival of Tokyo Electric Power Co. the operator of the stricken plant. Radioactive substances from Tepco’s Fukushima No. 1 plant have contaminated surrounding cities, farms, forests and the ocean….

The federation’s staunch opposition to separation of generation and transmission was shown in its rejection of adoption of the “Smart Grid” system that the U.S. is eager to promote — a electricity network that can efficiently and stably deliver electricity supplies by intelligently integrating the behavior of power generation entities and power users. The federation quibbled, saying the Japanese transmission system was “already smart enough.” It fears that the Smart Grid might open the way for outsiders to enter the electricity market, thus breaking the monopoly of the nation’s 10 utilities….

The power industry is also reluctant to build facilities to change the frequency of the alternating currents, so that electricity generated in the western half of the country, where electricity’s frequency is 60 hertz, can be transmitted to the eastern half of Japan where electricity’s frequency is 50 hertz, or vice versa — even though such interchangeability would inevitably reduce regional imbalances of supply….This reluctance is based on a fear that the interchangeability issue may strengthen the argument for separation of power generation and transmission.⁵

About ten years ago I attended a press conference on the dangers of Japan’s nuclear power stations, which was held at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo. It was well attended due to the deadly Tokaimura nuclear accident which had just occurred in 1999. An audience member asked Kenji Higuchi — a journalist and teacher who has written several books about the dangers of nuclear power — why a documentary film about him and the dangers to Japan’s nuke workers, Nuclear Ginza,⁶ was not allowed to be shown on Japan’s government news station, NHK. “It was squashed from the top down.” I have shown the film many times over the years to my university students, but I can’t reach millions of people.

Fast forward to June of 2011 when Higuchi gave a lecture at a small but prestigious college in Tokyo. One conscientious Japanese professor at that college has been alerting his students to the nuke issue and promoting Higuchi’s books. My contact who attended the meeting of only 10 people said that it was Higuchi’s belief that he was not allowed a larger venue because he is too direct in his speaking manner and names the companies that are complicit with the Nuclear Industry. The students’s parents who work for some of those companies might not like hearing such bold criticisms. Higuchi also surmised that the government has implicitly threatened universities not to touch on the nuclear issue in any critical way, such as allowing anti-nuke rallies on their campuses.

I teach part-time at this particular college and have freely published many articles there, but for the first time my submission which was to be on the nuke disaster was turned down because the issue was deemed “too sensitive.” It is noteworthy that one of the more academically open, meaty and progressive-minded schools in Tokyo is now telling people to keep their mouths shut. When I wrote a reply to the editor asking that if I would submit to peer review they would still consider my article, I received no response.

At another school which has an elite science and engineering department, my first year students have responded well to my cynical jokes about nuclear power. When I open the windows in the morning and say, “hey let’s let in the fresh air and radiation, it’s good for you,” everyone nervously chuckles while shaking their heads. The students provide very sensible and conscientious written comments to the articles I give them to read about the nuclear situation.

On the other hand, by second year many students realize that if they are in certain fields of study, it will not do well for their careers to criticize nuclear power. When we had discussions about energy issues, many gave articulate defenses of the various forms alternative energies available and how they should be developed– but in the end some groups said, “but we still think nuclear is the best!”

There is another aspect to this problem, it is simply “air headedness.” When choosing topics for presentations, some groups came up with the uninspiring and disputatious topic of “global warming,” while others choose “beer,” “chocolate,” “television,” and so on. Not real substantive stuff. One teacher suggested to me the reason many students to do not want to think about Fukushima is because Japan previously considered itself superior to its neighbors and has now taken it on the chin. This is sore subject for Japanese pride and Fukushima was a rude awakening reminding Japanese that they are merely human after all. Another explanation may be more postmodern and universal: 3D-HDTV = Triple Dumbing – High Deafening Talmud Vision. Too much “bread and circuses” and “dread and circumcision” has damaged our humanity and empathy for nature and others.

The censorship of critics of the Nuke Industry can be seen at all levels. For example, even “[a] government official who released a book on May 20 criticizing the government’s response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been asked to leave his post…. [Mr.]Koga has… pushed for changes to the country’s energy policy, such as a separation of electric power generation and transmission fiercely opposed by power companies…”⁷ Obviously this fellow was looking for an early retirement and was “asked” to leave his prestigious career for telling the truth.

In the meantime, as the Fukushima nuclear reactors which have had “corium” meltdowns continue to irradiate the nearby environment– which ultimately puts all of Japan’s inhabitants in danger– we are being told to “forget about it and go back to sleep.” Yet we can see many hopeful signs of concerned citizens nationwide organizing to address the dangers of spreading radiation and to eventually put an end to nuclear power generation in Japan.

1. Mask of Zion
2. The Jam – Going Underground
3. Most Japanese wish to scrap reactors
4. Japan’s Nuclear Cartel
5. Power industry’s chokehold
6. Nuclear Ginza Japan’s secret at-risk labor force
7. Ministry official who released book criticizing gov’t over nuke crisis asked to resign

Pete Rose’s birthday. Lindsey Lohan’s arrest record. The half-life of an isotope. It is all just numbers and stuff! But the last one can give you a tool to know when you are being lied to about matters of life and death; that is, if you want to know when you are being lied to.

The world, as our senses perceive it, is made of the naturally occurring elements – roughly 92 elements with a couple of them in a sort of grey area because of that half-life thing. ¹ An element has two distinctly different sets of properties depending on what parts of the atom of that element are being considered: chemical properties and nuclear properties. Chemical properties have to do with how the element interacts with other elements. Two or more elements may combine to make a compound; and so the many elements can combine to form the millions of different substances that make up the stuff of our world. ²

But at the center of each atom of each element is the nucleus or a core where the greatest mass of the element is contained. The number of protons, positively charged particles, in the nucleus determines what kind of element it is: oxygen has 8 protons, iron has 26 protons, uranium has 92 protons. Also in the nucleus are neutrons, particles much like protons with no electrical charge; it is the architecture of the proton/neutron structure that determines whether the nucleus will be strong like a well-made and mortared brick wall or easily disturbed like a pile of poorly stacked bricks. This structure of the nucleus has basically nothing to do with the chemical properties of the element.

Imagine a large parking lot with a thousand piles of bricks, poorly stacked. The first day you look at the lot, all the piles are intact. After several days (weeks) you notice that some bricks have fallen from some of the piles. After several years many of the piles have lost their original structure. It is easy to imagine that in a few hundred years, the piles would be bumps in a field of bricks. If, rather than piles, the bricks had been made into solid walls they would be unchanged in that length of time. This is the difference between an unstable atomic nucleus and a stable one.

Radioactive isotopes are the result of an unstable nucleus, but rather than a brick dropping to the ground when the pile is disturbed, the nucleus breaks up explosively – like a tightly wound spring – and pieces fly off at great speed, at or approaching the speed of light. It is these little pieces, and the huge amounts of energy that they carry, that make radioactive isotopes both useful and dangerous. ³

This is the first basic understanding needed to grasp the situation facing specifically Japan, and any other place that attempts to use controlled nuclear reactions. The second basic understanding involves numbers – really big numbers of really tiny things.

Put about 2 drops of water on your hand – really do it. See how that little bit of water is not even enough to puddle. Rub your hands together and in a moment the water is gone and you hands are dry. Do you know how many molecules of water there were on your hand? More than the number of stars in the entire total universe – and three times that many atoms – more than 10 billion trillion molecules of water.

Now imagine that 1% of the molecules in those 2 drops were radioactive (contained isotopes that might decay explosively): that would mean that there were 100 million trillion radioactively unstable atoms. Let’s say that you didn’t put two drops, but that only 100th of that amount of 1% radioactive water misted onto your hand: that would mean that there were (only) a million trillion radioactively unstable atoms on your hand.

A dust particle containing radioactive iodine or cesium can be millions of trillions of atoms. Lodged in lungs, the isotopes decay over time and some of the little pieces flying off explosively strike the structures of nearby living cells sometimes killing the cells, sometimes hitting the DNA; and sometimes striking the DNA in such a way that the cell is not killed but loses its bearings, goes rogue and reproduces outside of the body’s control.

Our human intuition is useless in the domain of the Big (and Tiny) Numbers. Certainty and uncertainty are turned on their head. A particle of dust that you would only see with the greatest attention can contain a trillion million radioactive nuclei with a half-life that result in 100 atomic nuclei decaying (exploding) on average every second (8,644,000 a day and thousands of millions in 25 years). These are monkeys typing Shakespeare numbers. The ‘impossible’ becomes certainty. A lung with only one particle too small to see has a good chance of one or more of its cells eventually being damaged in such a way that it will become cancerous. Perhaps the immune system will find it, perhaps not. Imagine a 100 pieces of dust, a thousand. Look at the light streaming in a window; watch the dust dance on the air.

With these understandings it is possible to make some sense from the ‘radioactive cloud’ of bull-shit spreading from Fukushima nuclear plants and Tepco corporate offices. First and immediately heart-rending is that the men (I assume that they are only men) working in the plant facilities are dead men; only weeks or months of life left for some or even most them. Second, many millions of people will be effected, especially in the region, but also all over the world. When the epidemiological studies are done (if they are done), specific long-term cancer rate patterns will follow the emission and weather patterns occurring over the next weeks, months and years.

And perhaps the saddest of all; it is possible to know these things. A competent understanding of chemistry would prevent the lies being told – even in the beginning before the plants were built. A little general knowledge of geology would make the locations at Fukushima, Diablo canyon, and San Onofre (last two on the San Andres fault system in California) unlikely locations even if a knowledgeable public could be convinced that nuclear generation of electricity was a good idea.

The situational sociopaths and actual psychopaths that are willing to endanger all living things for a little power (both political and material) will always be with us and unaddressable with normal human concerns – that is what the pathology part means. Public awareness is perhaps the only guiding and governing force.

I had a student once who “couldn’t” learn math or science, but who could tell the exact familial relation of 300 people to her and to each other in her extended family; that is what mattered to her. I in no way diminish the importance of being the teenage ‘grandmother’ to her family, but she could have learned anything. There isn’t 50 pounds of learning and 30 pounds used up on the relatives.

What she taught me is that we must believe in the importance of what there is to learn. We are at the mercy of the situational sociopaths unless we know enough to recognize their half-truths and lies. The only way I can see to bring these two statements together is for everyone who sees the third element of the syllogism (that we must come to see as important the learning that will protect our human and living interests in the face of economic and political interests) to go out of their way to inform the public mind of the importance of knowing enough not to be lied to.

The reactors are burning: the uranium and plutonium are on their own now that we have concentrated them, stuffed them into tight quarters and then lost control. The nuclear material will not be brought to heel; that is another lie. That we were ever actually in control of the process is another one. But We let it happen. Our willing ignorance and greed for ease let it happen. We need to learn enough about the world that we actually live in to actually live in it.

1. Half-life is not a difficult idea. It is the measure of the length of time it takes for one form of an element to “go bad”, that is, for it to breakdown. One form (isotope) of an element may take 20 minutes for ½ of the amount that is there to turn into something else (breakdown). Another might take 1000 years for ½ of the amount that is there to breakdown, while a third form of an element might take a billion years for ½ of the amount there to breakdown. The first has a half-life of 20 minutes, the second has a half-life of a 1000 years and the third has a half-life of a billion years. The first will be almost completely gone (turned into other stuff) in a few hours, the second gone in a few tens of thousands of years and the third will take “forever” to go away. The first is considered very unstable, the second is unstable and the third is a stable isotope (but radioactive).
2. Atom – the unit of an element; made of a nucleus (protons and neutrons) in the middle surrounded by electrons equal in number to the number of protons. Electrons are about 2000 times smaller than protons, but have a negative charge exactly equal to and opposite of the positive charge of the proton.

   Isotope – a form of an atom with a specific number of neutrons. The same element can be represented by several different isotopes: atoms, all with the same number of protons and electrons, but with different numbers of neutrons. Because of the differing numbers of neutrons, the nucleus of different isotopes of the same element have different structures and are therefore often more or less stable than the other isotopes of the same element.

3. Three different ‘pieces’ can be ejected explosively from a decaying atomic nucleus. Some isotopes produce all three and some predominantly only one or two; depends on the architecture of the nucleus. They are: gamma rays and other high-energy electromagnetic radiation, alpha particles (positively charged high energy helium nucleus, made of 2 protons and 2 neutrons) and beta particles (high energy negatively charged electrons or positrons).

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

– Ed Abbey

Three months after the March 11 earthquake and nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, thousands in Tokyo and other places in Japan came together for a lively “no-nuke action.” Although organizers had hoped to get a “million” people to participate, Japan is a very conservative society where most people do not express themselves on the streets in such a way. Although the anti-nuke movement is small, dedicated and vocal, they have shaken the foundations of the decrepit and corrupt Nuclear Village itself. It is reported that by April of 2012 all of Japan’s nuclear reactors will be shut down due to routine maintenance, but if they are prevented from being restarted due to community opposition that would mean the entire country would become nuke-free while having to increase energy supplies from elsewhere (natural gas, oil, coal etc.). Thus, there are many people who while not protesting are becoming very skeptical of nuclear power, upwards to two thirds supported the closing of the Hamaoka power station.

This comes at a time when the IMF, the international plunderers of national nest eggs, recommends tripling Japan’s sales tax to help pay off its supposed debts. The economy in Japan has not recovered due to the double whammy of the tidal wave devastation in the northeast, followed by the ongoing uncertainty of events at Fukushima. The billions of dollars to pay for the nuclear disaster does not include damage to the wider economy. How many businesses, including famous products such as Japan’s green tea and sashimi (raw fish) are going to become tainted with radiation, thus a less tantalizing purchase?

Communities are waking up and asking for better radiation testing of land, air, food and water. In Tokyo there was only one air radiation monitoring station until the government finally declared they would put a hundred in place. The demon hot rogue micro particles, those damnably unstable atoms emitted from Fukushima No. 1 that are now sharing our air space have made some people quite worried.

The spirited turn out on 6/11 against nukes is a heartening moment for those who long for some sanity in an unstable world. But to make alternative energy work in place of nuclear will require hard decisions, long term planning and a program of national energy saving. Japan has many creative engineers who if funded and left to their own devices could turn out a slew of ideas, including alternative energies, energy saving schemes, alternative building materials and the like. Artists and thoughtful architects, along with city gardeners, could envision how to build livable cities and send the bureaucrats packing back to their concrete office buildings where they could sit in their boring meetings.

Culturally speaking, this will require a shift in values from greed to restraint, from materialism to simplicity. This is not where the values of most people are at the moment, having been programmed by their High Deafening TV sets and schools and government propaganda to think only in terms of corporatist values. What one sees in Tokyo these days is the insatiable consumption of frivolous plastic junk from China instead more traditional Japanese values of frugality and restraint.

The corporate media in Japan which is heavily owned and influenced by the electrical power companies themselves has largely ignored the disaster in Fukushima as well as the protest movement. So we face a population primed for more capitalist greed and a virtual computer reality on the one hand, and the need for community oriented, simpler, old fashioned life styles on the other.

Vested interests will resist change as we have seen with campaigns to promote national unity in support of farmers and fishers, even though some of their products are tainted with radiation. Take the good old construction industry, which has pretty much turned Japan into one oblong block of concrete — these folks do not spend a lot of time contemplating the reflections of Henry Thoreau (“In wildness is the preservation of world”). Recycling radioactive sewer sludge into concrete blocks in order to cut costs and jump start Japan’s ailing economy is tempting. One such factory in Koto ward of Tokyo may have been caught incinerating radioactive sewer sludge and spreading Fukushima radiation for a second time! Local mothers protested.

Japan could reduce huge amounts of energy consumption simply by reigning in unrestrained consumerism. Vending machines gulp up significant amounts of electricity, not to mention the innumerable convenience stores that stay open 24/7. Turning Heat Island cities like Tokyo into green-leafed, pleasant and less populated cities, would help to reduce energy consumption; creating buildings out of hemp that stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter would also help; sending folks back to the countryside to resume farming would put the unemployed and disaffected to work and give spiritual replenishment. However, economic policies such as the Trans Pacific Partnership are forcing Japan in the opposite direction which is toward greater dependence on imports while drastically lowering food self sufficiency.

I am making it sound easier that it will be, and even alternative energies and materials are not “free lunches.” For example, while industrial hemp is indeed a miracle plant supplied to us with the love of Mother Earth, it still uses 25 percent of the amount of land that forests use for the wood and paper industries. As Swedish writer Firmin DeBrabander warns us in a recent article:

It’s time to be courageous and think big about altering our lifestyle, values and future. The powers that be are reluctant to rock the boat with consumers, and have decided that leaving consumption habits intact as much as possible is the preferable option. They’d rather get us into electric cars, rather than out of our cars altogether… we need more than half measures at this point.¹

Many of these quandaries will have to be tested, tried and worked out, and many sincere policies will fail. But banishing nukes back to the Pit Of Hell from whence they came must be an uncompromising position. Even though many countries in the world are still pressing the nuke-power direction, overall the air is escaping the balloon faster than they can pump their toxic air back in.

The radiation released from Fukushima (perhaps 20 percent the amount from Chernobyl, not including the tons of radioactive water which TEPCO is trying to store) is now considered to be a possible cause natal mortality in North America. We can be assured there will be cancer deaths down the road in Japan, perhaps in the tens of thousands, if not more. As Arnie Gunderson, a leading expert on Fukushima recently stated, “we are not out of the woods yet.” Gunderson thinks that within a year the three melted reactors will be cool enough to finally gain control of, which is good news, but that is a long time from now and a lot of radiation (150 terabecquerals per day by a government estimate) is still spewing into the environment. Furthermore, reactor no. 4 will take many more years beyond that to render safe. Its spent fuel pool of highly radioactive waste sits in a precarious position, something Humpty Dumpty might have a hard time putting together again if another huge earthquake were to devastate the nuclear site.

In the meantime, Fukushima city, home to 290,000 people (minus 10,000 children who were sent to other parts of Japan for their safety), suffers daily radiation levels several times higher than the recommended dose. Their mental and physical health is being sacrificed, along with the 1,300 workers at the Fukushima power station who are slowly being ground into dust for the sake of the misguided dream of “safe and clean energy.”

1. “The Green Revolution Backfires.”

It must have felt like the end of the world.

I can imagine what is must have been like for thousands across Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana and Georgia as dozens of killer tornados blazed a path of destruction like General Sherman’s march to the sea.

I can imagine what it must be like for hundreds of thousands still living in the nuclear dead zone of Japan, where the soil is infertile, where the land, the air and the water are contaminated forever.

It must feel like the end of the world.

The religious are inclined to say it is the wrath of God.  The secular may say it is nature’s revenge.  The scientific community says it is a confirmation of global climate change.  But to that child in Joplin Missouri, Tuscaloosa Alabama or Fukushima Japan it does not matter.  The age of catastrophe is upon us.

We are closer to the end of the world than we have ever been before and tomorrow we will be closer than we are today.

Japan is, in a sense, a microcosm of America.  Without the natural resources required to support its ever-growing economy, it chose nuclear as an alternative to fossil fuels.  Given that nation’s history it is an ironic choice.  Now it seems they are stuck with it.

Japan’s nuclear crisis is a profound tragedy and one that will shadow its people for as long as they shall live.  They chose nuclear energy in an age of natural disasters and they must pay the price.  They have become a virtual dead zone, an enigma to the rest of the world.  Their days are dark and their future is imperiled.

The story of Japan is a tragedy that might have been avoided.  They had a choice.  They took the nuclear option with the assurances of a scientific consensus that it was the safer option.  It has become clear that that consensus was dead wrong and the harm is compounded because it has damaged the credibility of science at a time when that credibility is needed to prevent further catastrophes on an infinitely grander scale.

The tragedy of Japan’s nuclear experiment should be a lesson to America and the rest of the world as we confront a similar choice:  In an age of catastrophe, when a single tornado can demolish half a city, when dozens of twisters can mark a path of annihilation through the south, when tsunamis and hurricanes can destroy national economies and wipe out hundreds of thousands from the earth, is the nuclear risk worth the gamble?

Until now most scientists have answered in the affirmative but the Japanese disaster has forced them to recalibrate.  Science made a bad promise, Japan committed, France doubled down and Germany followed suit.  Like Japan, France is now trapped in nuclear dependency as they await their own inevitable disaster.

Germany wants out.  In the wake of recent election losses the administration of Angela Merkel has announced it will close all nuclear plants within eleven years.  As news spreads through the back channels about how bad the Japanese crisis really is and how vulnerable we all are we can expect the people of Europe to demand that nuclear energy should be phased out throughout the continent.  That is the virtue of democracy.  When the people express a clear and decisive discontent, the government must respond or release the reins of power.

In America, the government and their corporate sponsors have been far more effective in deceiving the people.  We are among the last holdouts on the science of climate change.  Despite the mounting evidence and a string of environment disasters that support the theory, we cling to our monster vehicles and refuse to acknowledge a connection between the poisons we spew into the atmosphere and the planet’s revenge.  We continue to elect representatives who are making plans for more coal, dirtier and more oil, chemical fracturing to mine liquid gas and, of course,0 more nuclear energy.

What do we know that the world fails to grasp?  We have learned nothing from Joplin, from Katrina and New Orleans, from the bulging Mississippi River, from a catastrophic Gulf oil spill, from tornado strikes in California and Massachusetts, from the latest series of mining disasters, from flammable water and radioactive wastelands.

Will we learn nothing from Japan?

Nuclear energy, like coal and oil and oil sands and oil shale, is a last resort energy source for very good reason:  It is there and we can exploit it but its cost is high and in the end it will destroy us.

We are at a critical point in history.  Those nations that turn now to cleaner sources of energy, to solar and wind and efficient mass transit, will be the nations that dominate the future.

If at this critical juncture we hide our heads in the sand and wait for the next chain of catastrophes to render us a third rate power, we will have only ourselves to blame.

Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan makes a plea to his countrymen to “live life as normal”.

It would be churlish to deny scared kids or worried parents a hug from Mickey Mouse, if that’s what might console. But the proliferation of fantasies regarding the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plants continues at a ferocious pace – and behind-the-scenes, plans for a sarcophagus solidify.

The New York Times talks of the possibility of returning the land to a “greenfield” state. Denis Flory, a Deputy Director General of the International Atomic Energy Association insists Fukushima is not Chernobyl. At a recent meeting, Flory explains, “At Chernobyl a nuclear reactor exploded. In Japan… there may be…” The Deputy Director pauses and looks abashed, “some leaks, but containment is here.”

This absurd claim is made, despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Association’s own data asserts that 70% of the radioactive fuel in reactor no. 1 is damaged. In reactor no. 2, 30% of the fuel is damaged and it’s 35% in reactor no. 3. (Damaged means crumbled, cracked and/or melted fuel. It is now accumulating at the bottom of the reactor vessels and impeding cooling of, as yet, undamaged fuel.)

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency opines that high radiation readings above the irradiated fuel pool at reactor no. 4 may be from “rainwater.”

And, Big News, on Monday, April 18, TEPCO admits its month-long, much-ballyhooed effort to cool the reactors isn’t working, hasn’t worked and won’t work. A new cooling system will have to be designed and installed to bring the temperature of the fractious reactors under control.

A staggering admission.

The term boiling-water-reactor has a new punch. At the Fukushima plants water inside reactors vessels 1, 2, and 3 is hot. In the hottest reactor the water temperature is 338 degrees Fahrenheit, well above the boiling point. (The other two reactors aren’t much cooler.) Weeks and weeks of spraying by helicopters and pumping have been to little avail.

Take the Japanese government’s, TEPCO’s, and the world media’s hard labors to create the belief that the situation is “improving.” Combine this comforting notion with good-old, ordinary denial, with a highly understandable human desire to deny the magnitude of the tragedy, and it’s hard to keep one’s eyes fully open, right on-the-ball.

But here it is before our eyes: Three reactors still reeling out-of-control. Three reactors whose coolant is at a roiling boil — much like the bubble-filled and steam-generating water all of us know from cooking up a bit of pasta for dinner. One of these reactors, no. 2, has a steel containment vessel that may be cracked. Plus, at reactor no. 4, one steaming, over-heated, spent fuel pool the concrete support of which is a tad sketchy.

Unlike our pasta water, in the case of the Fukushima reactors, the boiling water is contaminated with fission products such as cesium, strontium and plutonium. And said water with its toxic load has to go somewhere, i.e. outside the reactor. So at Fukushima there is an ongoing program of what in nuclear parlance is called “feed and bleed.” Or, in simple language, feed water into the reactor vessel and release radioactive steam to the environment. And then there’s the advertent leaks to adjacent turbine buildings, outside ditches, and, alas, the ocean.

The current TEPCO estimate is that this will go on a long time. Month in and month out. Probably, until December. Regular burps of radiation into the atmosphere and regular releases of radioactivity into the ocean for 6 to 9 months?

That’s the short term outlook.

The longer term is 10 to 30 years to remove all the fuel, cut up the reactor vessels, cart the contaminated pieces of steel away, cut up the contaminated concrete and lug that away, take the intact fuel somewhere (the Rokkasho reprocessing facility?) and do what with the damaged fuel? Leave it in place, as was done at Chernobyl? Where, 25 years after the Chernobyl explosion, radioactivity is currently seeping out, requiring the emplacement of a second, larger sarcophagus?

Fukushima, Chernobyl. It’s not a pretty picture.

In the meantime, why not cover-up those ugly skeletal remains at Japan’s crippled plants? With some improvised coverings and, down the road, a sarcophagus or two or three?

Recently, the sarcophagus-approach came a couple of steps closer with the arrival in Japan of two immense concrete pump trucks.

Each of these behemoths, known as 70z’s, weighs 190,000 pounds. They are manufactured by a German company, Putzmeister. In 1986 this company was responsible for the construction of the concrete sarcophagus around the graphite reactor at Chernobyl.

The 70z’s weigh so much they had to be transported by Russian Antonov’s, the world’s second-heaviest cargo planes. Previously used to transport the Russian space shuttle, the planes were specially sent from Russia to the US to pick up the hefty pumps. And where did these pumps come from in the US? From Los Angeles, CA and Atlanta, GA.

One of the pumps was pulled off of the construction site for the MOX-fuel fabrication facility being constructed by the French-government-owned company, Areva, at the US Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. To interrupt a $4.86 billion dollar project (already 5-years behind schedule and $3 billion over-budget) is unprecedented.

Obviously, arrangements were made at high levels of the US, French, Russian and Japanese governments for the deal to go through. What was particularly telling about the deal?

It was already in the works by the end of March. At a time, when the Japanese government and TEPCO were endlessly intoning about getting the stricken Fukushima reactors “under control,” already the giant concrete pumps were being readied for transport to Japan.

On March 31, a spokesman for the company providing concrete for the MOX Fuel facility, was quoted in the Augusta Chronicle, “Our understanding is, they are preparing to go to the next phase and it will require a lot of concrete.”

March 31? “A lot of concrete?”

Of course, it never did make sense that such huge pumps would be necessary for cooling purposes. (Albeit the amazing stretch of the 70-meter crane would reduce radiation exposure of workers, as would impressive remote-control features.)

But why the need for the giant behemoth pumps flown in by Russian super-cargo plane? After all this was the company that poured concrete for the 10-mile-long Gotthard Tunnel burrowing under the Alps, between Switzerland and Italy. The company that, after the 1989 California earthquake, rebuilt the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The company that built the world’s highest tower, the Burj Dubai.

And the only company in the world to have experience building a giant, nuclear- sarcophagus.

After the pumps arrived in Japan, a company spokesman was still saying the giant pumps were for cooling the Fukushima reactors. (For weeks a somewhat smaller pump, also a Putzmeister, was pouring water into the wrecked irradiated fuel pool of reactor no 4.)

When pressed by a CNN reporter, the spokesman admitted pouring concrete was a “plausible scenario.”

Throughout the disaster of the past five, going on six weeks, TEPCO, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency and the Japanese government has seemed bumbling and inept to the point of absurdity. Behind the bland announcements, the silly re-assurances was a different reality: three-plus weeks ago, detailed, complicated plans were being made to stop some key work at the MOX fuel plant in South Carolina and arrange for the special transport of the immense concrete pumps to Japan.

What other secret plans are currently underway – that we will hear about a month from now, if we’re lucky?

What exactly is the proposed design for the sarcophagus or sarcophagi? Drawings up on the TEPCO site suggest a three-sided structure, one with a top and sides – but no bottom. That means the distinct possibility of melted fuel, if it is left on-site (as happened at Chernobyl), migrating downwards toward vital water tables and/or washing out to contaminate the sea. Toxins washing-down and out, continuously, for decades and decades and…

Japanese refugees in the required and voluntary evacuation zones, critics in the Japanese government, Japanese environmentalists, Tokyo residents, fishermen, abalone-divers, dairy farmers, agricultural workers and citizens of the world must demand more transparency regarding these critically important plans.

If the Fukushima clean-up project is left to the nuclear boys-in-the-back-room, the plan is bound to be contaminated. Contaminated by thinking distorted by the bottom-line – and warped by the desire to protect the nuclear industry.

Let’s not let that happen.