Sunday, June 3, 2012

Discouraged


I'm sitting at my computer with a stack of research papers at my side.

The first one is Takeo Ohnishi (2012). The Disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant after the March 11, 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami, and the Resulting Spread of Radioisotope Contamination. Radiation Research 177(1): 1-14.

The author concludes his analysis, which is framed as if the disaster were over, as "The earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan exceeded long-held assumptions made during the planning and construction of these nuclear power plants. Japan's scientists and engineers must learn from these events, begin anew from this incident, and plan more efficiently and effectively for the future."

Majia here: Instead of learning from this terrible and ongoing catastrophe, Japan's power elite wants to restart nuclear reactors and resume re-processing of nuclear fuel.
http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/osaka-mayor-changes-mind-and-now.html
http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/japan-and-plutonium-update.html


The next article at my side is "Studies of the Mortality of Atomic Bomb Survivors: Report 14, 1950-2003: An Overview of Cancer and Noncancer Disease. Radiation Research 177, 229-243.

This article documents that people are still dying, still experiencing excess relative risk, of cancer and a variety of other diseases, as a result of the bombing that occurred over 60 years ago. This study documents that for the sample population there is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation.


Under that article is a PILE of studies on "non-targeted" and "delayed effects" of exposure to ionizing radiation published in Radiation Research and other journals.

This research pretty clearly suggests that our current notions of dose-effects are inadequate because they are based on an outmoded model of radiation that presumes only directly irradiated cells are affected by the exposure.

Unfortunately, it seems that cells in the proximity of irradiated cells receive signals - chemical distress signals - that impact the bystanding cells in unpredictable ways.

Occasionally the bystander cells become heroes and come to the rescue by initiating DNA repair processes.

More often, the bystander cells produce "genomic instability" in their progeny.

That is, bystander cells can be inexplicably damaged and the damage gets passed on.

What really sucks is if the bystander cells are "germ line" cells that are involved in the reproduction of human offspring.

So, what is so discouraging about this pile of research is that it documents that the traversal of a single alpha particle is enough to break chemical bonds (break DNA) and produce significant and detrimental bystander effects.


So, meanwhile the chief scientist in all matters nuclear for Union of Concerned Scientists goes on the record stating that the radiation from Japan poses essentially no risk outside of Japan.

Edwin Lyman apparently claimed that: "Even 10 times the March 2011 radiation release, Lyman said, would only endanger Japan -- and possibly Alaska and U.S. territories.

For now, he said, scare stories alleging cover-ups of Fukushima's effect on the United States should be disregarded." [end excerpt]
http://www.news10.net/news/local/article/195483/2/Fukushima-still-feeds-lawmakers-concerns-for-West-Coast

What should be disregarded is Lyman and any other scientist who states that Fukushima poses no risk, or trivial risk, for people in the northern hemisphere.

Plutonium particles from Fukushima have been found in Lithuania. The jet stream brought them after flowing east over the Pacific, North America, the Atlantic and Western Europe (see site at bottom of this post).

Lots more plutonium particles can be found in North America than in Lithuania.

One plutonium particle can break your DNA. One plutonium article could cause problems for your unborn child.

I'm not fear mongering here. I'm just feeling very discouraged and frustrated by the lack of transparency, the lack of mitigation and the deliberate misinformation.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want people to panic. I personally don't think people will panic if the government began enhanced testing of our food and water to protect us from fallout.

People may be mostly sheeple, but they are going to take note when their tuna is contaminated and when their coastlines are bombarded with trash from Japan.

What causes panic once awareness sets in is a lack of trust and feeling that the situation is out of control.

Government has done little to nothing to promote trust by describing its efforts to protect our food, water, and coastlines from the biggest ecological catastrophe ever experienced by modern humans.

Heaven help us if people start seeing birth deformities in their children and/or significantly rising rates of autism or pervasive development disorders.

One can hope that such horrors are not visited upon any of us but the deformed children born after Chernobyl keeping haunting my imagination. I have friends from Poland, Sweden, and Romania who suffered thyroid disease and cancer from Chernobyl as well.

No one can predict what the effects from Fukushima will be, but far more radiation has been spewed from that broken plant into the atmosphere and ocean than spewed by Chernobyl.

The reality is that the Fukushima disaster is far from over and it has been spewing for over a year now. 

The plant has had huge steam eruptions over the last few weeks. Often times these emissions are tinged pink, brown, gray and yellow. Purple and blue lights produced by no human-made light source are sometimes visible.

The plant is Dante's inferno and it is on the surface of the earth.

The current policy in Japan, the US, Canada, and throughout most of the rest of the northern hemisphere is to pretend that the disaster has ended and that there will be no effects beyond a minor uptick in cancer in Japan.

This policy is guaranteed to fail and when it does the public is not going to be very receptive.

This is not the 1950s and the 1960s and the fallout we are experiencing exceeds that fallout in a number of significant and highly relevant ways.

The cover up will fail and when it does so will the legitimacy of our governments. Remember what Gorbachev said about Chernobyl. http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/mikhail-gorbachev-chernobyl-real-cause.html

Revolutions rarely have happy endings.

We need to figure out how to work cooperatively and transparently to survive the ecological holocaust we have wrought upon the planet without our heedless energy extraction and production regimes.


REFERENCE

Lujanienė G, Byčenkienė S, Povinec PP, Gera M.  Radionuclides from the Fukushima accident in the air over Lithuania: measurement and modelling approaches.Environ Radioact. 2011 Dec 27.

Analyses of (131)I, (137)Cs and (134)Cs in airborne aerosols were carried out in daily samples in Vilnius, Lithuania after the Fukushima accident during the period of March-April, 2011. The activity concentrations of (131)I and (137)Cs ranged from 12 μBq/m(3) and 1.4 μBq/m(3) to 3700 μBq/m(3) and 1040 μBq/m(3), respectively. The activity concentration of (239,240)Pu in one aerosol sample collected from 23 March to 15 April, 2011 was found to be 44.5 nBq/m(3). The two maxima found in radionuclide concentrations were related to complicated long-range air mass transport from Japan across the Pacific, the North America and the Atlantic Ocean to Central Europe as indicated by modelling.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Majia !

    There is a margin between the management of the disaster and the accident of Fukushima. The tsunami damaged water pipes for the supply of reactor electrical lines and pumps of relief. This situation is such in the world ! So: the accident may come from the Japan as of any other country.
    Therefore, the disaster management has nothing to do with the accident. For what is the management of the disaster, it appears that no nuclear-weapon country is able to provide a solution !

    ReplyDelete
  2. I appreciate your comments Huemarice5.

    You are so right about the lack of solution. It just goes on and on and on.

    I wonder what the consequences are going to be?

    ReplyDelete

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