Saturday, June 9, 2012

Paul Langley on the Normalization of Radiation [Poisoning]

Paul Langley wrote an excellent response to my implied question, why does Tepco have the webcam trained on Fukushima? His answer is that the images have the effect of normalizing the radiological pollution.

Here is an excerpt from his essay: "The Elephant in the Room that’s as big as a Whale: Normalising Radiological Pollution"

"A normalization program for radionuclide emissions which has remained in place from World War 2, through the 1950s to the 1990s, encompassing the period of Clinton’s disclosures, Chernobyl and, in an unbroken line to Fukushima’s disaster and TEPCO’s webcam.

The gravest sorrow is felt when the fact hits home that the current government and public administration in Japan agrees with the famous lie of General Groves: “There is no radiation sickness in Japan”. That is as a big a lie today, uttered by Noda and his nuclear bosses and hence by all the underlings as well.

When one brave Japanese doctor has to go on national tour to raise awareness of the illnesses, when the most recent press report of medically diagnosed radiation related symptoms is dated August 2011 (standing alone as the sole mass media report, when Japanese nurses tell a freelance journo “we don’t treat radiation diseases because the government is involved”, when a Professor of internal medicine has to cut crook at the Diet, only to be given an impossible decontamination task (the fallout is still landing and the people are living amid the cleanup- shame), people around the world watch the colours change in the radionuclide smog as it vents and rises up at Fukushima.

It has been a long row for nuclear authorities to hoe, this normalizing of radionuclide pollution. It has been going on, as I mentioned, since 1945. 

READ THE ENTIRE ESSAY HERE:
http://nuclearhistory.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/the-elephant-in-the-room-thats-as-big-as-a-whale-normalising-radiological-pollution/

Paul points out that the normalization of radiation problematizes efforts to show cause and effect relations, blurring the role artificially produced radiation has had on human health.

I agree with his excellent analysis. The normalization of atmospheric testing has truly blinded us to the long term health effects - including rates of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and autism - of the fallout from this period.

And medical science has for the most part blindly ignored ionizing radiation when studying diseases that are known to have an environmental causal component, such as autism, ADHD, and Parkinsons.

All that fallout from atmospheric testing disappeared from the public imagination. How did that happen given the concerns that were stated by the health authorities of the 1950s about the effects of this fallout?
see http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/burdening-species-with-genetic.html

We are so easily led down the yellow brick road, and misled by charlatan wizards with PhDs.


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