“Thousands of people want a court to consider whether their health, and that of their unborn children, was damaged by attending the detonation of nuclear bombs but your government – the latest in a long line of administrations of every political party to do so – is spending millions of taxpayers’ money to deny us this right.

“Your government has enshrined the Military Covenant to honour the sacrifices of all our veterans but we survivors of the nuclear tests are still being denied a fair hearing.”

Christmas Island veterans’ court struggle carries on, Nov 24 2011 by Lynn Jolly, Paisley Daily Express A DETERMINED nuclear testing campaigner has written to the Prime Minister in a bid to highlight the plight of 22,000 men who were forced to watch atomic bomb blasts. Thousands of soldiers claim they were used as guinea pigs on Christmas Island, in the Pacific Ocean, half a century ago as Britain and America carried out a series of nuclear tests.

These include Johnstone man Ken McGinley, 72, who went to Christmas Island as a young sapper with the Royal Engineers and remembers – at the age of just 19 – seeing the bones through his skin as he raised his hands to protect his eyes from the dazzling glare of the test blast.

Ken, right, has suffered constant health problems, including infertility, since then and, along with more than 1,000 other veterans, has battled against the Ministry of Defence through the courts.

The MoD claims the veterans can’t prove a link between the ill heath they’ve suffered and their exposure to radiation from the nuclear tests. But leave to appeal the decision at the Supreme Court was granted and this hearing, which involves 18 men and women who represent the whole group, is currently ongoing in London.

Ken’s letter to David Cameron states that all they want is “a very basic right – to be heard”. He is now waiting for a reply to his letter and hopes it will have an impact.

Ken told Mr Cameron: “Thousands of people want a court to consider whether their health, and that of their unborn children, was damaged by attending the detonation of nuclear bombs but your government – the latest in a long line of administrations of every political party to do so – is spending millions of taxpayers’ money to deny us this right.

“Your government has enshrined the Military Covenant to honour the sacrifices of all our veterans but we survivors of the nuclear tests are still being denied a fair hearing.

“It was 59 years ago that the first of 22,000 men were ordered to stand and watch as nuclear bombs were detonated. In the years that followed, many more bombs were exploded in Australia, America and the South Pacific.

“We were told to cover our eyes and turn our backs but had no safety clothing, equipment or advice.”

The veterans strongly believe their DNA could have been damaged by the radiation, which led to their wives having miscarriages, babies being born with defects and even grandchildren having deformities.

Mr McGinley’s letter also states: “Our time is running out but we will go on fighting. We want only to be heard. We served our nation.”

A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister’s office confirmed that they have received Mr McGinley’s letter.

She added: “We will respond in due course.”

http://www.paisleydailyexpress.co.uk/renfrewshire-news/2011/11/24/christmas-island-veterans-court-struggle-carries-on-87085-29829257/

Chernobyl veterans seek to storm Ukraine’s parliament Times of Oman Nov 01 2011

The demonstrators broke down a metal fence which was built up around the parliament several weeks ago after the first attempt of the Chernobyl “liquidators” and veterans of the Soviet Afghan war to break into the building.

About 100 riot policemen gathered near the parliament entrances to prevent the veterans coming into the chamber itself.  The protesters stayed on the square between the parliament and the broken fence and shouted “Shame!”.

In September, lawmakers gave initial approval to a bill cutting back benefits paid to those who helped clean up the April 1986 nuclear disaster and those who still live on the affected lands.
However the protests have meant the parliament has not taken further action.  http://www.timesofoman.com/innercat.asp?detail=51553

The facility will be launched in early 2013 and will only house Ukrainian nuclear waste, a large part of which is currently stored in “poorly equipped” locations, Chernobyl plant’s spokeswoman Maya Rudenko said.

“It will not be for material from nuclear plants” but waste from medical facilities and industries, …..

Construction of the storage facility is estimated to cost over 11 million euros ($14.6 million) to come from Britain, which will provide eight million British pounds ($12 million) and the European Commission (two million euros, or $2.6 million).

The Chernobyl nuclear plant is located about 100 kilometres (60 miles) north of Kiev and close to the borders with Russia and Belarus. Its fourth reactor exploded in April 1986 with fallout hitting the three Soviet republics along with a large part of Europe.

The area around the plant is still very contaminated and designated as a depopulated “zone of exclusion” whose population was evacuated and where no economic activity is allowed.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSYCpR5DGr4Kn0YlNK_tQxZAE_Wg?docId=CNG.4b56b632b2812693ed69ed1191fc79dc.241

 In March, 2006, 20 years after the accident, the people whose health had been damaged in Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus numbered 7,000,000. 

excerpt from: Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster[Kindle Edition] Takashi Hirose http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005OD75J2/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20

Or if they were unable to know this from the beginning, this only proves that they have neither competence at measurement nor sound judgment, which is more serious still…

Nuclear Family Bonds, Open Salon 25 Aug 11, “…..Japan has supported Chernobyl studies and projects in Ukraine for years.  Though one people suffered from the Bomb, and the other, a civilian nuclear plant explosion, both were bound by scars of the atomic age. That both, after Fukushima, are now also victims of the “peaceful atom” is almost getting weird.  No two peoples could seem further apart in their stereotypes than the productive and dutiful Japanese from the ne’er do wells of post-Soviet Ukraine .

Some studies show liquidators have worse health than the general population.  But the research is sufficiently flawed for the Ukrainian authorities to deny that specific illnesses were caused by radiation exposure and thus avoid paying for medical treatment.  While Chernobyl’s 8000 thyroid cancers are well studied, neither governments nor nuclear industries have provided any significant funding for researching more controversial health effects of radiation such as breast cancer and heart disease. Whenever you hear that “there are no studies proving any connection between radiation and [insert medical condition]”, you can be pretty sure it’s because no studies have actually been done……

the health impact of exposure is perhaps “the best understood, and certainly the most highly quantified dose-response relationship for any common environmental human carcinogen,” a report of the U.S. National Cancer Institute concluded…….the most stressful aspect of the Chernobyl results, in the final analysis, is that the accident surely caused thousands of deaths that cannot actually be identified. The Chernobyl fatalities, in that sense, are like the deaths of unknown soldiers……

Radiation Risks – IEEE Spectrum, Bill Sweet, May 22, 2011, “………..the accident showed that large radiation releases can occur in a light water reactor accident, not just in a defectively designed and operated Soviet-era reactor. So it’s important to be clear about Chernobyl’s long-term health impact.

Somehow the notion has got abroad that Chernobyl’s health impact was minimal. This is because the illnesses and premature deaths statistically expected from a Chernobyl-scale radiation release cannot be detected, individually or even collectively, among the hundreds of millions of cancer cases that would occur anyway, and because of continued debate about morbidity and mortality at low radiation dose levels.

What then is the basis for assigning thousands or even tens of thousands of premature deaths to Chernobyl?

Probably contrary to some popular misconceptions, the effect of exposure to radiation is relatively well understood. Because radiation can be precisely measured and leaves a clear trail, the health impact of exposure is perhaps “the best understood, and certainly the most highly quantified dose-response relationship for any common environmental human carcinogen,” a report of the U.S. National Cancer Institute concluded.

Committees of the National Academies have produced a succession of studies on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, and the seventh of them, the 2006 BEIR VII report, is widely considered to have produced the most authoritative estimates. They are based mainly on detailed studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing survivors, but also populations exposed to atmospheric nuclear weapon testing, workers in the nuclear industry, and so on. (A useful concise account can be readily found by searching online on “a summary of BEIR VII,” which is by the chairman and cochair of the committee.)

Radiation Risks – IEEE Spectrum, 23 May 11, “………When the BEIR VII dose-response estimates are  applied to populations exposed to Chernobyl radiation, as students of the subject like Tom Cochran and Elisabeth Cardis have done, the result consistently is is the range of 20,000-30,000 deaths; the range of uncertainty admittedly is large, ranging from several thousand to 70,000 or 80,000. So we can and should say, based on the best available science, that Chernobyl is causing at least several thousand deaths and probably about 25,000.

To be sure, not all national regulatory authorities have accepted the BEIR VII results as definitive, among them France’s. That may be why a 2008 United Nations report declined to assign any specific number to long-term health effects of Chernobyl. Some, unfortunately, have chosen to take that as a statement there have been no long-term effects.

Ten years after the Chernobyl accident, assessing Chernobyl’s health effects, Spectrum magazine referred to them in a headline as “stressful.” That referred partly to the demonstrable fact that near-term ladverse effects were mainly psychological, though not to be minimized. But the headline also meant to highlight the seemingly paradoxical contrast between higher-than-expected incidence of thyroid cancer, mainly in children, and lower-than-expected leukemia and solid cancer incidence.

In hindsight, we could and should have made it clearer that there was little prospect of detecting and measuring leukemia and solid cancer incidence at the expected rates. For the most stressful aspect of the Chernobyl results, in the final analysis, is that the accident surely caused thousands of deaths that cannot actually be identified. The Chernobyl fatalities, in that sense, are like the deaths of unknown soldiers……

Radiation Risks – IEEE Spectrum

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster in Perspective, Global Research ca by Dr. Helen Caldicott 15 may 11

Then we extrapolate through to Japan.  Japan is by orders of magnitude many times worse than Chernobyl.  Never in my life did I think that six nuclear reactors would be at risk.(5)  I knew that three GE engineers who helped design these Mark I GE reactors, resigned because they knew they were dangerous.(6)

So Japan built them on an earthquake fault.  The reactors partially withstood the earthquake, but the external electricity supply was cut off, and the electricity supplies the cooling water, a million gallons a minute, to each of those six reactors.  Without the cooling water, the water [level] falls, and the rods are so hot they melt, like at Three Mile Island, and at Chernobyl.
So the emergency diesel generators, which are as large as a house, got destroyed by the tsunami, so there is no way to keep the water circulating in the reactors.(7)  Also, on the roofs of the reactors, not within the containment vessel, are cooling pools.  Every year they remove about thirty tons of the most radioactive rods that you can possibly imagine.(8)  Each one is twelve feet long and half an inch thick.  It gives out so much radiation, that if you stand next to it for a couple of minutes, you’ll die.  Not drop dead.  Remember Litvinenko, the Russian, who got poisoned by polonium?(9)  You’ll die like that, with your hair falling out, and bleeding with massive infection, like AIDS patients die.

And [the spent fuel rods] are thermally hot, so they have to be put in a big pool, and continually cooled.  The pool has really no roof.
There have been three hydrogen explosions, blowing off the roof of the building, not the containment vessel of the core, but the roof.  And exposing the cooling pool.(10)  Two of the cooling pools are dry.  They have no water in them.  Meaning that the nuclear fuel rods are covered with a material called zirconium.  When zirconium is exposed to air, it burns, it ignites.  Two of the cooling pools at this moment are burning.  In the cooling pools are many times, like 10 to 20 times more radiation than in each reactor core.  In each reactor core is as much long-lived radiation as would be produced by a thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs.  We are dealing with diabolical energy. …….
In the nuclear power plants, however, there is a huge amount of radiation: two hundred elements.  Some last seconds, some last millions of years.  Radioactive iodine lasts six weeks, causes thyroid cancer.  That’s why people are saying, “Better take potassium iodide,” because that blocks the thyroid uptake of radioactive iodine, which later can cause thyroid cancer.

In Chernobyl, over 20,000 people have developed thyroid cancer.(14)  They have their thyroids out, and they will die unless they take thyroid replacement every day, like a diabetic has to take insulin.
Strontium-90 will get out, it lasts for 600 years.  It goes to the bone, where it causes bone cancer or leukemia.  Cesium lasts for 600 years — it’s all over Europe.  40 per cent of Europe is still radioactive.  Turkish food is extremely radioactive.  Do not buy Turkish dried apricots, or Turkish hazelnuts.  The Turks were so cross with the Russians, they sent all their radioactive tea over to Russia after Chernobyl.(15)

Forty per cent of Europe is still radioactive.  Farms in Britain, their lambs are so full of cesium they can’t sell them. ……
The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster in Perspective