Authorities are not giving a clear story on nuclear radiation and nuclear safety

Reporting from the scene of the disaster is hobbled. The only people with access are workers for the Tokyo Electric Power Co., owner of the reactors, and there is abundant evidence that they have downplayed the seriousness at every juncture, for obvious reasons…….

Nuclear plants a ‘plague’ , By Kevin Brooker, Calgary Herald, July 4, 2011, “…….Earlier this decade, when nuclear power plants were being painted with a green brush by their promoters, Caldicott fired back with a 2006 book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. In it, she contends that nuclear power cannot sustain itself without many, often hidden, subsidies, and moreover, that its supply chain from mining to processing to reactor is itself a massive producer of greenhouse gases. Worse yet, one of the byproducts is plutonium, making them virtual nuclear weapons factories.

She also predicted that, as a huge crop of reactors reach their 40th birthday, factors like fatigued metal and cracked containment devices would make breakdowns commonplace. Furthermore, catastrophic damage from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis was inevitable, and so too would be meltdowns far worse than Chornobyl.

Well, behold Fukushima Daiichi, giving Caldicott what is perhaps history’s most tragic “I told you so” moment. Depending on whom you care to believe, those reactors -which turn 40 this year -are deep into meltdown, releasing staggering amounts of radiation that is already pouring into the environment via air and water. Some experts suggest that it will take 100 years to contain it, if ever. And ground contamination will almost certainly render a significant part of Japan uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.

As if real physical threats aren’t bad enough, we are now enduring secondary fallout to the fallout: the inability to know whom to trust about what’s really going on, and likely to come in the future.

Further complicating the matter are the opaque terms of the science involved. When Japan’s nuclear safety agency reported last month that it had doubled its estimate of the amount of radioactivity emitted into the air, how are we to deal with the new number -“770,000 terabecquerels?”

I understand that contributing to panic is something governments must avoid. But here in North America, for example, many observers point out that governments at all levels are dragging their feet when it comes to transparently monitoring radiation levels.

And then there are the recent nightmare scenarios: fire surrounding the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons were invented, and flood waters threatening two reactors along the Missouri.

If all of this does not permanently quell further appetite for nuclear development, Caldicott is right: we’re doomed……http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Nuclear+plants+plague/5044843/story.html

July 4, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general

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