nuclear-news

Nuclear disasters? – a calculated gamble , collusion between governments and the nuclear industry

Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Nearly ‘Ended The Japanese State’, Radioactive Waste Specialist Explains, Sputnik News,   by Mohamed Elmaazi  12 Mar 21, ”………Sputnik: In what sense was ‘collusion’ between the state and the nuclear industry responsible for the disaster?

Kevin Kamps: [According to the Japanese parliamentary report] Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese national government, specifically its nuclear safety regulatory agency, had plenty of warnings that a large-scale earthquake, and even a tall tsunami, could hit that plant, and other nuclear plants across Japan for that matter. Yet way too little was done about it.

They just hoped it would never happen. But it did. The sea wall they had built was woefully inadequate, for example. It was easily overtopped by the tsunami. All the mistakes that led up to the catastrophic consequences had to do with this collusion. Wink wink, nod nod, between industry lobbyists and executives, safety regulators at all levels, government officials at all levels. Short cuts on safety and security, to save money, that is, boost profits, which pay astronomical executive salaries, even handsome take home pay for nuclear industry workers, kickbacks to local municipalities, revolving doors between industry and government.

And what’s so frightening about that conclusion is that we have such collusion here in the United States, [with] massive campaign contributions to office seekers, and lobbyist expenditures. The media even gets hoodwinked in all this, both in Japan and in the US. In Japan, they call this “the Nuclear Village.” Perhaps, in the US we’d call it the military-industrial-governmental-academic-media-nuclear power complex.

We [in the US] also have a couple three dozen, identical or similar nuclear power plants in design. These are General Electric boiling water reactors of the Mark I or Mark II design. The biggest in the world, for example, just south of Detroit by 25 miles, called Fermi Unit 2. So, I’ve described what happened and the consequences of what happened, where one of the largest releases of hazardous ionizing radioactivity in the environment that has ever occurred, into the ocean, into the air. Japan was hard hit with contamination.

The rest of the Pacific basin was hard hit with contamination, including the west coast of North America and the health implications of that, the genetic implications of that, will unfold for a very long time to come because these radioactive isotopes, which are hazardous caesium and strontium, for example, have at least a 300-year hazardous persistence, tritium 123 years, at least, plutonium, 240,000 years. So, in a sense, nuclear power disasters have beginnings, but they don’t really have endings when you’re talking about centuries or millennia or hundreds of thousands of years of hazard unleashed into the environment.

Sputnik: Could this be considered a freak accident? One that’s unlikely to be repeated?

Kevin Kamps: Unfortunately, not. There have been now several major nuclear power reactor meltdown disasters: Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania USA in 1979, Chernobyl in Ukraine in the Soviet Union in 1986. So many close calls to reactor meltdowns. It’s almost too many to enumerate and there’ve been other nuclear power related and nuclear weapons related disasters over the decades. So, these are actually fairly predictable. And I have colleagues who now refuse to call these accidents because these are foreseeable. This is a calculated gamble. That’s being taken every day at some 400 plus atomic reactors across the world, with more planned……  https://sputniknews.com/interviews/202103111082310108-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-nearly-ended-the-japanese-state-radioactive-waste-specialist-explains/

March 13, 2021 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, secrets,lies and civil liberties