Michael Leonardi of CAN telling like it is – a must read

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Radiation Truth

Fighting Back Against Nuclear Power

Published in CounterPunch on September 28th and written by MICHAEL LEONARDI

As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Nuclear Industry, and Obama administration continue to push nuclear energy as safe and clean, a grassroots insurgency is growing from the awakening depths of the growingly vociferous American maelstrom. Fukushima’s three meltdowns continue to emit over a billion bequerels of radioactivity a day into the environment and that radiation is spreading. The international media and all Atomic regulatory agencies around the world have been complicit in keeping the reality of this catastrophe silent. In the United States of America, despite reports of a decrepit, failing and unsafe nuclear program from the pages of CounterPunch to the Associated Press, CBS News and beyond, most Americans remain quiet and numbed on this issue. Much of this country’s union leadership, beholden to a broken and corporate owned Democratic Party and the monstrous energy giants that provide them jobs, have a slave plantation mentality toward their Radioactive, Oil Extrapolating and Gas Fracking bosses. The promise of a Green revolution based around economically viable, RENEWABLE and truly safe energy sources seems to be bound and shackled by a ball and chain mentality, but signs of a breaking point have finally begun to surface!

A truly grassroots insurgency is underway and is introducing itself to the world on October 1st with actions across North America. The Coalition Against Nukes has mobilized for the past several months to begin a no nuke uprising that won’t stop until ALL of our nuclear power plants are shut down and our future generations can look forward to a Nuke Free World. Isn’t it enough that we are leaving our future generations with the legacy of millions of gallons of nuclear waste and thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel to monitor and control for thousands of years? A part from Governor Perry’s idea of nuking Texas — which we might want to consider — there is no solution to ridding ourselves of this extremely toxic and highly radioactive waste piling up in hotspots around the globe. Enough is Enough!

The time has come to look beyond the lies and propaganda of our so-called world leaders and see them for what they are. We are being led down a path of destruction by criminal governments running a global system of mafia wars, rape and pillage as they take more and more from us all while poisoning and desecrating our air, land and water beyond any natural recognition. Our children are suffering now from respiratory illnesses and disease and the search for a cure for cancer lies in eliminating the industrial pollutants that cause it not in a research laboratory. As of yesterday the Palisades Nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Michigan was venting radioactive steam. The amounts are minimal and harmless say the NRC and Entergy spokespeople, THEY ARE LYING as they always do and this is the essence of their existence.

Look to the lessons we are learning from Japan. If there is a serious nuclear accident this is what we can count on from our governments, the United Nations, the World Health Organization and those “in charge”. They will lie to us for months, they will abandon us to die and they will act like nothing is happening. This is what is unfolding in the Crime Against Humanity devastating the 3 million residents and mainly the children that have been left in areas 5 times more radioactive than the areas of the Ukraine evacuated until this day after Chernobyl. Try and get your minds around how callous and utterly disdainful our governments have become toward their populations. Our governments represent the Inhumane Capitalist Engine and we are all disposable. Let us die our cancerous deaths while we are told that we have nothing to fear is the stark reality we are facing not tomorrow but today.

The alarm bells are ringing as Wall Street becomes the target of a global revolt. As C.A.N. organizer Remy Chevalier put it “It is time to zero in on Entergy, Exelon, Constellation, Dominion… all the sick nuclear power companies run by thugs.” These are just a few and I’d broaden that to include all of the Energy, Chemical and Biological Mutating giants that are hell bent on destroying the life affirming forces this beautiful planet has offered our species.

This is a call to action and the time to act is now. Not on facebook, not with letters and petitions, but in the streets and parks across the land on October 1st and beyond. The Coalition Against Nukes has pulled together rallies across the US and Canada on October 1st. The rally in New York will have a powerful list of speakers including CounterPunch contributors Helen Caldicott, Harvey Wasserman, Kevin Kamps, Karl Grossman and more. In downtown Toledo, Ohio congressmen Dennis Kucinich will join us in a rally calling for the shut down of Davis Besse and Fermi 2! Dennis is bucking the Democratic Party trend and as he has always done by saying No to Nukes! He will be joined by two Democratic council members, Green Party activists and more. In Virginia activists will target the state capital in a state that wants to bring back Uranium Mining. In California, Chicago, New Jersey, Florida, and Washington State NO NUKES will be the message. They will be drumming Against Nukes in Toronto Canada and as we voice our solidarity with the people of Japan and cry out NEVER AGAIN! The Japanese will be standing up to say no more nukes! In India they are marching and hunger striking to ban nukes. Italy banned nukes with a successful grassroots storm. Germany will be Nuke Free by 2022. It is time for this movement to rise up in United Sates too! NO NUKES ! ! ! Please visit the C.A.N. website at www.coalitionagainstnukes.org/ and join a rally near you or do something creatively anti-nuclear on October 1st and spread the word.

Michael Leonardi is a C.A.N. organizer and writer living for now between Toledo, Ohio and Italy. He is currently working for the Service Employees International Union to repeal the attack on collective bargaining in the State of Ohio. He can be reached at mikeleonardi@hotmail.com

New Wind Turbine Design from Japan

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Radiation Truth

– Energy Output Tripled

Here in the US, we derive 3.2 % of our total electricity from wind power. Just adding the new design, called a wind lens, would increase the power produced by wind to 9.6% of the total. The new design would also make wind power cheaper than coal and nuclear power, sans subsidies.

Read all about it in the Earthy Report

Nuclear Power and the Nuremberg Code

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Radiation Truth

The Nuremburg Code arose from legal proceedings against the notorious Nazi Doctors. Although it did not prevent human experiments, like radiological studies, it did eventually lead to the notion of “informed consent”, and some other good things.

Steve Breyer points out that nuclear power and the bomb from which it derived are human experimentation.Countless rushed experiments were necessary to complete the Manhattan Project. An explosion tested the first Bomb in the New Mexican desert; within weeks, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became radioactive laboratories (and sarcophagi).

Beginning with rushed experiments to complete the Manhattan Project the experimentation includes atomic testing in the Nevada desert, the Soviet Arctic, the Kazakh steppe, the Algerian Sahara, French Polynesia, and on “American” atolls in the South Pacific enabled the development of the hydrogen bomb and sundry innovations. Nuclear testing was done underground for Britain, the US, and the USSR after the enaction of the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963) . France continued atmospheric testing on Pacific islands, as they were not party to the treaty.

The number of victims of nuclear weapons manufacture and testing is unknown, but include Navajo uranium miners, soldiers, Utah sheep farmers, and residents around places like Rocky Flats, Colorado and Colonie, New York. Some New Mexicans. Helen Caldicott and Harvey Wasserman estimate 1000s of cancers result from civilian nuclear power annually. The recent book of collected studies on Chernobyl show nearly 1,000,000 deaths directly due to the accident.Time will reveal the toll Fukushima will take, although as with Chernobyl, great efforts will be taken to hide the data.

Countries employing nuclear power need to be held to the directives of the Nuremberg Code, as are social and medical scientists, we’d likely see a quick retreat from the nuclear brink.

The text of the Code, here edited for brevity, comes from Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law, No. 10, Vol. 2 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), pp. 181-182. It is available online)

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.

3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.

4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.

5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a prior reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur.

6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.

7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.

8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.

9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.

10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

Credit to Steve Breyer’s article on Dianuke

US Government decided to downplay Fukushima radiation

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Radiation Truth

Government agreed to downplay Fukushima radiation
Solar IMG Podcast

According to Arnie Gundersen, a energy advisor veteran with 39 years of experience as a nuclear power engineer, Fukushima is still unstable and leaking. Gunderson told SolarIMG that Americans are unaware they are being rained on with Fukushima nuclear hot particles and eating Fukushima contaminated food because the US government has deliberately minimized the catastrophe. This is partially due to a pact Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed with Japan. Gundersen, is working with a team of other scientists to prove government statements about Fukushima are false.

“The United States came up with a decision to downplay Fukushima,” said Gundersen who is awakening the public with information such as hot particles in rain will continue falling in the U.S., not just in the Pacific Northwest, for another year, and mentioning high-level fallout in Oklahoma a few days ago.

Gundersen said that Hillary Clinton signed a pact with her counterpart in Japan agreeing for the United States to continue buying food from Japan, even thought that food is not being properly tested for radioactive materials. Gunderson got the information from high-level people in the State Department.”So we are not sampling the food coming into the United States./

The US government has come up with a decision at the highest levels of the State Department, as well as other departments who made a decision to downplay Fukushima,” stated Gunderson.

In April, one month after the powerful tsunami and earthquake hit Japan, Gunderson said that “Hillary Clinton signed a pact with Japan that she agreed there is no problem with Japanese food supply and we will continue to buy them so we are not sampling food coming in from Japan.”

Gunderson has asked Americans with Geiger counters to send samples to him for an independent research team’s study.

Gundersen is convinced that the new study will prove that what the U.S. government is telling Americans is false.

Arnie Gundersen featured on his Fairwinds website a new documentary short titled, “Dial ‘M’ For Meltdown.” The video was created by Brian Rich to ensure the history of commercial nuclear power was documented and presented in an exciting way to a younger generation.

“I found most of the public was turned off by the complex nature of Nuclear Physics, even if what they didn’t know was going to kill them and their loved ones,” said Rich.Is Fukushima stabilized? Many children to suffer thyroid cancer in three to five years

“The reactors are better than since the accident,” reported Gundersen, but “they all have holes on them, so they are not holding water.”

“Until a couple of weeks ago, they had to constantly add water. Now there’s a system in place that’s cleaning the water enough that they can pump it back into the reactor.”

The reactors are still creating “an enormous amount of waste,” said Gunderson, and that “the filters are hotter than a pistol.”

“I still believe water is leaking into the ocean and I know water’s leaking into the ground table.”

Gundersen is concerned about indications that there is still iodine on site plus, “enormous amounts of iodine have been in the water.”

“There’s an awful lot of kids that are going to have thyroid problems in the next three to five years as the result of this.”

Kicking the nuclear can, On the Edge: Unit 4, Contaminated food and water, Children and cancer

Gundersen is “becoming increasingly concerned” about Fukushima’s impact on Americans.

He listed his major concerns related to Fukushima impact in the United States: Unit 4; radioactive beef, soil and rain; burning contaminated materials; and raising dose amounts.

Gunderson believes that Fukushima’s Unit 4 is “very fragile and could topple” in another earthquake.

Rather than a whole of government approach of resolving the radiation problem and protecting the people each Japanese prefecture is “doing its own thing”

“There is radioactive beef. There’s radioactive soil. There’s going to be radioactive straw.”

“The Japanese are not sampling enough,” said Gunderson, and Fukushima food is being bought by unwitting Americans.

The Japanese government arbitrarily increased the amount of “acceptable limits of radiation” a person can have, including raising child amount to the same as adults.

“For every 250 REM, you can expect a cancer,” he said. “So for every 10 men… one of those 10 will get cancer as a result of working at Fukushima.”

“They’ve got 8,000 people on site,” so the chances are 50:50 an individual worker will get cancer.

Gunderson stated “I’m estimating over the next five years, you’re going to see a 20% increase in lung cancer. You’re not going to be able to say a person’s individual cancer came from Fukushima, but when you look at northern Japan, whatever the rate would have been, there will be a 20% more.”

Burning contaminated materials results in what Gundersen referred to as “kicking the can.”

“The Japanese are allowing the contaminated material to be burned as long as it’s less than 7000 Becquerels. What they’re also allowing is, if you have a high concentration material and a low concentration material, you can average those two out.”

The radioactive contaminated material being burned in one prefecture in Japan contaminates the neighboring prefecture.

“It eventually ends up into the Pacific Northwest, either into B.C., Oregon, Washington or California. The process of burning the radioactive material means they’re kicking the can down the road.”

Gundersen added, “The accident isn’t over. It’s continually throwing back up the cesium which is already on the ground and getting into plants.”

“It’s going to get worse now with the straw harvest,” he said, speaking about the Japanese rice harvest beginning in September.

“After the rice is harvested, the straw, like the rice it grew, will be contaminated. With a half-life of 30 years, you’re not going to let it set in your barn for 300 years. You’re going to burn it.”

As the contaminated straw is burned and kicked into the next prefecture, etc, it will eventually make its way over to the United States and Canada where it will come down in the rain.

So continued Gunderson, “Kick the problem to Hawaii or British Columbia or Oregon.”

“A rainout is when a radioactive cloud passes over an area and, due to a coincidental rainstorm, the hot particles get dropped on the soil.”

“We’re going to see another year of these rainouts.”

“Geiger counters were going off the scale” a few weeks ago in British Columbia, said Gundersen, who added that the “only conclusion you could come to was industrial burning in Japan.”

Proving government wrong calls for citizenry participation

“I’m working with scientists to definitively prove what the government health officials say is wrong,” Gundersen stated, adding that the public can help do that.

He added, “now with lots of citizens having Geiger counters,” they can help with the new study by wiping a surface one meter by one meter with a cloth after a rainout, and placing that cloth under the Geiger counter.

“If you get a positive reading on the cloth, I’d like to see the cloth,” he said.

Gundersen advises people taking samples to note the location and time the sample was taken. He also requests that people wrap the sample in a triple layer of foil before mailing it to Fairwinds.

“Their constant truthful testimony against the nuclear industry… should be a real awakening to the public at large,” said Brian Rich. He also said that “Meeting Arnold Gundersen and his wife Maggie only opened my eyes to the dangers our country and civilization face because of decisions made decades ago and the lies created to further the nuclear agenda.”

Contact Gundersen through Fairwinds for further instructions about helping with the research: fairewinds.com/. See ENENEWS Energy News for regular radiation updates from Fukushima and United States nuclear power plants.

Fukushima makes Hiroshima look like a B-B gun

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Radiation Truth

Professor Tatsuhiko Kodama, head of the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo, gives emotional testimony and demands action.

From Professor Kodama’s plea:

“When we research the radiation injury/sickness, we look at the total amount of radioactive materials. But there is no definite report from TEPCO or the Japanese government as to exactly how much radioactive materials have been released from Fukushima.

“So, using our knowledge base at the Radioisotope Center, we calculated. Based on the thermal output, it is 29.6 times the amount released by the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In uranium equivalent, it is 20 Hiroshima bombs.

“What is more frightening is that whereas the radiation from a nuclear bomb will decrease to one-thousandth in one year, the radiation from a nuclear power plant will only decrease to one-tenth.

“In other words, we should recognize from the start that just like Chernobyl, Fukushima I Nuke Plant has released radioactive materials equivalent in the amount to tens of nuclear bombs, and the resulting contamination is far worse than the contamination by a nuclear bomb.”

SILENT SPRING MEETS THE LONG HOT SUMMER by Kim Roberson

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Radiation Truth

Kim Roberson’s latestpost on NuclearFreePlanet.org, an organization run by the Helen Caldicott foundation.

This excellent piece is both a personal journey as well as the story of an industry that is willing to lie, cheat, and sacrifice humanity in the name of profit.

From the About page of NuclearFreePlanet.org:
“The goal of Nuclear-Free Planet is far-reaching public education about the often underestimated and poorly understood medical hazards of nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Our focus is on the grave danger posed to public health by radiation, by the contribution of nuclear power to global warming, and by the real capacity of nuclear weapons, technology, and waste, to render parts or all of the earth uninhabitable forever.”

Who is monitoring the consequences of Fukushima?

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Radiation Truth

Not WHO, the World Health Organization.

This article by Alison Katz explains why the World Health Organization (WHO) is failing humanity. The agreement made by WHO to let the IAEA review anything related to nuclear power has led to the cover-up of Chernobyl’s human cost, as well as near silence about the unfolding Fukushima disaster.

Read the full article here.

Government officials refuse to test urine of Fukushima’s children

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Radiation Truth

Avoiding the truth, and being an accessory to murder by doing nothing.

Why Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Radiation Truth

To summarize a few key points:

The radiation risk model used by the ICRP is too simple. It treats internal (that is inhaled or ingested) radiation emitters the same as external radiation emitters. Busby is convinced that internal radiation exposure can be “up to 1,000 times more harmful than the ICRP model.”
Using the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) Busby calculates approximately 200,000 excess cancers within the next 50 years. Half will be diagnosed within 10 years. The ICRP model predicts 2,838 excess cancers. “The eventual yield will therefore be another test of the two risk models,”
Many studies done after Chernobyl showed much greater cancer rates than the ICRP model predicted.
“There will follow increased rates of ill health, including cancer and birth defects, which will be proportional to the overall air concentration. High in Japan, low in USA, and very low in Europe….”
“I believe that in the explosions at Fukushima Daiichi, huge amounts of spent fuel were blown sky high. The ground contamination out to 100 km at Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl, the dose rates higher. And Fukushima has contaminated Tokyo with 35 million people. The population of the 200 km radius is also enormous, about 10 million. Most of the Chernobyl stuff fell away from big population centers. Luckily it went north and west and not to Kiev which is south. Fukushima is still boiling its radionuclides all over Japan. Chernobyl went up in one go. So Fukushima is worse.”

Chris Busby was interviewed by Norimatsu Satoko and Narusawa Muneo for the Asia-Pacific Journal. He is Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), Visiting Professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Ulster, and Guest Researcher at the Federal Institute for Crop and Soil Research, Julius Kuehn Institute, Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants in Braunschweig, Germany.

Japan’s PM vows to get Japan off nuclear power

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Radiation Truth

“We will aim to bring about a society that can exist without nuclear power,” said Japan’s Prime Minister Nato Kan on Wednesday in a televised address to Japan’s citizens.

He continued, “Through my experience of the March 11 accident, I came to realize the risk of nuclear energy is too high. It involves techology that cannot be controlled according to our conventional concept of safety.”

35 of Japan’s 54 reactors are offline at the moment. They include reactors damaged or stopped by the earthquake and tsunami, as well as those closed for routine repairs. If reactors that continue to come offline for maintenance are not restarted, Japan has the potential to be off nuclear power by April 2012.

From the Washington Post