Fukushima - "As Bad as It Gets"

With hundreds of thousands of tons of highly irradiated seawater accumulating in temporary storage vessels, and the melted down, boiling cauldrons at the bottoms of reactor buildings creeping downward, toward groundwater, within meters of the Pacific Ocean, more ocean scientists are becoming concerned about the potential for grave, global harm caused by this ongoing, somewhat out-of-control emergency.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Senior Scientist, Ken Buesseler stated, even before the seriousness of the meltdowns was revealed last week, "Given that the Fukushima nuclear power plant is on the ocean, and with leaks and runoff directly to the ocean, the impacts on the ocean will exceed those of Chernobyl, which was hundreds of miles from any sea."

Controversial Japanese politician, Ichiro Ozawa, has asked for the government of Prime Minister Naoko Kan to step down, claiming in a Wall Street Journal article, that Japan will become "uninhabitable" because of the reactors' meltdown effects.

Protest in Japan, by one of the world's least demonstrative populations, is growing, as public awareness of the long-term effects grows, and as public officials, such as Dr. Shunichi Yamashita, a senior official at the Atomic Bomb Research Institute, resort to bullshit. The radiological health safety risk management adviser for the Fukushima prefecture, he was quoted last week by Aileen Mioko Smith, on Democracy Now, talking about the Japanese Government's ongoing "health study":

He speaks widely in the prefecture, always saying there’s absolutely no concern with the levels of radiation in Fukushima. He says that mothers, even mothers exposed to 100 millisieverts, pregnant mothers, will not have any effect, health effect. Remember the number 100. Compared to that, the Soviet Union required a mandatory evacuation during Chernobyl at five millisieverts. This doctor is quoted as saying, "The effects of radiation do not come to people that are happy and laughing. They come to people that are weak-spirited, that brood and fret." This is a direct quote. And he’s heading the study.

Here's Arnie Gundersen, one of the first credible people to raise concern over this series of ongoing events, on CNN last week:


I predict that unless the Japanese government exerts more sanity in its reaction to the deepening disaster, that there will be a popular revolution in the Island Kingdom. Although the Japanese are somewhat docile on the surface, they are arguably among the most intelligent people on the planet. As radiation sickness expands, they will not just sit and take it.

Nor should we.