Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster Worse than Advertised? — Al Jazeera Thinks So

© 2011 Peter Free

 

17 June 2011

 

 

To those of us who distrust unnecessary secrecy in government, Al Jazeera’s report regarding Fukushima seems plausible

 

Reporter Dahr Jamail wrote:

 

"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

 

"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen.

 

"The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up.

 

"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said.

 

"Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."

 

Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.

 

Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable.

 

© 2011 Dahr Jamail, Fukushima: It's much worse than you think — Scientific experts believe Japan's nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public, Al Jazeera English (16 June 2011) (paragraphs split)

 

 

It is not nuclear fission power itself that is the culprit, it’s the greedy careless who run and don’t properly plan or regulate it

 

However, this distinction may be meaningless.  We live in a world of avaricious, but politically powerful pseudo-imbeciles.  And we repeatedly hand them the keys to our kingdoms.

 

 

The moral? — Undisciplined air-heads should not be allowed to play with dangerous toys

 

Harmonizing (i) the levels of risk of our varying technologies with (ii) our limited intellectual capacities appears to be necessary.

 

Of course, to do that — we would need to be able to accurately calculate levels of risk.

 

Given our overly emotional reactions to (and avoidance of) some low-level risks, that, too, may be asking too much.

 

What is a mostly hairless ape to do?