Japanese nuclear disaster should be a wake up call

by newsmedia Thu Mar 17, 2011 20:25

They didn't release the info on Windscale at the time of what was then the world's first major nuclear power accident for 'political' reasons ...

The spin doctors who provide the gumph on so called safety of nuclear power are the same spin doctors who support, if not don't oppose, the bombing and shooting of civilians in the name of 'peace' ...

Simple they may be but they are simple lunatics and that makes them terribly dangerous in their ignorance.

by opus diablos - the regressive hypocrite party Fri Mar 18, 2011 13:18

..may be cartoon caricatures, but as somebody somewhere said, '..many a true word spoke in jest'.

The record of the nukocracy, back to falsifying of reports at the US Department of Energy after WW II to fastrack nuclear over other energy contenders is a litany of spin, lies, denial and disinformation. Result, anyone who has payed the slightest attention to the contradictions can never credit them with the capacity for a truthful or near-honest statement. Its been bred out of them. Handing this crew a licence to run anything is a bit like putting a sociopathic six-year-old in charge of the arsenal. Not smart.

Therefore it will happen. Homo stupidus knows best.

by Hubris Sat Mar 19, 2011 16:56

Using the excuse of 'It might interfere with rescue efforts' the US Military and Japanese Gov't block citizens access to Youtube. Japan has one of the best networks in the world - it is highly unlikely that Youtube would in anyway interfere with anything - so I conclude that they are trying to prevent dissemination of bad news

"Military Blocks High-Volume Websites as Precaution After Japan Quake" - http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/militar...10315

Fearing shortages of bandwidth might inhibit military operations after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, U.S. Cyber Command blocked some commercial websites that generally use “extraordinary bandwidth,” a spokesman said on Tuesday.

Caption: Video Id: 15gGuQJzD-U Type: Youtube Video
Angry French guy in Japan gives us his thoughts on Nuke Meltdown

by T Sun Mar 20, 2011 00:46

As we know early on in this unfolding disaster we were told that they were using seawater to cool the reactors and it was made clear that seawater is corrosive although it wasn't clear what exactly would be the mechanism nor how long it would take and what would happen.

According to Dmitry Orlov who has written about this on his blog, he says the effect could be to result in significant release of radioactivity in the form of an aerosol. If true, then an aerosol has the potential to spread for hundreds of miles and if this happen, it would be extremely serious.

What do they mean when they say that they are cooling the reactor with seawater? Seawater is corrosive, and is probably the worst coolant imaginable. Normally, nuclear reactors are cooled with fresh, filtered, deionized water. The crew at Fukushima used seawater because they had no other choice. When the cooling pumps failed because the tsunami caused a blackout, they called in the fire brigade, and the fire engines there apparently use seawater. The reactor cooling systems are plumbed with stainless steel pipes, which degrade rather rapidly on contact with sea water because of the chlorine in it, especially if they are hot (which they are). At Fukushima, “containment” has already become a relative term, since the reactors are vented to the outside air in any case to keep them from bursting, but once these pipes disintegrate (a process that might take a few days to a few weeks) the containment vessels will become riddled with holes, letting in outside air and, if by then there is any zirconium left to burn, possibly causing hydrogen explosions inside the reactors, compromising them further. Their radioactive contents will then be carried to the atmosphere in aerosol form. We will probably know when that happens because the Geiger counters in the area will peg out.

by opus diablos - the regressive hypocrite party Mon Mar 21, 2011 17:32

Worth a scan

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23764

Judge for yourself how credible it is. It fits my understanding of the industry, all the way back.

by common man Mon Mar 21, 2011 18:43

Can anybody tell me : Where does Ireland dump it's radoi-active waste, i mean medical isotopes etc and those used
in engineering ?

by T Mon Mar 21, 2011 23:59

There are reports circulating that quite high levels of radioactivity was detected in the sea offshore from Fukushima.

There are also reports of contamination of food supplies in the area. Surprisenly the Japanese government does not appear to have banned the sale of it.

It certainly looks like it is part of the Japanese psychic to play down these problems and of course the entire nuclear community worldwide and associated governments have been very low key about the radiation leaks now that we are over one week into it. It seems as if they have got a grip of themselves after the initial shock and the realisation has properly set in, that if they give this any more dramatic coverage then it is going to be very very damaging to the future image of nuclear power. So we now have the situation where there are leaks, there is still a serious accident in progress, but we are basically being lead to believe it is all under control now and I guess the hope is that we will all soon forget about it.

One of the best sites at the moment for a technical understanding of what is happening can be found at http://allthingsnuclear.org/

by art Tue Mar 22, 2011 11:39

Chernobyl was the wakeup call and we know what subsequently happened. There was an expectation during that crisis that a second explosion of a dirty bomb type could take place. Documentary published information broadcasted on Chernobyl crisis stated that had second explosion taken place “All of Europe would have become uninhabitable”.
The questions that need to be asked is why, given, the aforementioned scenario, is it necessary to continue with nuclear development and how people or organisations opposed to same could reasonably apply pressure for change.
In the wake of Japan’s nuclear accident Britain has just announced, that there is going to be no change, to their programme of building nuclear power stations.
Any campaigner trying to change the status quo needs to understand that the nuclear industry is a no go area, backed by the full might of the state. Hilda Murrell was an example of the harassment to be expected that has unlikely gone away, if anything, modern technology in all its complexity would be brought to bear to discredit any opposition.
Richard Dawkins once observed that people will die rather than think. Perhaps they are right as we lurch towards the techno singularity which might explain why nuclear is needed as a fuel. Furthermore are we just pawns in our evolutionary path where we have little control over our ultimate destiny.

by tom Tue Mar 22, 2011 13:24

Under the headline " Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power" , the former eco-warrior George Mombiot explicitly defended nuclear energy in his Guardian column yesterday.

In the article Mombiot admitted that many of his readers would be surprised to learn that he has dropped what he termed his former "nuclear-neutral" stance at such a critical point . As well as surprise there will surely be disappointment and a sense of betrayal for those who haven’t been following the implicit nuclear endorsements in Mombiot’s recent writing .The former radical is now shamelessly resorting to the same arguments used by the nuclear industry over the years to discredit its opponents: that , barring a return to some pre-industrial revolution bucolic ideal, the alternative to nuclear energy can only be the burning of fossil fuels.

Mombiot has already managed to conclude - by studying graphs from the safety of the Guardian’s Farringdon Road offices in London or from his eco-house in North Wales presumably - that the dangers of radioactive pollution for Japan have been “ wildly exaggerated” and that the impact of the accident on people and the planet has been small .

Perhaps he has had a Geiger counter and a crystal ball chipped into his brain . It surely couldn’t be the case that Mombiot ,who wrote in support of the Liberal Democrats in the run-up to last year’s UK election , has in fact been a closet supporter of the nuclear lobby for quite some time, but only came out openly in its defence at a time of crisis for the industry.

Link to the Guardian article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro...shima

by green leftist - none Fri Mar 25, 2011 11:40

There are some facts of science that stubborn old lefties need to take on board- for example the best think the UK has done for the environment so far is the closure of the Welsh coal pits! So the left should have gone green sooner instead of wasting so much energy on destructive planet killing coal. Monbiot is is a very long standing green activists and one of the few responsible grown-ups on the left that knows what's what about the environment. dialectical and logical arguments should be able to actually move with the times and admit a previous stance was wrong.
I protested at sellafield like a good green in 2001 but now with fresh information it is time for a fresh stance. If old greens like Monbiot are coming off the fence and going pro-nuclear because they have a deeper and clearer understanding of how to go about saving our planet then the rest of the left should play catch up. An anti-technology stance stuck in 1982 is not Marxist.

by Red Green Leftist Fri Mar 25, 2011 12:14

Full article text at url.

When nuclear reactors blow, the first thing that melts down is the truth. Just as in the Chernobyl catastrophe almost 25 years ago when Soviet authorities denied the extent of radiation and downplayed the dire situation that was spiraling out of control, Japanese authorities spent the first week of the Fukushima crisis issuing conflicting and confusing reports. We were told that radiation levels were up, then down, then up, but nobody aside from those Japanese bureaucrats could verify the levels and few trusted their accuracy. The situation is under control, they told us, but workers are being evacuated. There is no danger of contamination, but stay inside and seal your doors.

by ferret Sat Mar 26, 2011 03:20

ok, can any of the pro nuclear shills around here tell me how putting 4 nuclear reactors in close proximity to a known geological fault was ever a good idea except to turn a tasty profit for General Electric corporation?

The real environmental elephant in the room is trans national corporations playing countries off each other and corrupting and derailing political processes with cash so they can rape the worlds resources in double time to achieve ever more vulgar short term profits without having to give a shit about the environment or any environmental laws, labour laws or human rights.

The nuclear industry is just another example of this.

Humanity needs to cop on and defang these out of control monsters before they make meaningful human life impossible on a polluted prison planet

by opus diablos - the regressive hypocrite party Sat Mar 26, 2011 15:30

..state of automotive technology, he'd need roller skates.

Some info in this weeks New Scientist mag, including some of the history of cover ups in nuclear Japan. Worth a scan. Legible for non-science types like me. Dont forget your grain of salt for the damage limitation agendas. Lotsa funding in nuke research labs. MOD are regular advertisers so they tend to keep inside the tent, but do give criticism too.

by tom Mon Mar 28, 2011 23:15

Ritt Goldstein , an American investigative journalist based in Sweden , compares Fukushima to the Chernobyl tragedy in this report from Indymedia Japan .
http://japan.indymedia.org/newswire/display/7723/index.php

Focusing on the impact of the Chermobyl accident on the Swedish town Gävle , which in 1986 had been struck by a heavy rainstorm as a cloud of Chernobyl’s fallout was overhead, Goldsein writes :

“Gävle is about a thousand miles from Chernobyl, and the amount of nuclear fuel present at Chernobyl during the 1986 accident is reported as about 180 tons, none of which contained plutonium, an element much more toxic than the uranium used in standard reactor fuel. Estimates of the amount of nuclear fuel present at Fukushima are roughly in the 2000 ton range, dwarfing Chernobyl, and one of the six reactors (number 3) does use a mixture of plutonium and uranium, ‘mox’.”

“According to a 2006 Swedish study published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, it appears Sweden experienced approximately a thousand excess cancer fatalities because of Chernobyl, the number expected to increase, the cases concentrated proportional to the levels of radioactive exposure………….

A 2007 study performed by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Reasearch, a Cambridge Massachusetts based think tank, examined the cognitive effects of Chernobyl’s radiation upon Swedish children. It found evidence that: “fetal exposure to ionizing radiation damages cognitive ability at radiation levels previously considered safe.”

by opus diablos - the regressive hypocrite party Tue Mar 29, 2011 16:40

of radiation being detected here and in other European countries.
'Not a matter for concern' according to the experts.
Now if only those fucking experts didn't have such a long record of lying repeatedly we might have some trust in them, and have some clue where we stand.

Meantime stopnato@yahoogroups.com report depleted Uranium use in Libya.
No doubt its being used to protect those 'civilian populations' from Gadafi's cruel health programs.

by Larmee Wed Apr 06, 2011 04:12

Nuclear Power

Nuclear Power

by FishFucked Thu Apr 07, 2011 13:00

Nice picture BTW!

Here is an interesting article from http://www.countercurrents.org about the water discharges from the fukushima plant

http://www.countercurrents.org/takahara050411.htm

It's really all about the long term pollution of our water supply and our food chain isn't it? Imagine eating a nice tin of cesium tuna then being constantly irradiated from within until eventually one of the millions of cells in close proximity to the highly radioactive cesium particlesl has it's precise mechanisms scrambled enough by stray radiation to become cancerous

thats why wind/solar/wave/geothermal are the only way to go