Reply #14: Caldicott says evacuate North-West Japan

[Octafish]

This is something that should have been at the top of TEPCO's to-do list March 12:

Caldicott says evacuate North-West Japan

Dr Helen Caldicott says radiation many times in excess of that which led to the evacuation of Chernobyl has been reported in North-West Japan — so the area should be evacuated immediately.

Independent Australia
by David Donovan

The confusing crisis

Last Friday came the alarming news from Japan’s nuclear agency that the amount of radioactive cesium that has so-far leaked from the tsunami ravaged Fukushima nuclear plant is equal to 168 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Apparently, the damaged plant has released 15,000 tera becquerels of cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years and causes cancer, compared with the 89 tera becquerels released by the American World War II bomb.

On the other hand, in the same report, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said the March 11 Fukushima disaster is likely to have released only about 15 per cent of the radiation that went into the air in the 1986 Chernobyl accident, although this equates to roughly seven times the amount of radiation produced by Three Mile Island accident in the United States in 1979. Then, a couple of days ago, rice grown close to the Fukushima power plant was rather surprisingly declared fit for consumption by the Japanese authorities.

SNIP...

The Japanese credibility crisis

After significant dithering after the tsunami in March, the Japanese government eventually banned people from entering an area within a 20 kilometre radius of the crippled power plant, which led to between 80,000 and 130,000 people being evacuated from this precinct. Since then, in large part, local residents outside this area have been left to clean up by themselves, because the plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) is still struggling to bring the damaged reactors under control. TEPCO now plan to have the reactors, three of which went into melt-down, finally turned off cold by January, if you can believe their latest reports, which many experts do not.

The problem is that the reliability of claims from TEPCO, NISA and the Japanese Government are – as we have reported before – highly questionable. All three bodies have a major credibility crisis, with clear evidence that they colluded to cover up evidence that they knew the nuclear reactors melted down within hours of the March 11 tsunami. The reason for this seems to be that Japan is highly dependent on nuclear energy for its power needs, such that NISA has become more or less a branch of TEPCO – with staff perenially shuffling between the two bodies – and with a Japanese Government that is primarily concerned with talking down the extent of the crisis to avoid widespread panic amongst the Japanese population and allay rumblings about the viability of nuclear power.

What are we to make of it all?

CONTINUED...

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2011/health/fukushima-crisis-caldicott-says-evacuate-north-west-japan/

Wish the people at the top had more, eh, opportunities to interact with those who have to live with their decisions and policies -- in Japan and in the United States.