http://enenews.com/nyt-mayor-japan-govt-actions-akin-murder-authorities-hid-plume-forecasts-avoid-evacuations-officials-revealNYT: Authorities hid radioactive plume forecasts to avoid evacuations, officials reveal — Mayor says akin to “murder”
August 8th, 2011 at 11:23 PM
Japan Hid Radiation Path, Leaving Evacuees in Peril, Ko Sasaki for The New York Times, August 8, 2011:
(... Forecasts from a) government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases ... were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism. ...
As the nuclear plant continues to release radiation, some of which has slipped into the nation’s food supply, public anger is growing at what many here see as an official campaign to play down the scope of the accident and the potential health risks. ...
The Reasoning
* Some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities tried “to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry.”
* Current and former officials interviewed by the Times said “a wider evacuation zone would have meant uprooting hundreds of thousands of people… the government
desperate to limit evacuations beyond the 80,000 people already moved from areas around the plant.”
* Toshiso Kosako, a top Japanese expert on radiation measurement who resigned from an advisory group to Japan’s Prime Minister said “the prime minister’s office refused to release the results even after it was made aware of Speedi, because officials there did not want to take responsibility for costly evacuations if their estimates were later called into question.”
The Pattern
* “Officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster.”
* “The computer forecasts were among many pieces of information the authorities initially withheld from the public.”
* Meltdowns went officially unacknowledged for months.
* “In one of the most damning admissions, nuclear regulators said in early June that inspectors had found tellurium 132, which experts call telltale evidence of reactor meltdowns, a day after the tsunami — but did not tell the public for nearly three months.”
Namie’s mayor Tamotsu Baba said the withholding of information was akin to “murder.”
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