Fukushima Flim-Flam Still Spews from Murdoch's Wall Street Journal
By Harvey Wasserman
With every reactor disaster comes the inevitable whitewash.
But the Wall Street Journal has just paved a new super highway into the radioactive wasteland of atomic flim-flam with “Panic at Fukushima. “( http://online.wsj.com/... ).
The article represents a form of PR panic on the part of a nuclear power industry now crumbling at the seams. And it does fit a pattern:
Whenever the public somehow learns about one of the never-ending stream of radioactive releases from the local nuke---no matter how serious it may be---the official response is hard-wired to include the phrase “no danger to the public.”
When serious structural cracks surface at reactors like Ohio’s Davis-Besse or Crystal River, Florida, safety concerns are invariably dismissed with well-funded contempt.
As with fatally flawed steam generators at California’s San Onofre, if it can make an extra buck or two, the industry will run these reactors into the ground until the public rises up to force them shut or they melt. Nuke owners are protected by taxpayer insurance and the bankruptcy laws, so they know the consequences of a catastrophic disaster need not trouble their bottom line.
When earthquakes rattle reactors in Virginia and Ohio, or threaten others near New York City and in California, the public is “never in danger.” When a generation of Japanese complain that earthquakes could devastate the reactors there, they hear that Fukushima, Kashiwazaki et. al. are “perfectly safe.”
Then, when earthquakes hammer them both, we know who pays.
When the disasters are too big to hide, the industry PR machine devolves into total shamelessness. There was “no melting of fuel” at Three Mile Island until, nine years later, robotic cameras showed there certainly was.
“Nobody was killed” at Three Mile Island until epidemiological evidence showed otherwise. (Disclosure: I spent the worst week of my life in 1980 with the dying and bereaved in central Pennsylvania, leading to the 1982 publication of KILLING OUR OWN - http://www.ratical.org/... .
Nuclear apologist Patrick Moore terms Three Mile Island a “success story,” reminding us that an industry that uses flacks for accountants can view a disaster that turned a $900 million asset into a $2 billion liability as a big win.
When Chernobyl spewed huge radioactive clouds across Europe and into the jet stream that contaminated the entire northern hemisphere, the Soviet Union told us not to worry. At least one western “scientist” said the fallout would improve the health of those in Ukraine and Belarus, where a horrifying epidemic of stillbirths, malformations and birth defects still runs rampant. The Soviet Union is now dead...except in the hearts of a corporate media still parroting the Soviet lie that only 31 people died at Chernobyl. Scientific evidence shows a likely death toll of more like a million, and counting.
So now comes Fukushima, and the Murdoch-funded cheerleaders at the Wall Street Journal. The inevitable whitewash has come from a California physics professor.
The cheery message: Fukushima has harmed virtually no one except the nuclear industry, which has shut down in Japan.
Predictably, the article as a whole resides in a parallel pro-nuclear universe. Virtually devoid of actual fact, it is meticulously dissected by SimplyInfo ( http://nukefree.org/... ) in a brilliant primer on the health impacts of a truly apocalyptic nightmare that is far from over.
Entitled “The Truth vs. the Wall Street Journal,” SimplyInfo’s dissection is worth reading start to finish. But it really is deja vu all over again. This time the once-prestigious Journal, now a Murdoch mouthpiece, disgraces itself with some truly embarrassing attacks on basic reality. Simply and briefly:
The Journal astonishingly minimizes the death toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki using speculative data that has been discredited for decades while ignoring the findings by Japanese scientists that Fukushima has (thus far) spewed nearly 30 times as much radioactive cesium as did the Bombings;
The Journal uses an absurd averaging argument to assert Fukushima’s fallout will be nicely spread over the countryside, resulting in minimal doses for everyone. But plutonium, cesium, strontium and other killer isotopes tend to come down in clumps and clusters, heavily dosing some while missing others. As at TMI, Chernobyl and now Fukushima, woe be to the unlucky masses who get rained on;
The averaging argument jumps off the rails with pregnant women. At TMI the owners ran happy face public ads comparing the fallout to a single x-ray for everyone in the area. They failed to mention that way back in the 1950s a single x-ray to a fetus in utero was linked to a doubled rate of childhood cancer. The medical profession has acknowledged the danger at least since the 1980s. So these doses mean thousands of pregnant women---and their embryos and fetuses---are being exposed without their permission to radiation doses established science has branded as harmful to their children.
The Journal admits that Fukushima was hit by a 9.0 earthquake and 50-foot tidal wave, which it was not designed to withstand. But it doesn’t mention that this particular quake centered more than 100 miles offshore, while reactors such as Diablo Canyon, San Onofre, Indian Point and many more are within 3 miles of fault lines capable of delivering even larger quakes directly into the reactors’ underbellies. All three Fukushima reactors operating at the time went into core melt and exploded. But quakes closer in would reduce reactors to hot rubble, releasing clouds far more lethal than anything we wish to contemplate.
To its credit the Journal has published a rebuttal ( http://online.wsj.com/...) from Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, who points out that Japan’s exposure would be would be far higher if prevailing winds didn’t take Fukushima’s fallout into the oceans. But like Chernobyl, Fukushima’s radiation has long since reached our shores; at least one study shows an American death toll already in the thousands ( http://nukefree.org/... ).
Now 67 years since Hiroshima/Nagasaki, 33 since Three Mile Island, 26 since Chernobyl, the atomic industry still says radioactive fallout is good for us.
The Journal might instead heed Jeffrey Immelt, president of General Electric, who says nuclear power has no economic future. GE’s reactors designs are planted from Fukushima to both American coasts and throughout Europe. But Immelt says GE wants to join Siemens and others in getting out of the nuclear business and into Solartopia, ie wind, solar, etc.
That the Wall Street Journal has published a pseudo-scientific apologia so riddled with obscene inaccuracies seems a white flag of surrender from a technology once sold as “too cheap to meter.” No verbal contortions can ever cleanse what the Journal’s competitor, Forbes Magazine, long ago branded “the largest managerial disaster in American history.”
Sadly, we continue to pay for it with both our money and our lives.
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Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.harveywasserman.ning.com, along with WILL THE GOP STEAL AMERICA’S 2012 ELECTION? co-authored with Bob Fitrakis.