The super-storm that pounded the Atlantic Seaboard showed telltale signs of the global atmospheric effects from the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. Sandy can be added to the list of unseasonable or freakish weather events of 2012, including "winter tornadoes" that swept areas of the U.S. in January and the "derechos" or straight-line thunderstorms that smashed into Washington D.C. in July.

Why did Sandy form over the Atlantic Ocean, several weeks after the end of the autumn hurricane season? The answer was there in the daily weather reports throughout October. Months ahead of its normal southward dip, the northern jet stream arced downed across the western half of the United States. The high-pressure zone dropped temperatures to unseasonably cool numbers west of the Mississippi, and thus conversely trapped hot and moist air over the eastern states and Atlantic Ocean.

The yin-and-yang of a North American continent bifurcated between a cool West and warm East is what gave birth to Sandy. The humidity built up outside the Caribbean, formed into hurricane Sandy, and then spiraled into the Bahamas, killing some 60 people. Next in line for destruction: the vast swath between the Carolinas and New England, with unprecedented flood damage to the Big Apple and New Jersey.

The Eastern Seaboard crisis is not over. Now that Sandy has passed, its heat dissipates. The resulting drop in air pressure allows the jet stream's cold front to move into a vacuum, condensing airborne moisture into snow and hail. Blizzards are already hitting West Virginia with more soon to come.

Radiation Energizes The Skies

The jet stream flowing across northeast Japan, across the Northern Pacific and then over Canada and the northern states, carries tons of radioactive particles from Fukushima that are electrically-charging the atmosphere. The high energy from those isotopes is triggering cloud formation while amplifying wind, precipitation and lightning...and propelling destructive storms across North America and on into Europe.

The climate scientists, many of them meteorologists funded directly or indirectly by the nuclear-power industry, are predictably laying the blame for Sandy and other freakish storms on "global warming". The build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as deplorable as it is, remains still too low and gradual to account for a storm on the scale of Sandy and this past year's off-season weather anomalies.

In a similar denial, nuclear scientists working for Japanese utilities are claiming that hydrogen gas - not nuclear isotopes - led to the massive explosions that devastated the Fukushima reactors. In both cases, the gross disproportion between cause and effect is like the difference between a mouse and a whale - butterfly effect notwithstanding, since the butterflies of Fukushima are facing extinction.

Nuclear power is far more dangerous in its vast array of harmful, deadly effects than the public and regulators have been led to believe by industry lobbyists. It was no less than atomic-bomb creator Robert Oppenheimer who stated that the act of splitting the atom - the unleashing nuclear energy - is "the destroyer of worlds". As it stands after Fukushima, our world is the next to be utterly wiped out - if the nuclear industry is allowed to get away with its violence against life.

Time-bombs set to explode

Now that New Jersey and New York City have had a taste of what a few damaged reactors halfway around the world can do, the time has come for a closer look at the many "world destroyers" scattered across the United States. The New Jersey Oyster Creek nuclear power station came within a hair's breadth on the flood-line from a total knockout of electrical systems, which could have triggered a catastrophic meltdown.

In Louisiana, the Napoleonville sinkhole is spewing radiation, with the probable source been the Waterford nuclear plant located atop the very same aquifer. Nuclear particles bubbling out along the Gulf Coast, whose warm waters add to the force of hurricanes, is a looming threat to public safety, to say the least.

The Department of Energy is hiding the facts about the many deadly consequences and unthinkable risks of nuclear power, even as NASA conducts satellite studies of the damage inflicted to the atmosphere by continual Fukushima radiation releases. Both presidential candidates are partisans and protectors of the nuclear industry, particularly Exelon, operator of crippled Oyster Creek, and Entergy, which runs accident-prone Waterford and Indian Point plants. The damaged reactors in Japan were designed by GE and Westinghouse...and the chickens are coming home to roost.

Soon after their shocked reaction to the Fukushima meltdowns, residents along the Atlantic Seaboard went right back to sleep, assuming that fallout from halfway around the planet could not threaten their lives. Their comfort zone, reinforced by a sold-out news media and bought politicians, proved to be a false sense of security. The storm has passed but the underlying problem will not go away until a total ban is imposed on nuclear power.

Yoichi Shimatsu is a science journalist based in Hong Kong and former editor of the Japan Times weekly edition in Tokyo.