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13 Years On, Fukushima Aftereffects
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By Yoichi Shimatsu | |
The long-term threat from thirteen years of constant exposure to radioactivity is being topped up with releases of thousands of tons highly radioactive tritium-laced water drained out of temporary storage tanks at the ruins of the TEPCO nucler plant in Fukushima. Year 13 of that titanic disaster falls on March 11 (3-ll), marked by the release of the fourth batch of radioactive water from that site’s storage tanks. TEPCO is by now in the process of dumping 7.800 metric tons of tritiated water (about 10,tons) over a 17 day period. Over the coming 12 months, a total 54,000 tons of tritium-laced water will be dispatched along the pathway to the North American Current flowing to the North American Pacific Coast. That payload will be followed a year from now with a greater 6th nuclear-water dump. Do these deliveries represent a death sentence for the populations of North America? A nuclear bomb can destroy a city, whereas nucleated fog and rain will eliminate nearly all forms of life across the USA. Meanwhile unfiltered radioactive water is pouring out of the three-story pit below that nuclear facility into the Pacific Ocean. This more lethal wastewater flow is highly irradiated by raw chunks of uranium and by now dozens of other radioactive elements and transitional compounds of atomic decay. Neither TEPCO nor the UN Atomic Energy Agency has mentioned a word about this free-flowing super-hot radioactivity or its impact on Pacific Current and the Jet Stream flowing to the USA. The weather news outlets dare not mention this ongoing nuclear contamination as the prime cause of the unprecedented climate disturbances over the North America, including recurrent massive flooding followed by drought, unprecedented mountain snowfall followed by rapid melting and wildfires, and hosts of tornadoes and lighting strikes across the Continental USA. Birthing is now a Crime against Humanity As the heat of summer approaches, tritiated fog and rainfall can be expected to cause a massive increase in health disorders (due to direct exposure to tritium and ingestion or contact with the heavier isotopes). Meanwhile, radioactive particles are seeping into reservoirs and aquifers, poisoning the water supply for humans, animals and plant life. Another consequence will be raging forest fires triggered by concentrations of high-energy tritium left on wood as irradiated water evaporates. We are witnessing a major extinction event, and in contrast to the fetal implant debate, the medical establishment simply ignores this far greater threat to human health and indeed survival of this species. Giving birth nowadays dooms the child to an undeserved fate, for which parents in a just world would be prosecuted for their silent complicity with the global nuclear cover-up. Unfortunately, there is little in the way of self-defense that one can do, other than avoiding exposure to rainfall, fog and stepping in puddles. As in welterweight champ Carlos Palomino’s amusing TV ad for Miller beer warning about thirst in Mexico: “Don’t drink the water.” By now the entire North American water supply poses a serious threat to your health. You are a passenger aboard a ship of fools, come hell or high water. Perhaps this disturbing fact might explain the symbolic meaning of holy water and dipping the fingers when making the sign of the Cross. Water is Life. And by now it’s too late for baptism,. Which gets to the sin of the Kyoto Summit of 1997 which inaugurated the global “environmental” movement against coal, oil and gas in favor of nuclear reactor-generated electricity. That UN exercise in hypocrisy was presided over by Al Gore, the senator from the Tennessee Valley Authority, site of four massive reactors and the Oak Ridge National Lab, which processed the uranium payload for Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb. That “Green” kickoff party was paid for by Toyota, the pioneer of electric cars (to be fueled in Tokyo from TEPCO Fukushima) and by co-sponsor Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner operator of the doomed nuclear plant. What is needed now is an international corps of green activists to shovel the burnt-out nuclear waste out of the basement and into lead-clad tunnels. Any volunteers? The Green movement is a pathetic arm (more of a little pinky finger) of the Nuclear Establishment that continues its diabolical mission of poisoning the Earth. So don’t fill up with e-battery water, stick with gasoline to show your opposition to the nuclear mania. Grotesque Cover-up TEPCO is lying. Does that accusation qualify as news anymore? Photos taken by angry nuclear clean-up squads at TEPCO don’t lie, they just remain silent. Sometimes, however, the stress load goes far beyond deception, and somebody must shout, as in the recent photo taken of a naked coworker wallowing, dead inside a nuclear fuel pool. The unfortunate victim of radioactivity exposure lost his uniform and underwear to dissolution by high-energy nuclear particles, which dissolved - burned away - the cloth. His pectoral muscles are pock-marked, due to the gradual melting away of fat, leaving woven strands of muscle tissue. The photo reminded me of a big guy wallowing in an onsen after work hours. Unfortunately he did not die with his arms wrapped around a bottle of sake. There is no possibility of corpse retrieval, so this fellow’s corpse will gradually boil off like a chicken in a soup pot. During one of my dozen research ventures into the Fukushima Nuclear Exclusion Zone, I met one of the independent contractors who worked at the clean-up site. The workforce, he explained, consisted of low-end laborers recruited by yakuza (gangster) outfits in Okinawa and Asahikawa, Hokkaido. These were a motley crew of chronic alcoholics, released prison convicts and recently married lower-class manual laborers. TEPCO’s “health and welfare” policy was to immediately ship back anyone who showed symptoms of nuclear poisoning, usually indicated by a chronic nose bleed. On one of my later intrusions into the Zone, I met a clueless young couple from Malaysia, who failed to comprehend my advice to return home immediately if they intended to ever have children. Based on the heftiness of the melting corpse in the reactor pit, my guess is that he’s (was) Chinese, like one of the expendables in Jackie Chan’s brilliant movie “Shinjuku Incident,” just another Chineman who’ll never find his way home. Inside the Global Death Trap The question that arises is: Are there any safe havens on this planet? For anyone old enough to remember the Gregory Peck film “On The Beach”, the answer is “absolutely not” for we have turned Paradise into a Death Trap. For those of us who have enjoyed a well-traveled life, the answer is obvious that humanity is on the brink of extinction and blame cannot be attributed to some divine plan or natural order, since its our own damned fault because Fukushima and the rest of the nuclear nihilism could have been avoided. By now it’s way too late. Year 13 is thus a moment to contemplate the rather short human span on this blue planet and accept the fact that our species could have done far better if we had not allowed ourselves to submit in silence to our own fears and to Satanic promises of cheap power. Well, it’s too late now for regrets when Death knocks at every door. As in Euripides’ tragedy “Medea”, power-hungry vanity results in insanity and grotesque retribution, as now being seen in the ceaseless flows of radioactivity out of the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant, which was fueled by H-bomb grade isotopes from the PANTEX nuclear reprocessing plant in Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle, now the scene of no less than six (6) raging grassland fires. As detailed in the Madsen Report, that nuke facility was the source of President George W. Bush’s secret shipments of highly volatile nuclear fuel to Japan via Israel. For the sake of non-believers of scientific realism, I should point out that the anomaly of an oddly shortened ski season despite record snowfall is due to the abundance of tritium inside those icy crystals. Thus“hot snow” in the Sierras and the Rockies melts quickly. The net result is not only radioactive contamination of the nation’s water supply but also and the igniting of unprecedented wildfires, as happened last year across Canada. The residue isotopes from Fukushima are branding and burning down the forests, grasslands and homes across an North America apocalypse. Facing the End Briefly, I should point out that tritiated water out of Fukushima is merely one of the radioactive pathways with a far-greater threat of dozens of raw nuclear isotopes pouring out of the three-story deep basement of the TEPCO plant, which remains full of melted-down fuel rods in quantities sufficient to end all forms of life on Earth, with humanity the first to go. That melting body of a dead worker in a pool of radioactive water is an icon of our universal condition as each of us awaits an inevitable unnatural death. Meanwhile, the politicians, nuclear industry, scientists and professors have nothing to say about their debacle of their suicidal atomic madness. Indeed their “solution” to so-called global warming is to switch the oil-driven economy to electricity from aged nuclear power plants, many of those long past expiration date and leaking radioactivity into the waterways and jet-stream. Do not mourn - as a witness to human sinfulness, you should by now realize that the gift of Paradise is or was fragile and indeed ephemeral, demanding daily thanks, gratefulness, honest labor and goodness in every step one takes. We have failed, miserably and indeed shamefully, but soon our time will be over, and Earth will go back to its original condition as a lifeless rock on the edge of an uncaring Galaxy. How does the unlucky number 13 play into this unthinkable drama? Judas was the 13th man seated at the edge of the Last Supper, and unfortunately we are his treacherous spawn who brought down reprisal upon ourselves. Fukushima is by now the very definition of sinfulness. Go in peace.
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