Sunday, July 22, 2012

Fukushima, The Arrogance of Power and Disposable Life


The Washington Post today is reporting on the current scandal regarding Fukushima workers. The disregard for the value of human life evident in the story reported here echoes the past.

The desire to control the atom is like the desire to control the one ring that binds them all in Lord of the Rings.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Ring

The one who wears the one ring has absolute control over all other beings.

However, the one ring is evil and corrodes the character of each who wear it and all who seek it for the purposes of power.

Control over fission is the elusive "one ring" that corrupts absolutely all who seek it.

The heart of the lie is that the ring enslaves, rather than empowers.

So it is with nuclear.

Those who seek nuclear power become vehicles of chaos and destroy the lives of all those who they touch.

See below several stories about the dispossession of human life that is happening now and that occurred decades ago:

Japan probes under-reporting of Fukushima radiation dosage By Reuters, Published: July 21 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japan-probes-under-reporting-of-fukushima-radiation-dosage/2012/07/21/gJQAdgJw0W_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines

Excerpt — Japan’s Health Ministry has said it will investigate reports that workers at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant were urged by a subcontractor to place lead around radiation detection devices in order to stay under a safety threshold for exposure.

The Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported Saturday that an executive from Build-Up, a subcontractor to plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), had told workers to cover the devices, called dosimeters, when working in high-radiation areas.

MAJIA HERE: This is outrageous.

In March 2012 there were rumors circulating that between 700 and 4000 plant workers may already have died
http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/between-700-and-4000-fukushima-workers.html

The lack of concern for the safety of workers at the Fukushima plant reminds me of the treatment of Navajo uranium workers and "downwinders" of atmospheric testing during the Cold War.

Today those who were poisoned by the callous disregard for the toxic effects of radiation have some legal recourse, albeit it can never begin to address the pain and suffering.

What is interesting about the compensation program is that educational material about it exonerates the government of any responsibility for harm by asserting that knowledge about the effects of ionizing radiation on human health was so incomplete that policy makers have no direct moral culpability

National Radiation Exposure Screening & Education Program http://www.hrsa.gov/gethealthcare/conditions/radiationexposure/

[Excerpt] The Radiation Exposure Screening & Education Program (RESEP) helps individuals who live (or lived) in areas where U.S. nuclear weapons testing occurred.

RESEP was created by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) Amendments of 2000 to help thousands of individuals diagnosed with cancer and other diseases caused by exposure to nuclear fallout or nuclear materials such as uranium.

The program awards grants to health care providers in the 12 states most affected by the Cold War's nuclear weapons industry. The grantees serve radiation-exposed individuals and help them establish eligibility for the Radiation Exposure Compensation Program.
About Radiation Exposure

The United States conducted 227 above-ground and 828 below-ground nuclear weapons tests between July 1945 and November 1962. Many of the above-ground tests released radioactive material into the atmosphere that reached the ground as nuclear fallout.

Because the dangers of radiation exposure were unknown at the time, workers were not protected and people who lived near the test sites were not warned or evacuated.

Workers and residents may have been exposed to radiation externally -- touching fallout on the ground -- or internally -- breathing contaminated air, eating contaminated foods and drinking contaminated water.

Majia here: THIS IS A LIE. 


The dangers of radiation - particularly X-Rays and Radium - were known by the entire literate population in the US by the 1930s because of the trial of the radium girls.http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/icrp-versus-ecrp.html


The US Atomic Energy Commission deliberately manipulated the findings and reporting of the first "independent" study in the US on the biological effects of ionizing radiation. http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/icrp-versus-ecrp.html

The US government's retroactive compensation programs imply a denial of culpability by deceiving the public into believing that knowledge about radiation's harmful effects are some how 'NEW"

S.791 -- Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Amendments of 2011 (Introduced in Senate - IS)
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.791:

NEED PROOF OF GOVERNMENT DECEPTION AND CULPABILITY?
 

Read Paul Langley’s Medicine and the Bomb: Deceptions from Trinity to Maralinga 
http://www.fastpencil.com/publications/4282-Medicine-and-the-Bomb

It embodies the best tradition of engaged scholarship and offers the reader insight into one of the most disturbing applications of medical research found in modern history as research about the health effects of ionizing radiation was weaponized by the Manhattan Project.

Langley provides detailed historical documentation of how medical investigation of ionizing radiation conducted before the war was appropriated for wartime purposes. His careful analysis demonstrates that Manhattan project participants were cognizant that the human casualties of the atomic bomb would far exceed the direct damage caused by its explosive force.

Research on nuclear medicine from the period 1934 to 1940 had established that radiation exposure caused a range of harmful health impacts, including adverse effects for white blood cell counts, which had a wide range of somatic consequences.

During the war, researchers who had been studying radiation and medicine were employed by the Manhattan Project to focus on adverse effects, sometimes using human subjects. Pre-war and wartime findings were incorporated into military expectations for atomic bomb casualties.

In this fashion, the strategic assessments of the effects of the atomic bomb essentially weaponized the anticipated adverse health impacts of radiation. Langley’s findings are also disturbing because they demonstrate that after the war the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had conclusive information based on the research of Dr. J. G. Hamilton about the dangers of radiation on human health – particularly from internalized alpha and beta emitters –and yet the AEC persisted in trivializing the radiological effects of atmospheric testing by equating all forms of radiation with “sunshine."

Nowhere else will the reader find such a well-documented account of the use and abuse of research on the biological effects of radiation conducted from the 1930s through World War II.


PAST BLOG POSTS


Debating Radiation Safety: Background Informationhttp://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/debating-radiation-safety-background.html

1 comment:

  1. The nuclear cabal had its origins in the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. The were well aware of the dangers of radiation. After the war, the cabal avoided being broken up, and consolidated its position by fomenting the Cold War, creating an arms race, and dragging the world to the brink of nuclear war.

    McCarthyism, HUAC, and intimidation of the media and film industry by the blacklist were part and parcel of the consolidation of power. By the mid-50's it had spread its tentacles into academia, industry, and the media. It is more powerful now than it was then.

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