TEPCO Continues to Play Coy With Public Safety


B. McPherson
How many of these children will develop cancers?
Tokyo Electric Power Company continues to bob and weave around the truth of what is really happening at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power station. Since the disastrous tsunami , explosion and meltdown of the power station, the for-profit electrical company has played fast and loose.

February 6th they revealed that radioactive levels of water on the seaward side of the ruined reactors were one thousand times higher than allowed. They had the readings last July, but did not reveal them because the Stronium 90 count read 900 000 becquerels per litre and they thought that too high so they retested the water, found it really was five million and kept it quiet for seven months.

Since the disastrous earthquake hit Japan in 2011 crippling the nuclear power station, a litany of coverups and missteps has continued. Little attention has been paid to the real human cost of the wrecked plant.

Perhaps the most pathetic are the children of Fukushima Prefecture who are developing thyroid cancer. Radioactive iodine is suspected of causing the cancers, but like tobacco and cancer, the link is not proven. When Chernobyl blew up in 1986, thyroid cancers spiked there as well. While the experts argue about an iron clad link between the radioactivity and cancer, 75 people have been diagnosed with the life threatening disease.

For the rest of the world watching the dangerous removal of fuel rods from a rooftop pool to the Rube Goldberg fix to prevent more toxic water reaching the Pacific Ocean, the spectre of another earthquake hitting the crumbling plant is very real.

Two days ago 2 category 5 earthquakes hit the region. The spectre of a damaging earthquake which will bring the tottering buildings down amid radioactive clouds is very real.

One would think that given the damage that Japan has caused to the world, that they would have soured on the “friendly atom”. Nope. At least in Tokyo. In the elections held there Sunday the two anti-nuclear candidates were defeated. PM ABE was quick to speak about the restarting of nuclear plants. The door is open to construct more potential death factories.

Japan Times 
The Bulletin


I’ve heard that the citizens of Pompeii were optimists too.
Location: Fukushima, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan

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