FALL-OUT

By Uli Schmetzer
www.uli-schmetzer.com

Melbourne, Australia, April 28, 2011 – While Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant keeps shedding radiation at an unprecedented rate our mainstream media appears to have taken no further interest in what scientists like Australian Helen Caldicott bluntly describe as “the greatest health hazard the world has ever known.”

Behind the sudden silence about what threatens to become a colossal manmade disaster is a concerted effort by the governments of industrialized nations to save a nuclear industry they see as the only viable means to maintain the high level of energy consumption that will guarantee the comfortable lifestyle of the world’s affluent societies and assure the survival of their own crooked and corrupt governance systems.

Trillions of dollars are invested already in nuclear power and hundreds of nuclear plants are being constructed or planned to come on stream. Scrapping nuclear power and nuclear plants would probably send into bankruptcy many of the enterprises and mega-corporations who finance the election campaigns and expenses of our members of governments and are part of the de facto corporate powers running the world today. In the absence of viable alternate energy it would plunge the world into an acute energy crisis.

In the brutal equation of modern economic doctrine the lives or the health of tens of millions of people have now to be sacrificed to safeguard individual and corporate investments, maintain stock market prices high and retain an expensive armament industry and Armed Forces whose main task today is not to keep world peace but ensure (as gunboat diplomacy did in the past) that the world’s vital resources are either controlled by or accessible to the major powers.

The stark reality of this economic doctrine is that millions, possibly hundreds of millions, will die over a period of between five and sixty years as the result of radiation. Millions of babies will be born with defects. Cancer will become rampant, so will lethal organ failures. For this reason the control of negative information about Fukushima is downplayed or given a positive spin just as our current wars are officially fought to ‘liberate’ enslaved nations when we are actually destroying them.

The mass media, loyal serfs of power politics and corporations, perpetuate these ‘official’ lies and subterfuges. A corporation itself today, the media is easily convinced that airing or printing the warnings of nuclear Cassandras would ‘panic the public.’ Following the initial reporting of the horror of the tsunami’s effect and the possible meltdown of reactors (which has already occurred) Fukushima went off the radar in the mainstream media. Today only concerned Internet blogs carry reports that radiation carried by wind and ocean currents has increased dramatically and twenty U.S. cities and nine U.S. States have registered radiation contamination from Fukushima. (Probably other countries around the world have similar levels but are not measuring radiation.)

But officials, especially in Japan and the U.S. and government agencies keep telling their public these radiation levels are ‘harmless,’ ‘minute’, ‘miniscule’ and there is ‘no need for alarm.’

To any bona fide scientist that is a lie.

In its efforts to bail out the nuclear industry some media outlets have become even ridiculous. Media stooges like commentator Ann Coulter have even promoted the notion that a little bit of radiation is good for you and it ‘prevents’ cancer. (One blogger suggested Ms Coulter should buy a ticket to Japan to inhale more of the beneficial effects at the source).

No one seems to remember the 2005 findings by the U.S. National Academy of Science that there is ‘no safe level’ or threshold for exposure to radiation.

Scientist Caldicott, a physician, author and anti-nuclear advocate considers the current silence on the Fukushima disaster “the most monstrous cover-up in the history of medicine” and says radiation fallout from Fukushima is many times worse then the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster which allegedly cost the lives of one million people and contaminated 40 per cent of the European food chain – until today.

Instead of being educated how to confront or minimize the problem our couch-prone public is being entertained with such brainless shows as ‘Dancing with the Stars’ or ‘American Idol’ - or with the fairytale of a royal wedding in London.

In the meantime, silently, Fukushima spills into the sea some 520 tons of nuclear runoff a week, 20,000 times the amount the plant is permitted to dump into the ocean annually. With its roofs blown off by explosions the plant emits radiation clouds, invisible, tasteless and odorless. Wind and ocean currents carry the emissions around the world. Worse, Fukushima contains enough deadly plutonium (mainly from decommissioned nuclear warheads purchased from the U.S. and Russia and used as fuel for reactors worldwide) to kill every man, woman and child on our planet – should it ever find its way out.

Some scientists believe plutonium is already escaping while the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP) busily downplays the effects of the emissions on human health. But then, as is well known, the ICRP exists mainly to shield the nuclear industry against compensation and anti-nuclear activists.
Ends

Uli Schmetzer was a foreign correspondent for