Plume-Gate: Fukushima two years later

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on 11^th March 2011 was the greatest nuclear disaster, alongside Chernobyl, that the world has ever known. 

Yet it was only on 12^th October 2012 that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) admitted that it had failed to take stronger measures to prevent the disaster for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants. 

As of 13^th April 2013, radiation is still leaking from the facility, and the disaster is only beginning to wreak its havoc.  Indeed, two years after the incident, Japan is no closer to solving the myriad of problems faced in containing this horrendous incident.

Until now, General Electric (GE), a behemoth corporation that owns much of the media and is the designer of the Fukushima reactors, has diligently been running a total media blackout.  However, leaks, not unlike the radiation leaks still underway at Fukushima, are becoming more apparent because of recent developments. After the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit Japan and ravaged the nuclear facility in Fukushima in 2011, news is finally breaking through about how bad things really are.

Martin Fackler reported in the New York Times on 29^th April 2013: “Ground water is pouring into the plant’s devastated reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute.  It becomes highly contaminated there before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system.  A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive waste water, stored in huge tanks sprawling over 42 acres.  The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic sized pools.”

He added further: “TEPCO plans to chop down a small forest on its southern edge to make room for hundreds of more tanks, a task that becomes more urgent when underground pits, built to handle the overflow, sprang leaks in recent weeks.” 

There is concern that future leaks could reach the Pacific Ocean, and TEPCO’s worst fear is that they will run out of storage space.

Adding to this, Mike Adams, reporting for Natural News on 6^th May 2012, stated: “If reactor number 4 suffers a structural failure, the release of radiation from the 1,535 spent fuel rods would make it virtually impossible for work to continue on the site, potentially resulting in a release of radiation that would destroy the world environment.”

Let’s forget for a moment about health care reform, gun control, and the economy; this news should be hitting the front pages of newspapers and internet sites across the globe on a daily basis.     

Additionally, reports on intellihub.com on 7^th January 2013 and confirmed in Wikipedia statistics state that irradiated fish captured near the inoperative nuclear plant showed 25,000 becquerels of cesium per kilo, which is actually 250 times the level determined safe by the government. 

Certainly, the casualties have begun to pile up around Fukushima. Half the children in and around the contaminated area are being diagnosed with cysts and nodules on their thyroid glands and showing early warning signs of potential thyroid cancer.  Even in Tokyo, doctors are reporting dramatically increased incidents of incurable diarrhea, non-stop nose bleeds and flu-like symptoms.  A Japanese pediatrician even put out a YouTube video asking for help from outside since the Japanese government is not helping as they should. 

Does Plume-Gate, a term adopted in conspiracy circles to describe the media blackout of the potentially greatest disaster ever facing humanity, ring any bells?  Are the cover-ups, media blackouts and government agency lies happening so far away that we need not concern ourselves with it? Is it lies, leaks and corner-cutting combined with natural disasters that are at the heart of this catastrophe and other corporate disasters on the magnitude of Chernobyl, BP and Exon Valdez?

Derrick Jensen, philosopher and award winning author of over a dozen books critiquing civilization, opposed global warming activist George Monbiot in Orion Magazine in Sept/Oct 2011. Jensen said: “If the capitalists can just design this monstrous process better, he [Monbiot] seems to believe, they can continue to produce and concentrate highly radioactive materials without causing more accidents.”

Jenson continued: “Similar arguments were made after Oak Ridge, Windscale, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. You’d think by now we’d all know better. And you’d think it wouldn’t take a lot of imagination to see how routinely performing an action as stupendously dangerous as the intentional concentration of highly toxic and radioactive materials would render their eventual catastrophic release not so much an accident as an inevitability, with quickly giving way to the questions of when, how often, and how bad.”

With the entire world hinging on reactor number 4 at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and the small army of workers racing against time and the weather to keep the reactors cool and the nuclear waste contained, maybe it is time we started to consider the deeper problem of a world so intent on expanding and keeping its current luxuries in place at the expense of the world itself. 

With 435 nuclear reactors worldwide in operation, 66 more slated for construction and another 160 on order or planned, many undoubtedly being designed by the very engineers who control much of the media, perhaps it is seriously time to consider where all this development is leading us. 

Jennifer Bilek