Naturally, the Los Angeles Times Fukushima-denier article was picked up for “curated” aggregation by LA Observed. “With anyone who uses Facebook exposed to bogus but viral hype about supposed high radiation levels, public officials and scientists have put out the word that for them the evidence is in,” a blog post read January 12, 2014. “Things are still dicey to be sure at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power — and likely to get worse before they get better. But that’s a separate question from whether Pacific fish are being seriously contaminated, and the threat of impact here is yet another separate issue.”
A blogger for LA Weekly, which this reporter freelanced for from 1986 to 2012, referred to Santa Monica rain which EnviroReporter.com tested at over five times background in April 2012 as “acid rain” in a blog post covering what we had discovered. When this reporter objected and asked that the word “acid” be removed because it wasn’t accurate or that I would have to correct the mistake in the post’s comments, the blogger became defensive.
“I think there’s a popular perception about acid rain simply being toxic rain, but I’ll change it,” he responded. “I fixed your niggles. It’s the last time I’m picking anything up from you though, given your threats.”
Threats? Asking for a stupid mistake to be corrected is a threat coming from someone he knew for years from mutually contributing to the now defunct Los Angeles CityBeat? He stayed true to his word, though, and nothing critical of the Fukushima fiasco and its impact here has come out of the ever-thinning paper since. The once vaunted LA Weekly now investigates stories like broken parking meters.
Perhaps the blogger, who had previously won a Pulitzer Prize no less with a team of reporters at the Los Angeles Times, should be given some slack considering the shape of science knowledge in the United States at large. In short, the country is as dumb as a stump when it comes to all things scientific.
A National Science Foundation survey of 2,200 Americans released in early February found that 26 percent of those surveyed incorrectly answered the question “Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth.” The same survey found that only 48 percent thought that human beings “developed from earlier species of animals.”
Results from a 2012 Program for International Student Assessment showed this race to the bottom is nothing new and getting worse. U.S. students fell behind 29 nations and jurisdictions worldwide in mathematics, falling six slots from 23 just three years prior. Science acumen had American pupils placed behind 22 other education systems in the 2012 survey.
Even mountains of money thrown at American kids’ educations refuse to budge their rankings. Spending more than most countries on our students, about $115,000 per pupil, hasn’t amounted to much. Slovak kids perform at the same level as American ones with a per student expenditure of around $53,000 per pupil (which is less than half for any arithmetically challenged American reading this).
Soboroff showed Hill a newly purchased Geiger counter which was reading background outside the medical school and asked if it was anything to be worried about. “It would need to be showing tens of thousands of them,” Dr. Hill said. “It would be 10,000 instead of 0.1.”
Tens of thousands of times background is something to be concerned about when the California Highway Patrol considers three times background a hazmat situation? Preposterous isn’t strong enough a word to describe Hill’s hogwash.
It isn’t easily discernable which is more terrifying – a medical doctor who believes this rubbish or one that teaches it to future medical doctors. One can only wonder how many patients have and will get too much radiation from USC’s glowing school of radiobiology graduates.
Hill is not alone in his hooey. University of California Berkeley nuclear physics professor Kai Vetter went even further in Fukushima denial when interviewed by San Francisco’s CBS affiliate station KPIX-5 January 31. When asked about Radiation Station Pacifica California‘s David Crain and his use of an Inspector nuclear radiation monitor, Vetter blew off any remote possibility that such advanced Geiger counters work.
“A Geiger counter is not good enough,” said Vetter. “Not good enough at all.”
Vetter was not done. “We still see Cesium 137 back from the atmospheric tests in the 40s and 50s,” Vetter said. “We still see that. It’s, in a way, part of our natural background now.”
So now one of the fiercest manmade radionuclides is part of our “natural” background radiation? Is that like murder being part a “natural” cause of death because it is so common? Following Vetter’s logic, the answer is yes. And, once again, UC Berkeley has outdone USC but not in a good way. Perhaps most shocking is that Hill and Vetter didn’t think anybody would notice that what they were saying was untrue.
Meltdown denying maven Kim Martini, upon whose shoddy pronouncements so much of this hyperbolic media nonsense has been based was right in one thing: a widely distributed cover story artwork of a Ventura County Reporter feature as fear-stoking fallaciousness. The article was written by this reporter, who had nothing to do with the cover art selected to accompany it.
Martini had VC Reporter dead to rights. When this reporter saw the massive mistake, I knew that the Fukushima deniers would have a field day with it.
“The last feature was damaged due to the incorrect use of an earthquake shockwave map on the cover to represent what?” I subsequently wrote to the managing editor. “I don’t know. Fukushima contamination certainly did not and does not flow like the illustration. I repeatedly have had to explain that it was not my mistake, but the paper’s, as it angered a number of my readers.”
This wasn’t the last inadvertent sabotaging of this reporter’s work through art or editing. And I was not alone. These ‘own goals’ were a far cry from when the paper ran stories that changed Southern California history, like Rocketdyne Ranch in 2002. The decision to no longer write for publications that mistakenly damage my work was not an easy one. This reporter has had a long and fruitful experience with print media and wants it to survive and thrive.
Newspapers aren’t the only medium in which legacy media has either ignored or fumbled the Fukushima story. Al Jazeera America, which used the VC Reporter cover as its major art in a January 8 story, went on its own meltdowns denier spree subsequently with Debunking Fukushima’s radiation myths which featured a photoshopped giant mutant squid on a beach. AJA‘s piece was typical of the kind of false information being spun by an apparently clueless media.
“The first thing that people don’t realize is that radiation is natural,” AJA quoted Malcolm Crick, secretary of the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, in the piece. “We are exposed to radiation from outer space… that radiation is there, it provides us with a background exposure as we live on this planet.”
So the cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium 239/240 are natural? AJA doesn’t even ask. Nor does AJA question Crick’s assertion of Fukushima that “there were no radiation-related deaths or acute diseases among the general public and workers.”
Crick is clearly wrong according to numerous Japanese and international reports. A recent report in the Japanese publication Asahi Shimbun reported December 12, 2013 that 59 young people in the Fukushima prefecture had been diagnosed with or are suspected of having thyroid cancer. All of the thyroid cases were in people younger than 18 when the triple meltdowns began March 11, 2011. That the cancers developed so soon after the disaster started is somewhat of a mystery to scientists but that didn’t prevent Toshihide Tsuda, a professor of epidemiology at Okayama University from expressing alarm.
“The rate at which children in Fukushima prefecture have developed thyroid cancer can be called frequent, because it is several times to several tens of times higher,” he told the newspaper.
One of the first peer-reviewed studies to link Fukushima with American deaths was released by the International Journal of Health Services (IJHS) in January 2012. The study was authored by epidemiologist Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, and Janette Sherman, an adjunct professor and toxicologist at the University of Michigan. It found that deaths rose in 122 American cities after the meltdowns began, “Projecting these figures for the entire United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of the expected.”
Popular conspiracy Internet radio host Jeff Rense began a rumor last October 28 that this reporter had been threatened and had disappeared probably due to outspoken Fukushima coverage. Nothing of the sort happened, which I had made clear to him.
The story got so twisted that regular program guest Yoichi Shimatsu speculated that my disappearance coincided with the U.S. Department of Energy’s impending deal with Vietnam for nuclear reactors which may be something I might have to do with.
The bogus threat rumor ripped through the Internet in large part because of comments made on the most trafficked news aggregator on the Fukushima crisis, Enenews.com. Claiming over two million visitors a month, Enenews also publishes thousands of comments, including ones about this reporter’s apparent demise.
“I read some comments on ENENEWS that you and a few others have not been heard from for some time now and it was raising some suspicion about your safety,” wrote “Sunnie” from St. Louis in an email to EnviroReporter.com January 29. “I took it to another level, as I have been noticing some ‘untimely’ deaths, etc amongst some Fukushima ‘insiders’ and have been keeping an eye on the situation. I was fearful that you and your wife, Denise, might be among them.”
These kinds of comments on Enenews perpetuated the myth that this reporter and his editor had to hide from some unseen wholly fictional threat. A news organization that has been threatened and hides is not the reality or image EnviroReporter.com wants its readers to have of it. We cover serious subjects and scurrilous chatter perpetuated on the largest Fukushima disaster news aggregator can be harmful.
@zach: Apparently you’re a student from St Michael’s Grammar School, an Australian co-educational independent day school located in St Kilda, Victoria that costs tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend. I’m afraid that while that tony education has taught you how to construct poorly-punctuated sentences, it also did not impart the critical thinking skill set that would have enabled you to see that the “perfect crime” that this article exposes had nothing to do with your prattle here. Give it another read.
A perfect crime? why would japan do this to try and harm a few americans when it killed thousands of their own, cost them hundreds of billions of dollars and even made large parts of their own country uninhabitable due to radiation?
I think you have to be pretty big headed to believe that japan decided to do that to attempt to harm a couple of americans in such a far fetched way.
Start having some sympathy for the Japanese who had their lives ripped apart by the disaster.
@All: The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works sent EnviroReporter.com the following regarding progress, or shockingly no progress, done to make more safe America’s nuclear power plants and infrastructure. Having just finished Fukushima – The Perfect Crime? will probably have our readers not very surprised at what the outstanding, yet sadly outgoing, junior Senator from California has to say:
Opening Statement of Ranking Member Barbara Boxer
EPW Hearing on “Oversight of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”
October 7, 2015
(Remarks as prepared for delivery)
Today, the Environment and Public Works Committee is holding an oversight hearing on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). I remain concerned about the slow pace at which the NRC is implementing measures intended to protect American nuclear plants in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns that occurred in Japan in March 2011.
It has been more than four years since the Fukushima disaster, and Japan continues to face challenges in its cleanup efforts.
Only one of Japan’s 43 nuclear reactors has been turned back on since the Fukushima disaster. A recent analysis by Reuters found that of the other 42 operable nuclear reactors in Japan, only seven are likely to be turned on in the next few years. Reuters also found that “nine reactors are unlikely to ever restart and that the fate of the remaining 26 looks uncertain.”
For the last four years, I have been saying that in order to earn the confidence of the public, we must learn from the Fukushima disaster and do everything we can to avoid similar disasters here in the U.S.
Following the last NRC oversight hearing in April, I met with Chairman Burns to discuss the commission’s progress on implementation of the Fukushima Near-Term Task Force recommendations. I appreciate the letter he sent me after our meeting outlining the status of the commission’s work and anticipated timelines for completing each of the recommendations.
While I recognize that progress has been made on some of the recommendations of the Post-Fukushima Task Force, I am frustrated and disappointed with the overall slow pace. Not one of the 12 task force recommendations has been fully implemented. And many of the recommendations still have no timeline for action.
I am also concerned with some of the decisions the NRC is making on whether to implement important safety enhancements.
In particular, I am troubled that the Commission overruled staff safety recommendations and voted not to move forward with multiple safety improvements. For example, by a 3 to 1 vote, the Commission decided to remove a requirement that nuclear plants have procedures in place for dealing with severe accidents, like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. These procedures ensure plans are in place when multiple failures of safety equipment occur or other unanticipated events take place.
This requirement was identified in the aftermath of Fukushima, but after years of work on this and other proposals, the Commission simply chose not to move forward. That is unacceptable.
The Commission does not appear to be doing all it can to live up to the NRC’s mission “to ensure the safe use of radioactive materials for beneficial civilian purposes while protecting people and the environment.”
We need to look no further than the two nuclear power plants in my home state. At California’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant, NRC has repeatedly declared the plant safe even after learning of a strong earthquake fault near the plant.
At the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County, which has been closed permanently, the NRC recently issued exemptions to emergency planning requirements. The plant’s operator will no longer be required to maintain detailed plans for the evacuation, sheltering, and medical treatment of people residing in the 10-mile zone around the plant.
I am aware that the NRC is planning a rulemaking on decommissioning issues, but rubber stamping exemptions the way the Commission has is the wrong approach. I believe it is wrong to relax emergency planning requirements with thousands of tons of extremely radioactive spent fuel remaining at the site. The millions of people living in close proximity to the plant deserve better.
The NRC owes it to the citizens of California and the nation to make safety the highest priority and I urge all the Commissioners to refocus your efforts to do just that.
I look forward to discussing these issues with you today.
It should be mandatory that dispensaries test ‘medicinal’ marijuana for the presence of radiation now-along with pesticides, fungicides, etc. Wise up folks and quit smoking it.
@Eric: While it may be understandable to advocate such an extreme act, that would be terrorism which is unacceptable. Plus, there is no way to diminish the tons of goo at Fukushima by exploding the place sky high – radiation can’t be vaporized away, blown apart or scattered enough to be safe. It would make the massive mess even more unmanageable and deadly to flora and fauna on the land and in the sea.
Nuke the reactors. It would do less harm to the environment and oceans
Very good investigative factual journalism.
With regard to mainstream media’s coverage, it appears OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD is exerting it’s full force on this grave issue. For those who are not familiar, OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD was covertly implemented by the CIA soon after the agency was formed after WWII, for the purpose of infiltrating mainstream media and using it as a propaganda tool to promote their many covert agendas. Even though it was ordered by Congress to cease it during the late 1970s, it obviously was not done, and no oversight exists. Sensitive subjects which hit close to home, such as real investigations into murdered presidents, govt involvement in drug traffic, 911 and other false flag operations that factually implicate the true holders of power, will trigger the CIA’s mocking propaganda machine into high gear. And like paid stooges, the mainstream media falls in line with a synchronized goose step. And innocent victims be damned.
Anti-nuclear legend Harvey Wasserman has Michael Collins on as his guest to discuss Fukushima – The Perfect Crime? in this fast-paced show with a host who really knows his radiation. Collins describes radiation discovered along the Pacific coast in Pacifica and Santa Cruz, California, Fukushima-tainted dirt lab tested from the heart of marijuana growing country in Humboldt County, extremely radioactive rain in Death Valley, high radiation found through US EPA RadNet monitors coast to coast, meltdown deniers successfully pulling the wool over the Los Angeles Times, news aggregators and “alternative” news outlets, and the now-infamous Ventura County Reporter cover art for one of Collins’s 2012 Fukushima stories that shows how clueless the media, and Americans in general, are about the ongoing triple meltdowns that began in Fukushima Japan March 11, 2011. Not to be missed rarity.
This IS the perfect crime, because our stooge governments are allowing TEPCO to get away with it.
Specifically, I like how the Japanese Government has taken to explaining the skyrocketing thyroid cancer rates in Fukushima Prefecture — “it’s because we’re testing more thoroughly, not because there are more cancers.”
Yeah, right. If the Japanese Gov’t wasn’t lying its ass off, it would repeat the Fukushima study somewhere out of the immediate fallout zone, and then compare. Please don’t bet on that happening.
You can read some of the sordid details here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/09/fukushima-children-debate-thyroid-cancer-japan-disaster-nuclear-radiation
It’s about time for a bunch of nuke plant employees to show up and mansplain to us that “hardly any radiation was released, nukes are safe, even YOU eat bananas, and …” because we’re all just supposed to believe all the nuke industry’s bullshit.
There is an amazingly concerted effort going on to trivialize Fukushima. As recently as this week, the Japanese government was explaining away the skyrocketing childhood thyroid cancer rates in Fukushima Prefecture as “we’re doing a better job detecting, that’s all.”
“Ignore this situation at your peril.”
That’s a phrase I’ve heard far too often in my life, as to a variety of economic and public health disasters. With respect to radiation from Fukushima reaching the United States, the warning is appropriate.
In 1986, few Americans had ever heard of Ukraine, when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion and meltdown occurred. Whether out of Soviet egotism and pride, or out of fear of intense public anger and its consequences, the highest levels of the Soviet government made decisions to work in near silence (in terms of what the Soviet public knew) to attempt to staunch the continued atmospheric impacts of the explosion and meltdown. Moscow and Leningrad were far from the accident site, the bureaucrats and decision makers’ children were thought to be relatively safe, and catastrophic decisions were made. The residents of Pripyat, the town nearest the reactor, were not evacuated until 2 days after the explosion. Ukrainians living within 20 miles of the reactor were not evacuated until a month later, while Belarussians living in that 20 mile zone were not evacuated at all. The rest of the Soviet population was not aggressively educated on how best to protect themselves from becoming chronically ill from the variety of sources contaminated by the fall out from the burning reactor.
Literally hundreds of thousands of “Soviet citizens” of no consequence, Belarussians living to the north, Russians living in Bryansk Oblast of Russia to the northeast, and Ukrainians living to the east, west and south of Chernobyl were exposed first to airborne radiation from the explosion and fire, then to radiation in their drinking water drawn from the region’s surface waters, and then to radiation in the meat they ate and milk they drank because animal forage had been radioactively contaminated. Belarussians and Ukrainians were also extensively exposed from radioactive contamination of locally grown grain which went into their every day foods. The Soviet government found it inconvenient to try to prevent the public from unknowingly eating radioactively contaminated food (a situation which continues in Belarus today with particular intensity).
Over the succeeding years, the people living in those regions saw a dramatic increase in cancer and related health problems to such an extent that the people now call it “Chornobyl disease”. Birth defects substantially increased. Children died with more frequency than in other eastern European countries. Individual medical doctors in southwest Russia, Belarus and Ukraine began to undertake independent investigations of the effects of radiation on the health of the people. Those physicians wrote about their findings in medical journals published in the Russian and Ukrainian languages. In autopsies of the region’s dead children their organs were examined and Caesium-137 was found in its highest accumulation in the endocrine glands, in particular the thyroid, the adrenals and the pancreas. High levels were also found in the heart, the thymus and the spleen. The average person-on-the-street in the region now takes for granted the fact that their countrymen are still chronically sick and dying from the radiation.
The Belarussian, Ukrainian and southwest Russians have historically been chronically fatalistic, knowing that “Life stinks then you die” (a translation of a sentiment expressed in both languages.) As a consequence, the public at large in those countries knows and understands the “consequences of the Chernobyl explosion and fire” from practical experience and they soldier on.
Yet there were at least 7 non-Soviet organizations with “western” orientation which conducted public health studies in the region. All of those studies were met with criticism that Chernobyl related illnesses and deaths were under-reported or over-reported. Each study seemed directed toward a particular political goal.
In 2007 three physicians who lived in southwest Russia and Belarus put together of collection of articles on the medical effects of the Chernobyl explosion which had been written in the Russian language by practicing physicians and medical school professors. The book was simply titled “Chornobyl”.
By 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences had sponsored the publication of an English translation of that Russian language book, called “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment”. The publication was little noticed until 2011, when its contents began to be discussed as a result of the Fukushima meltdowns and radioactivity releases. A shit storm about the English translation publication ensued, with some “western” scientists and statisticians vociferously attacking the report out of a belief that eastern Europeans are incapable of conducting “credible” medical and environmental research…a charge which Russian and Ukrainian scientists and physicians find incredibly insulting, given those countries universities’ reputation for producing brilliant academics. In the 2 years following the Fukushima meltdowns the English-language translation of “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” became very difficult to obtain, in essence a suppressed or black listed document.
In contrast with Belarussians, Ukrainians and southwest Russians’ of the consequences of the catastrophe for their countries populations, Americans are completely in the dark about the consequences of Fukushima. Americans have not realized that public health consequences from the Fukushima meltdowns have already begun to occur, and as a consequence Americans are not trying to improve their chances at maintaining their pre-Fukushima life expectancy or that of their children. They are far more “in the dark” than the citizens of their historical enemy, the Soviet Union.
On all manner of issues, the Obama Administration is accused of “strictly controlling the message”. The progressive media, largely pro-Democratic Party, figuratively stick their heads in the sand on the consequences of Fukushima. No one is discussing how to better the non-interventionist outcome which was and is seen in Belarus, Ukraine and southwestern Russia.
The Republican/conservative media are supportive of economic powerhouses in the U.S., like the food and real estate industries as well as those in the medical industry who profit from widespread cancer treatment. The Republican/conservative media say nothing about the affects of the Fukushima meltdowns on people and the environment in America even when presented with the Obama Administration’s inaction and lack of candor as an opportunity for unfettered “slam journalism”.
Attacks are as-to-be-expected on journalists, scientists and citizens who try to discuss what is happening in the United States with respect to the Fukushima meltdowns. So confident of their silencing of the message, TEPCO’s American advisor Dale Klein* is now seriously talking about a program of perpetually dumping the region’s fresh water, now radioactively contaminated, into the Pacific, whether neighboring countries like it or not. The corporate, political and media elite have created an oligarchy of silence, laying down a fog of fatalism blinding the American people.
* http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/10/fukushima-operator-dump-contaminated-water-pacific
The radiation disaster in Fukushima has been and still is a cluster of lies that is allowing them to radiate the air and the Pacific Ocean and everything that lives in it and eats from it! TEPCO must be replaced with a group of international radiation and nuclear power plant experts to stop the leaking radiation from entering the Pacific Ocean and to clean up this ongoing disaster! The people at TEPCO that caused this disaster to happen by not securing the generators to higher ground after they were told to do so long before the earthquake hit and the people in the Japanese Government that allowed this to happen should be tried for crimes against humanity then put into prison! Now dozens of people are showing up with thyroid cancer and other cancers! Anyone that has been eating pacific ocean fish or sea food should think about doing a radiation detox.
Dang!
Amazingly well written. I am at a loss of words.
I read it twice and will probably read it again.
This one will be forwarded to my family and friends.
🙂 Good one, thanks.
“…more holes than a Fukushima reactor.”
– Michael Collins
Wow. Thank you for this. When I’ve mentioned, or made reference to the radiation contaminating here, people seem to ignore it or deny it. And some, appear to have the attitude of, we can’t do anything about it, so ignore it. I will be sharing this link.