One hundred out of 100 Pacific herring caught in Canada bleeding from their eyes, gills, fins and tails. Alaskan polar bears with oozing sores losing their fur. “Mysterious” outbreaks and mass die-offs. Dead seals and melting starfish in the Pacific. Studies coming back confirming that 100% of bluefin tuna off California’s coast contaminated with cesium-134 (half-life: two years) and cesium-137 (half-life: 30 years).
This isn’t your typical, average, everyday radioactive contamination, however. This radiation has been researched and traced back across the ocean to Fukushima and the crippled Daiichi nuclear power plant still crumbling there, spewing out 400 tons of irradiated groundwater a day, every day, since March 2011 when it was hit with a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
Even though it makes every kind of logical common sense that radioactive water has been proliferating throughout the largest ocean on the planet via currents ever since then — assimilating and ultimately effecting every single piece and natural process of the biosphere — the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has their own theory on why we shouldn’t worry about Fukushima radiation.
According to recent reports, TEPCO is claiming that the radiation simply doesn’t spread very far into the ocean (even though its continually being dumped in there every single second of every minute of every day):
Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s claim that radioactive water leaking into the sea from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant is confined to the coast doesn’t make scientific sense, according to a U.S. researcher who surveyed waters off the site last month.
Japan’s government has supported the utility’s statement that the irradiated groundwater flowing into the Pacific Ocean at a rate of some 400 tons a day remains in an area of 0.3 square kilometers (0.12 square miles) within the bay fronting the atomic station. [emphasis added]
And the Japanese government — which owns a majority share of TEPCO — supports that conclusion!
What?!
So let’s understand this. A month after the earthquake hit Fukushima, milk sampled in Hawaii by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had been tested and found to contain radiation at levels 2,033% higher than the federal allowable limits for drinking water, but President Obama claimed the government did not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the U.S.
The mainstream media continues to report on new leaks as if they’re happening in a vacuum with no bioaccumulative effect in regard to all the other leaks already reported. Fresh stories are coming out all the time of sick animals and dead sea life in and around the Pacific Ocean, showing signs of what could be radiation poisoning.
Just weeks ago, it came out that storage tanks are leaking (again), and ditch water radiation readings around the plant are some 6,700 times higher at 200,000 becquerels per liter than the 30 becquerel legal limit.
A few days ago, a Fukushima worker blew the whistle that the vast array of subcontractors handling the cleanup for TECPO are not really being managed. Safety precautions and monitoring for the mostly unskilled workers there are close to nil. Wages are being skimmed off the top. Data is being fudged. Real confidence builders for the rest of the world. There are even allegations that the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, are running most of it.
But not to worry, TEPCO says the radiation that its failed nuclear plant is continuously dumping into the ocean and contaminating the world at large with every single day is just staying right there in front of it.
(The company failed to clarify whether or not this containment was by fairy magic or flying unicorn power.)
It is okay, though, because even if the U.S. government has released maps like the one above and reports of radiation spreading from Japan throughout the entire Pacific are being confirmed with scientific animal testing off the California coast, the EPA has simply raised the safe water and soil radiation exposure level limits. Our president approved the raise last spring. The United Nations has also released a report assuring us all that radiation from Fukushima “is unlikely to be able to attribute any health effects in the future among the general public” (even as reports are being simultaneously released that significantly high numbers of Fukushima children are coming down with abnormal growths and being diagnosed with cancer).
Bear in mind, the plant sits on the site of a diverted river, on the coast of an island in the Ring of Fire, so called because of the high number of earthquakes and volcanoes that occur there. Sounds like a brilliant place to build a nuclear power plant, no?
A recent 7+ magnitude earthquake recently hit off the coast of Japan near Fukushima following a busy typhoon season, but TEPCO claims everything is just a-okay. The earthquake had no effect…no new damage, no spike in readings. The company released pictures of mudslides on the Daiichi Power Plant property (though no pictures of the plant itself).
To think that just the amount of radioactive cesium-137 being dumped into our environment alone has been estimated at the equivalent of 168 Hiroshima bombs (not to mention the how many bombs all that tritium, strontium, iodine and plutonium are worth) — to believe that something of this magnitude can happen and it will hold relatively negligible consequences on the biosphere, well…
Just because a lie is repeated over and over doesn’t make it true. Neither does closing one’s eyes and ignoring reality.
Earlier this year, yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen sailed from Melbourne, Australia to Osaka, Japan, then on to San Francisco. He recounted his eerily quiet trip in the Newcastle Herald. As someone who had traveled the same route a decade earlier, Macfadyen’s came back with his assessment — “The ocean is broken”:
“After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead,” Macfadyen said.
“We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.
“I’ve done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I’m used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen.”
But it wasn’t just a lack of life that haunted Macfadyen’s journey. It was the omnipresent tsunami debris still swirling around the ocean with nowhere else to go like a giant bowl of garbage soup.
Ivan’s brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States, marvelled at the “thousands on thousands” of yellow plastic buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.
Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.
…
“Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and pieces we never saw.”
Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and utensils.
But it gets even worse.
And something else. The boat’s vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.
Macfadyen could come to only one conclusion.
BACK in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock and horror of the voyage.
“The ocean is broken,” he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.
There’s really only one question left. Even if the people in charge had a reasonable grasp of the enormity of the situation at Fukushima, what would possibly motivate them to give the rest of us an honest assessment of what we’re actually up against here?
