The Hindu

13th June, 2012

Some nuclear experts are warning that spent fuel rods at a damaged plant in Japan could trigger a major catastrophe despite the government’s declaration in December that the emergency phase of the nation’s worst nuclear disaster was over.

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Medical records from contaminated areas speak for themselves; doctors, scientists and citizens bear witness to the devastating health impacts of radioactive fallout from nuclear accidents Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

A fully referenced and illustrated version of this paper is posted on ISIS members website and is otherwise available for download here

ISIS Report

24th May, 2012

The Chernobyl disaster occurred on 26 April 1986at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Prypiat in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, and close to the administrative border with Belarus.  A sudden power output surge prompted an attempt at emergency shutdown; but a more extreme spike in power output led to the rupture of a reactor vessel and a series of explosions. The graphite moderator was exposed, causing it to ignite, and the resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. From 1986 to 2000, 350 400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. According to official post-Soviet data, about 57 % of the fallout landed in Belarus [1]. Chernobyl is widely considered to have been the worst nuclear accident in history and one of only two classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown in 2011 (see [2]Fukushima Nuclear Crisis, SiS 50).

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Fukushima Daiichi site: Cesium-137 is 85 times greater than at Chernobyl accident.

Akio Matsumura

Reader Supported News

11th April, 2012

Japan’s former Ambassador to Switzerland, Mr. Mitsuhei Murata, was invited to speak at the Public Hearing of the Budgetary Committee of the House of Councilors on March 22, 2012, on the Fukushima nuclear power plants accident. Before the Committee, Ambassador Murata strongly stated that if the crippled building of reactor unit 4 – with 1,535 fuel rods in the spent fuel pool 100 feet (30 meters) above the ground – collapses, not only will it cause a shutdown of all six reactors but will also affect the common spent fuel pool containing 6,375 fuel rods, located some 50 meters from reactor 4. In both cases the radioactive rods are not protected by a containment vessel; dangerously, they are open to the air. This would certainly cause a global catastrophe like we have never before experienced. He stressed that the responsibility of Japan to the rest of the world is immeasurable. Such a catastrophe would affect us all for centuries. Ambassador Murata informed us that the total numbers of the spent fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi site excluding the rods in the pressure vessel is 11,421  (396+615+566+1,535+994+940+6375).

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Exposing the “No Harm” Mantra

Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman

Counterpunch

9-11th March, 2012

The myth that Fukushima radiation levels were too low to harm humans persists, a year after the meltdown.  A March 2, 2012 New York Times article quoted Vanderbilt University professor John Boice: “there’s no opportunity for conducting epidemiological studies that have any chance for success – the doses are just too low.”  Wolfgang Weiss of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation also recently said doses observed in screening of Japanese people “are very low.”

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Alexander Higgins

8th August, 2011

Food riot fears strike Japan after rice trading halted due to radiation contamination

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