BE AWARE OF THIS - IT IS NOT BEING COVERED ON THE LOCAL NEWS! --------------- HW: Well, this is a major crisis. We finally got an article in The New York Times that has been blacked out in American major media [Removing Fuel Rods Poses New Risks at Crippled Nuclear Plant] Thank God for your show and for the internet. Chernobyl Was Transparent Compared to Fukushima: Harvey Wasserman on Ongoing Crisis -----------------Tuesday, 19 November 2013 13:26 HW: You should be terrified. Its a mind-boggling situation at Fukushima. This is my 40th year fighting nuclear power, I hate to say it, back when [we] coined the phrase No Nukes in 1973. All the years weve been dealing with nuclear power, no one ever talked about three simultaneous meltdowns and four explosions at a single reactor site. This is not a Soviet reactor situation, these are General Electric reactors. There are two dozen in the United States virtually identical to Fukushima. LF: The information we were getting this summer included revelations that 300 tons of toxic water leaked in one week, and then in other news, the fact that 300 tons are leaking into the Pacific daily. HW: Every day, and this is for two and half years now, and there is no end in sight. It could go on, as Dr. Helen Caldicott said, for 50 years. Weve already detected radiation from Fukushima off of the coast of Alaska. There was a study of 15 tuna caught off the coast of California; out of the 15 tuna caught, 15 had radiation from Fukushima. LF: Radiation enough to be dangerous? HW: Yes, you wouldnt want to eat this tuna. This is really, really serious, Laura. I look through the internet everyday; Im getting reports from the Pacific that I can only refer to as apocalyptic: Major dead zones, radiation being detected all over the place. Radiation in even small doses, cesium, strontium, iodine, will bio-accumulate. If you get a relatively small dose into some seaweed, fish will come; they will eat enough seaweed that it will be significant; they will be eaten up the food chain; were at the top of the food chain: this is very, very serious. LF: When I looked into it further, it turns out this month the government of Japan is responding to this crisis of the summer saying, were going to take action. One of the actions that they seem to be taking is this complicated-looking spent fuel replacement procedure . . HW: Well, this is a major crisis. We finally got an article in The New York Times that has been blacked out in American major media [Removing Fuel Rods Poses New Risks at Crippled Nuclear Plant] Thank God for your show and for the internet. There is a spent fuel pool 100 feet in the air, brilliant design. John King at CNN called it a bathtub on the roof. It has no containment over it, and when the earthquake-tsunami hit, unit 4 had the fuel out. They were doing inspections in this pool, and a lot of it is very, very radioactive, and the stuff has been suspended 100 feet in the air since the accident. It actually caught on fire at one point, and they had to pour in seawater, which is corrosive. There is debris in the pool; we dont know the status of the fuel rods; and it has to come out of there because if, God forbid, [theres] another earthquake . . . If one is strong enough to knock these fuel rods to the ground, they are clad in zirconium alloy, which will catch fire if its exposed to air, spontaneously. Zirconium is the stuff that was in flashcubes that burn very brightly very quickly. If there is a fire of this stuff, there has been shown to be enough radioactive cesium in these rods to exceed the releases at Hiroshima by a factor of 14,000. Were talking about huge radiation leaks. So these rods have to be brought to the ground. Its never been done under these kinds of circumstances. truth-out.org/opinion/item/20116-chernobyl-was-transparent-compared-to-fukushima-harvey-wasserman-on-the-ongoing-crisis Chernobyl Was Transparent Compared to Fukushima: Harvey Wasserman on Ongoing Crisis truth-out.org Nuclear power expert Harvey Wasserman talks with GRITtv about the ongoing Fukushima catastrophe, the dearth of information there, irradiated
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 02:24:06 +0000
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