Prestigious doctor: US nuclear 'Baby valley of death,' Millions to die

Originally posted by earthdude
It looks like in a decade or two Japan will have a very nice wildlife preserve.

wildlife comes back

I think those who are going for the fearmongering doctor's take don't realize how large this planet is.

Doctors understand these dangers. We work hard to try to save the life of a child dying of leukemia. We work hard to try to save the life of a woman dying of metastatic breast cancer. And yet the medical dictum says that for incurable diseases, the only recourse is prevention. There’s no group better prepared than doctors to stand up to the physicists of the nuclear industry. Still, physicists talk convincingly about “permissible doses” of radiation. They consistently ignore internal emitters — radioactive elements from nuclear power plants or weapons tests that are ingested or inhaled into the body, giving very high doses to small volumes of cells. They focus instead on generally less harmful external radiation from sources outside the body, whether from isotopes emitted from nuclear power plants, medical X-rays, cosmic radiation or background radiation that is naturally present in our environment.

Revealed: British government's plan to play down Fukushima

Leaked emails show PR campaign was launched to protect UK nuclear power plans after tsunami in Japan.

Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse to try to ensure the accident did not derail their plans for a new generation of nuclear stations in the UK.

"This has the potential to set the nuclear industry back globally," wrote one official at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), whose name has been redacted. "We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and chapesses do not gain ground on this. We need to occupy the territory and hold it. We really need to show the safety of nuclear."

Meanwhile, on U.S. soil, radiation began to show up in samples of milk tested in California, just one month after the plants were damaged.

Radiation tests conducted since the nuclear disaster in Japan have detected radioactive iodine and cesium in milk and vegetables produced in California. According to tests conducted by scientists at the UC Berkeley Department of Nuclear Engineering, milk from grass fed cows in Sonoma County was contaminated with cesium 137 and cesium 134. Milk sold in Arizona, Arkansas, Hawaii, Vermont and Washington has also tested positive for radiation since the accident.

Additionally, drinking water tested in some U.S. municipalities also shows radioactive contamination. Is the fallout from Fukushima Daichi falling on us? Yes, it is.

Thanks to the jet stream air currents that flow across the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. is receiving a steady flow of radiation from Fukushima Daichi. And while many scientists say that the levels of contamination in food pose no significant threat to health, scientists are unable to establish any actual safe limit for radiation in food. Detection of radioactive iodine 131, which degrades rapidly, in California milk samples shows that the fallout from Japan is reaching the U.S. quickly.

According to the U.S.-based group of medical doctors Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), no amount of man-made radiation in water and food is safe. “There is no safe level of radionuclide exposure, whether from food, water or other sources, period,” said Jeff Patterson, DO, immediate past president of PSR, in late March. “Exposure to radionuclides, such as iodine 131 and cesium 137, increases the incidence of cancer. For this reason, every effort must be taken to minimize the radionuclide content in food and water.”

Doctor Alan Lockwood MD echoes this. “Consuming food containing radionuclides is particularly dangerous. If an individual ingests or inhales a radioactive particle, it continues to irradiate the body as long as it remains radioactive and stays in the body.”

“Children are much more susceptible to the effects of radiation and stand a much greater chance of developing cancer than adults,” states Andrew Kanter, MD, president of PSR’s board. “So it is particularly dangerous when they consume radioactive food or water.”

....

"They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

The Fukushima disaster will have a comparable toll, expects Dr. Sherman, who has conducted research into the consequences of radiation for decades. “People living closest to the plants who receive the biggest doses will get sick sooner. Those who are farther away and receive lesser doses will get sick at a slower rate,” she says.

We’ve known about radioactive isotopes for decades,” says Dr. Sherman. “I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and we knew about the effects then. To ignore the biology is to our peril. This is not new science. Cesium-137 goes to soft tissue. Strontium-90 goes to the bones and teeth. Iodine-131 goes to the thyroid gland.” All have been released in large amounts in the Fukushima disaster since it began on March 11. There will inevitably be cancer and other illnesses­as well as genetic effects­as a result of the substantial discharges of radioactivity released from Fukushima, says Dr. Sherman. “People in Japan will be the most impacted but the radiation has been spreading worldwide and will impact life worldwide.”

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Originally posted by adeclerk
reply to post by Mdv2

 

Meanwhile in America, no evidence of any coverup.

Originally posted by jadedANDcynical
Here is some THEY activity at it's finest for you and what's more is it's right here in America In MUD 105 precinct 9. I lived out that way up until about 6 or 7 years ago.

HOUSTON— Newly-released e-mails from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality show the agency’s top commissioners directed staff to continue lowering radiation test results, in defiance of federal EPA rules.

The e-mails and documents, released under order from the Texas Attorney General to KHOU-TV, also show the agency was attempting to help water systems get out of formally violating federal limits for radiation in drinking water. Without a formal violation, the water systems did not have to inform their residents of the increased health risk.

Data tampering, plain and simple.

So here we have a confirmed case in the US of selective sampling and reporting of radiation contamination of public water supplies. And all of this took place well before Fukushima became a concern.

“It’s a conspiracy at the TCEQ of the highest order,” said Tom Smith, of the government watchdog group Public Citizen. “The documents have indicted the management of this commission in a massive cover-up to convince people that our water is safe to drink when it’s not.”

He said it, not me. In case anyone missed it, the TCEQ is the group mentioned the BP thread linked in my sig that had air quality monitors maxed out when power was lost to the oil and chemical refineries in my area.

At the time it was reported that the instruments were providing faulty data, now I'm not so sure we weren't expose to greater contamination than we were told about back on Chernobyl day here in Texas City.

Just exactly what was it that was manipulated?

However, the TCEQ would consistently subtract off each test’s margin of error from those results, making the actual testing results appear lower than they actually were. In MUD 105’s case, the utility was able to avoid violations for nearly 20 years, thanks to the TCEQ subtractions.

It seems like someone finally found a clue. Or a conscience.

In an e-mail from Oct. 30, 2007, a TCEQ drinking water team leader began questioning a senior director about if it would be appropriate for the state agency to stop subtracting the counting error from test results to comply with all federal regulations.

This concerned person was basically told, "yeah, we know we're supposed to be counting the other way but we don't like those numbers so we will keep doing it our way instead."

And why was it reported this way? No other reason than bureaucratic ass-covering:

However, the TCEQ also told the Council: “Under existing TCEQ policy, calculation of the violation accounts for the reporting error of each radionuclide analysis. Maintaining this calculation procedure will eliminate approximately 35 violations.”

Official-level carpet sweeping of data so as to not inform the public. And who is affected by this? Many people, there are a lot of people that reside in that area one of which is highlighted in the article:

As a result, the subtracting method continued and residents of MUD 105, like Brenda Haynes, were never sent a required notice of violation. That notice would have informed them about the excessive alpha radiation in their water.

Anyone want to guess what causes this sort of radiation? Uranium and plutonium among other isotopes.

Guess where that leads...

Haynes came down with thyroid cancer while living in the MUD 105 district and continued drinking the water even after she was diagnosed. Although she will never know for certain if the water had any connection with her illness, Haynes and her husband are angry that they never were given appropriate notice about the added risks she was taking into her body while sick.

“We were put at more risk than what we thought,” said Ian Haynes, who added he and his wife would have been making different choices about what they consumed had they been warned.

This is sounding eeriy familiar to the situation in Japan.

Here are some names to add to our list of snakes. Careful, these Texas rattlers are not going to be giving you the courtesy of a warnig rattle:

The Texas Water Advisory Council, which reviewed and discussed the TCEQ testimony at a meeting on June 7, 2004, was comprised of some of the highest ranking public officials in Texas. Minutes from the TWAC’s annual report reveal that the members present that day to hear about TCEQ’s plan included then-chair of the TCEQ Commission Kathleen Hartnett White, then-Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs, General Land Office Commissioner Jerry Patterson, Sen. Robert Duncan, and other lawmakers and state leaders.

What do these yellow-bellied, good for nothing, low-down varmints have to say about this?

A spokesperson for Commissioner Patterson wrote KHOU-TV to say, “I’ve checked with Commissioner Patterson and sent him the report and he doesn’t remember “squat” about that committee,” wrote press secretary Jim Suydam. “He won’t be calling you.”

Sounds like "shut up and quit asking questions" to me. I wonder what else there is...

The meeting summary says that “Commissioner Combs stated small towns are going broke,” and further says, “Commissioner Combs asked what would the feds do if the state didn’t enforce.” The minutes indicate that someone at the meeting said there would be federal enforcement and loss of primacy.

At the same meeting, the summary says that the EPA had already warned that if Texas didn’t implement the rules, the EPA might take over the regulation of Texas water systems. The notes say that as a result “Texas will lose $66 million if delegation of the drinking water program is lost.”

This sounds a little like a scenario I've been discussing with a friend regarding possible fuure implications of what is happening right now on a global scale. It makes me wonder if this hasn't been done on purpose so as to intentionally bring down the EPA...

This paragraph

Then Chair of the TCEQ Commission Kathleen Hartnett White, who also sat on the Texas Water Advisory Council, says the decision to continue the subtraction was a good one.

Along with this one

“We did not believe the science of health effects justified EPA setting the standard where they did,” said White. She added, “I have far more trust in the vigor of the science that TCEQ assess, than I do EPA.”

tell me that the people who sit in positions of responsibility are out of touch and hear only what they want to hear as long as it supports what they think. I'm guessing the Ms Hartnett White has never heard of the dangers of internal exposure to alpha emitters.

Yet another example of politicians not wanting to be answerable to this whom they serve:

Lt. Governor David Dewhurst did not respond to written questions related to this story. The only comment from his office came from a spokesperson who wrote: “Just FYI—I’m told by our legislative staff that Texas Water Advisory Council was created in 2001, but was repealed in 2007. Evidently, the statutes creating the council made it clear that that it was an advisory board only, so they made no decisions.”

So all we have are the words of an unnamed spokesperson but the content is quite telling. If the Water Advisory Council cannot make or enforce decisions, what good is it?

Aologies for this monster post, this just hit really close to home for me.

TIS, my heart goes out to you. I cannot fathom what you're going through and can only say that my wife and I have discussed taking in a Japanese family and I can say that from your posts, yours would be high on the list. This artlce I've linked, though, shows that we might not be that much better off than you.

I like this writer, he reminds me of us ATSers in that he links his sources and has done a lot of research for his piece. Maybe I will invite him here.

Source for above quotes

Originally posted by Aeons
My children's chances of having babies with mutations has been drastically increased for the want of a government that dictated a SINGLE FRACKING DIESEL GENERATOR at a nuclear plant with six reactors and a secret weapons program at it.

The hate I have for the arrogant gorilla brained "leaders" of business and government over this issue is deep. This industry has proven they cannot be trusted in anyway to regulate themselves.

I am not anti-nuclear. I am anti-stupidity. This disaster is PURE stupidity.

blogs.forbes.com...

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Whether you choose to see the Fukushima fallout as safe depends on the perspective you adopt, as David J. Brenner, a professor of radiation biophysics and the director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center, elucidated recently in The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists:

Should this worry us? We know that the extra individual cancer risks from this long-term exposure will be very small indeed. Most of us have about a 40 percent chance of getting cancer at some point in our lives, and the radiation dose from the extra radioactive cesium in the food supply will not significantly increase our individual cancer risks.

But there’s another way we can and should think about the risk: not from the perspective of individuals, but from the perspective of the entire population. A tiny extra risk to a few people is one thing. But here we have a potential tiny extra risk to millions or even billions of people. Think of buying a lottery ticket — just like the millions of other people who buy a ticket, your chances of winning are miniscule. Yet among these millions of lottery players, a few people will certainly win; we just can’t predict who they will be. Likewise, will there be some extra cancers among the very large numbers of people exposed to extremely small radiation risks? It’s likely, but we really don’t know for sure.

via Fukushima: What don’t we know? | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

A few people certainly will “win,” which is why it’s so interesting that the EPA’s standard for radionuclides in drinking water is so much more conservative than the FDA’s standard for radionuclides in food.

The two agencies anticipate different endurances of exposure—long-term in the EPA’s view, short-term in FDA’s. But faced with the commercial implications of its actions, FDA tolerates a higher level of mortality than EPA does.

FDA has a technical quibble with that last sentence. FDA spokesman Siobhan Delancey says: "Risk coefficients (one in a million, two in ten thousand) are statistically based population estimates of risk. As such they cannot be used to predict individual risk and there is likely to be variation around those numbers. Thus we cannot say precisely that “one in a million people will die of cancer from drinking water at the EPA MCL” or that “two in ten thousand people will die of cancer from consuming food at the level of an FDA DIL.” These are estimates only and apply to populations as a whole.

The government, while assuring us of safety, comforts itself in the abstraction of the population-wide view, but from Dr. Brenner’s perspective, the population-wide view is a lottery and someone’s number may come up.

Let that person decide whether we should be alarmed.

edit on 9-7-2011 by Wertwog because: fixed the link

Multiple videos have been released showing high levels of radiation in Canada as the corporate media continues to cover up the real dangers posed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The tests were taken in multiple places in Canada including Lake Louise BC, Kelowna BC, Red Deer/Edmonton, and Hope BC. The radiation tests that were taken near Lake Louise BC clearly showed harmful radiation levels up to 1.66 mcSv/hr .

So far Canadian and American authorities have remained silent. We must DEMAND action from local health authorities. If these levels of radiation are being picked up in Canada it seems only a matter of time before they reach the west coast of the United States.

This should be a RED ALERT to all Americans and Canadians! source

Originally posted by randyvs
I've been saying it for sometime now. This was the elitist back up plan to the failure of the swine flu. They simply roll the dice enough til they come up craps. I'm on the west coast tasting metal every fricken day. I've noticed you even get used to it after awhile. Give it a year at the most. I won't be posting any longer then that I imagine.
The economy the radiation ? Somebody wants to thin the herd. That would put a crap full of deaths right around what time in history? Oh that's got to be a coincidence ? Riiiiight.

What the hell ? Things could always be worse.

edit on 20-6-2011 by randyvs because: (no reason given)

Originally posted by Jim Scott

Originally posted by Aeons
My children's chances of having babies with mutations has been drastically increased for the want of a government that dictated a SINGLE FRACKING DIESEL GENERATOR at a nuclear plant with six reactors and a secret weapons program at it.

The hate I have for the arrogant gorilla brained "leaders" of business and government over this issue is deep. This industry has proven they cannot be trusted in anyway to regulate themselves.

I am not anti-nuclear. I am anti-stupidity. This disaster is PURE stupidity.

I could be wrong, but I think the Bechtel Corporation is a big player in building nuclear power plants. I hope that, if that is the case, their engineers have made enough safeguards to prevent this from happening. Of course, we are always in a learning curve. Nuclear power is a great idea, it just needs better safeguards. www.bechtel.com...

edit on 7/2/2011 by Jim Scott because: Add link.

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-- Nuclear power in the long run, with proper safeguards, it is the best alternative that we have.--
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FOX news, radiation from Japan killing American babies