“The troubled nuclear plant… is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable,” according to a confidential NRC assessment.

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Mark Sircus, Contributing Writer

Activist Post

Japan said it is considering expanding the area covered by a compulsory evacuation order, with no immediate end in sight to the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. At this point we should all sit up and take notice of what is happening and what could all so easily happen.

Emergency workers were pumping nitrogen into the quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant to prevent further explosions. Now we hear things are getting so hot inside the destroyed reactor buildings that they cannot approach. On April 6, Reuters reported, “The core at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactor has melted through the reactor pressure vessel,” Rep. Edward Markey told a House hearing on the disaster. “I have been informed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that the core has gotten so hot that part of it has probably melted through the reactor pressure vessel.” America’s NRC said that some of the core of a stricken Japanese reactor had probably leaked from its steel pressure vessel into the bottom of the containment structure, implying that the damage was even worse than previously thought.

Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian that at least part of the molten core, which includes melted fuel rods and zirconium alloy cladding, seemed to have sunk through the steel “lower head” of the pressure vessel around reactor no. 2. “The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell,” Lahey said.

On April 5, Times writers James Glanz and William Broad headlined, “U.S. Sees Array of New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant,” saying: American engineers warned “that the troubled nuclear plant… is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable,” according to a confidential NRC assessment.

According to former GE reactor designer Margaret Harding, “Exposed/unprotected spent fuel rods in Units 1, 2, 3 and 4 pose extreme dangers. Moreover, explosions blew nuclear material ‘up to one mile from the units’ into the atmosphere, indicating much greater damage than previously disclosed. As a result, David Lochbaum from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) believes, “This paints a very different picture, and suggests that things are a lot worse. They could still have more damage in a big way if some of these things don’t work out for them… They’ve got a lot of nasty things to (handle), and one missed step could make the situation much, much worse.”

On March 29, Dr. Chris Busby said, “In fact, Fukushima already way exceeds Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and will get increasingly worse ahead as radiation releases continue and spread. I believe that (the array of) phony experts are criminally irresponsible, since their advice will lead to millions of deaths… I hope they are sent to jail where they can have plenty of time to read the scientific proofs (showing) their advice was based on the mathematical analysis of thin air.”

Dr. Busby cited John Gofman, a senior U.S. Atomic Energy Commission expert who resigned, saying: “The nuclear industry is waging a war against humanity.” Busby calls it “the greatest public health scandal in human history,” which can be witnessed in the present as the government and press continue to mislead the public.

As radioactive iodine and cesium-137 continue to spread across the northern hemisphere in higher and higher amounts, and is now reported in France, not a word is mentioned about the population’s iodine deficiencies and how that will guarantee that almost everyone’s thyroids will be ever so thirsty sponges for radioactive iodine. Criminal, mass murder and crimes against humanity are all words that come to mind thinking of this. Medical officials are either totally dumb or the meanest rats that ever walked this earth. They are obviously too stupid to realize that the public’s mineral deficiencies are a major factor in calculating vulnerabilities to exposures to radiation.

We have no choice but to prepare our hearts that this catastrophe will go to level seven and beyond releasing unsupportable radiation onto the nation of Japan and into the northern hemisphere—especially North America. And in fact this morning we find the Japanese doing just that, raising the nuclear catastrophe to level 7.

It is more than pathetic though that in the announcement about going to level 7 that the same article mentions Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano telling reporters there was no “direct health damage” so far from the crisis. “The accident itself is really serious, but we have set our priority so as not to cause health damage.” Seems like Japanese ministers are playing God now in their frustration over events that are simply overwhelming them.

Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear physicist at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute, said the revision was not a cause for worry that it had to do with the overall release of radiation and was not directly linked to health dangers. Incredible the press would even print such garbage. Sounds like these gentlemen are like men standing on the shoreline telling the tide not to come in.

The really bad news has yet to fall on Tokyo, one of the richest and largest metropolitan areas in the world. Will it succumb to the expanding radiation and become the first major center of civilization to fall?

Evacuation orders are currently issued when residents are at risk of receiving radiation of at least 50 millisieverts (with no time rate mentioned in the report), but the government said that arrangement assumed only brief exposure. Chronic and persistent exposures need to be calculated into the far future meaning people are going to have to be removed from wider and wider areas. “The standard does not take into account the effects of accumulative exposure,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said. “We are discussing what standards to use for accumulative radiation.” You would think that governments in conjunction with the nuclear industry would have had this all figured out by now but they remain in complete denial of the dangerous of radiation at low levels of chronic exposure.

The disaster is hitting the Japanese were it really hurts by destroying their crops and now fish. “Japan now has to contemplate having to change thousand-year-old eating habits. For an archipelago that has lived off the ocean since prehistoric times, radioactive fish is a worst-case scenario with possibly economy-wide implications.”

It is really scary to think about the situation worsening. So far most Japanese reportedly have not been directly affected by the calamity, but the realization that radioactive material has been found in seafood has made many of the nation’s 126 million people nervous, as it should. And those rolling blackouts are certainly having their effects on the population and the industries that have made Japan the great nation it has become.

Japan was also the scene of one of the worst public health disasters ever with thousands crippled by mercury poisoning of seafood caused when toxic chemicals were released into the sea in the 1950s and 1960s. Mercury is another invisible poison and has become a disaster running in the background that everyone seems to continue to ignore. This admission in the mainstream of the mercury mishap in Japan opens Pandora’s box—the one where heavy metals, toxic chemicals and radiation mix to create a truly poisoned world.

The high priests of this kind of world tell us not to worry as they raise the limits of what is considered “safe” as they did in Japan—the water is now “safe” to drink in Tokyo because they moved the goal posts and raised the limits of what is “safe.” The EPA reportedly also raised the “safe” limits.

Meanwhile doctors continue to expose their patients to higher and higher levels of radiation but this is going to finally have to stop. Soaring numbers of kids are getting CT scans in emergency rooms. The number of ER visits nationwide in which children were given CT scans surged from about 330,000 in 1995 to 1.65 million in 2008—a five-fold increase.

The number of kids’ ER visits didn’t increase measurably during the study, but the percentage of visits involving CT scans climbed from about one percent to almost six percent. Increases in CT scan use have also been found in adults and the cancer industry is desperately fighting to make sure women still get their mammograms even though they too expose women to dangerous radiation, the last thing they need in an increasingly radioactive world.

What medical officials, then doctors, will have to discover after they have been hit over the head several times with nuclear two-by-fours, is that every toxic exposure will increase people’s vulnerability to succumb to radiation sickness. Toxic accumulation, whether from heavy metals, chemicals, pesticides, food additives and preservatives, etc. will each take their toll, weakening our resistance or ability to clear radioactive particles from our bodies.

Dr. Mark Sircus is a natural health expert and self-sufficiency advocate. He is the author of several must-read books including titles such as Survival Medicine For the 21st Century, Winning the War on Cancer, and Humane Pediatrics. You can find all of Mark’s informative articles at his website IMVA.