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Fukushima fallout threatens Southland after a year of Japanese meltdowns

[Abridged and updated Beta Watch with new data, interviews and information]

By Michael Collins

Millions of Southern Californians and tourists seek the region’s famous beaches to cool off in the sea breeze and frolic in the surf. Those iconic breezes, however, may be delivering something hotter than the white sands along the Pacific – buckyballs.

According to a new U.C. Davis study, uranium-filled nanospheres are created from the millions of tons of fresh and saltwater used to try to cool down the three molten cores of the stricken reactors. The tiny and tough buckeyballs are shaped like British Association Football soccer balls.

Water hitting the incredibly hot and radioactive primarily uranium-oxide fuel turns it into peroxide. In this goo buckeyballs are formed, loaded with uranium and able to move quickly through water without disintegrating.

High radiation readings in Santa Monica and Los Angeles during a recent 42-day period from late December and to late January strongly suggest that radiation is increasing in the region.

The radiation, detected by this reporter and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency separate from each other using difference procedures, does not appear to be natural in origin. The EPA’s radiation station is high atop an undisclosed building in Los Angeles while this reporter’s detection location is near the West LA border.

Both stations registered over 5.3 times normal though the methods of sampling and detection differed. The videotaped Santa Monica sampling and testing allowed for the detection of alpha and beta radiation while the sensitive EPA instrument detected beta only according the government website.

Scientific studies from the United Kingdom and Europe show that sea water infused with radiation of the sort spewing out of Fukushima can travel inland from the coast up to 300 kilometers. These mobile poisons include cesium-137 and plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,400 years.

Even with government, University of California and this reporter’s tests showing high radiation in the air, water, food and dairy products in this state, the state and federal government cut off special testing for Fukushima radionuclides over half a year ago.

Southern California is still getting hit by Fukushima radiation at alarmingly high levels that will inevitably increase as the main bulk of polluted Pacific Ocean water reaches North America over the next two years.

Luckily, the area is south of where the jet stream has brought hot rains from across the Pacific and Fukushima over 5,000 miles away, upwind and up-current of the West Coast. Those rains have brought extraordinary amounts of radiation to places like St. Louis with multiple rain events detected and filmed showing incredibly hot rains.

Unluckily, North America is directly downwind of Japan where the government is having 560,000 tons of irradiated rubble incinerated with the ash dumped in Tokyo Bay. The ash that could escape would ALSO be radioactive adding to the witch’s brew of airborne toxins emanating from Japan which has suffered terribly from the meltdowns.

The burning began last October and continues through March 2014. Activists contend that people are getting an unwitting double dose with those along the coast looking at the prospect of a Pacific poisoned with highly mobile and extremely dangerous buckeyballs in the sea mist and breeze.

American media coverage of Fukushima’s continuing woes and contamination spreading across Japan and threatening Tokyo’s 30 million residents, while not robust has been adequate. Coverage of contamination in America and Southern California has been praciticaly non-existent.

With nuclear radiation monitoring equipment, this investigation has performed over 1,500 radiation tests in different media throughout four states and in jets miles above the nation.

Those readings, along with the EPA’s, combined with the UC Davis study of buckeyballs and European study of sea spray radiation spread, strongly indicate that Southern California is being exposed to significant amounts of radiation.

Other reports of likely-Fukushima fallout in the Southland exist.

The U.S. Geological Service (USGS) just reported February 21 that Los Angeles had more cesium-137 fallout than any other place in the nation during the opening days of the disaster from March 15 to April 5, 2011.

The amount of Cs-137 detected in precipitation at a monitoring station 20 miles east of downtown was 13 times the limit for the toxin in drinking water according to a report obtained by the EnviroReporter.com.

USGS released another astonishing study February 22 in from measurements, taken at its Bennington National Atmospheric Deposition Program in Vermont confirmed a grim cesium-137 scenario for Southern California.

“Deposition actually decreased as the air mass traveled east to west,” Greg Wetherbee, a chemist with USGS, told the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper before imparting an additional bombshell.

“In the United States, cesium-134 and cesium-137 wet dispersion values were higher than for Chernobyl fallout in part due to the U.S. being further downwind,” Wetherbee told the paper. “With Chernobyl, there was more opportunity for plume dispersion.”

This double whammy of cesium-137, with a half-life of 30 years isn’t even in a uranium-60 buckyball. But they are in the unfathomable spread of goo throughout the Pacific on the second strongest current in the world headed right for us.

In fact, these buckyballs may already be here according to this 11-month investigation, nanospheres turning the Endless Summer into the Endless Bummer.

JAPAN SYNDROME

The March 11, 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake was a magnitude 9.0 temblor on the Richter Scale and centered at an underwater depth of 20 miles about 43 miles east of the Oshika Peninsula of Tōhoku. It was the most powerful earthquake to have ever to impact Japan.

The shaker sent waves up to 133 feet high slamming into Japan destroying or damaging over 125,000 buildings in the island nation. The Japanese National Police Agency said that at least 19,166 people were killed or remain missing with over 6,000 injured.

This hit close to home for Glendale resident and entrepreneur Dale Ramicone who is married to a woman born in Japan. Ramicone knows the country well. He watched the earthquake and subsequent tsunami helplessly streaming live on his computer.

“Initially, my focus was on the tsunami and the tragic loss of life on the east coast of Japan,” Ramicone told EnviroReporter.com. “Several days later, the nuclear disaster began to unfold, and I emailed my niece who lives near Tokyo, urging her to evacuate to the west. She and her husband decided to stay where they were.”

Tokyo, a mere 141 miles southwest of Fukushima, has numerous high radiation detections recorded by the government and citizens who post their frightening films on YouTube.

In the last week, radiation was detected at the super-hot level 6.5 microsieverts per hour at Japan’s busiest train station near the Imperial Palace. The blogger Fukushima Diary showed photos of these detections which are 10 times higher than Chernobyl evacuation levels.

“Now, we hear that many Japanese officials were contemplating evacuating all of Tokyo, while at the time, they were telling everyone not to panic and stay put,” laments Ramicone.

While the Japanese government may not know what to do, the owners of the stricken plant, TEPCO, have been wily enough to solve one problem: liability. The company declared last year that once the radiation leaves it Fukushima property, it is no longer their property or problem.

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