MUST-READ!
– Fukushima: Radiation, Politics and Public Relations II (Veterans Today, Nov 11, 2012):
by Leuren Moret, Dr. Majia Nadesan and Jim Fetzer (with Major William Fox)
On Friday, 30 March 2012, Dr. Majia Nadesan and Leuren Moret appeared as the featured guests on “The Real Deal” hosted by Jim Fetzer to discuss the radiation effects of the Fukushima disaster and the fashion in which it has been covered up both by the Japanese and the American governments and media. Dr. Nadesan, a professor of communication in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, has studied Fukushima extensively. Ms. Moret is an independent geoscientist who has done expert studies on the Fukushima disaster and radiation problems around the world, including depleted uranium. What they had to tell us smacks of politics and public relations and is profoundly disturbing. This is Part II of the original interview, which can be heard here.
Introduction
by Major William Fox
NOTE: I invited Major William Fox (former USMCR commissioned officer), who was instrumental in arranging this interview to prepare an introduction. His key point is that the first line of defense to handle any major crisis is accurate information. Tragically, not only has accurate information been deliberately withheld from Americans regarding the Fukushima crisis, but they have also been steadily fed disinformation. He continues:
The stealth dirty nuclear war currently being visited upon America goes far beyond government and major media disinformation, although there is certainly plenty of the latter as well as the former. Dr. Majia Nadesan stated in this interview,
“In June it was reported in the Japanese press that there was actually melt-through. A melt-through is when the melted corium melts through all levels of containment. And not a single U.S. media — I did a search using EBSCO and using LexisNexis to see if any U.S. media picked up in June the Japanese report about the melt-through, and not one single U.S. media picked up that story. A melt-through means that the situation is out of control. Corium is sinking deeper into the ground while sporadically undergoing `limited criticalities’ and releasing ever more extremely dangerous volumes of contamination into the atmosphere, ground water, and ocean. The entire public in Japan, North America, and elsewhere needs to understand how this situation remains out of control.”
The failure to report these melt-throughs was followed by the Japanese government’s big lie perpetrated in December 2011 that all the reactors were in “cold shut down,” implying that all the melted nuclear fuel remained safely within their containment chambers and were subject to stable cooling systems which guaranteed against any further criticalities or radiation releases. Nothing could have been further from the truth. .
In the first part of this series, Dr. Nadesan described how Japanese media even went so far as to censor the Emperor of Japan’s speech in January 2012. She noted:
“This censorship was — the only American media that picked it up was The Atlantic where there was an article discussing this. But the Emperor of Japan stated that the Fukushima disaster was not over — one [his first point]. And there has been a concerted propaganda effort to make people in Japan and elsewhere believe that the reactors are in cold shut down, and that is a myth. And so the Emperor destroyed that myth by saying that the disaster was not over. The second thing that the Emperor said was that it wasn’t safe for people to return to their homes in the exclusion zone or even further out. That was censored in Japan, and there was no coverage of it in the United States. And, sort of the predominate message of cold shut down continues to prevail in the U.S. media.”
During the first hour of this interview, Leuren Moret explained how blame for the cover-up went much higher than just the Japanese government alone: “But the U.S. had to hide the effects of the nuclear weapons testing program, and they have hidden the effects of nuclear power in the United States, and actually it is Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and former British Petroleum scientist Steven Koonin from Cal Tech who have been directing TEPCO and the Japanese government on their emergency response.”
People around the globe are now under assault right down to the DNA level. Fertility rates are plummeting and birth defects are rising everywhere. Leuren Moret noted during the second hour: “And then it [radiation] gets lofted into the air, and the worst thing is pregnant women getting exposed, especially in the first about six weeks. 80% of the embryos die in organisms that are exposed in the first six weeks of pregnancy.”
Bomb test radiation, nuclear power plant emissions, aerosolized depleted uranium, and myriad other forms of nuclear toxicity have already raised background radiation levels to the point that fertility rates have dramatically declined in major areas around the globe. Leuren Moret’s Geiger counter in the San Francisco Bay area shows that Fukushima radiation has now doubled background levels compared to the pre-Fukushima melt-down era. She has also observed that we are getting hit with more than just a few isotopes such as radioactive iodine and cesium. In fact, according to a TVA study, nuclear power plants can emit the entire witches’ brew of radionuclides found in an atomic bomb blast, something like 1,300 fission products in all.
Cesium-137 alone has a half life of 30 years. As a rough rule of thumb, many experts estimate that it takes about ten half lives for radioactive isotopes to decay down to below dangerous levels. This means that it could take over 300 years for the massive amounts of cesium that have already blanketed North America to no longer pose a significant hazard.
As global background radiation levels rise, the rates of sterility and birth defects rise in direct proportion. If this trend persists, we will eventually reach a tipping point where background radiation rates will not only prevent human populations from adequately reproducing themselves, but also where radiation will create such a burden of mutated, dysfunctional people that many currently productive societies will not longer have the critical mass of intelligent, fit people required to advance civilization.
At a minimum, high level malefactors are clearly playing an extremely dangerous game of nuclear chicken with the future of mankind. At a maximum, they have a mentality approximated by the phrase “criminal insanity” and are succeeding all too well in fulfilling some of the darkest global depopulation schemes one can imagine.
Transcript: “The Real Deal” Radio Show (29 March 2012)
Host: Jim Fetzer: James Fetzer Ph.D.
Guests: Dr. Majia Nadesan, Ph.D., and Leuren Moret: Leuren Moret, B.S., M.A., PhD (AB
Hour Two
Dr. Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Real Deal”, continuing my conversation with Majia Nadesan and with Leuren Moret. I think these PR aspects are utterly fascinating, Majia. Do you have more graphs and documents you would like to introduce in our discussion?
Dr. Nadesan: Well, just as an example to demonstrate this, the situation at Fukushima, the exact situation, seems to be unclear. But one thing is clear is that there is no containment of the nuclear cores in at least three of the units at Fukushima. Units 1, 2, and 3. In June it was reported in the Japanese press that there was actually melt-through. A melt-through is when the melted corium melts through all levels of containment. And not a single U.S. media — I did a search using EBSCO and using LexisNexis to see if any U.S. media picked up in June the Japanese report about the melt-through, and not one single U.S. media picked up that story. The only outlet that came close was The Washington Post [which] did include a story that included a quote by a scientist about the hypothetical possibility for a melt-through, and this occurred [but was not reported]. This Washington Post story was reported a day or two after the Japanese press reported the melt-throughs. But the Washington Post story did not acknowledge that the Japanese press had said in fact there was a melt-through. So there is no other explanation other than censorship for the fact that that was not reported in the U.S. press.
China Syndrome at Unit ? Infrared Image http://fukushima-diary.com/2011/10/news-inside-of-reactor-1/
Dr. Fetzer: Leuren?
L. Moret: Yes, it is really interesting, something was going around blogs, and people were passing it around for a while. TEPCO came out with a press conference and a PowerPoint presentation and it might have been around the same time. It was! It was TEPCO who had actually admitted it had melted through. But that PowerPoint didn’t get circulated very widely. But then another report showed up. It was a simulated melt-down and melt-through just like Fukushima that was simulated at Browns Ferry, a nuclear power plant in the eastern U.S. I forgot which state it is in, maybe Tennessee, I am not sure. But the Browns Ferry simulations of how long it took to melt through the raise in temperature once the electricity, the power source was shut down. It actually completely coincided with, and was verified by the Fukushima TEPCO PowerPoint presentation. I will have to send those to you both. So they knew from the very beginning.
Dr. Nadesan: Yes, yes, I concur, that they did know from the very beginning. But they don’t want to acknowledge it because it essentially means that any nuclear plant anywhere could in fact have a melt-down, especially the Mark I’s, within 24 hours of a station blackout.
L. Moret: That is right. Yes, that is right. That’s right.
Dr. Fetzer: I would like to report some of the information that is coming over the Internet, and to get your comments on it. Some reports about how there is a lot of fallout that has come into this country, meaning the United States. A lot of radiation coming down in rain. British Columbia, Seattle, the whole of Washington, Oregon, part of California being powerfully affected. They know of an organic farm in Portland that is not selling or producing anything more because he tested it and found a lot of radiation on his farm. Hawaii had tainted fruit and milk, and there is a lot of radiation there too. Generally very frightening what happened on the West Coast. There are more here, but let’s begin with those.
L. Moret: Go ahead Majia.
Dr. Nadesan: Well I think that one of the most concerning things is that if you look at the recently released NRC transcripts, they were projecting the dose to the thyroid of a one year old child, and they had different calculations. But one of their calculations was a thyroid dose of 30 millisieverts just from iodine to the thyroid of a one year old child annualized. And 30 millisieverts is a lot of radiation. And there is research that finds that every [10] millisieverts over 10 milliseiverts causes a 3% increase in cancer over a five year period in adults. So now we are talking about kids getting three times that from one radionuclide or various forms of the iodine, because it is not just Iodine-131. This projection doesn’t include cesium, it doesn’t include strontium or plutonium or uranium. In the transcripts somebody actually asked “Should we alert the public?” and the response was “No.” So we don’t really know what the real thyroid impact was because nobody is publishing that data. We don’t even know if the data is being collected. But clearly there was no effort to make any kind of recommendations to the public to keep their kids inside or to stop drinking milk or dairy, which was found in the wake of Chernobyl to be the primary vector by which small children were exposed to iodine is through milk. And that’s disturbing.
Dr. Fetzer: That is very disturbing. And who was it Majia who was saying “No” when the question arose, “Shall we alert the public”?
Dr. Nadesan: It was a conversation among a variety of NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] people, and the transcript can be found online. I don’t know the specific individual’s name off the top of my head. I would have to pull it up.
Dr. Fetzer: So the members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are themselves suppressing the information about the contamination in order to protect the nuclear industry?
L. Moret: But so did the U.S. Surgeon General. And if you recall, all those reactors exploded one after another. On March 17th we started seeing chemtrails all over the Bay area. And the Fukushima cloud was supposed to arrive on the 18th or 19th. It was supposed to arrive on Friday. On the 17th letters went out to every medical doctor in every county in California. I suspect it was nationwide and came from the Surgeon General. And the message –I had copies of two sent out to doctors — one in Sonoma County, north of the San Francisco Bay area, and the Stanford area, whatever county that is, San Mateo I think — anyway the state and county health officials warned doctors not to give iodine to patients who were concerned about radiation exposure from Fukushima. The excuse was that it would damage their hearts or make them sick or this or that. Now I can’t imagine health officials doing that. It is so absolutely irresponsible and just malicious because the health effects of even low levels of radiation are very well known. And they have been known for a long time. Even before 1920. Dr. [Joseph] Mueller‘s work was the micro-biological foundation for understanding the health effects of radiation. And he did studies on fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1946 for his work before 1920. But telling people not to take iodine is completely crazy, and when you tell a whole nation after you have put them through 1,300 bomb tests, and fried their children’s brains, which is what has happened in the U.S., it is beyond irresponsible. And the iodine levels were monitored and reported and were very high for Japan, Hawaii, and the U.S., also Canada, by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty facilities that are all over the world. They are nongovernmental-funded so they were much more revealing. And they have excellent facilities with excellent equipment and very good scientists trained to do very careful measurements. So all indications, all governments knew this because then they immediately stopped allowing any reporting at all by the end of July and that is when the melted fuel started hitting the ground water. It had melted down into the ground and was subsurface, and big cracks started opening up between the reactor buildings at Fukushima, and radioactive steam was coming out of the ground into the air. And if you look at the EPA levels reported for different cities of radiation in the rain, that is when the levels started increasing.
Dr. Nadesan: Actually it is interesting because I have been monitoring the EPA data and either they were really censoring EPA data for RadNet early on in March and April, either they were censoring that or the levels got even worse in December, because, for example in Phoenix, and in California, the radiation levels in December 2011 were extremely high, and this is after the cracks at the plants that were reported, they subsequently led to concerns because of measurements that there was fission occurring at the plants in November. And by December, we were having literally radiation levels, beta levels, that are electron counts, off the charts in places like Bakersfield and Yuma.
L. Moret: That’s right.
Dr. Nadesan: They were very high. And I noticed that there was a pattern. West Coast cities that had mountains to the east of them were really hit hard. So Fresno, Bakersfield, Sacramento, Yuma Arizona, Phoenix, Arizona, these places have mountains immediately to the east of them where the air got trapped, had these extremely high levels. And you could see the radiation moving across the country if you were to look at the jet stream and then map the jet stream on to the EPA RadNet levels. Unfortunately most of those beta levels have been taken down now and a lot of cities are not even reporting gamma levels any more. So we don’t even have access to that information any more.
L. Moret: Yes, Dr. Busby told me, because he and I were talking daily for months, and he had a lot of insider information as a government radiation expert. And he said the EPA was lying from the beginning. The Japanese and American governments and Canadian governments were completely lying, and he said the only sources that he trusted and other radiation experts that we worked with in Germany and Russia, and other countries, the only data they trusted was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty monitoring station at Cologne University in Germany and NILU in Norway, and they were both shut down [by] July 31st, and there is no reporting at all now. [NOTE: NILU was shut down on May 11, 2011, a suspiciously “occult date” divisible by “11” like “9/11]“].
Dr. Nadesan: Yes, and even the NILU, is that the Norwegian Institute?
L. Moret: Yes, yes.
Dr. Fetzer: The fact that there is no reporting now means that the numbers must be off the charts.
L. Moret: That’s right.
Dr. Nadesan: The cesium levels are growing in Japan.
L. Moret: That’s right.
Dr. Nadesan: And there was just an article that was published in one of the Japanese press, it was only a brief excerpt in English, but what the excerpt said was that they are finding that cesium levels in the area around Chernobyl continue to increase in the animals there. And so it is not clear whether it is increasing because the plant is spewing even more radiation, or it is increasing because of the bioaccumulation that occurs, and that is why the effects of this are going to be across time. Because it is really not so much the radiation we are exposed to in the air that is the biggest issue. It is as it ends up in our carrots, as it is absorbed. Any plant that absorbs potassium is going to be absorbing cesium from the soil, and so it is going to end up in the plants, and then it is going to end up in the animals, and at the top of the food chain these concentrations are going to get higher and higher and higher in us. And our body’s ability to do the DNA repair will be weakened as it is simply overwhelmed by all this genetic damage that occurs.
L. Moret: That’s right, and the bioaccumulation in the environment and in living systems is very complex because it is very different for each species or for each geographic location or weather or whatever. But I will give a couple of examples. In shellfish, these are filter feeders that take in water like clams, abalones, muscles, sea urchins, and they take minute particles out of the seawater and then release the seawater, the waste, and continue filter feeding. And the bioaccumulation can be 150,000 to 300 [thousand] times higher in, for instance, an oyster than the radiation levels in the sea water around it that it is living in. And this was discovered off of Seattle. A man suddenly died, a middle-aged man. And he loved to eat oysters. So they did an autopsy on him and did bioassays and everything, and he was just full of radioactive zinc. Well radioactive zinc, where does that come from? That is a fission product. So they went out and discovered where these oysters — he knew where he was buying them, and they traced them to the producer, and discovered that the oyster bed was 150 miles off the coast of Seattle, and yet the levels were so high that they caused his death.
Dr. Fetzer: Don’t you imagine this is from dumping polluted water into the ocean? It is inevitable it would happen from the beginning, so don’t you suppose –
L. Moret: Oh, its Hanford and the Trojan Reactor on the Columbia River. They completely poisoned the Columbia River, and then currents take it all over.
Dr. Fetzer: You are telling me this is contamination coming from North America.
L. Moret: Yes, this is before Fukushima.
Dr. Fetzer: Ah!
L. Moret: And so this very same phenomenon is going to happen because of Fukushima over here. Now with fish living in fresh water and salt water, the carnivorous fish that eat smaller fish have lower levels of radiation concentration in them than fish that eat off of the bottom, and you know they pick up mud and filth and that is full of radiation. And so the bottom feeders have higher levels of radiation that the carnivorous fish. So there are all kinds of subtle differences and mechanisms in the environment for bio-concentrating in certain foods and animals. And what they are doing basically is poisoning the whole Pacific because these releases continue every day, twenty four hours a day, and they are dumping this into the ocean, or it is leaking into the ocean, carried by the great conveyor belt of circulation that goes around the North Pacific, and then goes through Southeast Asia, and then around Africa, and up around the Atlantic, so it circulates the entire world oceans, carrying all this Fukushima radiation. And who knows where it will go. But it is going to wash up on shorelines all over the world. And then it gets lofted into the air, and the worst thing is pregnant women getting exposed, especially in the first about six weeks. 80% of the embryos die in organisms that are exposed in the first six weeks of pregnancy.
Dr. Nadesan: There was a wonderful study that was done on the bird population in California after Chernobyl, and they found extremely high bird mortality for birds that ate new growth. What they found was that essentially no offspring were born, and it was because they were killed by the buildup of the iodine in the vegetation, which the birds ate and fed to their young. It led to this really high infant mortality. It was on the west side of the coastal mountain range. They didn’t find it on the east side. So it was specific to how the fallout was dispersed and the role of mountains in shaping that. But yes, the contamination that is going into the ocean as well as the contamination in the air is going to end up in people, and this is an unprecedented level of radiation that has been released at one time. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hcBGSr9QGk.) There is nothing like it. I don’t know whether it exceeds the level released over atmospheric testing, but that occurred over a decade. It occurred in the 50?s and did not stop until the 60?s, it was started in the 40?s. But we’re talking about incredible volumes of radiation which is being released in a year period that essentially has been unmitigated. You know it is being released into the air, it is being released into the soil, it is being released into the ocean. It is unprecedented. It is called the worst release of radiation into the sea ever, and it is going to end up in us.
L. Moret: That’s right.
Dr. Nadesan: That has implications.
L. Moret: Well, the difference between the radiation released from atmospheric testing and the Fukushima disaster as well as the whole nuclear power program and these uranium weapons they have been using on the battlefield since 1990 is that with atmospheric testing, those nuclear bombs were injected high into the atmosphere because they were actually using the radiation released from nuclear bombs to study the behavior of the earth’s magnetic field in the ionosphere. And so that was really key to developing HAARP, actually. The difference now, and then the jet stream would primarily transport that radiation from west to east at the same latitude. But, 85% of that radiation from bomb testing is still up in the ionosphere. So we only got 15% protracted over the whole period up to now since 1952 when they did the first nuclear bomb test in the U.S. Now the weapons that are being used on the battlefields and the nuclear power plants and the Fukushima disaster are releasing large volumes of radiation, particulates, and it is even solids, liquids, and gas which are being picked up at ground level and then they are drifting up into the troposphere which is where all the storms and hurricanes and tornadoes — it is the most turbulent part of the entire atmosphere– so there is a 95% rainout of the radiation released on the ground within the first two and a half months. So Majia, we are getting a very, very, very acute exposure compared to the nuclear bomb test period.
Dr. Fetzer: Let’s take our final break here. This is Jim Fetzer, your host with Leuren Moret and Majia Nadesan talking about Fukushima and its consequences. You don’t want to miss everything left to say. We’ll be right back.
LAST BREAK
Dr. Fetzer: This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Real Deal”, concluding my conversation with Leuren Moret and Majia Nadesan. I would just like to mention that the idea of this particular interview involving Majia, Leuren and me came from Bill Fox of America First Books who has had a number of astute ideas that we have liked and implemented that have made a big difference, I think, where this will be the third in a series of studies based upon these interviews that will be published in Veterans Today, and the previous two which wound up generating four different articles about all of this have been making their way around the world. They seem to be very well received. Leuren, you could comment about that.
L. Moret: Yes, they have been really well received, not so much by the people who do not like what we are doing, but I think they have had an astounding impact. And you know information is not just frightening. That is not why we are doing this. It is empowering. You really can’t effectively act in your own best interest and take care of your family and friends and protect them unless you know what the truth is. So we are not doing this to frighten people or sensationalize this issue. It is the most serious issue in the world today, and it will continue to be for many centuries. So it is really a pubic service, and we are all very interested in hearing people’s comments as well. But I think that what Majia is presenting today is a perspective and a way for people to understand what is really happening and how to look at the information being presented in the media and to understand that it is not the truth. To understand it has happened before, and to understand that economic factors are one of the main things behind it. But we also have to discuss before we end this interview some ways that are part of the solution. I don’t like to leave people just knowing about the problem and not offering some solutions to them.
Dr. Fetzer: Let me just add a comment here about a technical, philosophical distinction, but it is obvious in this instance between what is known as “rationality of belief,” which involves forming your beliefs based upon the available relevant evidence, where you need to make sure your belief is formed on the basis of all the relevant evidence to have it best founded in relation to what evidence is available, versus “rationality of action” which has to do with adopting measures or techniques or actions that are going to advance your goals. Ordinarily, to achieve effective action in the world you need a high degree of “rationality of belief” so you know the situation you are in and can take those actions that are best founded in terms of what you know. But, there can be those who have goals that entail deceiving a certain target population about the actual situation. So even though they may have rational beliefs, they may take actions that entail curtailing or suppressing or distorting the information that is available for their own specific goals. So this is very well illustrated here, I think, if you assume for example that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear energy industries want to protect their viability politically, and believe that can be done most effectively by suppressing or distorting the information about the catastrophes that have ensued from reliance on nuclear energy, then you can see where they can benefit in terms of “rationality of action” from deliberately disseminating information that is false or misleading, or simply manufactured in order to obtain that goal. So for the sake of “rationality of action,” you can actually, based upon beliefs that are rational, nevertheless you can distort what you believe to be true for the sake of the objective that is your goal.
Dr. Nadesan: I think that is very important, and if you look at the history of public relations in the United States, Edward Bernays wrote a book called Propaganda (1928), and he was actually an advisor to presidents, and encouraged fear of communism as a way of making the population malleable. And that kind of mentality, that really the role of leadership in democracies is to mobilize consent rather than to actually create a democratic society, I think perpetuates today. We see that the media, although the media is not always a tool being used for the purposes of propaganda, it often is. What people need to realize is to look for the inconsistencies and contradictions both within stories and also across stories and to realize that in many ways we are kind of in a crisis situation, because our food, our air, our water is all becoming increasingly contaminated, and we are starting to see the proliferation of diseases that simply cannot be explained by any kind of genetic or even lifestyle explanations like Parkinsons, growing cancer, growing thyroid cancer, growing autism, growing ADHD — and these things are not simply all a function of just measuring them differently. Our bodies are essentially under assault from all of the chemical and radiological contaminants. And if we don’t pay attention to what is happening and demand reform, really, if we don’t demand reform, then we are compromising our genetic heritage and our survivability as a species. Fukushima to me is sort of like the last straw. If people don’t wake up and see what is happening and demand transparency, and demand preventative action, demand collaborative governments’ response across the world to deal with Fukushima, I really don’t see how we can recover from this because it really just shows that no matter how large the crisis, the public is just going to sort of sleep through it until it is too late to recover.
Dr. Fetzer: Majia, I think what you are saying is exactly right, and we have been confronted with a series of environmental catastrophes, including the use of what now turn out to be advanced nuclear weapons in Iraq where we have all of the genetic defects that are taking place here, where a quarter of births are stillborn, and three quarters of those born live are suffering from serious genetic abnormalities. The BP disaster in the Gulf Coast which has contaminated so much of the shell food, shell fish, the lessor forms of life on which all the higher forms of life is dependant, you are going to have unbelievable effects on the coastal population, which of course as we know world-wide is where most of the world’s population is located along the coasts of the different continents. And then of course now in Fukushima, I believe you are exactly right, that we are confronted with disasters of unparalleled proportions and that if the governments and the news media and so forth are so under the control of corporations they are placing profits ahead of people, that they are placing their own personal corporate interests ahead of the welfare of the people, that it may in fact make it impossible as a practical matter for effective steps to be taken, and thereby bring about the more rapid extinction of the human species. And I say this as a student of evolution, we are talking about events here of a magnitude that they have the capacity to bring about the extinction of the human species sooner rather than later by virtue of failing to take appropriate actions that might have been taken other than for the suppression of information or its deliberate distortion for the sake of private interests and maximizing profits.
L. Moret: Well, on March 25th there was an article, AP article in the news, titled “Another Japan Reactor Shuts Down, Only One Left Operating,” and this is really interesting, because what’s happened is the Japanese people have been beaten into submission for a thousand years. They are very, very, very controlled socially. But, since this has happened, all the frustration and the anger and the outrageous extermination of the Japanese people in this instance has really mobilized them, and they are doing a lot of demonstrations in Japan. They are doing a lot of things despite the censorship there. The people are really mobilized, and suddenly the Japanese government and TEPCO are not willing to really turn all their reactors back on. In fact this last one which is up on Hokkaido, the northern island, they are going to turn that off. It is for refueling and inspection, but it is not expected to be turned back on again because of overwhelming opposition by the public at the local level. The local leaders are afraid to support nuclear power now because they won’t get reelected, and then that proliferates up into the higher levels of the government. So we could see the end of nuclear power in Japan. I can see that now. But it is only because of the opposition of the people. And I went on 20 speaking tours to Japan between 2000 and 2010 and the people all over Japan at all levels were very interested in the information that I presented, and actually I took Dr. Busby’s ECRR report which was the first risk model that challenged the U.S. Government basis for the world radiation exposure standards. [NOTE: A good example of Dr. Busby’s work in this area prior to 2003 is “From Sellafield to Chernobyl and Beyond: Exposure to Man-Made Ionizing Radiation As the Primary Environmental Cause of Recent Cancer Issues,” Contribution to the ASPIS seminar, Kos Island, September 6, 2000. Please also see a Dr. Chris Busby archive here.] I stayed in Japan in 2003 all summer, and educated the lawyers who were representing the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They had never won a law suit against the government just for health benefits. And after I educated them and they translated that new risk model, they went into the Japanese courts, conservative ones, like in Nagoya and Hiroshima, and they have been winning all their cases since then. So it is really up to the scientists to produce the good science, up to some people in academia like Majia Nadesan educating the public about how the media affects the information they are getting, and how that protects or doesn’t protect the citizens. I just think a lot of really good things are going to come out of this terrible tragedy.
Dr. Fetzer: But the fact of the matter is even if there was a cessation of the nuclear power industry in Japan, we may nevertheless be anticipating the extinction of the Japanese population and culture. I mean that would take the nuclear energy industry with it, but it would have been a cause and effect relationship that is simply catastrophic.
Dr. Nadesan: And we have the same problems here in the United States. The San Onofre Nuclear Power plant I believe is shut down at the moment because they discovered that there had been deterioration of vital pipes. And there was no explanation how this deterioration could have occurred because the pipes were very new, and it is just that the entire plant was unsafe. Where I live there is the Palo Verde nuclear plant, and there is a gentleman who I have had correspondence with who has for his entire career, he is 89 now, but for his entire career he studied radiation, essentially. He has looked at the tritium emissions from the Palo Verde nuclear plant. He has a new book out entitled Hidden Tritium (2012) –his name is Clyde Stanger — that shows his analyses of the tritium releases and how they threaten human health in the Phoenix area, because tritium is continuously released from nuclear plants. It is essentially a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, and so there is no way you can filter it out, so it gets in your drinking water. It is in precipitation. It is in our lakes, it’s in our swimming pools. As a beta particle if it is ingested and if it is somehow breathed in, it can do damage inside our body as an internal emitter. And Chris Busby’s model that Leuren was discussing is significant because it looks at the effective internal emitters on the body and the models that had been used prior to that simply emphasized external exposure. When they did use models for calculating internal exposure it was based on an extrapolation that was developed before DNA was fully understood. So it doesn’t look at things like the bystander effect, which shows the way in which radiation can damage cells that aren’t even directly hit by the gamma radiation, or the beta radiation, just because of the synergy of the cells in their environment. So new understandings of the effects of radiation show conclusively how dangerous they are, and not just from plants that go awry like Fukushima, but by fully operating plants like Palo Verde, and yet nothing is being done. And in fact, instead, what is being done is proposals to build more nuclear plants and proposals to update the U.S. nuclear arsenal. I mean it is truly madness and can only be explained by greed and profit.
L. Moret: That’s right, and another thing that is happening, this is very, very serious, the Fukushima [radiation] coming over to North America is being rained out and is contaminating all the surface water and irrigation supplies and then everything living on the plants or in the water or living on the land or in the water is going to bio-concentrate the radiation. It is going to increase every month, every week, every day for decades ahead. And what is being reported all over the world, and people are irate about it, is now Halliburton has special exemptions in the United States by the EPA and in other countries and those governments to conduct frackings, subsurface fracking. They are allowed to use extremely poisonous chemicals in the United States because the EPA gave them an exemption and a pass to use these horrible chemicals that were used also in the BP disaster in the Gulf, and nobody else is licensed to use those because they are so toxic. So they are pumping these horrible biological poisons as chemicals to do fracking, which is subsurface exploration for gas, and the chemicals are poisoning ground water. These are ancient aquifers where the water is a million years old or even more under ground. They are permanently poisoning them, and water districts very frequently take well water from aquifers or deep drilling, because that is like champagne, and they mix it with surface water which is the runoff from the mountains, which is loaded with the radiation. When you combine chemicals and radiation you get synergistic effects which are multiplications by many times of what one or the other, the chemicals or the radiation would cause. So you are subtly multiplying the effects of low levels of radiation and chemicals and coming out with a really, really killer result.
Dr. Fetzer: Let me add from a moral point of view that this is all very understandable from the point of view of the corrupt moral theory known as “limited utilitarianism,” according to which an action is right when it maximizes benefits for the members of your group, regardless of the consequences for others. So it could be exemplified by the Third Reich. It could be exemplified by the mafia. It could be exemplified by General Motors. An illustration of General Motors was when the corporation made the decision to put the fuel tank on the outside of the frame of certain pickup trucks they knew in anticipation there would be more deaths and maiming from fires that would result from accidents that otherwise would not have brought about those effects, but they had lot’s of lawyers they were paying retainers anyway. So they went ahead to do it because it would have cost a $1.05 or so more to put them on the inside of the frame than the out[side], and they realized that by making calculations even if they had to handle law suits they would come out ahead profit-wise, and clearly that is going on here with the nuclear power industry. I published an article about it titled “Are Corporations Inherently Corrupt?” which you can find online. Marjorie Kelly has a brilliant book entitled The Divine Right of Capital (2003) in which she proposes that corporations have to be re-conceptualized, reconstituted so that they are performing some public good, which used to be the case in the past. But perhaps most simply put, that they should be serving not merely the interests of the stockholders by maximizing their profits, but they have to maximize the benefits to stakeholders, namely everyone whose interests are affected by the actions taken by the corporation. So you now have to take into account consumers, the environment, the general situation from the point of view of ecology and evolution, which would transform our understanding of the functioning of corporations, so these kinds of catastrophes would not occur. All of this must be contrasted with a deontological viewpoint according to which every human being, every person must be treated as an end, and not merely as a means. I mean the classic kinds of abuse that humans exercise on other humans, murder, robbery, kidnapping, rape, are all very easily understood as using other people merely as means. When you cannot use other people merely as means, you restore mutual respect between parties where one another are respecting each other with regard to their interests, which of course can be then generalized even in a democracy often identified with classic utilitarianism where the greatest good for the greatest number does not satisfy the deontological conception because you could have a society,for example, that was a slave-based society that produces more happiness for the majority, if say 85% were the majority and 15% the slaves, even though the slaves were very, very, unhappy by being used by the majority. It could be the case that this arrangement for society would produce the greatest good for the greatest number, but if you work it the other way around, and recognize that a democracy and majority rule only functions properly when you have minority rights combined with majority rule so that even the minorities have to be respected. Then you get the proper balance between morality and politics, which is a subject that I discuss in Render Unto Darwin (2007), one of my most recent books about all these issues, including a critique of creation science and intelligent design and creationism in relation to evolution which has to be understood as having multiple variations because there are eight different causal mechanisms that affect the evolution of species and where most of the criticisms of evolution have been based upon caricatures that only cite for example genetic mutation and natural selection when they are discounting or ignoring genetic drift, sexual reproduction, sexual selection, group selection, genetic engineering, and so forth. So I just say there is a very broad intellectual canvass here that we are addressing that has many elements, but where the domination of corporations in pursuit of profits is really at the heart of the matter, I am sorry to say, and is corrupting life on this planet and may even lead to its ultimate extinction sooner rather than later.
Dr. Nadesan: And in a democratic society government has the responsibility to arbitrate neutrally competing interests, and unfortunately we see so many ways with the financial crisis, the BP oil spill, the Fukushima disaster, genetically modified food — and not so much the genetic modification but what they are being genetically modified for, to be doused in Roundup, we are seeing over and over again that governments’ willingness, ability, capabilities, to protect the public interests have been fundamentally eroded. And they have been eroded because of the revolving door and conflicts of interests and greed. This is incredibly important now because we are reaching such a critical point. As Leuren says, our fresh water supplies are being compromised by both chemicals and radionuclides. Our food supply is being compromised by the lack of fresh water, by erratic climate change and this year it may even have been impacted by all the radiation that Fukushima has spewed. So we have all these pressing problems that are threatening our continued survival, and yet our governing apparatuses are self-serving and self-interested and as a result are simply unwilling to address these issues. And the public is complacent. So if we don’t all wake up and act collaboratively to fix them, we are not going to have a very happy future.
Dr. Fetzer: Majia, I can’t thank you enough for coming on this show today. You are making excellent contributions. I greatly value your perspective. You have greatly enriched our understanding of these issues. Leuren, I can’t thank you enough for being here again. And I want to conclude by thanking Bill Fox once more for having a brilliant idea in recommending that we have this particular interview. This is Jim Fetzer, your host, thanking my guests, Majia Nadesan and Leuren Moret for being here, and all of you for listening.
Leuren Moret is an independent geoscientist who has done expert studies on the Fukushima disaster, radiation problems around the world including depleted uranium.
Majia Nadesan, Ph.D., is a professor of communication in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.
Jim Fetzer, Ph.D. is the McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth, is a former Marine Corps officer and the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
William B. Fox, Publisher, America First Books, prepared the transcript and also assisted in organizing this interview with Leuren and Majia.