Today's topics:
(1) The first million is the hardest... (by Ace Hoffman) (2) The Real Story: Chernobyl show to air on Earth Focus TODAY (3) Jeff Phillips (writing from New Zealand): Uranium mining over and under (4) Iris Cheng (Greenpeace): Chernobyl: distorted reality, and unanswered questions (5) Conrad Miller: Chernobyl 25th anniversary disaster (6) Google Earth Maps Out At-Risk Populations Around Nuclear Power Plants (7) Contact information for the author of this newsletter
---------------------------------------- (1) The first million is the hardest...: ----------------------------------------
April 26th, 2011
Dear Readers,
Today is the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl. Today, a quarter century ago, the ruthless murder of a million people began. And the cover-up.
How quickly we forget! How destined we are to repeat!
Today's commemorations around the world might have gone practically unnoticed by the mainstream media, save perhaps for a 60-second spot about a decaying sarcophagus, were it not for Fukushima.
Today we honor and remember the already-dead from Chernobyl:
1) The "liquidators" who helped clean it up (about 800,000 young men) who now die like flies of cancer, leukemia, and a thousand other stranger ailments.
2) The local citizens who were not told for a week or more that anything was wrong, even while the rest of the world knew because a nuclear reactor power company in Sweden had alerted the "free" public (that is, the Western media) several days after Chernobyl exploded, after the ill winds tripped their own monitors.
3) The people around the world who also MUST have died, in addition to the million who lived nearer the plant or were among the liquidators.
4) The descendents, for at least seven generations, of all these people -- that's how far the DNA is likely to show damage, perhaps even further down the line.
"The million" are only the ones that were reasonably easy to count. I use the term "easy" very relatively: WHO wouldn't count them -- for five years they didn't even start to take a half-hearted look. IAEA wouldn't count them (and probably prevented WHO from doing so). It would be bad for the promotion of nuclear power, their mandate and perceived mission. The nuclear industry didn't want them counted. The nuke-loving cash-strapped secretive militaristic Russian government certainly didn't want them counted. Nobody wanted them counted.
So they weren't counted. Not easily, unless the term is relative. People halfway around the world, not under Soviet censorship, propaganda, or oppression, were NEVER counted by anyone. Billions of Curies, tens of thousands of terabecquerels... didn't just disappear. Many of them were breathed in by someone. They killed people all over the world, and still do. So will Fukushima Daiichi.
Cover-ups and lies hide the million-dead from the ongoing Chernobyl horror. Some say it's only tens of thousands, some say "merely" thousands, and some -- the nuclear industry in America, for instance-- just three or four dozen.
Nobody says, "nobody died at Chernobyl" like they (lie) and say about Three Mile Island.
Until last month Chernobyl was the worst industrial accident in human history -- unless you believe the lies.
New pictures have reportedly been released of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 -- the MOX reactor -- indicating the reactor pressure vessel itself had exploded last month (see Jeff's article, below).
The nuclear industry represents a small fraction of 1% of the human work force, even in America or France. These people could all be building wind turbines, except for those people who will have to guard the waste -- a cost society must incur forevermore, and which keeps getting more and more costly, and will continue to do so, at least until we stop making more waste every day.
It's time to stop the assault on human and other life. It's time to turn off the nukes.
Forced down our throats, and paid well to work there, society gave it a try.
Nuclear power has failed miserably. It's not enough to prevent new reactors, or even to prevent relicensing -- one unit at Fukushima had just been relicensed for another ten years just weeks before the catastrophe began. It's not enough to wait months and months for the "lessons learned" from Fukushima. It's not enough to be promised improvements, changes, more and better backup systems. All those are nice. But we need to close the reactors down forever.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman Carlsbad, CA
The author. 54. has, like you, seen far too many nuclear disasters (one is too many). Visit his web site: www.acehoffman.org to read his book online or as a free download: "The Code Killers", about the many ways the nuclear industry destroys humanity.
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-------------------------------------------------------- (2) The Real Story: Chernobyl show to air on Earth Focus TODAY: --------------------------------------------------------
Earth Focus, the environmental news magazine of LinkTV, has produced a documentary called Chernobyl -- The Real Story. It features interviews with Dr. Janette Sherman editor and Dr. Alexey Yablokov who is a Councilor Russian Academy of Sciences and co-author of the book Chernobyl Consequences for People and the Environment published by the National Academy of Sciences. The documentary was produced by Raisa Scriabine, edited by Toni Genberg, Sean McAll and Dustin Harrison Atlas. Producer for LinkTV is Kim Spencer. The piece is made possible with support from the Wallace Genetic Foundation, the Marisla Foundation and the Park Foundation.
You can download the documentary (2.5 GB) here:
ftp://4.71.46.20/Web%20Deliverables/Earth%20Focus/Chernobyl%20wWrapper.mov
Username ftp-guest Password w3lc0me
If the direct link does not work, try this (username and password are the same):
Click on Web Deliverables, then click on Earth Focus, then click on Chernobyl wWrapper.mov.
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Democracy Now! has a segment devoted to the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl featuring Dr. Janette Sherman and Dr. Jeff Patterson, the immediate past-president of Physicians for Social Responsibility:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/26/chernobyl_catastrophe_25th_anniversary_of_worlds
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-------------------------------------------------------- (3) Jeff Phillips (writing from New Zealand): Uranium mining over and under --------------------------------------------------------
At 11:33 PM 4/25/2011 -0700, synthaissance-owner@yahoogroups.com wrote: Re: [synthaissance] CHERNOBYL DAY/RUSSIAN TRANSLATION ASSISTANCE REQUEST ======================
"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."
Today is the 25th anniversary of the reactor explosion/meltdown at Chernobyl in the Ukraine, which contaminated thousands of square miles of Russia's "bread-basket" and has already caused over a million premature human deaths, not to mention incomprehensible damage to non-human lives and marine and terrestrial eco-systems.
As the Fukushima nuclear debacle continues to unfold, and it's true nature is revealed, we are witnessing two parallel streams of extremes: unprecedented release of extremely dangerous radio-nuclides into the planetary biosphere that is by no means over, at levels that have long surpassed Chernobyl and may have already surpassed the sum total of all nuclear detonations since 1945; and unprecedented levels of corporate fraud, governmental deception, institutionalized cover-up and systematic brain-washing blitz using the Hitlerian 'big lie' technique. While carcinogenic and mutagenic levels of radioactive actinides and isotopes are disseminated throughout the biosphere, the leaders of the modern world tell us to watch tv and be happy.
That the public as a whole is so indifferent to this global catastrophe, the likes of which has never been experienced in the history of civilization, despite having been exposed to and having access to reasonably accurate information on what is happening, is to me beyond belief. We seem to be witnessing a totally new level of active denial and intentional unreality in the mass population. Although most people are relatively ignorant scientifically, by choice, and could not possibly explain why ionizing radiation is dangerous to life as we know it, most people do possess the deep-seated and almost common-sense intuition that it's certainly not good for us. So why do so few people seem to care at all about what is going on?
On this day in 1986 I was in the high desert of Arizona, at a place called Big Mountain, on the Navaho reservation. A group of us had gone there from Santa Cruz California in support of the indigenous people who were being forcibly relocated so that Peabody Coal could strip-mine their land. During the week we spent up there we met with elders and learned of the ancient prophecies, particularly those of the Hopi. We sang, danced and talked. I walked around with a Geiger counter taking readings of back-ground radiation as an F-111 fighter plane swooped over menacingly at less than 100 feet of altitude.
We learned that we were on the Grant Mineral belt, near a place called Black mesa, where the uranium for the first atomic bomb was extracted. We heard Hopi elder Thomas Banyacya tell us about the ancient prophecy, "If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."
We were out of touch with the outside world for a week, and when we came down to Flagstaff, we saw the biggest head-line possible for a newspaper: the Chernobyl meltdown. This is still the freakiest "synchronicity" of my entire life.
Ever since then I have undertaken to spread the word of nuclear awareness, and have realized this to be the single greatest threat to life as we know her on this planet. Astronomer Carl Sagan made a huge effort to create awareness of this situation, and contracted a fatal leukemia because of his massive number of personal protests at the Nevada Test Site. As a scientist, Sagan was fully aware that the Earth is the only planet we know of in the entire universe that is home to life; unfortunately, his belief was that the danger we faced was from all-out thermo-nuclear war. I don't think he was aware of the less visible but equally real form of "nuclear war" being waged in the form of DU and later from "geo-terrorism" environmental warfare techniques as envisioned by Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Central in the on-going battle of life against death, quite literally on this planet, is the unique down-under country of Australia. Home to approximately 40% of the world's entire uranium reserves, she has traditionally limited herself to 3 uranium mines. But in recent years mining interests and pro-nuclear power-brokers are storming the government and populace with 'safe and clean' propaganda designed to manufacture consent not only for expanded uranium mining, so that Australia can become the "Saudi Arabia of uranium", but worse, for the construction of dozens of nuclear reactors across her wonderfully subtle landscape, the power from which could easily be supplied by means far less necrophilous in nature, even including the totally taboo concept of "conservation." Moreover, more solar energy falls onto the surface of Australia than any other country, yet she has less solar technology than Germany.
The battle for the survival of life as we know her may in fact be under way right now in Australia, a battle within an historically and legendarily apathetic people who have a chance to rouse themselves from their beer and telly, to rise up and make a difference that DOES matter in a big way, the battle against their tendency to adopt an attitude of "no worries" even when confronted with not only the on-going genocide of their own indigenous people but themselves as well. Soon I'll be posting a more in-depth version of this story.
I have recently gotten in touch with Dr. Alexy Yablokov, co-author of the recent and excellent book on the long-term health effects of Chernobyl. Soon I will be posting excerpts from this book. Dr. Yablokov has agreed to do an interview with me and to answer some questions, but his English isn't very good and my Russian is nil.
I wanted to ask if anyone out there happens to be fluent in Russian or knows someone who is who might have a little time to translate a few paragraphs from English into Russian and then from Russian in to English? If anyone can help, you will be making a big contribution to the sharing of extremely important information, plus I'll send you some hand-painted rocks! Please get in touch if anyone can help with this.
Happy Chernobyl Day. By the way, photos just coming out show that Reactor #3 at Fukushima fully exploded very early on...this is the reactor itself, the one with the MOX plutonium fuel rods. This means that large amounts of plutonium have been going around the world in all those radiation clouds.
Jeff Phillips New Zealand
http://dolphinmatrix.com/Jeff/ http://picasaweb.google.com/therockist http://rachels-carson-of-today.blogspot.com http://www.synthaissance.blogspot.com/ http://tutunui-wananga.blogspot.com/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/synthaissance/ http://cryo-now.blogspot.com/ http://www.regainyourbrain.org/ http://thebrink-jeffphillips.blogspot.com/
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." Mark Twain
"Politics is the entertainment branch of government." Frank Zappa
"Government is the public-relations branch of globalisation." K. Rubrick Shreddinger
"The only thing that's faster than light is simultaneity." J. Paul Serengeti "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's." William Blake
"On Spaceship Earth, there are no passengers: everyone is crew." R. Buckminster Fuller
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-------------------------------------------------- (4) : Chernobyl: distorted reality, and unanswered questions: --------------------------------------------------
Blogpost by Iris Cheng - April 19, 2011 at 16:32
We have just returned after completing an important mission in Ukraine taking around 70 journalists from 18 countries with us to Chernobyl, nearly 25 years after the nuclear catastrophe. It was one of the largest media trips Greenpeace has organized. These seasoned journalists asked critical and insightful questions, none of them easily moved.
But many of them were deeply disturbed by what they saw and heard often by the mundane details that were mentioned matter-of-factly by the interviewees.
Like every year Ukraine government needs to spend between six to eight percent of the fiscal budget to cope with the consequences of Chernobyl.
Like how tens of thousands of Ukrainian children need to be sent away every year to uncontaminated areas for at least a month, in order to allow the body to get rid of some of the Cesium-137 accumulated through eating everyday food like milk, mushrooms, berry jam and meat.
Like how food sold in every market needs to be tested for radionuclide like Cesium and Strontium.
Like how children of Rokytne get tonsillitis several times a year because their immune systems are compromised by radionuclide. According to deputy head doctor from the District Hospital, two-thirds of the population of 53,000 he cares for is affected by Cesium-137 contamination in food. Rokytne is 300km away from Chernobyl, on the other side of the country.
Like how the local health and sanitary station in some areas need to make maps to tell local communities where the radiation hotspots are and thus unsafe to go.
Like how in school children are taught the practical steps of radiation safety, and do emergency drills with gas masks.
Like how young expectant mothers get advice about what food they need to avoid, in order to minimise radionuclide uptake, which causes deformity in the developing fetus. They need frequent checks and if the fetus develops serious deformity then it may have to be aborted.
Like how it is considered impolite to ask workers building the new sarcophagus about their personal radiation dose. If it reaches the limit then they cannot work, which means they lose their job.
Like how radioactive waste containment and management had become an important sector of the economy, because of the Chernobyl disaster. The original sarcophagus, hastily built in the months after the accident, is meant to only last 25-30 years and now at risk of collapse. Underneath, the destroyed reactor is still on site and cannot be dismantled because of its extreme radioactivity.
The consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster lie in these mundane everyday facts. Life for these communities is brutally distorted, for centuries to come.
However, when I returned from Ukraine, I was hit by another distorted reality.
Nuclear proponents now claim that despite the fact that the situation in the Fukushima nuclear plant is still not under control, despite the massive amount of radioactive water dumped into the sea with unknown consequence Fukushima proves that nuclear energy is safe, because so far no one has been killed by the radiation?
I want them to say that to the doctors and the parents who are told that the state can now only afford to send children away for breaks in clean areas for 18 days per year. Nuclear supporters probably don’t know that it takes 50 days for the body of a child (100 days for adult) to get rid of half of its radioactive Cesium-137.
I want them to say that to the public health officials who are struggling to find funding to continue monitoring food contamination.
I want them to say that to the young woman who told us her favourite fruit is the blueberries from the forests. She knows they are contaminated by Cesium but she cannot help eating them sometimes.
I want them to take human life more seriously. There are 442 nuclear power plants in the world today and the majority are aging. There will be leaks, power outages, human errors, design flaws. The nuclear industry has no solutions to the radioactive waste problem. How many more life-crippling nuclear disasters will it take before the world gets rid of this outdated, dangerous and unnecessary technology?
Iris Cheng is a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace International, based in Hong-Kong.
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-------------------------------------------------- (5) Conrad Miller: Chernobyl Disaster 25th Anniversary In Fukushima's Radioactive Shadow: --------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------- (6) Google Earth Maps Out At-Risk Populations Around Nuclear Power Plants: --------------------------------------------------
"If a nuclear power plant in the US were to have issues, who would be affected? In a partnership between Nature News and Columbia University, we now have a Google map that tells us the population sizes around plants so we can easily scan and see the number of people that could be affected should anything occur at the plants."
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-------------------------------------------------- (7) Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
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Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Carlsbad, CA
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
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