It will take years to know the increase in cancer rate deaths of tech workers and cleanup personnel. Some believe it could be significant. Much of Japan's food supply and plant life is contaminated. It is a waiting game to see its conclusive effects over time. The larger question is how will it affect all of us? The power of government and the news media reveal little about it now. There is food contamination found even in Washington State and in California. Foods shipped east and winds which transport contamination particles from deadly Cesium and other lethal elements make it a factor. How much of a danger it poses to us in the long run no one yet knows. My personal opinion is it poses a consequential threat but because cancer takes so long to develop we may never know its direct correlation. My hunch will always say it is a direct one.
Since the American memory and attention span is measured in minutes, the story goes mostly unnoticed and under-reported. Even tsunami debris is from Japan washing up on our shores and more will. Heads here, as usual, are in the sand as attention MUST be but never is paid for more than a 48 hour news cycle -- and that's being generous. The fate of the nuclear power industry is at stake. Money in this country and the politics that are appended to it are all too often in our Citizens United culture the reason information is squashed.
I post a link to the MSNBC article here. I suggest reading it and demand that the nuclear power plants we do have are inspected, brought up to date and the ones we are thinking of building never are. The cumulative effects of radiation are known. The hour of nuclear madness has arrived and did so with the first explosion of a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima/Nagasaki in August, 1945. No amount of radiation is safe as the great Helen Caldicott stated. I quote from an article about her below and which in its entirety can be found here.
Helen Caldicott, the Australia-born American physician and anti-nuclear activist of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was a practitioner of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston, U.S. A leading critic of nuclear technology and armament industries, she tried to raise the world's conscience through her almost solitary protest writings and TV and radio appearances against the dangers of nuclear technology for the environment. In the light of Fukushima (2011), Chernobyl (1986) and Three Mile Island (1979) nuclear accidents (all of which happened after 1978) and the great concern they generated in the world during the last four decades, Caldicott’s 1978 book Nuclear Madness assumes prophetic significance.
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