With every atomic reactor disaster comes the inevitable whitewash.
And Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has just painted a tragic new coat over the radioactive wasteland of atomic flim-flam.
Its "Panic at Fukushima" speaks volumes to a nuclear power industry now crumbling at the core. It fits an historic pattern:
When yet another radioactive leak emits from the local nuke -- no matter how serious -- the official response is hard-wired to include the phrase "no danger to the public."
When serious structural cracks surface at reactors like Ohio's Davis-Besse or Crystal River, Florida, safety concerns are invariably dismissed with well-funded contempt.
As with fatally flawed steam generators at California's San Onofre, if it can make an extra buck, the industry will run these reactors into the ground, safety-be-damned. Protected by federal taxpayer insurance and the bankruptcy laws, they know even a catastrophic disaster need not trouble their bottom line.
When earthquakes rattle reactors in Virginia and Ohio, or threaten others near New York City and Los Angeles, the public is "never in danger." Likewise a generation of Japanese heard for decades that reactors at Fukushima and Kashiwazaki were "perfectly safe."
But, now that earthquakes have hammered them both, we know who pays.
At Three Mile Island, there was "no melting of fuel" until, nine years later, robotic cameras showed there certainly was.
"Nobody died" at Three Mile Island until epidemiological evidence showed otherwise. (Disclosure: In 1980 I interviewed the dying and bereaved in central Pennsylvania, leading to the 1982 publication of KILLING OUR OWN).
TMI was a "success story" for industry apologist Patrick Moore, whose accounting skills apparently include cheerily alchemizing a $2 billion liability from a $900 million asset.
Likewise, the Soviet Union said not to worry as Chernobyl spewed lethal radioactive clouds across Europe and into the jet stream that contaminated the entire northern hemisphere. One "scientist" said the fallout would "improve" human health in downwind Ukraine and Belarus, where stillbirths, malformations and birth defects still run rampant.
The Soviet Union is now dead...except in the hearts of a corporate media still parroting the Politburo lie that only 31 people died at Chernobyl, rather than the million-and-counting that now seems likely.
For Fukushima, the inevitable Murdoch whitewash comes from a one-time Koch-funded climate skeptic named Robert Muller. He says Fukushima has harmed virtually no one except the nuclear industry, which the Japanese people have all but shut.
Muller's article occupies a parallel pro-nuclear universe. Virtually devoid of actual fact, it is meticulously dissected by SimplyInfo in a brilliant primer on the health impacts of a truly apocalyptic nightmare that is far from over.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
