66 Years Ago: When Truman Opened the Nuclear Era With a Hiroshima Lie

Lively discussion on the comments, too - so have a read.  THANK YOU GREG MITCHELL

Greg Mitchell

In a piece earlier this week I mentioned the decades-long U.S. "coverup" of facts and options related to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima 66 years ago today, including the Truman White House censoring the first Hollywood movie about The Bomb. But that shaping of the full impact, and ramifications, of the new weapons -- which would continue for years -- began within hours of the first use.

On Aug. 6, 1945, President Harry S. Truman faced the task of telling the press, and the world, that America's crusade against fascism had culminated in exploding a revolutionary new weapon of extraordinary destructive power over a Japanese city.

It was vital that this event be understood as a reflection of dominant military power and at the same time consistent with American decency and concern for human life. Everyone involved in preparing the presidential statement sensed that the stakes were high, for this marked the unveiling of both the atomic bomb and the official narrative of Hiroshima.

When the astonishing news emerged that morning, exactly 66 years ago, it took the form of a routine press release, a little more than a thousand words long. President Truman was at sea a thousand miles away, returning from the Potsdam conference. Shortly before eleven o'clock, an information officer from the War Department arrived at the White House bearing bundles of press releases. A few minutes later, assistant press secretary Eben Ayers began reading the president's announcement to about a dozen members of the Washington press corps.

The atmosphere was so casual, and the statement so momentous, that the reporters had difficulty grasping it. "The thing didn't penetrate with most of them," Ayers later remarked. Finally, they rushed to call their editors, and at least one reporter found a disbeliever at the other end of the line. The first few sentences of the statement set the tone:

"Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. ...The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. ...It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe."

Although details were modified at the last moment, Truman's four-page statement had been crafted with considerable care over many months. If use of the atomic bomb was inherent in its invention, an announcement of this sort was inevitable. Only the timing was in doubt.
would be suppressed by the U.S. for decades. 
From its very first words, however, the official narrative was built on a lie. Hiroshima was not an "army base" but a city of 350,000. It did contain one important military base, but the bomb had been aimed at the very center of a city (and far from its industrial area). This was a continuation of the American policy of bombing civilian populations in Japan to undermine the morale of the enemy. It was also to take advantage of what those who picked the target called the special "focusing effect" provided by the hills which surrounded the city on three sides. This would allow the blast to bounce back on the city, destroying more of it, and its citizens.

The vast majority of the dead in Hiroshima would not be military personnel and defense workers but women and children. Also: at least a dozen American POWs. When Nagasaki was A-bombed three days later it was officially described as a "naval base." Film footage shot by the Japanese and later the Americans showing the full extent of the human damage would be suppressed by the U.S. for decades.

There was something else missing in Truman's announcement: Because the president in his statement failed to mention radiation effects, which officials knew were horrendous, the imagery of just a bigger bomb would prevail in the press. Truman described the new weapon as "revolutionary" but only in regard to the destruction it could cause, failing to mention its most lethal new feature: radiation.

Many Americans first heard the news from the radio, which broadcast the text of Truman's statement shortly after its release. The afternoon papers quickly arrived with banner headlines: "Atom Bomb, World's Greatest, Hits Japs!" and "Japan City Blasted by Atomic Bomb." The Pentagon had released no pictures, so most of the newspapers relied on maps of Japan with Hiroshima circled.

By that evening, radio commentators were weighing in with observations that often transcended Truman's announcement, suggesting that the public imagination was outrunning the official story. Contrasting emotions of gratification and anxiety had already emerged. H.V. Kaltenhorn warned, "We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us."

It wasn't until the following morning, Aug. 7, that the government's press offensive appeared, with the first detailed account of the making of the atomic bomb, and the Hiroshima mission. Nearly every U.S. newspaper carried all or parts of 14 separate press releases distributed by the Pentagon several hours after the president's announcement.

Many of them written by one man: W.L. Laurence, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, "embedded" with the atomic project. General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, would later reflect, with satisfaction, that "most newspapers published our releases in their entirety. This is one of the few times since government releases have become so common that this has been done."

The Truman announcement of the atomic bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, and the flood of material from the War Department, firmly established the nuclear narrative (see much more on this in my new book, Atomic Cover-up and e-book).

One of the few early stories that did not come directly from the military was a wire service report filed by a journalist traveling with the president on the Atlantic, returning from Europe. Approved by military censors, it went beyond, but not far beyond, the measured tone of the president's official statement. It depicted Truman, his voice "tense with excitement," personally informing his shipmates about the atomic attack. "The experiment," he announced, "has been an overwhelming success."

The sailors were said to be "uproarious" over the news. "I guess I'll get home sooner now," was a typical response. Nowhere in the story, however, was there a strong sense of Truman's reaction. Missing from this account was his exultant remark when the news of the bombing first reached the ship: "This is the greatest thing in history!"

Greg Mitchell's new book is "Atomic Cover-up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made." Also in e-book editions. His email is epic1934@aol.com.

Japan’s Fukushima catastrophe brings big radiation spikes to B.C.

Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, says that while radiation coming from Fukushima will lead to higher cancer rates among Canadians, the risk posed to individuals is very small.

By Alex Roslin, August 4, 2011

Nuclear impact

Japan’s Fukushima catastrophe brings big radiation spikes to B.C.

Monitoring stations catch a fraction of Fukushima fallout

After Japan’s Fukushima catastrophe, Canadian government officials reassured jittery Canadians that the radioactive plume billowing from the destroyed nuclear reactors posed zero health risks in this country.

In fact, there was reason to worry. Health Canada detected massive amounts of radioactive material from Fukushima in Canadian air in March and April at monitoring stations across the country.

The level of radioactive iodine spiked above the federal maximum allowed limit in the air at four of the five sites where Health Canada monitors levels of specific radioisotopes.

On March 18, seven days after an earthquake and tsunami triggered eventual nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, the first radioactive material wafted over the Victoria suburb of Sidney on Vancouver Island.

For 22 days, a Health Canada monitoring station in Sidney detected iodine-131 levels in the air that were 61 percent above the government’s allowable limit. In Resolute Bay, Nunavut, the levels were 3.5 times the limit.

Meanwhile, government officials claimed there was nothing to worry about. “The quantities of radioactive materials reaching Canada as a result of the Japanese nuclear incident are very small and do not pose any health risk to Canadians,” Health Canada says on its website. “The very slight increases in radiation across the country have been smaller than the normal day-to-day fluctuations from background radiation.”

In fact, Health Canada’s own data shows this isn’t true. The iodine-131 level in the air in Sidney peaked at 3.6 millibecquerels per cubic metre on March 20. That’s more than 300 times higher than the background level, which is 0.01 or fewer millibecquerels per cubic metre.

“There have been massive radiation spikes in Canada because of Fukushima,” said Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.

“The authorities don’t want people to have an understanding of this. The government of Canada tends to pooh-pooh the dangers of nuclear power because it is a promoter of nuclear energy and uranium sales.”

Edwards has advised the federal auditor-general’s office and the Ontario government on nuclear-power issues and is a math professor at Montreal’s Vanier College.

In a phone interview from his Montreal home, he said radiation from Fukushima will lead to higher rates of cancer and other diseases among Canadians. But don’t panic. Edwards cautioned that the risk is very small for any particular individual.

“It’s not the risk to an individual that’s the problem but how much society is at risk. When you are exposing millions of people to an insult, even if the average dose is quite small, we are going to see fatal health effects,” he said.

Some impacts may have already occurred in North America. Infant mortality in eight cities in the U.S. Northwest jumped 35 percent after Fukushima, according to an article by internist and toxicologist Janette Sherman and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano on the Counterpunch website in June. The number of infant deaths rose from 9.25 per week in the four weeks prior to March 19 to 12.5 per week in the following 10 weeks, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control data.

“There has been a dismissiveness about the long-term hazards of nuclear power,” said Dr. Curren Warf, adolescent-medicine division head at B.C. Children’s Hospital.

Warf was on the board of the Nobel Peace Prize–winning U.S. antinuclear group Physicians for Social Responsibility before he moved to B.C. in 2009.

“These were some of the most advanced nuclear power plants in the world. But a natural earthquake and tsunami rendered their safety measures completely meaningless,” he said in a phone interview while on vacation in Tofino on Vancouver Island.

It’s not clear what health impacts British Columbians will face from the fallout from Fukushima, Warf said. But he added, “It should be a warning to Canada, the U.S., and the rest of the world about the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to natural catastrophes. These things have typically been dismissed in much of the planning.”

Dr. Erica Frank agrees. “The main concern I’ve had is we are not paying attention to Fukushima as a warning sign. Given the catastrophic long-term issues and what to do about nuclear waste, I had hoped it would be more of a wake-up [call] than it was,” said Frank, a professor of population and public health in UBC’s faculty of medicine and a past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

She called on Canada to follow Germany’s lead, which, in response to Fukushima, decided in May to phase out all of its nuclear power plants by 2022. “If Germany can do it, we can too,” she said in a phone interview from her Vancouver home.

With 450,000 people homeless, fallout across much of Japan, and a damages bill estimated at $300 billion, Fukushima is the “biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind”, said U.S. nuclear-industry whistle blower Arnold Gundersen in a June 10 Al Jazeera story.

Even the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the Fukushima plant, has acknowledged that the disaster may surpass the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. “The radiation leak has not stopped completely, and our concern is that the amount of leakage could eventually reach that of Chernobyl or exceed it,” a TEPCO official said in an April media release.

In the case of Chernobyl, radiation caused 985,000 deaths worldwide—including almost 170,000 in North America—between 1986 and 2004, according to a Russian study published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Fallout contaminated about 100,000 square kilometres of land. And 25 years later, five to seven percent of government spending in Ukraine is still devoted to dealing with the disaster’s health, environmental, and other after-effects.

The impacts of Fukushima are still in the earliest stages of being determined, especially since the nuclear plant is still spewing huge amounts of radiation. On Monday, TEPCO reported detecting record-high radiation levels at the plant—double the previous record set in early June. The new level—at least 10 sieverts (10,000 millisieverts) per hour—could cause death or incapacitation within a few seconds’ exposure.

Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, said in July that decommissioning the plant would take “several decades”.

Fallout has contaminated food and water across Japan. In July, officials reported that Japanese consumers had eaten meat contaminated with radioactive material. Cattle feed at one farm had levels of radioactive cesium 57 times higher than the government ceiling.

Japanese investigators later determined that almost 3,000 cattle had eaten radioactive feed before being shipped to market. Prices of Japanese beef collapsed after 23 out of 274 beef samples exceeded government radiation limits.

In Tokyo, radioactive iodine in tap water reached double the government ceiling in March. Meanwhile, TEPCO reported in April that a seawater sample near the Fukushima plant contained 7.5 million times what was described as the legal amount of iodine-131.

TEPCO released 11,500 tons of radioactive water from its storage tanks into the Pacific Ocean on April 4.

One aspect of the fallout and seawater contamination that remains unclear is how it might affect fish stocks, especially migratory species like salmon that could pass through poisoned areas of the ocean, eat irradiated prey, or have radioactive water dumped in their home ranges by Pacific currents.

Of the five species of Pacific salmon that are native to western North America, the sockeye is the most commercially prized. It also has the most wide-ranging migration route through the North Pacific, swimming for two to three years—as far as just northeast of the top of Japan—before coming back to its natal streams in Alaska, B.C., and the U.S. Northwest.

This year’s returning sockeye are just starting to be caught off Vancouver Island’s west coast. So far, there is no word as to whether or not these fish will be tested. According to an April 17 story in the Anchorage Daily News, U.S. federal officials have already stated that there is no need to even test Alaskan salmon.

Across the Pacific Ocean, it took only a few days after the disaster for radioactive fallout to start showing up in drinking water and milk across North America. Governments in both Canada and the U.S. monitored the radioactivity, but their data is reported in such a confusing and irregular way that it’s extremely difficult to determine if maximum contamination levels have been exceeded and how public health is being impacted.

“It’s very, very difficult to interpret radiation levels detected from Fukushima and translate them into standards. It’s a nightmare,” said Arjun Makhijani, an electrical and nuclear engineer and president of the Takoma Park, Maryland–based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, in a phone interview.

And that’s not a coincidence, said Vanier College’s Gordon Edwards. “To me, it’s a way of obscuring the impacts. It’s a smoke screen.”

Dale Dewar agrees. “The government always downgrades the results. They want to soft-pedal the extent of the accident because it will threaten our own nuclear industry,” said Dewar, a family physician and the executive director of Canadian antinuclear group Physicians for Global Survival, in a phone interview from her home near Wynyard, Saskatchewan.

One of the highest post-Fukushima radiation readings in North America came on March 27 in rainwater in Boise, Idaho. It contained 14.4 becquerels of iodine-131 per litre—130 times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contamination level of 0.11 millibecquerels per litre.

EPA officials said in media reports that the high levels didn’t pose a health threat. For the agency to sound an alarm, it says, a person would have to exceed its maximum level for an entire year, drinking two litres of the contaminated water each day.

But nobody seemed to investigate how long the rainwater in Boise remained radioactive. Inexplicably, the EPA stopped monitoring Boise’s rainwater after the extremely high reading on March 27. The agency’s only other reading for the city was on March 22.

That day, the iodine-131 level hit nine becquerels per litre.

In fact, if the two readings are averaged out and stayed just as elevated over the entire six-day period from March 22 to 27, a person drinking the Boise rainwater during this time would have exceeded the EPA’s annual ceiling by 75 percent.

In B.C.’s Lower Mainland, iodine-131 in the rainwater hit almost the same level as in Boise. It also seems to have exceeded the EPA’s ceiling.

On March 19, the iodine-131 level in rainwater in Burnaby suddenly spiked from zero to nine becquerels per litre. The next day, it rose even further, to 13, according to data collected and released by Krzysztof Starosta, an associate professor of chemistry at SFU, and others.

The iodine-131 levels remained well above the background level (which is close to zero) for 12 days.

The average level of radioactive iodine was seven becquerels per litre over the 12 days. That means a person drinking two litres of the rainwater per day would have consumed 166 becquerels of iodine-131 during that period.

That’s more than double the maximum amount that the EPA says a person can drink in an entire year, which is 81 becquerels.

Starosta did not respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.

Starosta issued a statement on March 28 saying the levels were safe because they were lower than levels detected after the Chernobyl disaster.

“As of now, the levels we’re seeing are not harmful to humans. We’re basing this on Japanese studies following the Chernobyl incident in 1986 where levels of iodine-131 were four times higher than what we’ve detected in our rainwater so far,” the statement said.

The contaminated rainwater also didn’t spark concern from Canadian public-health officials. That’s in large part because Canadian standards are far more lenient on radioactive contamination than those of the EPA.

Canada allows six becquerels per litre of iodine-131 in drinking water—or 54 times more than the EPA. By the much higher Canadian ceiling, the rainwater in Burnaby was fine to drink.

At the B.C. Ministry of Health Services, spokeswoman Laura Neufeld referred questions about radiation monitoring to Health Canada. A Health Canada spokesperson, Stéphane Shank, didn’t return the Straight’s call. (Shank is the same Health Canada employee who did not return calls regarding a recent Straight story on nanoparticles.)

“It shows you these standards are not scientifically based,” Edwards said. “They’re arbitrary and really based on political considerations. We have a government strongly committed to the export of uranium and promotion of nuclear energy.”

And even if the radiation level in Burnaby didn’t hit the far higher Canadian ceiling, Edwards said, any amount of radiation can cause cancer and other illness. “To suggest that a certain level of radiation exposure is safe is untrue. It verges on misrepresentation. There is no evidence that there is any safe level of radiation exposure. It means you should operate as far below that level as you can,” he said.

Either way, without adequate monitoring, we may never know the impacts on Canadians.

From comments:

Ionizing radiation can break molecules, at a cellular level, causing unpredictable chemical reactions.

Think of vibrations breaking glass, that is what happens at a cellular level, in your body, from ionizing radiation.

Ionizing radiation is insidious, these large subatomic particles travel until they are stopped.

Your skin can easily stop them.

Once they are ingested, inhaled, or enter your body through a cut, their grotesque potent force cuts through your body like knife through butter, into the cells, blood or other organs, impacting other organs and leaving behind hideous, shocking damage.

A single alpha particle from Plutonium, Uranium, Americium or Radon can deliver a huge blast of radiation inside your body. This radiation energy can destroy your genetic material at a cellular level.

Once radionuclides are released into the environment they circulate and are carried with the winds until they become part of the soil and food chain. They land in our drinking water, are on the pastures that our livestock graze on, are on our vegetables and in our fruit trees.

This is particularly dangerous for humans because we are at the top of the food chain, where the higher concentrations of radionuclides are.

Most Common Diseases From Ionizing Radiation:

* leukemia
* lymphoma
* solid tumors or any organ
* bone & blood disorders
* lung cancer
* breast cancer
* endocrine disruption
* reproductive abnormalities
* accelerated aging process
* birth defects
* congenital malformations
* kidney, liver damage

These diseases and mutations don't stop with us. If ionizing radiation enters our genes, not only does it cause irreversible damage to this generation, but to future generations, as evidenced by children being born years after Chernobyl.

In Washington state, we've been detoxing and taking other precautions for ourselves, our animals and our soils since March 14. 

Because of the 31 radioactive elements spewing for almost 5 months, these precautions will continue for the rest of our lives.

Are you waiting for government permission to protect yourself?


Another comment:


a few things to note. 
1/ To Douglas Gray, the Hanford I know about is in south central Washington State and is the site of a huge nuclear waste and processing facility. It presents a danger to everyone in the area including southern BC. EPA radiation monitoring after Fukishima began at Richland Wa. next to Hanford on March 3 and ended March 31 after the levels went from 81 CPM(counts-per-minute) on the 30th to 277 CPM on the 31st.
2/ Health Canada operates(ed?) The Canadian Radiological Monitoring Network (CRMN) managed by the Radiation Surveillance and Health Assessment Division, Radiation Protection Bureau (RPB). Their online Monitoring Data stopped being posted for the only mainland BC station (Vancouver) three years ago or more. 
3/ There is no safe level of radiation exposure. If the normal background is increased by 20% that will likely cause 20% more radiation induced cancers in the population exposed. The idea of safe limits comes from the kind of thinking that brought us pesticide regulation. Pesticides are tested for toxicity on a given animal and the mortality is expressed as an LD50 number. This disregards the long term effects, mutagenic and more subtle nervous system damage. So with radiation dose they look at deaths from radiation poisoning: an extreme effect caused by massive exposure. Ionizing radiation can cause cell damage at any level, it just becomes more likely the higher the exposure.
I have been monitoring background radiation in the BC interior since Fukishima (with a couple of breaks) and you can see my data at http://lumbywatch.ca

Fukushima Plant Now Leaking Highest Radiation Levels Since Tsunami

In case you forgot, one of the worst disasters since the advent of nuclear energy is still underway. And although the initial shock has worn off, the radiation levels sure haven't: TEPCO measured 10,000 millisieverts/hour—that's fatal.

This figure's 3,900 times higher than the naturally-occurring cosmic radiation we soak up every year—only it's leaking from the paralyzed plant every hour. These levels disperse dramatically with distance—so, say, Tokyo isn't in any danger—but the news should be startling, and proof that the plant is still an enormous hazard to the people of Japan, who are still grappling with contaminated beef, poisoned by the hemorrhaging reactor. [NHK via @Joi]

You can keep up with Sam Biddle, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.

RELATED STORIES

• Japanese Nuclear Emergency Director: You Have No Right to a Radiation-Free Life

• Japan's Buying All the Radioactive Beef It Can Find (And Burning It)

• Fukushima's Radiation Now Spreading in Japanese Meat

  
  

Japan/TEPCO updates: Hot links

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/30/us-japan-nuclear-workers-idUSTRE74T0WA20110530>Two Fukushima workers may have exceeded radiation limit 30 May 2011 Two workers at Japan's crippled nuclear power plant may have exceeded the government's radiation exposure limit, the plant operator said. Measurements of external exposure and radioactive iodine in their thyroid glands suggested that the two male workers, one in his 30s and the other in his 40s, had surpassed the maximum set by the government of 250 millisieverts over the life of the control and clean-up project. The government relaxed its upper limit for exposure for the Fukushima disaster, allowing 250 millisieverts for male emergency workers compared with the conventional maximum of 100 millisieverts for nuclear-related emergencies.

;http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-30/japan-risks-chernobyl-like-dead-zone-as-fukushima-soil-radiation-soars.html;Fukushima Debacle Risks Chernobyl 'Dead Zone' as Radiation in Soil Soars --Radiation from plant has spread over 600 square kilometers (230 square miles) 30 May 2011 Radioactive soil in pockets of areas near Japan's crippled nuclear plant have reached the same level as Chernobyl, where a "dead zone" remains 25 years after the reactor in the former Soviet Union exploded. Soil samples in areas outside the 20-kilometer (12 miles) exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant measured more than 1.48 million becquerels a square meter, the standard used for evacuating residents after the Chernobyl accident, Tomio Kawata, a fellow at the <http://www.numo.or.jp/en/>

Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan, said in a research report published May 24 and given to the government.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/30/3230175.htm;Deluge could spread Fukushima radiation 30 May 2011 There are fears a tropical storm off the coast of Japan could wash radioactive material from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the air and sea. Now downgraded to a tropical storm, former Typhoon Songda is still expected to bring strong winds and torrential rain to Tokyo later this morning, with the Fukushima area also forecast to experience a deluge. The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), has apologised for not being prepared for the bad weather.

<http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tepco-cant-stabilize-reactors-by-year-end-report-2011-05-29>Tepco can't stabilize reactors by year-end: report 29 May 2011 Tokyo Electric Power Co. is coming to the view that it will be impossible to stabilize the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant by the end of this year, possibly affecting the timing for the government to consider the return of evacuees to their homes near the plant, Kyodo News reported, citing senior company officials. The revelation that meltdowns had occurred at the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors at the plant, most likely with breaches to pressure vessels encasing nuclear fuel, has led the officials to believe that "there will be a major delay to work" to contain the situation, one of them said.

<http://www.midasletter.com/index.php/uranium-stocks-under-seige-as-fukushima-continues-spewing-radiation-11053001/>Uranium Stocks Under Siege as Fukushima Continues Spewing Radiation 30 May 2011 As shares in uranium exploration companies continued to shed value, Japan's nuclear nightmare is still getting worse. News this weekend that the hope of 'stabilizing' the leakage of radiation by steam into the atmosphere and by water into the ocean is unlikely underscores just how bad the situation is. Within a 20 kilometre radius around the stricken plant, a Chernobyl-style dead zone is developing, with levels of 1.48 million becquerels a square meter measured within that area. Dangerous levels of radiation have now been confirmed as far as 600 kilometres away from Fukushima.

Iodine 131 and a classic magicians' distraction technique.

This was posted to www.llrc.org today

Iodine 131 and a classic magicians' distraction technique. 

This post is about radio-Iodine but we have doubts about going with it. If the authorities can get us all thinking about Iodine and then reassure us that actually it's not a problem except for people in Japan (which is broadly true) then we might not realise that the really dangerous isotopes - Plutonium, Uranium, Strontium, Tritium in particular - are not even being reported. This is a massive failure of Governments' duty of care. 

However, with that caveat, we'll fall into the Iodine trap because we have received many requests for advice since the Fukushima emergency began. 

Our early advice on taking stable Iodine is unchanged. It is here. 

The European Committee on Radiation Risk has published amethod for calculating doses from drinking water or milk contaminated with Iodine 131. ECRR's main message is reassuring about the risks, so far as USA and Europe are concerned. They are not much different from what you hear from official sources.Calculating doses from Iodine.

Take the figure for Becquerels per litre (Bq/l). (There is information on the internet. LLRC has no resources for monitoring it all). If, as in USA, the radioactivity levels are expressed in picoCuries (pCi), convert pCi to Becquerels (Bq) by multiplying by 0.037.

To convert a dietary intake into a dose multiply the Becquerels by 0.11 and the answer will be the dose in microSieverts. For example, if a litre of water is contaminated with 0.5 Bq, drinking it will give 0.5 x 0.11 = 0.055microSv. (This uses the ECRR adult dose coefficient for Iodine 131 which is slightly different to the ICRP dose coefficient - see ECRR 2010 p. 244).

The cancer risk associated with this dose is small. It can be calculated by dividing the dose in microSv by 1 billion. For the above example this means that if a billion people each drank a litre of water contaminated with 0.5 Bq then 5.5 of them would develop cancer over a period of 50 years. The individual person would increase his or her chances of getting cancer by 1 in 182 million. (This uses the ECRR cancer risk coefficient of 0.1 per Sievert which is different to the ICRP risk coefficient 0.05 per Sievert - seeECRR 2010 p. 180).

Note that this calculation is for a single intake. Iodine 131 loses half of its radioactivity in 8.04 days. This means that if your water supply comes from rainfall and if the rain becomes contaminated in a single episode the radioactivity will decay to 1/16th of its original concentration during a month and so on. That's assuming no further releases from the reactor affect your region.

Black Ops on CRIIRAD?

In the last few days many websites and newspapers have misreported Iodine dose figures from the French NGO CRIIRAD. It is claimed that CRIIRAD has said if a child under 2 years ingested 50 Becquerels of Iodine 131 the dose would be
10milliSieverts. At best, this is a transcription error; at worst it's a propaganda attack intended to discredit good sources of independent advice by making them look like scaremongers. 

CRIIRAD actually said:

Les enfants en bas âge (0 – 2 ans) sont les plus vulnérables : l’ingestion d’une cinquantaine de becquerels d’iode 131 suffit à délivrer à leur organisme une dose de

10 µSv. (Children under the age of 2 are the most vulnerable. Ingesting about 50 becquerels of Iodine 131 is enough to give them a dose of 10 µSv.) 

That's 10 microsieverts, a thousand times smaller than 10 millisieverts. We have checked the calculation. It appears that CRIIRAD has used ICRP dose and risk coefficients and a ten-fold multiplier to correct for the small body mass of these little children. This is reasonable (for any given intake, a small body mass means a larger dose). According to LLRC's arithmetic the effective dose to the child is 11µSv. Using ECRR dose coefficients it would be 27.5µSv. 

So beware of nonsense on the net. The micro / milli confusion can arise because the International System of Units (SI) uses the letter m to stand for milli or 1/1,000. The Greek letter mu (µ) stands for micro or 1/1,000,000. Some software packages use the Symbolfont to allow Greek characters and the key you press to get µ is the "M" key. If someone pastes the resulting text into an editor that doesn't recognise Symbol it will give an m. It looks like a small error but in this case it's a thousand times wrong.

If you have more questions email us. We get a lot of emails. We can't answer them all, but we read them all and they influence what we write about here.

Bad news and good advice for Fukushima's refugees

Iodine131 affects the thyroid gland. A few years ago the New York Times reported that doctors had found a puzzling increase in thyroid cancer in New York State. Here's the link. The increased cancer rate was driven by immigrants from Belarus and Ukraine, many of whom settled in New York. Their doctors and, presumably, public health officials didn't realise that it was important to watch for changes to their thyroids, while back in the homeland the people who stayed behind were monitored closely and treated early. Eventually, the emigrés' thyroid cancers became impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, in many cases they were diagnosed too late. 

Apologists for nuclear power claim that the increase in thyroid cancer in the Chernobyl-affected territories is an artefact caused by increased vigilance - more thyroid cancers were detected because doctors were looking for them. (This quote is from the BBC's disgraceful Nuclear Nightmares mockumentary of 2006.) They think this gets radioactive fallout off the hook. The New York experience shows the opposite; radioactive fallout caused the cancers and lack of vigilance killed the victims. This is a powerful warning to people who have left the blighted parts of Japan. Don't think you have left the radiation problem behind; it might have come with you. If you think you have been exposed, make sure your doctor knows it. Get regular checkups long-term. If medical people on LLRC's circulations send us relevant advice we will post it later.

AMY GOODMAN: Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan tried Tuesday to calm fears about radiation levels and food safety in the region around the heavily damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant. His comments came after Japan raised the severity rating of its nuclear crisis to the highest possible level, heightening concerns about the magnitude of the disaster.

Speaking at a news conference to mark one month since the massive earthquake and tsunami devastated the northeastern coast of the country, Japanese Prime Minister Kan said produce from the region around the Fukushima plant is safe to eat despite radiation leaks.

PRIME MINISTER NAOTO KAN: [translated] From now on, people should not fall into an extreme self-restraint mood, and they should live life as normal. To consume products from the areas that have been affected is also a way in which to support the area. We should enjoy the use of such products and support the areas that have been affected. I ask you to do this.

AMY GOODMAN: A spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency said the latest food sample data indicates levels of contamination are below the limits set by domestic authorities. Denis Flory, IAEA spokesperson, also said yesterday Japan’s nuclear crisis was not comparable to Chernobyl.

DENIS FLORY: The mechanics of the accidents are totally different. One happened when a reactor was at power, and the reactor containment exploded. In Fukushima, the reactor was stopped, and the containment, even if it may be somehow leaking today—and we do not know—the containment is here. So this is a totally different accident.

AMY GOODMAN: Japanese officials said they raised the severity level to 7 because of the total release of radiation at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, not because of a sudden deterioration in the situation. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster is the only other nuclear accident rated at the highest level, 7, on a scale developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency to assess nuclear accidents. But officials insist so far the power plant in Japan has released one-tenth as much radioactive material as Chernobyl.

To discuss the situation in Japan, as well as his latest book, we’re joined by Dr. Michio Kaku, a Japanese American physicist, a bestselling author, professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York and the City College of New York. His brand new book is Physics of the Future: How Science Will Change Daily Life by 2100.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to see you again.

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Glad to be on the show, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about this raising of the category level to 7, on a par with Chernobyl.

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Well, Tokyo Electric has been in denial, trying to downplay the full impact of this nuclear accident. However, there’s a formula, a mathematical formula, by which you can determine what level this accident is. This accident has already released something on the order of 50,000 trillion becquerels of radiation. You do the math. That puts it right smack in the middle of a level 7 nuclear accident. Still, less than Chernobyl. However, radiation is continuing to leak out of the reactors. The situation is not stable at all. So, you’re looking at basically a ticking time bomb. It appears stable, but the slightest disturbance—a secondary earthquake, a pipe break, evacuation of the crew at Fukushima—could set off a full-scale meltdown at three nuclear power stations, far beyond what we saw at Chernobyl.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about exactly—I mean, as a physicist, to explain to people—exactly what has taken place in Japan at these nuclear power plants.

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Think of driving a car, and the car all of a sudden lunges out of control. You hit the brakes. The brakes don’t work. That’s because the earthquake wiped out the safety systems in the first minute of the earthquake and tsunami. Then your radiator starts to heat up and explodes. That’s the hydrogen gas explosion. And then, to make it worse, the gas tank is heating up, and all of a sudden your whole car is going to be in flames. That’s the full-scale meltdown.

So what do you do? You drive the car into a river. That’s what the utility did by putting seawater, seawater from the Pacific Ocean, in a desperate attempt to keep water on top of the core. But then, seawater has salt in it, and that gums up your radiator. And so, what do you do? You call out the local firemen. And so, now you have these Japanese samurai warriors. They know that this is potentially a suicide mission. They’re coming in with hose water—hose water—trying to keep water over the melted nuclear reactor cores. So that’s the situation now. So, when the utility says that things are stable, it’s only stable in the sense that you’re dangling from a cliff hanging by your fingernails. And as the time goes by, each fingernail starts to crack. That’s the situation now.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the food, the level of contamination of the food? They are increasingly banning food exports.

DR. MICHIO KAKU: The tragedy is, this accident has released enormous quantities of iodine, radioactive iodine-131, into the atmosphere, like what happened at Chernobyl, about 10 percent the level of Chernobyl. Iodine is water soluble. When it rains, it gets into the soil. Cows then eat the vegetation, create milk, and then it winds up in the milk. Farmers are now dumping milk right on their farms, because it’s too radioactive. Foods have to be impounded in the area.

And let’s be blunt about this: would you buy food that says "Made in Chernobyl"? And the Japanese people are also saying, "Should I buy food that says 'Made in Fukushima'?" We’re talking about the collapse of the local economy. Just because the government tries to lowball all the numbers, downplay the severity of the accident, and that’s making it much worse.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to be done now? I mean, one of the biggest problems is secrecy, both with the Tokyo company that runs the plants and also the government, the constant downplaying from the beginning. And yet, there are so many people who have been evacuated, who are demanding compensation. There was just a major protest at TEPCO with the people in the area who have been evaluated—no jobs, no money—saying, "We demand compensation."

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Well, TEPCO is like the little Dutch boy. All of a sudden we have cracks in the dike. You put a finger here, you put a finger there. And all of a sudden, new leaks start to occur, and they’re overwhelmed.

I suggest that they be removed from leadership entirely and be put as consultants. An international team of top physicists and engineers should take over, with the authority to use the Japanese military. I think the Japanese military is the only organization capable of bringing this raging accident under control. And that’s what Gorbachev did in 1986. He saw this flaming nuclear power station in Chernobyl. He called out the Red Air Force. He called out helicopters, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and buried the Chernobyl reactor in 5,000 tons of cement, sand and boric acid. That’s, of course, a last ditch effort. But I think the Japanese military should be called out.

AMY GOODMAN: To do...?

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Because of the fact that the radiation levels are so great, workers can only go in for perhaps 10 minutes, 15 minutes at a time, and they get their year’s dose of radiation. You’re there for one hour, and you have radiation sickness. You vomit. Your white corpuscle count goes down. Your hair falls out. You’re there for a day, and you get a lethal amount of radiation. At Chernobyl, there were 600,000 people mobilized, each one going in for just a few minutes, dumping sand, concrete, boric acid onto the reactor site. Each one got a medal. That’s what it took to bring one raging nuclear accident under control. And I think the utility here is simply outclassed and overwhelmed.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, these workers are in for much longer periods of time.

DR. MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. And we don’t even know how much radiation levels they’re getting, because many areas around the site have no monitors. So we don’t even know how much radiation many of these workers are getting. And that’s why I’m saying, if you have access to the military, you can have the option of sandbagging the reactor, encasing it in concrete, or at least have a reserve of troops that can go in for brief periods of times and bring this monster under control.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the evacuation zone? Is it big enough?

DR. MICHIO KAKU: It’s pathetic. The United States government has already stated 50 miles for evacuating U.S. personnel. The French government has stated that all French people should consider leaving the entire islands. And here we are with a government talking about six miles, 10 miles, 12 miles. And the people there are wondering, "What’s going on with the government? I mean, why aren’t they telling us the truth?" Radiation levels are now rising 25 miles from the site, far beyond the evacuation zone. And remember that we could see an increase in leukemia. We could see an increase in thyroid cancers. That’s the inevitable consequence of releasing enormous quantities of iodine into the environment.

AMY GOODMAN: What has to happen to the plant ultimately?

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Well, in the best-case scenario—this is the scenario devised by the utility itself—they hope to bring it under control by the end of this year. By the end of this year, they hope to have the pumps working, and the reaction is finally stabilized by the end of this year.

AMY GOODMAN: Oddly, it’s sounding a little bit like BP when they were trying to plug up the hole.

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: "It will happen. It will happen."

DR. MICHIO KAKU: They’re literally making it up as they go along. We’re in totally uncharted territories. You get any nuclear engineering book, look at the last chapter, and this scenario is not contained in the last chapter of any nuclear engineering textbook on the planet earth. So they’re making it up as they go along. And we are the guinea pigs for this science experiment that’s taking place. Then it could take up to 10 years, up to 10 years to finally dismantle the reactor. The last stage is entombment. This is now the official recommendation of Toshiba, that they entomb the reactor over a period of many years, similar to what happened in Chernobyl.

AMY GOODMAN: Entomb it in...?

DR. MICHIO KAKU: In a gigantic slab of concrete. You’re going to have to drill underneath to make sure that the core does not melt right into the ground table. And you’re going to put 5,000 tons of concrete and sand on top of the flaming reactor.

AMY GOODMAN: Should people be concerned about any food that says "From Japan"?

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Not from Japan. But remember, in the area, the sea, we’re talking about levels that are millions of times beyond legal levels found right there. However, as you start to get out further, radiation levels drop rather considerably.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about policy in this country. I mean, we are now seeing happening in Japan this horrific event. Japan was the target of the dawn of the Nuclear Age, right?

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Your own family mirrors the history of the Nuclear Age. Can you talk just briefly about that, before we talk about current U.S. policy?

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Yeah, first of all, I have relatives in Tokyo, and they’re wondering about evacuation. In fact, some of my relatives have already evacuated from Tokyo. They have little children. And radiation has already appeared in the drinking water in Tokyo. And so, people are wondering, you know, especially for young children, for pregnant women, should they leave. People are voting with their feet now. A lot of people are voluntarily evacuating from Tokyo, because they simply don’t believe the statements of the utility, which have consistently lowballed all the estimates of radiation damage.

AMY GOODMAN: And, though, in the past, in terms of your own family’s history, your parents, being interned in the Japanese American internment camps?

DR. MICHIO KAKU: That’s right. In California, my parents were interned in the relocation camps from 1942 to 1946, four years where they were put essentially behind barbed wire and machine guns, under the supervision of the United States military.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, you became a nuclear physicist, interestingly enough, and you worked with the people who made the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan.

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Yeah. In fact, my high school adviser was Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. And he arranged for me to get a scholarship to Harvard, in fact, and that began my career as a nuclear scientist. And Edward Teller, of course, wanted me to work on the Star Wars program. He put a lot of pressure and said, "Look, we’ll give you fellowships, scholarships. Go to Los Alamos National Laboratory, Livermore National Laboratory. Design hydrogen bombs." But I said no. I said, "I cannot see my expertise being used to advance the cause of war."

AMY GOODMAN: And you’ve been very outspoken when it comes to nuclear power in the United States. This, of course, has raised major issues about nuclear power plants around the world, many countries saying they’re not moving forward. President Obama is taking the opposite position. He really is very much the nuclear renaissance man. He is talking about a nuclear renaissance and has not backed off, in fact reiterated, saying this will not stop us from building the first nuclear power plants in, what, decades.

DR. MICHIO KAKU: Well, there’s something called a Faustian bargain. Faust was this mythical figure who sold his soul to the devil for unlimited power. Now, the Japanese government has thrown the dice with a Faustian bargain. Japan has very little fossil fuel reserves, no hydroelectric power to speak of, and so they went nuclear. However, in the United States, we’re now poised, at this key juncture in history, where the government has to decide whether to go to the next generation of reactors. These are the so-called gas-cooled pebble bed reactors, which are safer than the current design, but they still melt down. The proponents of this new renaissance say that you can go out to dinner and basically have a leisurely conversation even as your reactor melts down. But it still melts. That’s the bottom line.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what do you think should happen? Do you think nuclear power plants should be built in this country?

DR. MICHIO KAKU: I think there should be a national debate, a national debate about a potential moratorium. The American people have not been given the full truth, because, for example, right north of New York City, roughly 30 miles north of where we are right now, we have the Indian Point nuclear power plant, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has now admitted that of all the reactors prone to earthquakes, the one right next to New York City is number one on that list. And the government itself, back in 1980, estimated that property damage would be on the order of about $200 billion in case of an accident, in 1980 dollars, at the Indian Point nuclear power station.

AMY GOODMAN: No private corporation could even build a nuclear power plant: you have to have the taxpayers footing the bill.

DR. MICHIO KAKU: You have to have what is called the Price-Anderson Act, having the United States government guarantee the insurance. Nobody will guarantee—nobody will sell an insurance policy for a nuclear power plant, because who can afford a $200 billion accident? That’s why the United States government has underwritten the insurance for every nuclear power plant. So the Price-Anderson Act is an act of Congress that mandates the U.S. government, the taxpayers, will underwrite the insurance, because nuclear power stations are not insurable.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Dr. Michio Kaku. We’re going to go to break, and when we come back, we want to ask him about, well, his new book, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Change Daily Life by 2100. What would be a day in the life of the future? Is it possible that, oh, the internet can be in your contact lens, that cars will drive themselves? Just what we’ll ask Dr. Kaku when we come back. Stay with us.