Australia’s pro nuclear zealots continue to “spin” Fukushima
One year on, Fukushima is still spinning The Drum, Jim Green, 16 Feb 12, The first anniversary of the Fukushima disaster is fast approaching and it promises to be another silly-season for Australia’s pro-nuclear zealots.
They have form. While the crisis was unfolding in March last year, Ziggy Switkowski advised that“the best place to be whenever there’s an earthquake is at the perimeter of a nuclear plant because they are designed so well.”
Switkowski wants dozens of nuclear power plants built in Australia – dozens of places to shelter from earthquakes.
Even as nuclear fuel meltdown was in full swing at Fukushima, Adelaide University’s Professor Barry Brook reassured us that:
“There is no credible risk of a serious accident… Those spreading FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] at the moment will be the ones left with egg on their faces. I am happy to be quoted forever after on the above if I am wrong … but I won’t be.”
Eggs, anyone?
John Borshoff, CEO of uranium miner Paladin, described the Fukushima crisis as a “sideshow”. A Fukushima farmer was equally succinct in his suicide note: “I wish there wasn’t a nuclear plant.”
Here are some of the arguments we will likely hear from nuclear boosters in the lead-up to the March 11 Fukushima anniversary.
Expect a barrage of personal attacks since the boosters will want to avoid discussion about the horrendous impacts of the nuclear disaster – and how the disaster could so easily have been prevented if plant operator TEPCO had taken straight-forward measures to properly protect back-up power generators from flooding. The nuclear lobby will attack critics for overstating the scale of the disaster. Any comparisons with Chernobyl will be howled down. True, radiation releases from Fukushima have fallen short of the radioactivity spewed into the environment from Chernobyl. But TEPCO itself drew the comparison a month after the disaster began:
“The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl.”
And while they’re attacking nuclear critics for overstating the radiation releases, the boosters will be trivialising the problem or ignoring it altogether. Brook wrote an ABC opinion piece in December which states that “no-one was killed by radioactivity from the event” and is silent on the problem of long-term cancer deaths from exposure to radioactive fallout.The boosters will repeatedly use this quote from a June 2011 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report:
“To date no confirmed long-term health effects to any person have been reported as a result of radiation exposure from the nuclear accident.”….
How could long-term health effects be evident three months after the event? Cancers typically have a latency period measured in years. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that one of the IAEA’s objectives is to promote nuclear power…..
Nuclear boosters are unsure whether to defend TEPCO or to cut the company loose and portray it as a rogue operator. Toro Energy, an Australian uranium mining company, defends Toro:
“It was therefore a sequence of extraordinary forces unleashed by an unprecedented natural disaster which caused the accident at the reactors, not any operating failure, human error or design fault of the reactors themselves.”
Yet the Japanese government’s Investigation Committee found that TEPCO’s preparations for and protections against a disaster where “quite inadequate”. And every step of TEPCO’s response to the disaster was “a day late and a dollar short” according to a former vice-chairman of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission….. http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3832080.html
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