Antinuclear

Dr Helen Caldicott on the need for Australians to understand the implications of Fukushima nuclear disaster

“The misinformation about this is endless. Radiation is an invisible killer — that’s the ace up the nuclear industry’s sleeve. You don’t get cancer immediately, it takes years … and it doesn’t bear a sign denoting where it came from.”

She adds:

“The latent period for leukemia is five to 10 years and solid cancers, 15 to 80 years.”

Thus, she says, it is premature and “misleading” to conclude that there are no radiation-related deaths from the Fukushima accident.

Educating Australians about Fukushima’s implications: Dr Helen Caldicott, Independent Australia  Michelle Pini 13 June 2015, In April last year, Michelle Pini interviewed Dr Helen Caldicott on the Fukushima disaster. As IA was the first to report the nuclear melt down in Australia with some dozen updates as the full disaster unfolded, we think you’ll find this story highly relevant.

DR HELEN CALDICOTT is hard to ignore. Her breadth of knowledge and fervour for her subject seem limitless. She gesticulates often, her gaze is direct, and there is a practical sense of urgency in her voice.

An Australian physician and world-renowned anti-nuclear activist and educator, she makes time to be interviewed despite having just returned from a speaking tour of Japan and Denmark. If Caldicott is jetlagged, she shows no sign.

Caldicott tells me emphatically:

“Fukushima is bigger and much worse than Chernobyl yet we are buying Japanese food imports, we are eating fish that are likely contaminated and there is no telling whether the atmospheric radiation cloud which hovered over Japan initially, will not end up here.”

We are discussing the 2011 events at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, described by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) as “the largest civilian nuclear accident since … Chernobyl.”  (see The Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, 2014.)……….

After our meeting, I re-read the UNSCEAR report. It also mentions,

‘An increased risk of thyroid cancer in particular can be inferred for infants and children.’(UNSCEAR, Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 2013.)

On this, Caldicott is furious:

“The misinformation about this is endless. Radiation is an invisible killer — that’s the ace up the nuclear industry’s sleeve. You don’t get cancer immediately, it takes years … and it doesn’t bear a sign denoting where it came from.”

She adds:

“The latent period for leukemia is five to 10 years and solid cancers, 15 to 80 years.”

Thus, she says, it is premature and “misleading” to conclude that there are no radiation-related deaths from the Fukushima accident.

Caldicott is committed in her quest to educate Australians (and the world) about Fukushima and its implications:

“This topic has been almost totally ignored by the media in Australia but it needs to be publicized. We are talking about an issue that has had profound ramifications globally.”

And she believes that the Fukushima disaster is not over:

“It’s an atomic time-bomb with a number of buildings still vulnerable to collapse if there’s another earthquake. And they’re building a large cancer hospital in Fukushima — that tells you everything.”

But Dr Helen Caldicott is optimistic about the future:

“The first step to great change is great awareness. Jefferson said, ‘An informed democracy will behave in a responsible fashion’ — we have to bomb them with information.”

Revelations about the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster continue to mount in favour of Dr Caldicott’s predictions. This morning’s news from Global Research reveals that Fukushima University’s Michio Ayoama has advised Kyodo that the West Coast of North America will be hit with as much as 80 per cent of the cesium deposits already experienced in Japan by 2016.

You can check out Michelle Pini’s blog at https://michellepinisblog.wordpress.com.  https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/educating-australians-about-fukushimas-implications-dr-helen-caldicott,7819

June 12, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News