THE NUCLEAR FLOWER ALSO BLOOMS IN JAPAN

Why would anyone build a nuclear reactor near the sea shore in a place so subject to earth quakes and tsunamis? Financial greed, ignorance, stupidity—take your pick but be assured that whoever made these decisions will not be amongst the ones who suffer, among the thousands, the tens of thousands or the millions of people who will suffer for years or die.

Fukushima 'much bigger than Chernobyl', says Russian nuclear activist

From: AFP April 02, 2011 7:27AM

Source: The Australian

JAPAN'S unfolding nuclear disaster is "much bigger than Chernobyl" and could rewrite the international scale used to measure the severity of atomic accidents, a Russian expert says.

"Chernobyl was a dirty bomb explosion. The next dirty bomb is Fukushima and it will cost much more in economic and human terms," Natalia Mironova said.

Ms Mironova is a thermodynamic engineer who became a leading anti-nuclear activist in Russia in the wake of the accident at the Soviet-built reactor in Ukraine in 1986.

"Fukushima is much bigger than Chernobyl," she said, adding that the Japanese nuclear crisis was likely to eclipse Chernobyl on the seven-point international scale used to rate nuclear disasters.

Chernobyl, which a 2005 report by UN bodies including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called "the most severe in the history of the nuclear power industry", was ranked a seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES).

But Japan's ongoing crisis, triggered by a massive earthquake and tsunami three weeks ago which took down the main electricity and back-up power supplies needed to power cooling systems at several reactors at Fukushima, could be "even higher" on the INES scale, she said.

"Chernobyl was level seven and it had only one reactor and lasted only two weeks. We have now three weeks (at Fukushima) and we have four reactors which we know are in very dangerous situations," she said.

Japan's nuclear safety agency has maintained its rating of the Fukushima accident at four, while a French watchdog has upgraded it to six.

Chernobyl's death toll is hotly debated. UN agencies estimate up to 9000 people could be expected to die as a direct consequence of the accident, and the disaster will end up costing hundreds of billions of dollars.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace say up to 100,000 people could die.

Ms Mironova is touring the US with other Russian anti-nuclear activists, including Tatiana Muchamedyarova and Natalia Manzurova, who worked as a "liquidator", or emergency clean-up and recovery worker, at Chernobyl.

Their visit was originally planned to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown, which occurred on April 26, 1986.

But in the wake of the disaster in Japan, Ms Mironova and her colleagues rewrote their presentations to compare the accident at Chernobyl with Fukushima.

The following statements are replicas of the sentiments expressed by Russian authorities.

March 12th, 2011 Written by Shane Connor

'For everyone, though…they risk unnecessary panic that could become even more widespread than the fallout itself.'

This statement by a reporter was promulgated to his considerable profit. He quotes no expertise in the field, perhaps he Googled it, but it was used by the following:

Newspapers: NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, USAToday, Washington Post, Boston Globe, SF Chronicle, Newsday, WND, IEEE Spectrum, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, National Defense Magazine, TIME Magazine.

Telivision: CNN, FOX, CBS, CNN.

Radio: NPR.

Another reporter.

Date: 03/18/2011 Written by: Jon Barron.

'Since I first wrote about the nuclear disaster in Japan, many things have changed—and yet little has changed. By that I mean there have been countless breaking news stories and changing events appearing hour by hour. Panic is spreading. There has been a worldwide rush on iodine supplies. Stories have broken that workers have fled the nuclear plants. Then stories appeared saying that was a mistranslation of Japanese press releases. Then we learned that workers have returned to the nuclear plants, fighting to regain control of the situation. Today we learned that alert levels have risen from Level 4 to Level 5. And television broadcast after television broadcast informs us that radioactive death clouds have rolled across the Pacific Ocean raining terror down on confused citizens in the US.'

Perhaps we would do well to read a poem written by an observer of the Chernobyl explosion, a Russian resident in Pripyat whose name is Lyubov Sirota. She is very ill now.

Here is a photograph of her, taken not long before the Chernobyl 'accident'.