Nuclear Apocalypse in Japan

Nuclear Apocalypse in Japan
Lifting the Veil of Nuclear Catastrophe and cover-up

By Keith Harmon Snow

As the sun set over quake-stricken Japan on Thursday 17 March 2011, we learned that four of six Fukushima nuclear reactor sites are irradiating the earth, that the fire is burning out of control at Reactor No. 4's pool of spent nuclear fuel, that there are six spent fuel pools at risk all told, and that the sites are too hot to deal with. On March 16 Plumes of White Vapor began pouring from crippled Reactor No. 3 where the spent fuel pool may already be lost. Over the previous days we were told: nothing to worry about. Earthquakes and after shocks, tidal wave, explosions, chemical pollution, the pox of plutonium, contradicting information too obvious to ignore, racism, greed -- add these to the original Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine and Death. The situation is apocalyptic and getting worse. This is one of the most serious challenges humanity has ever faced.

The U.S. nuke industry is blaming Japanese experts, distancing itself from the monster it created. Instead of sending nuclear or health experts to assistance the Japanese people in their time of desperate need, US President Barack Obama first sent teams of intelligence agents and FEMA trained military grunts with special security clearances. The Pentagon floated a naval strike force led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan off the coast of Japan: advertised as a 'humanitarian' operation, the strike force was repositioned after it was partially irradiated. Can we trust officials and the corporate news media to tell us what is happening in an honest, timely, transparent manner? Are there precedents to the nuclear crisis in Japan? What is the U.S. defense establishment really concerned with here?

Humanity now faces a deadly serious challenge coming out of Japan -- the epicenter of radiation. Intentional efforts to downplay or dismiss this catastrophe reveal the immaturity of western civilization and some of our most acute human pathologies, including our worship of technology and our psychopathology of denial. The widespread distortion and cover-ups to protect private profits, national and corporate interests, to fool and betray the people, are unacceptable. Here are some of the deeper whats and whys and hows -- some technical issues and the kinds of questions people need to ask -- about the nuclear apocalypse unfolding on planet earth. Prayers are not enough. It's time to question everything, to put politics aside, to take personal action to halt nuclear expansion and defend ourselves from this industrial juggernaut.

PRO-NUKE ANTI-NUKE NO NUKES

I know something about technology, and science: I have Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering -- with honors -- from one of America's top Engineering schools. Before 1990 I worked in classified programs for General Electric -- the maker of the nuclear reactors now irradiating Japan. I worked at GE Aerospace Electronics Laboratories: low-level classified government programs in communications, radars and missile guidance systems for Ronald Reagan's infamous Star Wars (Strategic Defence Initiative) programs.

From 1990 to 1993 I taught English at Japan's big Soga Shosa (trading houses) like Mitsubishi and Sumitomo Corporations, and meanwhile I biked the rivers, swam the beaches, hiked the mountains and studied the culture of Japan. Japanese corporations were paving the shorelines and rivers with concrete, sinking giant tetrapods off shore. One corporation even developed these giant rubber bladders -- the size of football-fields -- sunk offshore, which could be pumped full of seawater to provide a giant barrier against tsunami's. Of course, the profit margins for these corporations supplying these bags were huge, but I wonder what happened to the technology, if these were ever deployed, and where.

For the first 34 years of my life I was in favor of nuclear power. This changed when I saw young people in the United States put their bodies on the line to protest the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Station operations in Tennessee (1994). The commitment and integrity of these young people made me rethink my nuclear bias.

The giant sea walls of concrete tetrapods used off the eastern coast of Japan to protect
smaller sea ports and fishing villages from waves. Photo c. keith harmon snow, 1994.

I began my career as a journalist by looking deeply into the rabbit-hole of nuclear power from 1993 to 2000. I visited the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Public Document Rooms -- which have since been closed in many places -- where I read thousands of microfilms and scanned microfiche records and excavated document after document in search of truth. I visited nuke plants in New England and industry conferences. I interviewed officials and I attended the most boring and sometimes secretive public meetings with the most stifling and unimaginative bureaucrats and with engineers (like me) so dry they squeaked. And then I reported on regulatory corruption, technical failures, undemocratic initiatives to betray the public trust, and the accumulating radiation and nuclear poisons -- and the many ways that the mass media supported and perpetuated the mythology.

THE ARROGANCE OF HUMANISM

"I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors," wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dr. Joseph Oehmen on March 13. "By 'significant' I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on -- say -- a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation."
So begins a recent U.S. business sector article titled You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster in Japan -- Here's Why, published four days after the earthquake struck in Japan. It has already proved false. Properly understood for what it is -- a childish, myopic, arrogant attempt to belittle the truth and influence public opinion -- the article provides an apt example of the rampant industry disinformation that is sweeping aside rational and compassionate and precautionary assessments with irrational jingoism, simplistic emotional appeals, and wrong-headed thinking. The post went viral and was republished widely.

How do we define apocalypse? EARTHQUAKE + TSUNAMI + AGED NUKE PLANT + LOSS-OF-COOLANT ACCIDENT + PLUTONIUM + FIRES + DISINFORMATION + GREED + DENIAL + FEAR + POLITICS = APOCALYPSE.

How many nuke plants are involved? We don't really know. Not that we have not been told, we have. There are six reactors at the Fukushima site, one reactor at the Tokai nuclear facility and three reactors at the stricken Onagawa nuclear complex. There are toxic chemical spills, petroleum refinery fires, gas fires, dangerous debris and human pathogens from the thousands of dead people and animals. The place is an apocalyptic nightmare, to be sure, but from the beginning the most important facts regarding the status of the nuclear pants and their components, their functioning or failing systems, the operability of the control rooms or integrity of the reactor containment structures, were being denied to the public. Now we are seeing some damage control by the U.S., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the media.

It is simultaneously as though we are believed to be incapable of even the most rudimentary understanding of what is going on, while also being denied the truth in keeping with more than sixty years of secrecy and denial by the cult of the atom and its incestuous cult of intelligence.

The question is: what can we believe to be true? Look at the photos of the explosion. Are we stupid enough to believe that no radiation has been released from this reactor's primary or secondary containment systems? On Wednesday March 16 we were finally told that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had ordered its remaining staff to evacuate areas of the Fukushima plant after radiation levels spiked and plumes of white vapour "were seen pouring from what authorities identified as [emphasis added] the station's No. 3 reactor.

The language about white vapors "seen pouring from what authorities identified as the stations No. 3 reactor" does not inspire confidence that 'authorities' had any clue about the status of things. Indeed, they are not in the control room, obviously, or anywhere near it, or anywhere near 'the station's No. 3 reactor' because they are standing back trying to identify what they are seeing, to see what is going on, and where it is going on. The reactor's are too hot: this is radiation: this is the nightmare scenario we were told could not happen. Radiation is contaminating air, soil, ocean, people.

The You Can Stop Worrying "article" first appeared as a reader's comment posted following the Business Insider journal story Japan Death Toll Climbs Astronomically As Nuclear Crises Intensifies, which was itself a republished and retitled New York Times feature of Monday March 13. At first glance, the two Business Insider stories couldn't be further apart in their general themes: You Can Stop Worrying, which translates to, calm down, don't get hysterical, pay no attention to those anti-nuclear fanatics who think that even microwave ovens will kill you, versus the Death Toll Climbs Astronomically feature, which for all practical purposes we can translate to Holy shit, brother! Run for your life! Duck and Cover!

However, both stories serve as part of the unraveling global media disinformation campaign about the ongoing nuclear catastrophe in Japan. The primary imperatives of this campaign are economic. In other words, most of the reportage out there about what is happening in Japan -- so far -- has been anchored in western epistemological frameworks based in money, greed, private profits and loss. The loss should not be interpreted to mean that people (mostly we are talking about people NOT affected by the apocalypse in Japan) care about who lives or dies, but rather that their primary concerns are their financial balance sheets, their corporate images, their personal retirement portfolios, and the fall of the Nikkei Index and Dow Jones trading they drool over.

Sadly, the attitudes of many "news" writers (and their readers), government officials, energy consultants, corporate executives, nuclear experts and technicians, western humanitarian relief professionals (such as World Vision careerists), or of environmentalists for nuclear power -- like scientist James Lovelock -- and many other people who, for one reason or another, have had something to say about the nukes crisis in Japan, or about how Japan's nuclear misfortune can never become a Chernobyl, or how Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone, or why the events in Japan, no matter how alarming, should not be allowed to interrupt the "nuclear renaissance" touted by U.S. President Barrack Obama, or something about the beauty of some nuke somewhere else, are all based in self-interest, not the altruistic and compassionate concerns of all humanity, of environmental stewardship or the preservation of all life on earth, but in a self-righteous, arrogant and ignorant selfishness of the kind that author David Ehrenfeld elaborated in his monumental work, The Arrogance of Humanism.

Japanese are technical geniuses. The rail system and subways were precise: you could set your watch by them. In 2003, their advanced magnetic levitation Shinkansen bullet trains performed at 581 kilometers per hour (361 mph). If the Japanese can't do, no one can. Yet today Japan is on fire -- the epicenter of deadly radiation now emanating out of that sizable island. This is not about Japan, folks, or national borders: its about all of us, everywhere.

SPENT FUEL POOL FOOLS

While the absence of cooling water facilitated the nuclear crises in Japan, most likely some major reactor components (proven unsafe) also failed under the seismic stresses of the 9.0 quake. Key components likely cracked or shattered. The tsunami and huge aftershocks advanced the chaos. These factors were complicated by the loss of offsite electrical power (an electrical BLACKOUT), the failure of emergency diesel generators, and the subsequent loss-of-coolant (water).

Embrittlement of nickel-based superalloys that comprise reactor internals was flagged as a major safety issue as early as the 1960s, yet such problems were bureaucratically dismissed, covered over, buried in paperwork and regulatory studies produced by the NRC ("NUREG" documents), and ignored. Intergranular stress corrosion cracking of BWR core shrouds (the core shroud is next to fuel rods deep inside) is another major safety issue in GE designed BWRs built by Hitachi at Fukushima, and these plague every BWR reactor in the U.S.

We don't know, however, and for many days we were offered the standard industry refrain: no need to worry, no threat to public health and safety. BWR core shroud cracking (NUREG-1544), reactor pressure vessel cracking (NUREG-1511), embrittled components and aging (NUREG/CR-5939), cooling system failures (NUREG/CR-6087), reactor containment isolation systems failures (NUREG/CR-6339) -- all thoroughly documented.

The redundancy and ever-touted 'defense-in-depth' systems failed at Fukushima. All over the U.S. such systems have been routinely disabled to minimize electricity-generating outages, increase output power and maximize corporate profits. There are as many possibilities of failures outside what we have been spoon-fed -- the official sequence of events -- as there are dead people.

Amongst the most troubling and most deeply underplayed questions of the entire crisis concern the Fukushima Spent Fuel Pools. These basin are packed with tons of irradiated fuel rods that need to be cooled. One of the major postulated accident scenarios involves a Loss-of-Coolant Accident (LOCA) to the reactor core, but a LOCA event can also occur with a spent fuel pool. It has. Fires and explosions in Japan. The Spent Fuel Pools at the six Fukushima reactors are NOT inside primary containment. They are exposed. Burning. About to burn.

Reactors No. 4, 5, and 6 at Fukushima were shutdown when the earthquake struck. After the water drained and the spent fuel became exposed, the pool at reactor No. 4 caught fire, and continues to burn, as of Thursday March 17, releasing massive amounts of radiation into the environment. The status of the other six spent fuel pools at Fukushima is unknown. A courageous U.S. journalist Rachel Maddow explored the spent fuel pool issue with a former government official. The most important, critical point made by Princeton professor Frank Von Hippel occurs at minute 14:19 -- where Rachel Maddow talks over him: these are LONG-LIFE RADIONUCLIDES being emitted from the spent fuel pool(s). Isotopes of cesium: Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years and will be around and hot for decades.

How much disaster are we talking about? The atomic bomb that exploded at Hiroshima created about 2000 curies of radioactivity. The spent fuel pools at Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant (U.S.) are said to hold about 75 million curies. There are six spent fuel pools at Fukushima, but the numbers of tons of fuel rods in each have not been made public.

The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) did the math: If Fukushima's Reactor No. 4 operated for 35 years and produced 30 tons of irradiated fuel per year and each ton is equivalent to 24 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, then each fuel pool could contain on the order of 24,000 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, if all the produced irradiated fuel remains in the fuel pool.

Nuclear stupidity No. 1: the Fukushima reactor buildings are square (not circular) and had to absorb the force of the tsunami wave straight on. Stupidity No. 2: six reactors clustered too close together. Stupidity No. 3: no shoreline protection against a tsunami. Stupidity No. 4: reactors sited on earthquake faults. Stupidity No. 5: assumptions and calculations proving that the reactor, prior to its construction, could withstand anything that nature threw at it. Stupidity No. 6: it didn't begin in Japan: the industry, with all its corruptions, false assumptions and technological hubris, was born in secrecy in the United States of America.

Stupidity No. 125: spent fuel pools are packed too tightly, as is well-established by industry documents, for economic reasons, discarding safety concerns. Stupidity No. 458: the Spent Fuel Pools at Fukushima are suspended up high inside the reactor buildings secondary containment -- the same buildings whose roofs are blowing off! Are we to believe that the massive explosions that were captured on film, and others that were not, did not damage these elevated time bombs?

How many stupidities do we need to admit before we admit that it can happen in the United States and Europe and Canada too? Imagine those courageous Japanese nuclear workers at Fukushima -- sacrificing their lives! -- trying to save their families, Japan and the rest of us from our unprecedented stupidity!

During World War II they were called kamikazis and we have always portrayed them as terrorists: they were soldiers and pilots sacrificing their lives for the sake of their nation. Well, these heroic men and women sacrificing themselves at Fukushima have my deepest respect.

There is an ocean adjacent to the Fukushima complex, and yet the reactors and fuel pools cannot be kept cool. Impossible. The huge heat sink necessary to cool the melting fuel is not available. This is not about earthquakes and tsunamis -- it is about loss of off-site power, backup generators and emergency systems that occur in a blackout. Do electrical outages and blackouts occur anywhere else? Blizzards? Tornadoes? Hurricanes? The world is seeing more and more extreme and unpredictable weather. Claims that a serious nuclear 'accident' cannot happen in the U.S., Europe or Canada are false, and nuclear executives know it. That is why corporations refused at first to get into the nuclear power business, until the U.S. Government indemnified them with the Price Andersen Act (1957).

"What this [Fukushima] station suffered was a station blackout," says Deb Katz of the Citizens Awareness Network, who helped shut down Yankee Atomic in Rowe Massachusetts, "and the backup safety systems that were supposed to keep it operational -- the backup diesel generators -- failed. This can happen without an earthquake. A midwest [U.S.] power company caused the northeast grid to fail a few years ago; a flood or a terrorist attack could do the same. We could then experience a similar slow motion catastrophe though not on the grand scale of the Japanese site with its 6 nukes."
A LONG HISTORY OF DECEPTION

Like the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japanese officials have a long history of covering up ugly nuclear realities. In a recent WikiLeaks diplomatic cable, politician Taro Kono, a high-profile member of Japan's lower house, told U.S. diplomats that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (MITI) -- the Japanese government department responsible for nuclear energy -- has been "covering up nuclear accidents and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry." In 2002 "the chairman and four executives of TEPCO, the company that owns the stricken Fukushima plant, resigned after reports that safety records were falsified."

Such singular but remarkable events follow a pattern of wholesale U.S. cover-ups that define the industry as secretive and criminal, and they involve shoddy equipment, human incompetence, unsafe designs, inadequate safety measures, and economic decisions that have occurred since the very beginining of Japan's nuclear power era -- which itself was born out of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with US.-made weapons of mass destruction.

The control room at the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Station, Tennessee.
Photo c. keith harmon snow, 1994.

In the 1960's, TEPCO planned to build a reactor outside Kashiwazaki city: nuclear officials told the local community, for example, that radioactivity from the plant would increase rice cultivation and the coloring of the carp (a delicacy): seven reactors were eventually built there. In June 1973, radioactive waste water leaked from a storage tank at Fukushima's reactor No. 1. In July 1974, Kansai Electric asked Westinghouse Corporation to replace the steam generator of one of Kansai's two Mihama reactors after Mihama I experienced four major shutdowns in less than four years.

In September 1974, following the emergency shutdown of 21 of the then 55 U.S. reactors due to radioactive leaks at the Illinois Dresden Reactor No. 1, Japanese officials inspected their six Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs), similar to the Dresden BWR, and they found similar defects at Fukushima I and Hamaoka. Ditto, 1975: emergency shutdown's in the U.S. prompted inspections that discovered Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) problems at the Fukushima I and Tsuruga BWR reactors. Japan's Mihama reactors were plagued with radioactive 'leaks' and faulty equipment that prompted Kansai officials to demand a refund from U.S. contractor Westinghouse Corporation. The Mihama Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) have been scrammed and shutdown and leaked. The accident at the Mihama Reactor No. 3 on 9 August 2004 was previously considered Japan's worst nuclear accident: there was no tsunami, and no earthquake.

Japan's fleet of white elephant nukes only grew more problematic. From April to September 1977, six of Japan's fourteen reactors were shutdown. Japanese corporations joined with Westinghouse and General Electric in the 1980's to export their destructive technology to other countries, mostly targeting the so-called Third World. Before 1979 there were some 25 reactors under construction or completed in Japan, and until last week there were 55 operating reactors. In 2006, GE and Hitachi Corporation teamed up to create three joint venture nuclear companies to expand nukes in North America.

One fact is certain: we have already been massively lied to about a massive and still unfolding nuclear disaster. The radiation releases from some four to six nuclear reactors in collapse are already known to be excessive, described by reputable experts as "worse than Three Mile Island but not as bad as Chernobyl." It may be worse than Chernobyl yet.

Additional radiation has been reported at the Onagawa complex, but this was explained away as wind-blown radioactivity from the Fukushima complex. Meanwhile, in the same reports, officials said that radiation was not leaking from Fukushima, or it was minimal, and there was no cause for alarm.

The core of the nuclear reactor at Tennessee Valley Authority's Unit 2 Pressurized
Water Reactor (PWR) prior to irradiation. Photo c. keith harmon snow, 1994.

After several days of lies and distortions and official government censorship, reports appeared under the headlines Japan radiation leaks feared as nuclear experts point to possible cover-up. Reports also began citing partial meltdowns of nuclear fuel rods. The threat of meltdown is real, it has been happening to some degree, and it has already occurred far more than we have been told. The physical and thermonuclear states of materials and systems and the spread of radioactivity at Japan's reactors remains shrouded in disinformation and silence.

THE CLEAN AND GREEN PROPAGANDA

Of course, technology gurus and corporate executives and financial consultants are hysterical, claiming there were no deaths from Three Mile Island and that deaths at Chernobyl are exaggerated by the mass media. These claims are false. The new book, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment provides irrefutable evidence of massive loss of life.

"The book is solidly based -- on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports -- some 5,000 in al," says journalist Karl Grossman. "It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow."

James Lovelock, author of the renowned GAIA Hypothesis, is a celebrated environmentalist for nuclear energy peddling nuclear power as a clean, green, renewable energy source of the future. However, Lovelock has a long history working for NASA -- the outer-space division of the Pentagon -- and is deeply enmeshed in the western epistemological framework.

Commenting on Japan's nuclear crisis, Lovelock said that people were 'prejudiced' against nuclear power unreasonably. "It is very safe," he said. Chernobyl, for instance, was "an idiotic mess-up that could only have occurred in the Soviet Union", and according to UN estimates had killed only about 56 people. More people are routinely killed in oil refineries and coal mines, he pointed out."

James Lovelock's Chernobyl statement should immediately discredit him as a quack: Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is unwilling to go on record claiming anything less than many, many deaths. Further, Lovelock's comment about the 'idiotic mess-up' by Russians is inherently racist: the Russians were the first to put a satellite (Sputnik) into orbit, for example, and NASA collaborated with the Russian MIR Space Station, which broke all kinds of records.

Lovelock suggests that nuclear reactors are our only hope to curtail global climate change, and that this may involve, for example, the 'suspension of democracy'. However, democracy has been long since suspended for many of the earths people and species -- forced to live and die with our burgeoning wastes, consumption and exploitation. Lovelock's analysis is patently false -- contaminated by his own inability to see beyond his privilege and self-interests.

Not convinced? Lovelock has also reportedly stated, wrongheadedly: "One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War."

Tell this to the mutant babies, weak-spined and deformed children from the Chernobyl killing zones, chronicled in Russian filmmaker Vladimir Kuznetsov's, "While We Are Still Alive, and to the people of Bikini Atoll whose stolen island is officially acknowledged to be highly contaminated. Savannah River is another SUPERFUND site.

The nuclear power cycle involves disease, despair and death from the uranium mining to daily operations to the nuclear waste "'dumping'. Uranium mines in Niger that have built France's entire nuclear complex are toxic wastelands spreading radiotoxins across north and sub-Saharan Africa. The Tuareg and Toubou nomads have been completely shattered by the confiscation, exploitation and irradiation of their lands by the nuclear complex. Native Americans continue to suffer massive epidemics of disease, contamination and confiscation of lands in the Secret Nuclear War at the American Ground Zero: the nuclear complex has compounded the native American genocide begun in 1492. Daily contamination releases into water, soil and air occur at every operating nuclear reactor in the world. There is no 'disposal' of deadly nuclear toxins that now exist to perpetuity, and yet wastes are typically dumped on poor communities like Barnwell, South Carolina, or native American lands.

Out of sight, out of mind: nuclear poisons are colorless, odorless, and deadly.

START WORRYING, HERE'S WHY
The writing You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster in Japan -- Here's Why is packed full of disinformation and technical jargon, masked as scientific expertise, meant to confound, confuse and scientifically impress the un-technical (concerned) reader. The author at first did not identify himself, which is a tactic many people use so that they do not have to take responsibility, or worry about being held accountable. Appended as a sort of disclaimer to the article that morphed out of the comment we find the statement: "Since posting this, we have learned that it was written by Dr. Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT."

In the nuclear arena, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is known for the infamous Nuclear Reactor Safety Study (WASH 1400), chaired by MIT nuclear scientist Norman P. Rasmussen (commonly known as The Rasmussen Report), that whitewashed the massive flaws and safety failures of a burgeoning, secretive, incestuous nuclear power industry, even while it exposed them to some degree.

According to a Nuclear Information and Resource Service fact sheet on Fukushima, in 1986, Harold Denton, then the NRC's top safety official, told an industry trade group that the GE "Mark I [BWR] containment, especially being smaller with lower design pressure, in spite of the suppression pool, if you look at the WASH 1400 safety study, you'll find something like a 90% probability of that containment failing."

Produced at the height of the United States' anti-nuclear movement in 1974, the Rasmussen Report downplayed the risk of nuclear accidents and polished the image of a technologically diseased industry. The stridently pro-nuclear MIT has spent billions of taxpayers dollars on secretive and highly biased research programs of all things nuclear. MIT is also a known hotbed of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with a revolving door from MIT to government to the CIA.

"I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake," wrote MIT's Dr. Josef Oehmen in his initial post of March 12. "There has not been one single report that was accurate and free of errors... By 'not free of errors' I do not refer to tendentious anti-nuclear journalism - that is quite normal these days. By 'not free of errors' I mean blatant errors regarding physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors are build and operated. I have read a 3 page report on CNN where every single paragraph contained an error."

Turns out Dr. Oehmen's report had so many errors, and yet was so widely regurgitated, that it was taken over by MIT's nuclear experts. Dr. Oehmen employs the standard ruse of claiming that the press, which can very easily be shown to as stridently pro-nuclear as MIT itself, is instead plagued by "tendentious anti-nuclear journalism -- that is quite normal these days." He then explains nuclear power (wrongly) arriving at last at his definitive statement that, "I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors."

ENDS

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