Cleanup From Fukushima Daiichi: Technological Disaster Or Crisis In Governance?

[PearliePoo2]

http://fairewinds.org/demystifying/cleanup-from-fukushima-daiichi-technological-disaster-or-crisis-in-governance

More than 19,000 Japanese drowned, their bodies scattered on Japan’s eastern shores when a tsunami struck Japan on March 11, 2011. Kevin Wang wanted to help, and his Anaheim, Califonia-based company, PowerPlus, had the cleaning know-how to handle almost anything. Wang has spent decades developing equipment to clean up almost every sort of nasty gunk in existence, from massive oil spills, to radiological contamination, to dead bodies in quantity.
Immediately after the tsunami, Wang visited the Japanese consul general in Los Angeles to offer his company’s assistance in dealing the huge threat to public health posed by this mass casualty event. The response by Japan’s consul-general made Wang’s jaw drop. “Absolutely not,” the consul replied, continuing on with rejection language so brusque, Wang had no doubt his offer was taken as an insult.
Far from being an isolated incident, the encounter that Wang had now seems to be a harbinger of the systemic denial that has crippled the Japanese government’s response to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. First-hand witnesses have described a deeply flawed reaction to the nuclear meltdown that has been marked by an underestimation of the extent of the contamination, insufficient radiological testing, and a glacially-slow response making clean-up harder as time passes. Most damning of all has been a stubborn unwillingness to use desperately needed clean-up assistance by ignoring technical competence in favor of political influence.

[PearliePoo2]

1. More from the article:

Shortly after arrival on their first trip to Japan, the group headed for Shirikawa, a city 45 miles west and a few miles south of the Daiichi nuclear plant. Industrial hygienist Engelhard was shocked as soon as he unpacked his radiation sensor gear and turned it on. Here they were almost 50 miles from the accident site and in the opposite direction of the prevailing winds, and the crew’s radiation alarms immediately started going off.

“The radiation levels we were seeing were 1,000 times background, higher in spots,” Engelhard said. “If we had been working on a site this contaminated in the US, we would have been fully suited up in radiation protection suits, gloves, and respirators. Yet people were walking around and going about their business, with no idea of how contaminated everything around them was.”

One of the first demonstrations conducted by Wang’s team was at a Japanese school still in routine use. The contamination was widespread and included troubling accumulations of radiation in biological materials. While the asphalt driveway was contaminated, the grass next to it was four times as radioactive as the asphalt. The worst were the patches of fungus on the bleachers at the school’s baseball field, which had sucked-up radionuclides to such a degree that they were emitting radiation at 70-times the contaminated asphalt.
Engelhard described the chilling phenomena of the fungus-turned-radiation-sponge as, “a remarkable example of biological amplification.”

Wang said it more bluntly, “A boy sitting on that patch to watch a baseball game could do real damage to his gonads.”

[Mnemosyne]

2. Damn shame no one pays much attention. We are all connected. K&R nt