Another Lesson for the United States from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Radiation Release — Know and Do Nothing National Government Is Not the Way to Go

© 2011 Peter

 

31 August 2011

 

 

Radioactive cesium in Japanese sewage

 

Al Jazeera today reported that radioactive cesium sewage from the Fukushima Daiichi radiation release is building up in more than 12 Japanese sewage treatment plants.

 

 

Citation (video)

 

Steve Chao, Radioactive waste swamps Japan sewage plants: Environmental experts warn of new crisis over build up of contaminated sewage far from Fukushima plant, Al Jazeera (31 August 2011) (2 minutes and 50 seconds)

 

 

Japan’s national government has apparently abandoned any pretense to crisis leadership

 

Workers have not been trained to handle the radioactive sewage, or to protect themselves.

 

The Japanese government has indicated that it has more important things to do than deal with the issue.  It considers the threat minimal.  (Apparently reinterpreting preexisting guidelines upward, just as it did by raising children’s permitted radiation exposure in its non-response to Fukushima’s atmospheric radiation release.)

 

So, potentially harmful sewage is being stored on site in piles.  One such string of piles is 1 kilometer long.

 

Some sewage plants have run out of room for radioactive sewage.  Radiating waste is presumably allowed to continue along in the ordinary treatment sequence, contaminating everything downstream.

 

Perhaps worse — at least insofar as common sense is concerned — radioactive sewage is being sold as agricultural fertilizer.  Despite warnings from experts that the less than desirable product will introduce further radioactivity into Japan’s food supply.

 

 

Typical “coast now, pay later” government

 

A health expert told Al Jazeera that experience from the 1986 Chernobyl radiation release indicates that the consequences of the government’s inaction will show up in citizens’ health five to ten years from now.

 

Of course, we (and especially the Japanese) already know this.

 

 

“What’s this Japan mess got to do with us, Pete?”

 

Small government libertarian theocrats like Texas Governor Rick Perry, ex-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachman — taken at the implications of what they say about the desirability of de-toothing federal government — would leave U.S. citizens at the mercy of an incompetent federal government akin to Japan’s pitiable example.

 

If Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Irene (2011) have achieved anything, it is to demonstrate that large and competent Government is absolutely necessary in our People’s endeavor toward greatness.  Some problems are just too big for state and local governments to successfully deal with.

 

 

The moral? — Demagoguery and competent leadership are not the same thing

 

With so many hot-aired ignoramuses on America’s political stage, it would be wise to remind ourselves of the damage that the United States would undergo, were we to act on their ill-considered recommendations.