A Radiation Exposure Health Disaster Is Apparently beginning to Play Out in Japan — a Lesson for the United States about Integrity in Government

© 2011 Peter Free

 

18 August 2011

 

 

Public harm is one of the consequences of tolerating lies and concealment from government — whether in Japan or the United States

 

The general public’s short attention span has apparently motivated most of the media to drop reporting about one of the world’s most spectacular nuclear radiation-release disasters.

 

Given that the Fukushima Daiichi earthquake and tsunami-prompted March (2011) radiation release is the stuff of Hollywood movie blockbusters, it is difficult to understand the media’s reasoning.

 

Wisely, Al Jazeera stuck with this low-traction story.  It is increasingly obvious that its editors’ instincts were correct.

 

There is probably a behemoth (and long-drawn out) public health crisis lumbering down the Japanese pike.  Al Jazeera’s Dahr Jamail reported today that the Japanese government has not yet quantified the total amount of released radioactivity.  In consequence, many Japanese are doing their own radiation monitoring.

 

Technically knowledgeable people are also concerned:

 

According to Dr [Tatsuhiko] Kodama [a professor at the Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology and Director of the University of Tokyo's Radioisotope Centre], the total amount of radiation released over a period of more than five months from the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster is the equivalent to more than 29 "Hiroshima-type atomic bombs" and the amount of uranium released "is equivalent to 20" Hiroshima bombs.

 

When on August 2nd readings of 10,000 millisieverts (10 sieverts) of radioactivity per hour were detected at the [Fukushima Daiichi] plant, Japan's science ministry said that level of dose is fatal to humans, and is enough radiation to kill a person within one to two weeks after the exposure.

 

The Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters are the only nuclear accidents to have been rated level seven on the scale, which is intended to be logarithmic . . . .

 

"We have begun to see increased nosebleeds, stubborn cases of diarrhoea, and flu-like symptoms in children," Dr Yuko Yanagisawa, a physician at Funabashi Futawa Hospital in Chiba Prefecture [200 kilometers from Fukushima Daiichi], told Al Jazeera.

 

She attributes the symptoms to radiation exposure . . . .

 

"Because the nuclear material has not yet been encapsulated, radiation continues to stream into the environment."

 

Kodama is an expert in internal exposure to radiation, and is concerned that the government has not implemented a strong response geared towards measuring radioactivity in food.

 

"Although three months have passed since the accident already, why have even such simple things have not been done yet?" he said. "I get very angry and fly into a rage."

 

© 2011 Dahr Jamail, Fukushima radiation alarms doctors, Al Jazeera (18 August 2011)

 

Like Dr. Kodama, Dr. Yanagisawa criticized the government’s response.

 

Given the 200 kilometer distance between the failed reactors and her hospital, and seeing apparent radiation sickness in her patients, she believes that the government’s public health response has been inadequate.

 

 

When disaster exposes self-serving politicians and bureaucrats, they lie or change standards

 

Dahr Jamail’s interviews indicated that the Japanese government’s only response to these hazards was to raise children’s radiation exposure limit twenty-fold.  Obviously based on no scientific or medical justification.

 

 

American government increasingly exhibits the same recklessness with truth and lapsed duty

 

The Fukushima’s Daiichi accident’s exposed Japan’s governmental incompetence.  That failure is due in large parts to (a) undue corporate influence and (b) a lack of government accountability.

 

The mix holds lessons for other nations, including the United States.  Our more outspoken (and arguably abrasive) culture has not protected us from special interests’ gutting of the social element of the “social contract.”

 

 

A premise

 

My (arguably debatable) premise in making this argument is that democratic government, by American history’s definition, exists to serve the People.  Not to turn them into helpless grist that fuels unregulated corporations’ life-careless profit-seeking.

 

 

Examples of recently failed governance in the United States

 

For examples of failed governance in the United States (that parallel Japan’s Fukushima lead-up and response), we need look no further than:

 

(i) the Army Corps of Engineers’ inexcusably incompetent job in protecting New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina (now subject of a documentary and a lawsuit)

 

or

 

(ii) the U.S. Minerals Management Service’s complicity in creating conditions that led to BP’s Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

 

 

The lesson here is not that nuclear power (or oil) are bad — but that the toleration of lying, concealed facts, and outrageous governmental incompetence is

 

It may be that we (as a species) are too stupid and too low on integrity to manage potentially dangerous technologies.  Or anything else important.  Like democratic liberty.

 

If we Americans, like the Japanese, don’t get the money that is ruining democracy’s contract (to produce the People’s generalized good) out of government — we are apt to be surpassed by other nations that have figured out a more effective way of delivering governance, in spite of humanity’s perennially flawed nature.

 

If we continue to refuse to:

 

(i) recognize humanity’s penchant for inadequacy and evil;

 

(ii) acknowledge corporations’ legally-mandated, society-harming avarice;

 

and

 

(iii) accept that people and corporations actually do vary along a spectrum of such behavior —

 

we will remain unlikely to produce anything but the lowest common denominator from a very mucked-up pool.

 

In the United States, this abysmally low standard is typified by virtually anyone prominent in politics.  Take, for example:

 

(a) the charismatic, talented, manipulative silliness of Texas Governor Rick Perry

 

and

 

(b) the leadership-challenged, mostly spineless, political genius of President Barack Obama.

 

Both men characterize the “times-inadequacy” of most of the world’s democratic leaders.

 

We should see that permitting our society’s plutocratic and lunatic fringes to continue to direct the nation’s course (if only by thoughtlessly venom-laden gridlock) is a prescription for national failure.

 

 

The moral? —  Fukushima Daiichi is a parable with lessons for American governance

 

We and the Japanese are in the same boat.  Radically different democratic cultures, same outcome.

 

Both governments are zapping people with a killing radiation comprised of deceit and plutocratic greed.

 

In a democracy, our political leaders are us.  If we change ourselves — and our usually thoughtless attitudes and mostly evidence-lacking opinions — we can change governance.  Given money’s hold on our institutions, this will be difficult to do.  But it needs to be done, or our liberty is going to die in roughly the same time span that Fukushima’s irradiated victims are drawing their last breaths.

 

A parable carried on a tsunami’s wave.