From: Reader Supported News
By William Boardman – Reader
Supported News
Fallout from Fukushima? A re-make of Godzilla! That’s
the good news
There’s not much new to
say about Fukushima. It remains an out of control disaster with as yet unmeasurable
dimensions that continue to expand. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that
everything new about Fukushima is just the same-old same-old getting worse at
an uneven and unpredictable rate. Either way, it’s not good and, while it’s
worse in degree, it’s not yet apparently worse in kind, so that’s one reason
you don’t hear that much about it in the news these days.
Whatever the full truth is
about Fukushima, it’s probably unknowable at present. And it might remain unknowable even if
there was total transparency, even if there were no corporate, institutional,
governmental, and other layers of secrecy protecting such enemies of the common good as profit, capital
investment, and weapons development.
Secrecy and false
reassurance have always been an integral part of the nuclear industry in all
its manifestations. In January
2014, Tokyo Shimbun reported yet another example of nuclear opposition to honesty: the Fukushima prefecture government and the government-run Fukushima
Medical University signed a
secrecy agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a United Nations agency that “is committed to
applying the highest ethical standards in carrying out its mandate,” or so it claims. The IAEA’s press release about the agreement is bland and inoffensive. According to Shimbun, each party to the agreement has the right to designate any information as confidential, specifically
mentioning data about thyroid cancer in children or other facts that might
“stir up anxiety of residents.”
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