My mother was reminiscing about Japan the other day. She'd seen it in the 60's with my father, on one of his Tours to Japan he'd organized for work. "The cherry blossoms trees, the hidden gardens of Kyoto. There were ponds everywhere. But now I suppose it's ruined. All that nuclear bullshit ruined it -"
I'd seen it in the 80's, briefly, one night, when Lars was whining to Jim about this sushi bar in Tokyo he HAD to go to, "It's no worse than your sending for ribs from that place in Chicago when we were recording in L.A," he said. I was one of the photographers on tour with that band. "It's no worse than your sending for that bitch from London --" Less than 24 hours later, from the back of the limo I saw entire buildings that were in neon, in motion.
I love Japan. I love the Japanese. You've got to admire something about a group of people who repeatedly, picked the worst song from their latest album, and wanted that band to perform it live on TV. They'd point at my bottle of Evian and holler, "Hai! Fallout from Chernobyl!" But Japan has changed. It's not the same. You should stay away from Japan. It's radioactive.
As little as one millionth of a gram of radiation will cause cancer if it is breathed in or enters the blood stream by way of a cut or another opening in the skin. Plutonium 239 isotopes have a half life of 22,000 years - it needs to be kept isolated and out of the air and water supply. Strontium 90 has a half life of 30 years, which means half its radioactivity will decay in 30 years. It will then take another 30 years for on half the remaining radioactivity to decay & then an additional 30 years for one half of that to decay and so on. So to say that Strontium 90 has a half life of 30 years means it will remain dangerous for hundreds of years, even at low levels.
In a commercial reactor designed to produce electricity, like those in Fukoshima district, a controlled chain reaction takes place in the core by splitting atoms of uranium. This creates a lot of high heat in the uranium filled fuel rods & produces a variety of products that are unstable and give off gamma rays and subatomic particles. Hot spent rods are removed to tanks, kept in 39 feet of water that glows blue from the excited uranium. They are kept there between 5 and 30 years to cool down. If it loses its coolant, the rods will overheat, melting their containers first, then the steel pool liners, before, finally melting the steel holding the tank itself. Other nearby rods will also be melted in a zirconium fire that cannot be put out. This fire spews deadly Plutonium, Cesium 137, Strontium 90 and other radioactive materials thousands of miles.
In a country with roughly 1500 earthquakes a years, who's the brainiac that decided a major fault line was a good idea for not one, but eleven nuclear reactors? At least four of the six exploded, which means, well, you know what it means, do the math.
So stock up on your potassium iodide pills, hmm? But potassium iodide will not protect a person from all forms of radiation poisoning that one receives in a reactor meltdown. Iodine 131 is dangerous for weeks and collects in the thyroid; potassium iodide, if taken right after exposure, floods the thyroid with harmless iodine, preventing the radioactive iodine from being absorbed. But that's it. NO one's said anything about the Strontium 90 you're getting pelted with - dangerous for hundreds of years & collects in the bones, causing leukemia. No one has a solution for the Cesium 137 you've brushed your teeth with, which is dangerous for hundreds of years & accumulates in muscle tissue.
The only real protection would be evacuation. Japanese children are peeing radioactive urine in the Fukoshima district, it was reported in the news yesterday. Of course there's radioactive food. The whole country should be evacuated. And yet the Japanese tourist board is "committed to welcome visitors from all over the world with an unchanging spirit of hospitality". That's because the British government demanded that the Japanese nuclear company play down the Fukoshima accident 2 days after the earthquake, and before the extent of radiation was known. Internal emails, according to the Guardian, show the businesses EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse were ordered to ensure the accident did not derail their plans for a new generation of nuclear in the UK. They even argued it was not as bad as TV had made it look(!), even though the consequences were still unfolding & 2 major explosions were yet to play out. The degree of collusion was reported as truly shocking.
For a nation of Buddhists, I should think this is conflict of interest, this fallout from Hello Kitty. But this is what it's come down to: the whole incident was hushed up so Britain can get what it wants. The screws are relying on their media puppets to dumb you down. No one cares about human life any more, or that Japanese children are going to glow in the dark. As long as special interest has ambition, a few will trample the rest.
God save the Queen! Hai!
[posted by richardporter for pixelasana]
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