The Fukushima disaster is doing more than providing trace radiation readings. It is registering major fallout contamination all over the world. We've gotten so used to such contamination that we don't realize what it means to us. Sure, the levels aren't high enough that hair is falling our or people are dying directly. But they are high enough that it is causing stochastic disease; degraded immunity to disease and energy levels, and increased odds of various cancers including leukemias, lung cancers, thyroid cancers, and a whole host of others. The governments response to fallout contamination, all over the world, is to put a classification stamp on the information and treat those who disobey the gag orders as nuts. So when someone gets one of his reports into a newspaper or magazine it is a rare and encouraging thing. One activist I've met recently is a young fellow named Samuel Dal Pizzol who recently wrote about his own measures in Encantado Brazil, inland from Porto Alegre in the area that is part Pampas and was once part of the little country of Uruguay. It is a land of Gauchos and farmers, and beautiful country. And they are getting radiation there.
"recorded peaks of up to 86 uSv / h ( microsievert per hour , unit for measuring radiation) , a result considered very high . Although the "discovery " , Brazilian nuclear experts and authorities found that the region of Encantado no risks of contamination."
86 microsieverts per hour is a high enough reading. And the experts know this, but our governments seem only unanimous in their desire to treat this ongoing disaster as a publicity and propaganda issue, rather than doing anything about it. "No risk of contamination?" This is evidence of contamination. And people with geiger counters have been measuring rates double or tripple the previous background all over the world since Fukushima started.
Samuel Dal Pizzo is an ordinary young man, living in a place that is out of the way in a part of the world where everybody in the rest of the world confuses Buenos Aires with Rio De Janero, but the locals know the scale of their own countries is grand. I consider him a hero and hope we realize the massive fraud and injury being done to us by the folks involved in manufacturing Atom Bombs and dangerous reactors -- before we get worse.
I once tried to pretend that everything was okay after a series of disasters. And everytime I said "at least it can't get any worse" it got worse. And our situation with Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and other sources of massive contamination is the same reality, the more we pretend that this time "we've learned our lessons and it can't get any worse" the more we find they haven't learned anything and are setting up the next one. Each disaster worse than the previous. We have found out just how incompetent, reckless and cheap the people running the nuclear system are. I hate saying that because I grew up in a family of engineers, some of whom were involved in this industry. But this system of secrecy, restrictions on information, and hiding failure has already led to multiple cascading massive potentially earth threatening earthwide disaster. We need to wake up before the people running this industry kill us all.
Samuel Dal Pizzo is a hero and we need more like him.
Thank-you for covering this story..Samuel is doing good work measuring radiation in Brazil.
ReplyDeleteThis is awesome Christopher. :)
ReplyDelete