NBC exposes the “unspeakable” realities of the Japanese catastrophe in its 60 Minutes program Sunday night during which leading nuclear scientist Dr. Michio Kaku said radiation from Fukushima will impact of all of humanity.
The Examiner
August 16, 2011
NBC exposes extreme Fukushima radiation human rights violations while U.S. media remains silent.
Australia’s NBC exposed the “unspeakable” realities of the Japanese catastrophe in its 60 Minutes program Sunday night during which leading nuclear scientist Dr. Michio Kaku said radiation from Fukushima will impact of all of humanity. The nuclear energy power industry violation of the right to health is apparent throughout the new Australian report.
Watch: NBC 60 Minutes Special On The Fukushima Nuclear Fallout
“In fact the whole world will be exposed from the radiation from Fukushima,” Dr. Kaku told NBC reporter Liz Hayes.
“We are already getting radiation from Fukushima,” Dr. Kaku said.
Just as Australia’s SBS exposed in depth the reality of the 2010 BP Gulf of Mexico catastrophe unlike any U.S. mainstream news station, Sunday, Australia’s NBC has now exposed in depth the Fukushima catastrophe.
“The Fukushima crisis is far from over. The crippled nuclear power plant is still leaking; and, judging from Chernobyl, recovery will not be measured in years, more like centuries,” reported the Australian presenter Liz Hayes.
Best known in Australia for reporting on 60 Minutes, Hayes is also known as former co-host of Australia’s Today, a position she held by popular demand for a decade.
From The 60 Minutes Blog
Liz Hayes From NBC TV Show 60 Minutes
Liz Hayes: Fallout
Chernobyl is about three-and-a-half hour’s drive from Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine, a country still carrying the scars of a human and environmental catastrophe.
In April, 1986, a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded, ironically during a safety test. What followed affected the world. A massive plume of smoke and a cloud of radiated particles swept across Europe and around the globe.
[…]
Frank was our radiation expert, because after Chernobyl we travelled to Japan and the contaminated territory of Fukushima.
Japan’s nuclear disaster in Fukushima is ongoing. There is an exclusion zone and thousands of people have been forced to leave their homes.
These are not earthquake or tsunami victims. These are radiation refugees – people who miraculously survived the horrors of that dreadful natural disaster in March, only to be made homeless by the meltdown of nuclear reactors in their region.
[…]
Much of the region is rural and deceptively peaceful. A Geiger counter the only indication radiation, the invisible enemy, is present.
The human face of this dreadful situation can be seen in shelters in public buildings. It’s where you’ll find families, old and young, struggling to retrieve their lives – a near impossibility when all you have is a cardboard box to mark out your spot, your home.
I don’t know how Japan will recover, and how these refugees will survive. Like Chernobyl, Fukushima could well become a dead zone, where no one will ever be able to return.
[…]
As Hayes traveled through now deserted areas of rubble, that were once houses, toward Fukushima, the silence was shattered by the beeping of deadly gamma radiation fallout 40 kilometers from the crippled nuclear power plant.
“Gamma radiation is a stronger form of radiation and will go through most things apart from lead,” warned Frank Jackson, refusing to to drive Hayes any further.
Hayes stated after the Fukushima assignment, “When I realised my only safety devices on my latest assignment were a couple of Geiger counters, some pretty flimsy pieces of protective clothing and a burly bloke named Frank, I must say I feared this was one of those times when the risks didn’t add up.”
Introducing Dr. Kaku on the Fukushima 60 Minutes program, Hayes said, “If you thought nuclear power had been averted in Japan, then meet physicist Michio Kaku.”
Dr. Kaku told Hayes, “If you’ve been exposed to Cesium because you’re a nuclear power worker, even after your long dead and buried, your grave site will be radioactive.”
“Your great grand kids can come to your grave site with a Geiger counter and see that great granddaddy still has radiation at his grave site.”
Unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe: Nuclear refugees
So far, over 135,000 Japanese people have been forced to evacuate according to Hayes.
Riding toward Fukushima, through piles of rubble for stretches where homes once stood, documented in NBC program, Hayes said, “Streets and towns and villages are deserted.”
“And locals have been told their food and water may be contaminated.”
Stopping along the way, the Geiger showed that a head of cabbage registered as much radiation as an X-ray.
“So every time you have a cabbage, you have an X-ray,” said Hayes.
Radiation refugees by the thousands, wearing masks, live in cardboard shelters, sleeping on the floors of public buildings, with few possessions and little to no privacy, as Hayes saw first-hand and was documented by NBC.
“People have gone to a lot of trouble to make cardboard box into their home.”
Many Japanese people fear their country will never fully recover.
“Do you think you’ll ever be able to take food, water and air you breathe for granted again?” Hayes asked Chia Maxamoto.
“Ah, knowingly? I don’t think so.”
Dr. Kaku asserted about the Japanese people, “These are guinea pigs, absolute human guinea pigs.”
Chernobyl plant and people still crippled and crippling
Hayes of NBC went to Chernobyl to document the scene there that is still “incredibly radioactive.”
“It is a terrible reminder of the horrors those rescue workers faced of not just a fire, but an invisible enemy.”
With what she called her “trusty producer, Phil Goyen, and crew, Scott Morelli and David Ballment, in toe,” Hayes “headed into the exclusion zone of Chernobyl, the scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.”
Hayes wrote about the Chernobyl dead zone, “where remnants of lives once lived can be seen everywhere. Homes and schools and playgrounds frozen in time from the day workers and their families were ordered out, never to return.
“We entered a hospital where the first fire fighters to attend the exploding nuclear plant were taken. Their uniforms are still in the basement, and still highly radioactive.”
She said that entering the radiation hospital was a moment she will never forget, furthering, “For the first time I had a sense of the fear and horror those rescue workers must have felt. A terrible death from something they couldn’t see or touch or smell, but certainly felt.”
Children born years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster still develop cancer from it, as documented by NBC when Hayes was at Kievis Radiation Hospital built specifically for Chernobyl victims, some of whom Hayes interviewed.
These children are “battling cancer and other illnesses believed to be caused by the contamination,” she said.
Children over 32 miles from Fukushima ground zero are already suffering fatigue, diarrhea, and nosebleeds, the three most common of eight radiation sickness signs, the three in the earliest stage of the disease. Five hundred Fukushima children already have radiation in their thyroids.
Explaining that 5,000 tons of Boric acid, concrete and sand were used to bury Chernobyl’s reactor, Dr. Kaku added, “It took years to do this and created a sarcophagus.”
“We all have Chernobyl radiation in our bodies.”
With the Chernobyl power plant in the background, Hayes said there “now a mere band aid over a molten core that is still hot and some still fear is still melting.”
A new sarcophagus has to built because the original one is breaking down.
“The Chernobyl nuclear disaster is still far from over,” said Hayes, reporting that to this day, there is still a 30 kilometer exclusion zone around the nuclear energy plant.
Since 1986, over 5 million people have been affected around Chernobyl according to scientist Iryna Lubunska, interviewed by Hayes.
“One of the things I feel I should know now is where a nuclear reactor is in any country, anywhere in the world, because it might affect me even if I don’t live in that country,” said Hayes.
Today, people as far away as in England are still being affected by Chernobyl.
Fukushima radiation is now combined in the U.S. with toxic radioactive tritium leaking from three-quarters of United States nuclear power plants, radiation from fracking, and radiation from the 2010 BP Gulf oil catastrophe.
Although a tight lid on Fukushima fallout information is keeping Americans in harms way after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed a secret pact with Japan to continue importing its untested food, and government agreed to downplay the fallout lethality, the nuclear energy silent killer continues devouring its victims, now and will for generations, as NBC documented.
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