Monday, February 10, 2014

The Revenge Of Godzilla

Japan has dealt with the reality of the atomic age for almost 70 years since the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in the only wartime use of the atomic bomb by the USA. It has produced a desensitized, traumatized society that is dealing with the reality of atomic energy like a wounded war veteran with severe PST. I've written extensively about the almost surreal state of incompetence of the Japanese government and the Energy Company in managing their nuclear facilities. It all culminated with Fukushima, sitting on a fault line and experiencing a continuing series of earth quakes since the original disaster.  Just last week, there was a 5.1 offshore quake. As they retreat farther and farther from reality and sink deeper and deeper into corruption, the Japanese government has criminalized reporting alarming news from Fukushima. The homeless and poor are being recruited by the Japanese Yakuza Mafia as expendable workers, who don't have to be paid before they are contaminated and die to do unsafe clean up work. One way the Japanese dealt with the immediate trauma of the Atomic horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fantasy. Read the origins of the popular, lovable monster Godzilla. Godzilla was an atomic mutant monster. It was all about how a traumatized society deals with nuclear trauma and turns it into fantasy. Now, it is as if Godzilla is taking his revenge against the rest of the world. They are doomed and so must the rest of accept our fate as victims of Japans Nuclear incompetence. The latest reality is the inability of the Japanese to deal with the contaminated ground water at Fukushima, so the solution? Dump it into the Pacific Ocean.
All trust has been shattered. It isn’t as if the Pacific Ocean needs more radioactive mire, but the Japanese government is trying to dump their poisoned ground water into an ocean that is already quickly dying. A senior scientist at MIT, Ken Buesseler, and co-author of Japan’s Continuing Nuclear Nightmare says, “ultimately you can’t keep putting contaminated water in tanks. You are going to have to decontaminate and release some of that water. There’s a finite amount of real estate . . .” but Tepco isn’t decontaminating that water. They simply don’t have the resources to do it. High strontium-90 levels found in groundwater are simply going to be redirected to the Pacific if the government gets approval.
The question is whose approval? Who ultimately is in charge of saying, “sure you can put so much poison in the ocean, it will never be able to support life again, and while you’re at it, go ahead and start watching that toxic, radioactive sludge travel up the food chain, until it reaches human beings, and kills them off faster than the plague.” The Nationwide Fisheries Foundation has been called upon to support the dumping, ‘as long as the water’s contamination level is far below the legal limit,’ one that has been recently changed by governments around the world. Please read this piece, 50 Reasons Top Fear The Worst From Fukushima in EcoWatch by Harvey Wasserman to see the real dangers we are facing today.
While the measure is an attempt to keep the toxic water from piling up in tanks, it certainly isn’t a wise decision to dump it into the ocean, especially since Tepco has been imprudent in reporting the true levels of contamination up to this point. Officials are requesting a more stringent level of – how shall we put this – appropriate contamination compared to legal limits before releasing the water into the ocean, but most of us are well appraised, there are no longer any safe levels of radiation in the Pacific – sea lions, whales, deep sea squid, lantern fish, sardines, sea stars, and even plankton are showing up with radiation poisoning and dying on our shores. Enough already. Japan, and the rest of the world – wake up! You are killing life on earth as we know it. Or maybe that was Godzilla's plan all along.

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