Tag: International Atomic Energy Agency

A new study of the effects of tiny quantities of radioactive fallout from Fukushima on the health of babies born in California shows a significant excess of hypothyroidism caused by the radioactive contamination travelling 5,000 miles across the Pacific. The Fukushima catastrophe has been dismissed as a potential cause of health effects even in Japan, let alone as far away as California. And on what basis? Because the “dose” is too low.

Fukushima’s missing melted cores and radioactive gushers continue to fester in secret. Japan’s harsh dictatorial censorship has been matched by a global corporate media blackout aimed – successfully – at keeping Fukushima out of the public eye. But that doesn’t keep the actual radiation out of our ecosystem, our markets … or our bodies. Speculation on the ultimate impact ranges from the utterly harmless to the intensely apocalyptic.

The conclusion of a recent report of a Japanese parliamentary panel that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster was rooted in government-industry “collusion” and thus was “man-made” is mirrored throughout the world. “Regulatory capture” is the pattern among nuclear agencies right up to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Nuclear fallout knows no state or national boundaries and will contribute to increase in illnesses, decrease in intelligence and in instability throughout the world. No country can maintain itself if its citizens are economically, intellectually, politically and socially impoverished. Given the continuing and known problems caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe, we must ask ourselves: Before we commit ourselves to economic and technological support of nuclear energy, who, what and where are we willing to sacrifice and for how long?

Today I was slated to speak in Damascus, Syria, at a conference to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 60th year that the Palestinian people have been denied their Right of Return enshrined in that declaration. But I was not allowed to exit the country.