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Last Updated on August 5, 2015

It’s strange, it was only a little over one year ago the world experienced a significant nuclear meltdown. The world is still experiencing the meltdown, and yet in the main-stream media it’s old news. When was the last time you heard or saw significant media coverage of the current status with the Fukushima disaster? Doesn’t it feel like Fukushima is a thing of the past? Something which happened yesteryear, was all sorted out, and no longer concerns us? How odd is that? Very odd. What’s even more odd is that Fukushima, just like Chernobyl, was an unavoidable disaster that was not caused by nature, rather it preventable and resulted from corporate and political corruption.

I’ve just been reading Greg Palast‘s A Vultures’ Picnic. I’ve hardly been able to put the book down every evening since I started reading it. I most certainly can’t go to sleep without reading at least 10 to 20 pages of this epitome of global corporate corruption exposure. The chapter I currently reading explores the Fukushima disaster. Palast makes a very convincing and conclusive case that Fukushima was completely avoidable, and entirely the result of corporate corruption and illegal corner-cutting.

Greg Palast has the personal notebook of the seismic safety inspector who gave a report on the plant design and backup generators utilised in such a design. It’s not a design unique to Japan, it’s used all over the world. Here’s what Weisel wrote in his notes after inspecting a plant in the US built using the same design specification utilised in Japan, with some pre and post commentary from Palast:

[Palast] I’ve seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level.

Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could “completely and utterly fail” during an earthquake.

“Utterly fail during an earthquake.” And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.

According to my understanding of the case Palast has made and published in Vultures’ Picnic, the following points are true:

  • The facility at Fukushima was knowingly not designed to withstand the kind of earthquakes nuclear power plants are required by law to withstand.
  • The backup diesel generators where knowingly not of sufficient standard to do what they are required to do (i.e. immediately supply electricity into the facility if or when the facility is shut down, in order to keep the cooling equipment operating, to prevent a meltdown). It was well and truly knowing that these generators were, as Palast puts it, “just decorations” guaranteed to fail if they are actually turned on.
  • The backup generators didn’t fail because they were destroyed by the earthquake, and they didn’t fail because a Tsunami washed them out to sea. Apparently two broke the moment they were activated (as was expected) and the remaining generators were not able to be activated because they facility was not designed in such a way as to prevent the generators from being disabled by floodwaters. Basically the generator rooms flooded, and that was the end of that. This design flaw was known about, yet never addressed.
  • It seems fair to say that even if those other generators were not flooded by the Tsunami, they would have failed anyway, just like the two that did have a chance to turn on.

Here’s another quote from Palast’s book,

On March 12 this year [2010], as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew:  the “SQ” had been faked.  Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK.  He’d flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit.  The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.  Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts.  The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away.  It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.

I was ready to vomit.  Because I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it:  Shaw Construction.  The latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.

Here he goes on to say what SQ refers to,

SQ is nuclear-speak for “Seismic Qualification.” A seismically qualified nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A “seismic event” can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.

This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by U.S. and international rules.

In my earlier articles written in the months following the Fukushima disaster I pointed out there was mass cover-ups taking place. I have a friend in Japan who is close to a family that knows the President and the elite social circles he hangs out in. At times my friend gets to spend time with these folk (including the President) from the upper echelon of Japan. Following the Fukushima event she got most of her information about the disaster directly from these folk she was spending time with. She doesn’t speak or read Japanese and had no idea what was being portrayed by the media.

When she returned to New Zealand she got to see what the world-at-large was being told about Fukushima. She was shocked by the contradictions and lies. The media was basically saying, “It’s pain in the arse this happened, but hey, we’ve got it under control and everything’s going to be okay.” What my friend was hearing on the inside was that the situation at the plants was almost completely out-of-control, that  Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was lying to the President about the situation, and the initially he was made aware of the seriousness of the situation through watching the televised news, in contradiction to what TEPCO was reporting to him directly. I am just skimming the surface, but least to say there Fukushima was a cover-up job long before the disaster even hit, and continues to be a cover-up right to this day.

The bigger issue here is that there are nuclear power facilities all over the world, and especially in the USA, with the same design faults and the same faulty backup generators that failed in Fukushima. According to reports from Greg Palast, many other nuclear facilities have backup generators that have no chance of performing the important task should they ever be required to do so. It’s a miracle we’ve not had more nuclear melt-downs in the last few decades. But how long can we continue to play this risky game of cost-cutting and corporate-political conspiracy?

I highly recommending reading A Vultures’ Picnic by Greg Palast. I consider it a must-read book for anyone with the slightest bit of interest in the well-being of this planet and we the people. Use any of the following links to check it out on Amazon:

 

[amazon_image id=”0525952071″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”B005QBEIA6″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Vultures’ Picnic (Enhanced Edition): In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores[/amazon_image]

 

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