[/quote]A nuclear energy expert Arnie Gundersen concurred on the direness of the Fukushima situation-- in contrast to Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the "spigot" isn't turned off yet, and radiation continues to leak into the Pacific Ocean. Fish are picking up extraordinarily high levels of radioactive materials, and Gundersen said he would not eat fish that comes from the West Coast. In Japan, "the epidemiological data that will develop over the next 30 years [will show that] somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million new cancers will develop as a result of this," but the nuclear industry can hide behind the fact that a high percentage of people get cancer anyway, he pointed out. Gunderson stressed the importance of stopping the groundwater contamination, and suggested building a trench of zeolite to absorb the radiation surrounding the plant.
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The pacific ocean has been receiving a billion times more radiation than Fukishikma for a billion years. The ocean has tritium, uranium, thorium, and a zillion other radioactive isotopes. Every day it is hit by zillions of cosmic rays which create radioactive isotopes in the water.
Fukishima is leaking, yes, and it means precisely nothing. Nada. Zilch.
It will have zero effect on the US and nearly zero effect on the people near the reactor.
Meanwhile, Chinese coal dust, containing hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive material, and millions of tons of mercury, is poisoning the fish of the Pacific ocean. That is a real hazard to the Pacific. If China had built modern nuclear reactors instead of coal plants, the pollution would be almost nothing.
The average US citizen might as well be a caveman, in terms of their understanding of radiation and energy production. The growth of the anti-nuke movement is the greatest environmental disaster of modern history.
We can only hope and pray that Bill Gate's terrapower reactor initiative, which is utterly fricking brilliant, succeeds in China. That will free the world from the massive horrific pollution of coal.
PS. The modern anti-nuke movement was funded, created, and supported by the coal industry in the 1980s, precisely because coal was being killed off by the nuclear industry. It is one of the great corporate conspiracies of all time.