Act 1: Japanese Prime Minister Had to Fly In to Fukushima In the Middle of the Night to Get the Scoop from Low-Level Nuclear Workers … Because Tepco Wouldn’t Tell Him the Truth [5]
In this 27-second video, Amy Goodman summarizes her interview with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan:
We just came from Tokyo. We broadcast for three days from Japan. And we’re going to play the interview I did with the former prime minister, the one in charge at the time [of the Fukushima disaster], Naoto Kan. He said it was extremely difficult to get a straight answer from TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, that ran the plants, and he had to fly in. He figured the only place he could get a straight, nonpolitical answer—he flew in the middle of the night to the plant to talk to the workers to figure out whether he had to evacuate 50 million people in Tokyo.
This is not the first time Tepco has been less than honest:
- An official Japanese government investigation concluded that the Fukushima accident was a “man-made” disaster, caused by “collusion” between government and Tepco and bad reactor design [6]
- Tepco knew right after the 2011 accident that 3 nuclear reactors had lost containment [7], that the nuclear fuel had “gone missing” [8], and that there was in fact no real containment [9] at all. Tepco has desperately been trying to cover this up for 2 and a half years … instead pretending [10]that the reactors were in “cold shutdown”
- Tepco admitted that it’s known for 2 years [11] that massive amounts of radioactive water are leaking into the groundwater and Pacific Ocean, but covered it up
- Tepco falsely claimed [12] that all of the radiation was somehow contained in the harbor right outside the nuclear plants
- Tepco has substantially under-reported [13]the amount of radiation released at Fukushima
- Tepco – with no financial incentive [6] to actually fix things – has only been pretending [14] to clean it up. And see this [15]
Act 2: U.S.Nuclear Authorities Were Extremely Worried About West Coast Getting Hit By Fukushima Radiation … But Publicly Said It Was Safe [16]
Nuclear expert Ed Lyman - chief scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists - said:
While the U.S. government was telling the American people there was nothing to fear from Fukushima and that U.S. plants aren’t vulnerable to the same problems, internally, they were—there was a much different story. So we’ve learned from a lot of Freedom of Information Act documents that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the White House were actually very concerned about the potential impact of radiation from Fukushima affecting not only Americans in Tokyo, which was more than a hundred miles away from the plant, but also Americans on the West Coast. And they were furiously running calculations to try to figure out how bad it could get. But there was no sense of this in what they were telling the public.
Indeed, Seattle residents were exposed to dangerous radioactive "hot particles" because the government didn't warn residents:
This is similar to the Japanese government withholding radiation plume data from evacuating Fukushima residents ... which caused them to evacuate to areas [17] of very high radiation.
EneNews [18] rounds up details on the freedom of information act information.