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Radiation Rising in Fukushima

This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com with your Sunday Update for this 27th day of March, 2011. And now for the real news.

The crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan’s northeast became even more desire this weekend with Japanese government spokesman Yukio Amano warning yesterday that Japan was “still far from the end of the accident.” Amano’s warning comes as the Tokyo Electric Power Co announced today that radioactivity in water discovered in the turbine housing unit of reactor no. 2 is now 10 million times higher than normal. [NOTE: TEPCO has since retracted that statement, saying it is only 100,000 times higher than normal.]

Now the spread of the radioactive contamination has been discovered to be even worse than previously thought, with radiation levels over 30 kilometres away from the plant found to be 40% higher than the annual radiation limit set for the general public.

This comes on the back of reports yesterday showing that radioactivity in seawater samples taken within a few hundred meters of the plant contains concentrations of radioactive iodine-131 over 1200 times higher than the legal limit.

The Japanese government updated that figure earlier today to show that that number has again increased, with radioactivity levels now over 1800 times higher than legal limits.

Official assurances that these readings and reports do not pose a significant risk to the general public are wearing thin as more evidence emergences of obfuscation and coverup by TEPCO about what is happening at the plant.

Yesterday TEPCO officials acknowledged that they had covered up the high radiation levels in the underground levels of the turbine building of one of the reactors, and that they had deliberately withheld that information from pertinent third parties.

Last week Hirose Takashi, a researcher at the Aomori Prefectural Industrial Research Institute and a man who has written extensively on nuclear power went on Japanese TV to point out the lies that are being told about the supposed safety of this radiation.

“They are saying stupid things like, why, we are exposed to radiation all the time in our daily life, we get radiation from outer space. But that’s one millisievert per year. A year has 365 days, a day has 24 hours; multiply 365 by 24, you get 8760. Multiply the 400 millisieverts by that, you get 3,500,000 the normal dose. You call that safe?”

Many are now expressing concern that the Japanese government’s moves to quietly raise legal radiation limits in a number of areas indicates a tacit acknowledgement that increased radiation exposure will continue to be a daily reality for residents of Japan for the foreseeable future.

On March 17th, the government raised the radiation exposure limits for emergency workers at the Fukushima plant from 100 millisieverts to 250 millisieverts.

On March 22nd, the government announced that they were raising the bar for access to decontamination from 6,000 counts per minute to 100,000 counts per minute.

And now the International Commission on Radiological Protection is recommending that the Japanese government raise allowable radiation exposure limits for the general public from 1 millisievert per year to 100 millisieverts per year, not because the fundamental laws of physics and human biology have changed, but to stop people from moving out of the effected areas.

Meanwhile in the American media, some are now attempting to make fun of the situation, actually saying that increased radiation levels are good for you.

Infowars.com has contacted Ann Coulter’s staff to offer to pay for a first class flight to Tokyo and to pay her usual speaking fee to go to the site and drink the radioactive water there, but Coulter has so far refused to do so.

As the unfolding nuclear crisis continues to develop, look for ongoing coverage and updates at corbettreport.com