“To not choose is to choose.”.

...Bill, I'm just wondering: What "choice", exactly, are you referring to with the title of this thread?

Are any of us choosing to be irradiated? To build what are now clearly and demonstrably revealed to be leee-than-adequate reactors in chronically dangerous locations? To worry ourselves sick over the health, safety and longevity of our own bodies and those of our families, children and planet?

I mean, it's a catchy title; I just can't figure what it means. Can you clear this up for me, please? I'd like to know what my "choice" here is, exactly.

Many thanks.

Rick Cromack.
Allen, Texas

I read a very interesting article about WHY information is being censored.
Just to protect the Nuclear agency from future lawsuits for getting cancer.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/31/980920/-Lies-As-Law:-Codified-H...
This is a diary not about Fukushima, or even about Three Mile Island. It's a diary in response to a pro-nuclear apologist who visited my last diary lobbing lies (as usual), to clear up some facts about the nuclear industry in general, the U.S. government's shameful involvement in promoting it, and the U.S. legal system's blatantly rights-violating treatment of claims for damages caused by nuclear reactor accidents/meltdowns.

In my last diary, Fukushima Update: 5-28-11, one of our live-in apologists took issue with the premise that radioactive contamination released from melting reactors moves through the environment in "plumes" that travel with the prevailing winds. Or currents, in the case of waterborne releases.

In fact, he called my contention that denial of these very facts has been established in U.S. federal courts as an unassailable 'fact' no one can argue or present evidence against, a conspiracy theory. In a series of insulting comments, this nay-sayer defended the authoritarian position of the U.S. nuclear establishment that all radioactive contamination released by melting reactors must affect all people in a 50-mile radius from the plant in a full 360 degrees equally. This is how they determine if anyone is likely to get enough radiation to give them cancer (or kill them in the womb, or cause birth defects, etc.), and all claims must be based on that authoritative declaration.

Now, of course, anyone paying attention knows that contamination from melting reactors does indeed travel in plumes that follow the prevailing winds and currents. Thus those in the path of those plumes receive much more radiation than people who are not in the plumes. We can even see the plume maps generated when the Chernobyl reactor melted down, and we can see the plume maps generated daily from the Fukushima meltdowns disaster ongoing. So I thought this might be a good time to mention why it is that the U.S. government and judicial system still insist not so, for any meltdowns that have or will happen in this country.

It's called The Price-Anderson Act, which was first passed in 1957 to socialize the risks of utilities operating nuclear power plants in case of catastrophes like, say, meltdowns. Because in the 1950s the government wanted to encourage utilities to invest in nuclear power, but no utility would do so without a hefty liability cap in case things went wrong. Thus was established an arbitrary limit on damages any citizen could be compensated for in the event he or she was harmed or killed by a friendly neighborhood nuke.

When TMI-2 melted in 1979 Price-Anderson kicked in to provide immediate compensation to the pregnant women and children evacuated to the Hershey Convention Center (downwind in the plume), to businesses and workers who suffered lost income, and to establish a "health fund" resulting from a class action suit in 1981, just 2 years after the meltdown. Another class action suit was filed in federal court in 1988 representing plaintiffs who had developed cancers and/or survivors thereof. Since the incubation for radiation-induced cancers can be 5-20 years, the list of plaintiffs grew steadily until the suit was finally dismissed in 1996 but a judge appropriately named Rambo. At the time of its dismissal there were more than 2,000 plaintiffs. In her decision, Rambo wrote:

Finally, Dr. Vergeiner's testimony was admitted by the court subject to the condition that Plaintiffs could explain how the testimony was still relevant in light of the court's exclusion of the bulk of Dr. Vergeiner's proffered expert testimony. Had Plaintiffs presented admissible evidence demonstrating that significant quantities of noble gases were released from TMI during the accident, Dr. Vergeiner's testimony would assist the jury in understanding how prevailing weather c onditions effected the plume's path and the rate at which it dispersed." However, on the current state of the record, Plaintiffs have no high release evidence. Without high releases, there is no dense yet narrow plume, and there is no need for Dr. Vergeiner to explain how such a plume might have evaded the TLDs set up to monitor airborne radiation.
I am the person who processed the TLDs at Three Mile Island in the month following the accident. Releases were not tracked by stationary TLDs after the accident, though there were some stationary TLDs before the accident. The plume going out was instead tracked and mapped by helicopters on a regular, round the clock basis. The maps of the plume, along with readings in the plume, were included in the NRC 'event notifications' sent to all operating nuclear plants daily, and distributed to all health physics personnel at the plant daily. These were NOT introduced as evidence in this case, because the NRC and utility had an entirely different strategy for 'proving' no one suffered harm from their little meltdown.

Rambo dismissed the suit for "lack of evidence" because the academic epidemiologists hired by the plaintiffs to do a study of cancers in the area around TMI found that cancers and cancer clusters occurred along a pathway extending north-northeast of the plant along the direction of prevailing winds. The government (NRC was a defendant along with Met-Ed/GPU, the owners/operators of TMI-2) had insisted in two 'Blue Ribbon' investigations of the accident early on [Kemeny and Rogovin] that estimated releases of radioactive isotopes from the plant had to be evenly distributed to all of the people living within 50 miles of the plant in any direction. This cute little maneuver served to dilute the pool of people who unfortunately lived right in the path of the plume with ~4 million other people who were never exposed to significant radiation from the meltdown. Rambo didn't bother to question this nutty methodology despite the fact that the defendants admitted that it was primarily people within just 20 miles of the plant who were dosed.

That astoundingly deceptive and factually challenged methodology was embraced by the court without examination and without hearing any testimony from witnesses who monitored the releases of radioactive contamination and recorded the doses - and who were to have provided plume maps generated by the NRC in the weeks following the accident. Plume maps which lined up exactly with the map of cancers and cancer clusters generated by the epidemiologists all those years later.

It would have been impossible for the defendants to claim their methodology in assessing health effects was valid if they themselves had mapped the plume leaving Three Mile Island. Exactly the same kind of plume activity well-documented from weapons testing days, from the Chernobyl meltdown, and now from Fukushima. TMI was no different, yet none of the people who were greatly harmed or killed by radiation from the U.S.'s own meltdown received compensation for their damages. Thousands of innocent people were deliberately sacrificed on the altar of nuclear power. Someday soon thousands more will join their ranks when the next one (or several) melt down.

You might think it's a bit unfair for U.S. government and courts to decide by (utterly dishonest) fiat that people harmed by nuclear power plants are not entitled to a fair hearing or realistic compensation for the harm done. Others might well agree, but that is not reality in the good ol' U.S. of A. The question has even been decided - way back in 1978, the year before TMI melted down - by the Supreme Court of the United States.

The case is Duke Power Co. v. Carolina Environmental Study Group, 438 U.S. 59 (1978). Several environmental groups filed suit in western North Carolina against the NRC regarding the Price-Anderson Act, maintaining that it violated the 5th Amendment because it didn't ensure fair or adequate compensation to victims of nuclear accidents, and that it violated the 14th Amendment by treating the victims of nuclear accidents differently than victims of other types of industrial accidents.

In the opinion, the court decided that it's perfectly okay to treat the victims of nuclear accidents unfairly because Congress intended for victims of nuclear accidents to be treated unfairly when it passed the Act. The court specifically concluded that…

• it is clear that Congress' purpose was to remove the economic impediments in order to stimulate the private development of electric energy by nuclear power while simultaneously providing the public compensation in the event of a catastrophic nuclear incident.
• The record supports the need for imposition of a statutory limit on liability to encourage private industry participation and hence bears a rational relationship to Congress' concern for stimulating private industry's involvement in the production of nuclear electric energy.

and finally…

• There is no equal protection violation, since the general rationality of the Act's liability limitation, particularly with reference to the congressional purpose of encouraging private participation in the exploitation of nuclear energy, is ample justification for the difference in treatment between those injured in nuclear accidents and those whose injuries are derived from other causes.
It's not like the government didn't know meltdowns were possible or even likely. It's not like they didn't know that plumes of radioactive contamination travel with prevailing winds to cause harm to those living beneath those plumes. It's just that they decided thousands of citizens could be allowed to die in such an event without a cent of compensation (or even health care) because nukes are way more important than people. That's the law, as it stands and has stood for 54 years.

Thus they can claim for all historical and legal purposes that radioactive plumes of contamination leaving nuclear plants do not exist and cannot be made to exist by any factual evidence or testimony in any court of law or historical record. Even when everybody with minds, eyes and half a brain can easily demonstrate that this is entirely, 100% bogus. The people must be allowed to die. Nukes must be saved.

To all of us at Nuclear Free DK and otherwise interested in following the events worldwide as nations begin to come to grips (or not) with the nuclear beast, it is in the understanding of THIS nation's insidious role in deploying these monsters all over the world that will eventually prove most useful in the planning of political opposition to this particular status quo. We need to take Price-Anderson on directly. We need to point to the corruption it's caused to our government, our regulators, and our judicial system, and educate people to their status as human sacrifices to the nuclear godling.

And when this is clearly understood by the people of this country, the decision to end our nuclear adventure and develop alternative energy sources that don't require human sacrifice will be easy. No nukes.

And there's probably no way to prove definitively that even one of those several hundred thousand American cancer cases was caused by Fukushima, Bill.

Just the way the despicable nuclear industry likes it...

...God love ya, my friend, I certainly empathize with how much anxiety and stress the ongoing.Japan nuclear event has meant for you, and I really do value your opinions, your diligence, thoughtfulness, tenacity, and curiosity... But I wonder sometimes if maybe you need to take a little break from all this, if just for a few days, as I have on occasion.

You are, I think, a genuinely compassionate, concerned, constructively inclined soul, and your many contributions have been invaluable, to me personally and to many, many others here and elsewhere. I do not for one second doubt your intentions, question your agenda or have any second thoughts regarding your basic humanity. You are a straight-talking, decent and honorable fellow, if I'm any judge of character... and I usually am. But when you spend a couple of paragraphs delineating the various horrors and statistical likelihoods of bad outcomes confronting us, and then sign off with a flippant, devil-may-care, glibly morbid "non aperitif"!, I frankly wonder if all this hasn't succeeded in pushing you off the edge somewhat, from cautious optimist to sober skeptic to sarcastic cynic, and finally to smart-assed fatalist. And that would be a genuine tragedy, my friend, one among many in this crisis. We need you, Bill, clear-eyed and scrupulous and diligent and demanding and discerning. We do NOT need another "golden kazoo", and while you're still a far cry fom that kind of presence, here, you're not quite so far removed from that state as you once were, and I honestly wonder if you're even aware of the changes you have exhibited here, lately. You are FAR less willing to believe good news, for example, than you used to be, and much more insistent on the inevitability of bad outcomes. I suppose I am, too; nut, damn, man, I HATE to see my current emotional trajectory echoed in others. I need SOMEBODY to keep the optimism lamp lit, brother; 'cause if we've ALL fallen into resignation-cum-despair, then there'll be no one left to pull me out.

What I'm saying, I guess, is this: We need to KEEP HOPE ALIVE. NOT in a patronizing, disingenuous, ignorant, naive or contrary way; but in a the-future-is-not-yet-known, much-less-set sort of way. Yes, what we THINK we know is pretty damn bad, but we DON'T know EVERYTHING, least of all what happens NEXT. As I said in another thread recently: Welcome to wherever we are. I sure as Hell don't have the slightest idea where, exactly, that is, except: nowhere I'VE ever been, before.

Chin up, my friend. We need to keep one another encouraged. I for one have NO desire to be an organizational officer in some sort of apocalyptic Toastmasters or atomic Kiwanis Club. (The Knights of Cesium?) AndI really don't think you do, either.

Clear heads, open eyes, honest dialogue, candid opinions, constructive discourse. We follow those principles, we'll get through this, I promise you... together.

Rick Cromack.
Allen, Texas