A documentary lifting the lid on secrets and techniques surrounding the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe exposes the terrifying risks of nuclear energy, writes Karl Grossman.
A NEW documentary titled The Fukushima Disaster: The Hidden Side of the Story is a strong, shifting, informative movie that’s fantastically made. Directed and edited by Philippe Carillo, it’s among the many strongest ever made on the lethal risks of nuclear know-how.
Australians featured within the movie are Dr Helen Caldicott, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and John Keane, professor of politics on the University of Sydney. Carillo is a resident of the nation of Vanuatu, 1,750 kilometres northeast of Australia.
The documentary begins with the phrases of U.S. President John F Kennedy from 1961:
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It then goes to the March 2011 catastrophe on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy plant in Japan after it was struck by a tsunami. Its backup diesel mills kicked in however “did not run for long,” notes the documentary. That led to 3 of the six plant reactors exploding – and there is video of this – “releasing an unpreceded amount of nuclear radiation into the air”.
“Fukushima is the world’s largest ever industrial catastrophe,” then says Professor John Keane. He says there was no emergency plan and, as to the proprietor of Fukushima, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), with the accident its CEO “for five nights and days… locked himself inside his office”.
Meanwhile, from TEPCO, there was “only good news” with two Japanese authorities businesses additionally “involved in the cover-up” – the Nuclear Industry Safety Agency and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
“Japanese media was ordered to censor information. The Japanese Government failed to protect its people,” the documentary relates.
Yumi Kikuchi of Fukushima, since a frontrunner of the Fukushima Kids Project, recollects:
Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer and now a principal of Fairewinds Energy Education in Burlington, Vermont within the United States, speaks of being advised by Naoto Kan, the Prime Minister of Japan on the time of the accident, that “our existence as a sovereign nation was at stake because of the disaster at Fukushima Daichi”.
Kan then seems within the documentary and speaks of “manmade” hyperlinks to the catastrophe.
The documentary tells how Kan, following the accident, turned “an advocate against nuclear power… ordered all nuclear power plants in Japan to shut down for safety” and for the nation “to move into renewable energy”.
Subsequently, “a nuclear advocate”, Shinzo Abe, turned Japan’s Prime Minister.
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Yoichi Shimatsu, a former Japan Times journalist, seems within the movie and speaks of “the cruelty, the cynicism of this government”. He speaks of how within the accident’s aftermath, “nearly every member of Parliament and leaders of the major political parties”, together with company executives, “moved their relatives out of Japan”.
He says:
“If it’s safe, why they left?” asks Kikuchi.
Gundersen says:
There is a bit within the documentary on the impacts of radioactivity which incorporates Dr Caldicott discussing the impacts of radiation on the physique and the way it causes most cancers.
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She states:
Maggie Gundersen, who was a reporter after which a public relations consultant for the nuclear trade and, like her husband Arnie, turned an opponent of nuclear energy, speaks of how nuclear energy derives from the World War II Manhattan Project program to develop atomic weapons and post-war so-called “Atoms for Peace” push.
Gundersen says in changing into a nuclear trade spokesperson, “the things I was taught weren’t true”. The notion, for instance, that what is named a containment at a nuclear plant is unfaithful as a result of radioactivity “escapes every day as a nuclear power plant operates” and in a “calamity” is launched massively.
As to economics, she cited the declare many years in the past that nuclear energy could be “too cheap to meter”.
The president of Fairewinds Energy Education says:
Regarding the radioactive waste produced by nuclear energy, she says “there is literally no technology” to safeguard it for the various years it stays deadly. “It does not exist.”
As to worldwide oversight, the documentary presents the ultimate model of the Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation issued in 2014 which finds that the radiation doses from Fukushima ‘to most people throughout the first 12 months and estimated for his or her lifetimes are typically low or very low… The most vital impact is on psychological and social well-being’.
Shimatsu says it isn’t solely in Japan however on a global degree that the results of radioactive publicity have been utterly minimised or denied:
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In Germany, says Maggie Gunderson, “the politicians chose” to do a research to substantiate that no well being impacts “happened around nuclear power plants… But what they found was the radiation releases cause significant numbers of childhood leukemia”.
A abstract of that 2008 research comes on the display screen. The U.S. adopted up on that analysis, she says, however lately “the [U.S.] Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was not going to do that study,” that “it doesn’t have enough funding; it had to shut it down”. She stated the actual purpose was that it was producing “data they don’t want to make public”.
Beyond the airborne releases of radiation after the Fukushima accident, now, says the documentary, there’s the rising risk of radioactivity by water that has and nonetheless is leaking from the plant in addition to greater than one million tons of radioactive water saved in a thousand tanks constructed on the plant web site.
After the accident, TEPCO launched 300,000 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. Now there isn’t any land for extra tanks, so the Japanese Government, the documentary relates, has determined, beginning this 12 months, to dump large quantities of radioactive water over a 30-year interval into the Pacific.
Arnie Gundersen speaks of the cliche that “the solution to pollution is dilution,” however with the radiation from Fukushima being despatched into the Pacific, there will likely be “bio-accumulation” – with vegetation absorbing radiation, little fish consuming that vegetation and intensifying it and larger fish consuming the smaller fish, additional bio-accumulating the radioactivity. Already, tuna off California have been discovered with radiation traced to Fukushima. With this deliberate additional and but higher dispersal, 1000’s of individuals “in the Pacific basin will die from radiation,” he says.
Andrew Napuat, a member of the Parliament of Vanuatu, an 83-island archipelago within the Pacific, says within the documentary:
Vanuatu, together with 13 different international locations, has signed and ratified the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty.
As the documentary nears its finish, Arnie Gundersen says that contemplating the meltdown on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, the meltdown on the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986, and now the three Fukushima meltdowns in 2011, there was “a meltdown every seven years roughly”.
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He says:
And, he provides:
(There are 440 on the planet immediately.)
Meanwhile, he says:
The value of manufacturing power from wind, he says, is three cents a kilowatt hour, for photo voltaic, 5 cents and for brand new nuclear energy vegetation, 15 cents. Nuclear “makes no nuclear economic sense”.
Maggie Gundersen says, with tears in her eyes:
Philippe Carillo, who labored for 14 years in Hollywood and who since 2017 has lived in Vanuatu, has labored on a number of main TV documentary initiatives for the BBC, twentieth Century Fox and French National TV in addition to doing impartial productions. He says he made The Fukushima Disaster: The Hidden Side of the Story to “expose the nuclear industry and its lies”.
His earlier award-winning documentary, Inside the Garbage of the World, has made modifications concerning the usage of plastic.
The Fukushima Disaster, The Hidden Side of the Story may be seen at Amazon (UK and U.S.), Apple TV, iTunes, Google Play and Vimeo on demand.
Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism on the State University of New York. He can be an award-winning investigative reporter. Click right here to go to Karl’s web site.