Paul Joseph Watson | Emails reveal “scandalous collusion” with nuclear industry, talking points were also parroted by global warming alarmists.
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
July 1, 2011
Just 48 hours after the onset of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the British government devised a propaganda campaign to downplay the severity of the crisis, a talking point that was hastily parroted by leading global warming alarmist George Monbiot.
“Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse to try to ensure the accident did not derail their plans for a new generation of nuclear stations in the UK,” reports Rob Edwards.
“We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and chapesses do not gain ground on this. We need to occupy the territory and hold it. We really need to show the safety of nuclear,” wrote one official at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith labeled the complicity between the government and the nuclear industry in downplaying the crisis “appalling,” while Greenpeace’s Louise Hutchins said the emails provided evidence of “scandalous collusion”.
“Anti-nuclear people across Europe have wasted no time blurring this all into Chernobyl and the works,” said the BIS official in another email. “We need to quash any stories trying to compare this to Chernobyl.”
While this PR blitz was being coordinated, we now know that the Japanese government was deliberately lying about the severity of the radiation release from Fukushima in an effort to conceal the fact that the crisis was already on a par with Chernobyl.
Within just two weeks of the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the nuclear plant, the amount of radiation released from Fukushima already rivaled that of Chernobyl, the worst nuclear disaster up until that point.
Reactors number 1 was also in meltdown just hours into the disaster, but this was denied for months by the authorities.
The government’s public relations campaign to downplay the severity of the crisis was enthusiastically parroted by many quarters of the man-made global warming crowd, eager as they were to not let focus slip away from the deadly threat posed by the life-giving gas carbon dioxide, to the point where people like George Monbiot almost went so far as to characterize radiation as harmless and nutritious.
In the days and weeks after Fukushima, Monbiot, perhaps Britain’s foremost global warming alarmist, wrote a series of articles for the Guardian in which he made accusations that others had “wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution”.
“As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology,” wrote Monbiot.
In response, nuclear expert Christopher Busby called Monbiot “criminally irresponsible” for encouraging his readers to ignore the threat posed by Fukushima radiation.
Monbiot’s rhetoric, in addition to the British government’s efforts to downplay the crisis, serve as a stark reminder that many leading environmentalists don’t give a damn about real threats to the environment, preferring instead to spend all their time obsessing about carbon dioxide emissions and thinking up new ways to exploit global warming fearmongering as a means of controlling every aspect of our lives.
This is an agenda enthusiastically pushed by the British government, which routinely works in consort with big think tanks to promote PR campaigns aimed at rescuing the anthropogenic climate change myth, about which Brits are becoming increasingly skeptical.
The most recent examples were the 10:10 campaign, which simulated executing children who refused to believe in man-made global warming, as well as the “Planned-opolis” scenario, which depicted a future totalitarian world of CO2 rationing, where big government on steroids would enforce a dictatorial eco-fascist nightmare.
Fukushima spin was Orwellian
Guardian | It was an open secret that Britain’s decision to back nuclear power in 2006 was pushed through government.
John Vidal
Guardian
July 1, 2011
It was an open secret that Britain’s decision to back nuclear power in 2006 was pushed through government by a cosy group of industrialists and others close to Tony Blair, and that a full debate about the full costs, safety and potential impact on future generations was suppressed.
But the release of 80 emails showing that in the days after the Fukushima accident not one but two government departments were working with nuclear companies to spin one of the biggest industrial catastrophes of the last 50 years, even as people were dying and a vast area was being made uninhabitable, is shocking.
What the emails shows is a weak government, captured by a powerful industry colluding to at least misinform and very probably lie to the public and the media. When the emails were sent, no one, least of all the industry and its friends in and out of government, had any idea how serious the situation at Fukushima was or might become.
Radioactive Waste Dumped in Open Pits Outside Los Alamos National Lab Washington’s Blog | To understand why a raging wildfire near the Los Alamos National Laboratory is a big deal, you must understand how wastes were disposed.
Washington’s Blog
Friday, July 1, 2011
To understand why a raging wildfire near the Los Alamos National Laboratory is a big deal, you must understand how wastes were disposed.
AP writes today:
Los Alamos Canyon runs past runs past the old Manhattan Project site in town and a 1940s era dump site where workers are near the end of a clean-up project of low-level radioactive waste. The World War II Manhattan Project developed the first atomic bomb, and workers from the era dumped hazardous and radioactive waste in trenches along six acres atop the mesa where the town sits.
“The threat is pretty limited,” said Kevin Smith, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration site manager for Los Alamos, which over sees the lab. “Most of the materials have been dug up.”
But a report produced by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability found:
Approximately 18 million cubic feet of radioactive and chemical solid wastes onsite were disposed of since 1943. “All of the radioactive waste and most of the chemical waste have been buried on the mesas of Pajarito Plateau where LANL is located. Radioactive liquid wastes were discharged to the canyons, initially with little treatment.”
For many years, one method of disposal was “kick-and-roll”. The back of a truck was brought to the edge of a hole and barrels of waste were kicked. Wherever the barrels rolled tow as their final resting place.
No protection was put in place to ensure contaminants did not spread from the barrel. It is not clear that today’s practices are more protective.
An estimated 899,000 curies of low-level transuranic [i.e. radioactive elements heavier than uranium, such as plutonium] wastes were buried at Los Alamos. It is difficult to estimate exactly the quantity of radionuclides buried onsite due to the inaccurate record keeping and alterations in the definitions of low-elevel waste in the intervening years. Disposal continues today in unlined pits and shafts, a practice declared illegal by the New Mexico Attorney General’s office in 2011…
Tons of plutonium were processed at LANL in the early years of development and again in the 1980s. After the Savannah River Site, LANL contains the second largest volume of plutonium-238 in the US nuclear weapons complex: this type of plutonium has a 90-year half-life, a very high activity and is extremely hazardous…
No wonder people have warned that the trees and soil in the areas surrounding the Los Alamos Laboratory may themselves now be radioactive. See this and this.