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Interview with Helen Caldicott on Fukushima

Shadows of Fukushima By Michelle Pini

In Australia, we don’t have nuclear power, we just export our radiation for the joy and benefit of the rest of the world – it’s immoral. Dr Helen Caldicott

Dr Helen Caldicott is hard to ignore. Her breadth of knowledge and fervour for her subject seem limitless. She gesticulates often, her gaze is direct, and there is a practical sense of urgency in her voice.

An Australian physician and world-renowned anti-nuclear activist and educator, she makes time to be interviewed despite having just returned from a speaking tour of Japan and Denmark. If Caldicott is jetlagged, she shows no sign.

“Fukushima is bigger and much worse than Chernobyl,” she says emphatically. “Yet we are buying Japanese food imports, we are eating fish that are likely contaminated and there is no telling whether the atmospheric radiation cloud which hovered over Japan initially, will not end up here.”

We are discussing the 2011 events at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, described by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) as “the largest civilian nuclear accident since … Chernobyl.” (The Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, 2014.)

As a 16 year old, Caldicott read On the Beach, a novel set in Melbourne about a nuclear war resulting in the obliteration of life on earth. “I kind of lost my innocence after that book and never felt safe again,” she says.

Caldicott then went on to study medicine and learned about the effects of radiation, mutations and cancers. “At the same time, Russia and America were testing bombs like there was no tomorrow – it was insanity,” she says, describing the events that have fuelled her obsession for so long. (Caldicott has campaigned against uranium mining and nuclear power for 43 years.)

“We don’t know where things are being grown, and because we can’t taste, smell or see radiation, nobody should be eating Miso soup or rice or anything else imported from Japan,” advises Caldicott.
SNIP

ISIS: Tokyo Contaminated & Not Fit for Habitation, Doctor Says

It is unfortunate that, besides the obvious, ISIS also stands for the Institute of Science In Society. Perhaps it would be opportune for this ISIS to consider altering their name to the Institute of Science And Society (ISAS) before the NSA sends in the drones….

ISIS Report 24/9/14: Tokyo Contaminated & Not Fit for Habitation, Doctor Says

Excerpt

All 23 districts of Tokyo contaminated with radiation, worse than at Chernobyl after the accident, and blood cells of children under ten are showing worrying changes; the WHO, the IAEA & the Japanese government cannot be trusted

Susie Greaves

In July 2014 Dr Shigeru Mita wrote a letter to his fellow doctors to explain his decision to move his practice from Tokyo to Okayama city in the West of Japan [1]. In it, he appeals to their sense of duty to answer the anxieties of parents in Japan who do not believe the information coming from the authorities. He says “I must state that the policies of the WHO, the IAEA or the Japanese government cannot be trusted.” and “if the power to save our citizens and future generations exists somewhere, it does not lie within the government or any academic association, but in the hands of individual clinical doctors ourselves.”

Mita claims that all 23 districts of Tokyo are contaminated, with the eastern area worst affected – up to 4 000 Bq/kg. (The becquerel is a unit of radioactivity. One Bq is the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second.) These findings confirm what the nuclear physicist Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Nuclear Education found in 2012, when he picked up five random soil samples in Tokyo from between paving stones, in parks and playgrounds. The levels of contamination were up to 7 000 Bq/kg; in the US, anything registering these levels would be considered nuclear waste [2].nWhile practising in Tokyo, Mita also discovered changes in the white blood cells of children under 10.
SNIP