Fukushima Cover-up continues

To learn from Fukushima, Greenpeace commissioned “Lessons from Fukushima.”

This report, by three independent experts (a nuclear physicist, a correspondent for a health publication and a nuclear engineer), documents how the government, regulators and the nuclear industry enabled the Fukushima Daiichi disaster and then failed to protect the people from its impacts. Given that these failures are repeated wherever nuclear power is generated, means that millions who are in the shadow of reactors live with the risks of the next nuclear disaster. Instead of acknowledging these risks, many politicians and authorities responded to Fukushima by calling for the need to “restore public confidence in nuclear power.”

Something is clearly wrong. A year after the disaster began, governments continue to protect the nuclear industry instead of protecting their citizens.

Greenpeace 28th Feb 2012

There are broader issues and essential questions that still

deserve our attention:

• How it is possible that – despite all assurances – a major

nuclear accident on the scale of the Chernobyl disaster

of 1986 happened again, in one of the world’s most

industrially advanced countries?

• Why did emergency and evacuation plans not work

to protect people from excessive exposure to the

radioactive fallout and resulting contamination? Why is

the government still failing to better protect its citizens

from radiation one year later?

• Why are the over 100,000 people who suffer the

most from the impacts of the nuclear accident still not

receiving adequate financial and social support to help

them rebuild their homes, lives and communities?

These are the fundamental questions that we need to ask

to be able to learn from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

This report looks into them and draws some important

conclusions:

1. The Fukushima nuclear accident marks the end of the

‘nuclear safety’ paradigm.

2. The Fukushima nuclear accident exposes the deep

and systemic failure of the very institutions that are

supposed to control nuclear power and protect people

from its accidents.