The Austrialian Is All For Nuke Plants Even After #Fukushima Disaster

saying "Fukushima looked ugly but the alternative is so much worse". Why? Well, global warming and CO2 increase, of course. Graham Lloyd of The Australian also claims the Japanese government has "responded with greater speed and precision to the Fukushima emergency than did their Soviet counterparts at Chernobyl, which was a much more serious accident."

Emergency? (Oh boy. That's like NISA calling the accident an "event"). The article was written before Japan upgraded the "emergency" event to a "Level 7" accident.

From The Australian's Graham Lloyd (4/9/2011):

THE Fukushima nuclear emergency has intensified the global climate change debate.

Japan's post-tsunami crisis has prompted an immediate reappraisal of ambitious nuclear energy plans in the booming markets of China and India and hastened the withdrawal of ageing plants in Western Europe, most notably Germany.

According to some calculations, if the world's nuclear ambitions are reduced because of Fukushima global carbon emissions could increase by an additional three billion tonnes by 2030.

Some believe this would be enough to push global temperature rises beyond 2 per cent and into a potentially calamitous upward spiral.

This has caused leading environmental campaigners, such as British author George Monbiot, to reappraise their attitude towards nuclear energy with some dramatic results.

Monbiot has not only changed from nuclear avoider to pro-nuclear campaigner he has taken on the long-standing figurehead of the anti-nuclear cause, Australia's Helen Caldicott.

"I'm very worried that the global response to what's happening in Fukushima will be to shut down nuclear power stations around the world and to cancel future nuclear power stations, and that what will happen is that they will be replaced by coal," Monbiot wrote this week.

And after years of campaigning against nuclear power, Monbiot now describes the exaggerated claims of the health impacts of radioactivity as akin to what he believes are the pseudo-scientific pleadings of climate change deniers.

"The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health," Monbiot wrote.

Monbiot cites a UN Scientific Committee report into the Chernobyl accident, which found that of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation. The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, including four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia.

In the rest of the Chernobyl population there have been 6848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children arising "almost entirely" from the Soviet Union's failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131.

Otherwise "there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure".

Japanese authorities have responded with greater speed and precision to the Fukushima emergency than did their Soviet counterparts at Chernobyl, which was a much more serious accident.

(The article continues.)

The last paragraph quoted is a downright LIE. Amazing. There you go, Kan, here's your ally. Invite the reporters from this outfit to your presser and spread the good news that Fukushima is nothing.

The second to last paragraph is extremely questionable also, in light of the extensive studies to the contrary.

I suppose Australia is very safe from the radioactive plumes and contaminated water from Fukushima, being in the southern hemisphere, and has the luxury of still promoting the nuclear energy to save the world from the "global warming".

Never mind that millions of Japanese have had to breathe radioactive air and eat radioactive vegetables and fish. Small price to pay for saving the world from "global warming".

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