Sunday, October 13, 2013

(OT) South African Nuclear Physicist Declares "There Was No #Fukushima Nuclear Disaster" Because No One Died from Radiation


I remember seeing the similar declaration in the first year of the disaster (which is not a disaster at all according to this physicist), because there was no death from acute radiation sickness. The Guardian's George Monbiot, for example, declared right after the start of the Fukushima nuclear accident that he was now an avid supporter of nuclear energy precisely because of the accident, where "no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation".

But to read, after more than two and a half years, the same, simplistic and narrowly defined, head-in-the-sand argument that there is no nuclear accident because no one died from radiation sickness is more than I can tolerate in my recovery. Please feel free to read and comment as you like.

The site that carries the article also has an article penned by a Greenpeace founder pushing for GMO rice.

From CFACT (10/12/2013; emphasis is mine):

Physicist: There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster

by Kelvin Kemm

....Let us now ponder the Fukushima nuclear incident which has been in the news again lately.

Firstly let us get something clear. There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster. Total number of people killed by nuclear radiation at Fukushima was zero. Total injured by radiation was zero. Total private property damaged by radiation….zero. There was no nuclear disaster. What there was, was a major media feeding frenzy fuelled by the rather remote possibility that there may have been a major radiation leak.

At the time, there was media frenzy that “reactors at Fukushima may suffer a core meltdown.” Dire warnings were issued. Well the reactors did suffer a core meltdown. What happened? Nothing.

Certainly from the ‘disaster’ perspective there was a financial disaster for the owners of the Fukushima planJapan Tsunami pushes carst. The plant overheated, suffered a core meltdown, and is now out of commission for ever. A financial disaster, but no nuclear disaster.

Amazingly the thousands of people killed by the tsunami in the neighbouring areas who were in shops, offices, schools, at the airport, in the harbour and elsewhere are essentially ignored while there is this strange continuing phobia about warning people of ‘the dangers of Fukushima.’ We need to ask the more general question: did anybody die because of Fukushima? Yes they did. Why? The Japanese governJapan tsunami boatment introduced a forced evacuation of thousands of people living up to a couple of dozen kilometres from the power station. The stress of moving to collection areas induced heart attacks and other medical problems in many people. So people died because of Fukushima hysteria not because of Fukushima radiation.

(Full article at the link)


Fukushima plant workers would be glad to know that all they have been dealing with since the day one of the accident is nothing but nuclear hysteria.

It seems the so-called foreign "experts" featured in the net media fall into two types. One is like this South African nuclear physicist or George Monbiot, who says there was no Fukushima nuclear disaster because no one died of radiation sickness. The other type includes people who continue to assert, without offering any data or evidence, that Reactor 4 is "tilting like Tower of Pisa", or "leaking from the bottom", or "a million people will die from illnesses caused by radiation from Fukushima".

I don't think the truth lies in either of them, but these two extremes continue to get most coverage.

(H/T @Tommi_M_Elo for the article)

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

(OT) South African Nuclear Physicist Cheated Exams, Bought Credentials; Lacks Brain

*fixed

Anonymous said...

"Total private property damaged by radiation... zero". Well, this statement goes beyond propaganda into outright lie (although Goebels used to say that gross lies are seldom questioned...). Maybe he should consider buying property in Minami-Soma; hysteria will afford him a price well below the pre-disaster levels.

I have read this kind of negationist reasoning elsewhere, from the same kind of people who suggest to dump contaminated water into the ocean, so that the health impact becomes so spread out that it becomes impossible to detect.

I will not comment further on the health impact but I agree with this South African gentleman that it has been a financial disaster and it is *extremely important* that investors in nuclear energy take these losses in full, not the taxpayer nor the ratepayer.

Beppe

Apolline said...

Hi Ultraman,

I made some research about the author, Kelvin Kemm. This is his biography :
Dr Kelvin Kemm is a Technology Strategy Consultant and runs his own company, Stratek, based in Pretoria, South Africa. He studied at Natal University where he gained a PhD in nuclear physics before working as a scientist at the Atomic Energy Corporation of South Africa. He subsequently moved into the field of the management of technology, and became involved in a variety of projects in many industrial sectors, giving him wide exposure to the technological and industrial base of society. In 1994, Dr Kemm was appointed to the International Board of Advisors of the Washington DC-based environment and technology lobby group, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. In 1996, he became the first person from Africa to be appointed to the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), and was appointed to the ESEF Board in 1999. He is also a member of the British Institute of Nuclear Engineers. Dr Kemm has written a public interest book on technology entitled "Techtrak – A Winding Path of South African Development". He also has his own weekly newspaper column in Engineering News, and has appeared widely on radio and TV.

CFACT receives money from EXXONMOBIL.

Read also this (august 2013) :

http://nuclear-news.net/2013/08/12/south-africa-kemms-pro-nuke-puff-and-the-africans-reaction/

Anonymous said...

Since we redefined the meaning of "cold shutdown" after Fukushima, why not also redefine "disaster"? It makes life so much easier.

And @ Beppe: right on!
*mscharisma*

Apolline said...

A little error in this phrase :

Certainly from the ‘disaster’ perspective there was a financial disaster for the owners of the Fukushima planJapan Tsunami pushes carst.

The words are mixed with the legend of the picture. The real phrase is :

Certainly from the ‘disaster’ perspective there was a financial disaster for the owners of the plant.The plant overheated, suffered a core meltdown, and is now out of commission for ever.

Anonymous said...

Kemm, Monboit--- they are a travesty that has become internet joke fodder except on places like the misguided nuclear engineering subforum of the Physiscs Forums where some nuke engineers keep reasoning to themselves that the industry is still praiseworthy and can do no wrong.

All ridiculousness aside, how can responsible people(the few that exist) in the nuke industry stomach this written drivel? It must be because they assume we are complete morons.

Anonymous said...

Apologies in advance if I got anything wrong but I believe the gist is correct, so here it is.
Hilarious: TBS's News23 commentator Kishii Shigetada just stated a few minutes ago that decontamination did not work well because Japan followed IAEA instructions but the latter did not know that Japan is affected by rain and typhoons. Decontaminated areas are therefore unexpectedly (YES, soteigai, 想定外!) getting contaminated again.
The same commentator also mentioned that it was decided that decontaminating forests and mountains was not feasible (apparently Japan has a lot of forests and mountains too!) and this contributed to a resurgence of contamination. I guess they expected radionuclides to gentlemanly stay put in the forests, just like they gentlemanly restrict themselves to the 0.3 sqKm of the Fuku 1 port.
Beppe

SouthJerseyJoey said...

what, no mention of bananas and their radioactive equilalent dose??

Anonymous said...

I'd like to shove some bananas up their ass so they can have their own little nuclear fission.

That "physicist" probably gets a hard-on from deluding himself into believing that humans are so amazingly superior and powerful to have invented nuclear energy. He doesn't want to admit that humans and their creations are not infallible perfection, so he spends all his time coming up with irrelevant justifications.

Anonymous said...

Kelvin Kemm, part of the Chilled Heads Coalition

check out their funding

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_a_Constructive_Tomorrow

Anonymous said...

Chilled Head Coalition -- in other words, coalition of the brain dead and numbed nuts.

Anonymous said...

Kelvin Klemm, besides obviously being blind to longtime and genetical damages caused by radiation is as well a proponent of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor System, a gas-cooled reactor with baseball-sized spheric fuel. The South Africa-research program has meanwhile been stopped by lack of funding. (Thank god!)
Here's how Klemm promoted them:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/1999/kemm.htm

And here's what Rainer Moormann, quite famous nuclear whistleblower wrote about the concenpt:
http://juwel.fz-juelich.de:8080/dspace/bitstream/2128/3136/1/Juel_4275_Moormann.pdf

If you don't want to read this all, here's a very short summmary:
Moormann contradicts the "inherent safe" statement, explaining it with design flaws. Apparently, core tempreatures can rise inadmissably high during operation while they can't be monitored continually, due to the design.

There are 2 sites in Germany with PBRs, both not operating anymore.
1st one was a prototype reactor in Jülich; AVR. Remains: probably the worldiwide highest Sr90 contamination of a reactor, Sr in earth and groundwater under the reactor, reactor vessel still radiating as high that has to be stored temporally for at least the nest 60 years on site; illegal storing of highly contaminated waste in interim storages; 2285 missing pebbles; 652 mio deconstruction costs (at least; decontamination of the ground and fuel disposal up to now can't even be calculated) and so on...
2nd one was THTR-300 in Hamm, a prototype as well. Hamm "distinguished" itself by releasing masses of isotopes into the air during an accident. This had been connected to Chernobyl in first part, as the operator denied any responsability for this spike. In total sum, there had been 80 incidents to be reoprted within 423 days of full-load operation. The operation turned out to be highly in deficit; the reactor itself is now in "safe enclosure" status (=6,5 Mio €/Year); estimated decomissioning costs as of September 2013: 404 Mio. €; due to high radiation on site manageable at the earliest between 2023 and 2044. Laying in was in 1989...

Taking these facts into account - why should anybody trust a guy who supports this kind of energy generation? These cases were not even a "DBA".

Viola

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