By Joaquin

The truth is, there is a big fat lie that the nuclear power industry and the media are foisting on the public and that has not changed. But first let's take a look at some other lies. For example, here is a picture of an exploding reactor building #3 at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant: (Image)

We are supposed to believe that this hydrogen explosion is no biggie; course it isn't; it's just a direct hit. WTF, there is a huge amount of concrete flying hundreds of meters in the air not a tin roof; the nature of the damage done by this explosion has proven to be the subject of one lie after another.

The media is confusing everyone about radiation because they refuse or are unable to discern the difference between contamination and direct radiation. That's because the media are run by people who are either trying to obfuscate what is going on or are just plain idiots; your choice. Look at this picture: compiled from Sources: TEPCO (Tokyo Power); International Atomic Energy Agency; Federal Aviation Administration; Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Never-mind that most of the data is missing in the above picture, which seems to say the plant is safe to walk around in anytime as long as you don't mind the possibility of a CT-SCAN now and then. Today, several plant employees found out the hard way what a dangerous lie this is.

So, back to the big lie; what is it? This lie has to do with the nature of nuclear power in the future. Everyone is asking, can we make nuclear technology, the current, nuclear technology safe? In truth, the current risks with the nuclear fuel cycle i.e., the risks of contaminating the environment, are not the risks of the future because the current nuclear fuel cycle is not the fuel cycle that will be used in the future. There's just not that much uranium left to fuel an extensive expansion of nuclear power generation. (See Note 1)

So, where's all the nuclear fuel going to come from? The answer has to be that the nuclear industry and U.S. government intend to use more exotic fuel cycles in the future power plants including, MOX (currently leaking our of reactor 3), reprocessed Uranium, Thorium, and breeder reactors of various types (See Note 2 )

The industry and their government and media proxies don't want to talk about this fact too much because the waste from these future fuel cycles is far more dangerous than most of the stuff slowly making a large part of Japan uninhabitable for the next few dozen millennium. In other words, the discussion in the media about future nuclear safety is completely dishonest.

Clearly, given the lies coming out of Japan and the media's willing participation in them, nuclear energy is too dangerous for the truth and that these institutions are too corrupt to act as responsible stewards of such a dangerous existing technology.

Now we find them already lying about the future. American's are for the most part too ignorant to figure out the truth on their own; there is a cultural ignorance towards science across most of the U.S. Therefore, any further development of nuclear power in the U.S. should be put off indefinitely.

Reposted with the permission of the author. First published in The Agonist.

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Also see: Michael Collins' Blogged version of this article and New Scientist - Fukushima radioactive fallout nears Chernobyl levels

You may reproduce this article entirely or in part with attribution of authorship to Joaquin and a link to the article.