Monbiot's conversion, now 'loves' glowing example of Fukushima

[Zardoz]

Our founder turned one trick climate pony - George scribbles like a Zombie for the war and money control Western power elite in the Guardian today. These fascists require positive press from fake environ-mentalists to put their evil plans back on track since the developing Fukushima disaster.
No mention does Monbiot make of the need for crippling public subsidy - motivation of entire industry being for plutonium for weapons - deadly legacy for hundreds of thousands of years - nor of last week's accident at Oldbury nuke station in Gloucestershire. 

Neither will you find in the Guardian today anything that Jeremy Corbyn, John MacDonald or dennis Skinner said in yesterday's commons 'debate' on Libya. 

Oldbury reactor failure leads to 'mildly' radioactive steam release
http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/news/Concern-plumes-steam-Oldbury-nuclear-station/article-3348796-detail/article.html
Reactor 2 was automatically and safely shut down following an electrical problem on conventional plant in the site's turbine hall.
"Post trip cooling on Reactor 2 has commenced successfully. Investigations into the cause of this event are ongoing."



Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima
Japan's disaster would weigh more heavily if there were less harmful alternatives. Atomic power is part of the mix up in my brain

Want some real news and not this City of London financed hypnotic pseudo-left tripe?
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/
http://www.whatreallyhapened.com
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
http://www.antiwar.com
http://www.globalresearch.ca

Tony

--- In Diggers350 at yahoogroups.com, Tony Gosling <tony at ...> wrote:
>
> A cloud of nuclear mistrust spreads around the world
> March 16, 2011
> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/a-cloud-of-nuclear-mistrust-spreads-around-the-world-2242988.html
> http://thetruthiswhere.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/a-cloud-of-nuclear-mistrust-spreads-around-the-world/
> 
> After decades of lies, nuclear reassurances now fall on deaf ears
> 
> Special report by Michael McCarthy
> 
> It is unprecedented: four atomic reactors in dire 
> trouble at once, three threatening meltdown from 
> overheating, and a fourth hit by a fire in its 
> storage pond for radioactive spent fuel.
> 
> All day yesterday, dire reports continued to 
> circulate about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear 
> plant, faced with disaster after Japan's tsunami 
> knocked out its cooling systems. Some turned out 
> to be false: for example, a rumour, disseminated 
> by text message, that radiation from the plant 
> had been spreading across Asia. Others were true: 
> that radiation at about 20 times normal levels 
> had been detected in Tokyo; that Chinese airlines 
> had cancelled flights to the Japanese capital; 
> that Austria had moved it embassy from Tokyo to 
> Osaka; that a 24-hour general store in Tokyo's 
> Roppongi district had sold out of radios, torches, candles and sleeping bags.
> 
> But perhaps the most alarming thing was that 
> although Naoto Kan, Japan's Prime Minister, once 
> again appealed for calm, there are many – in 
> Japan and beyond – who are no longer prepared to be reassured.
> 
> The scale of the alarm is the remarkable thing: 
> how it has gone round the world (Angela Merkel 
> has imposed a moratorium on nuclear energy; in 
> France, there are calls for a referendum); how 
> it's even displaced the terrible story of Japan's 
> tsunami itself from the front-page headlines. But 
> then, public alarm about nuclear safety, as the 
> Fukushima emergency proves, is very easy to raise 
> – and, as the Japanese authorities are now discovering, very hard to calm.
> 
> The reason is an industry which from its 
> inception, more than half a century ago, has 
> taken secrecy to be its watchword; and once that 
> happens, cover-ups and downright lies often 
> follow close behind. The sense of crisis 
> surrounding Japan's stricken nuclear reactors is 
> exacerbated a hundredfold by the fact that, in an 
> emergency, public trust in the promoters of 
> atomic power is virtually non-existent. On too 
> many occasions in Britain, in America, in Russia, 
> in Japan – pick your country – people have not 
> been told the truth (and have frequently been 
> told nothing at all) about nuclear misadventures.
> 
> To understand the mania for secrecy, we have to 
> go back to nuclear power's origins. This was not 
> a technology dreamt up as a replacement for 
> coal-fired power stations; this is a military 
> technology, conceived in a life-or-death 
> struggle, which has been modified for civilian 
> purposes. At its heart is the nuclear chain 
> reaction, the self-sustaining atom-splitting 
> process ("fission") which occurs when enough 
> highly radioactive material is brought together, 
> and which produces other radioactive elements 
> ("fission products"), and a release of energy.
> 
> When it was first achieved by the physicists 
> Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, in an atomic "pile" 
> built in a squash court of the University of 
> Chicago in December 1942, it merely produced 
> heat; but all those involved understood that if 
> it could be speeded up, it would produce the 
> biggest explosive power ever known. And so was 
> born the Manhattan Project, the US undertaking to 
> build the atom bomb which was, while it lasted, history's biggest secret.
> 
> Secrecy came with nuclear energy, like a 
> birthmark, and, indeed, for 10 years after the 
> first A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 
> 1945, it remained a covert military technology, 
> although first the Russians, and then the 
> British, followed the Americans in developing it. 
> Britain built a pair of atomic reactors at 
> Windscale on the Cumbrian coast, which produced 
> (as a fission product) plutonium, the material 
> used in the first British nuclear weapon. That 
> was exploded off the coast of Australia in 1952. 
> And it was in one of these reactors that the 
> world's first really serious nuclear accident 
> occurred: the Windscale fire of October 1957. The 
> reactor's core, made of graphite, caught light, 
> melted and burned substantial amounts of the 
> uranium fuel, and released large amounts of 
> radioactivity. It was the most serious nuclear 
> calamity until Chernobyl nearly 30 years later, 
> but the British government did all it could to 
> minimise its significance, trying at first to 
> keep it a complete secret (the local fire brigade 
> was not notified for 24 hours) and keeping the 
> official report confidential until 1988.
> 
> It was to be the first of many such nuclear 
> alarms and cover-ups at Windscale. In 1976, for 
> example, the secrecy surrounding a major leak of 
> radioactive water infuriated the then Technology 
> Minister, Tony Benn, who supported nuclear power, 
> when he learnt of it. But similar cover-ups were 
> happening all around the world.
> 
> At the US atomic weapons plant at Rocky Flats, 
> Colorado, there were numerous mishaps involving 
> radioactive material which were kept secret over 
> four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. In 
> Russia, the province of Chelyabinsk, just east of 
> the Urals, housed a major atomic weapons complex, 
> which was the site of three major nuclear 
> disasters: radioactive waste dumping and the 
> explosion of a waste containment unit in the 
> 1950s, and a vast escape of radioactive dust in 
> 1967. It is estimated that about half a million 
> people in the region were irradiated in one or 
> more of the incidents, exposing them to as much 
> as 20 times the radiation suffered by the 
> Chernobyl victims. None of which, of course, was 
> disclosed at the time. Chelyabinsk is sometimes 
> referred to now as "the most polluted place on the planet".
> 
> When we turn to Japan, we find an identical 
> culture of nuclear cover-up and lies. Of 
> particular concern has been the Tokyo Electric 
> Power Company (Tepco), Asia's biggest utility, 
> which just happens to be the owner and operator 
> of the stricken reactors at Fukushima.
> 
> Tepco has a truly rotten record in telling the 
> truth. In 2002, its chairman and a group of 
> senior executives had to resign after the 
> Japanese government disclosed they had covered up 
> a large series of cracks and other damage to 
> reactors, and in 2006 the company admitted it had 
> been falsifying data about coolant materials in its plants over a long period.
> 
> Last night it was reported that the International 
> Atomic Energy Agency warned Japan more than two 
> years ago that strong earthquakes would pose 
> "serious problems", according to a Wikileaks US 
> embassy cable published by The Daily Telegraph.
> 
> Even Chernobyl, the world's most publicised 
> nuclear accident, was at first hidden from the 
> world by what was then the Soviet Union, and 
> might have remained hidden had its plume of 
> escaping radioactivity not been detected by scientists in Sweden.
> 
> So why do they do it? Why does the instinct to 
> hide everything persist, even now, when the major 
> role of nuclear energy has decisively shifted 
> from the military to the civil sector? Perhaps it 
> is because there is an instinctive and indeed 
> understandable fear among the public about 
> nuclear energy itself, about this technology 
> which, once its splits its atoms, releases deadly forces.
> 
> The nuclear industry is terrified of losing 
> public support, for the simple reason that it has 
> always needed public money to fund it. It is not, 
> even now, a sector which can stand on its own two 
> feet economically. So when it finds it has a 
> problem, its first reaction is to hide it, and 
> its second reaction is to tell lies about it. But 
> the truth comes out in the end, and then the 
> public trusts the industry even less than it 
> might have done, had it admitted the problem.
> 
> It doesn't have to be like this. A quarter of a 
> century ago, Britain's nuclear industry acquired 
> a leader who for a few years transformed its 
> public image: Christopher Harding. He was an open 
> and honest man who thought that the paranoia and 
> secrecy surrounding nuclear power should be swept away.
> 
> When he became chairman of British Nuclear Fuels, 
> which ran the Windscale plant, he decided on a 
> new order of things. He renamed it Sellafield, 
> and, to general astonishment, decreed that 
> instead of sullenly turning its back to the 
> public, it should welcome them with open arms. He 
> did the unthinkable: he opened a visitor centre!
> 
> Harding died young in 1999, but he was, in his 
> lifetime an exceptional man: not only for his 
> charm and his personal kindness – he was revered 
> by Sellafield employees – but for his vision of a 
> nuclear industry which would be better off 
> dealing with its problems through transparency 
> and honesty, rather than through obfuscation and 
> deceit. But he was, unfortunately, the exception who proved the rule.
> 
> The rest of the nuclear industry has been 
> dissembling for so long, and caught out in its 
> lies so often, that the chance for trust may have 
> passed. Even if, as I suspect, the Japanese 
> government is trying to be reasonably up front 
> about the problems at Fukushima, it is by no 
> means certain that anything it says about the 
> nuclear part of their nation's catastrophe will be believed.
> +44 (0)7786 952037
> http://tonygosling.blip.tv/
> http://www.thisweek.org.uk/
> http://www.911forum.org.uk/
> "Capitalism is institutionalised bribery."
> _________________
> www.abolishwar.org.uk
> <http://www.elementary.org.uk>www.elementary.org.uk
> www.public-interest.co.uk
> www.radio4all.net/index.php/series/Bristol+Broadband+Co-operative
> <http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf>http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf 
> 
> "The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic 
> poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
> <https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/>https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
>