Deceit by the Japanese Government

Details
2013 January 28

YAGASAKI Katsuma  

Since 3.11, 2011, the Japanese government has been untruthful in every aspect of the disasters at the Fukushima Dai-ich Nuclear Power Plant. They did not reveal a useful data obtained by SPEEDI, which simulates the flow of radioactive material after the nuclear disaster. Because of it, no effective evacuation was conducted, and so that the people in vicinity were exposed to radiation unnecessarily. They did not provide potassium iodide tablets in time. The government declared in Dec., 2011 that the disasters had been brought under control, while even none of the details of the disasters of those four reactors was known at the time.

Another incidence in which the government tried to make the radiation effects appear less than the reality was uncovered recently. The government has set up quite a few radiation monitoring facilities in Fukushima prefecture. A civilian team for verification of their accuracy has been measuring the monitors exhaustively. More than 120 monitors were checked to date. What they unraveled are:

  1. The vicinities of the monitors are typically cleaned and decontaminated, and hence would show relatively low radiation values. The citizens measured radiation at several points 10-15 m away from each monitor. The monitor values turned out to be lower by 50-70 % than those at places un-decontaminated nearby. Thus the true exposure the people would subject to is approximately double of the value shown on the monitor.
  2. The monitors typically indicate about 90 % of the true values determined by other measuring devices. There have been some reports that the government (Ministry of Science and Education) officials demanded to the manufactures that their instruments should under-evaluate the radiation.

This deception is only one recent example, and indicates that the government is attempting to convince the Japanese citizens that the nuclear accident and the resulting radiation release would not be so harmful: “don’t worry about it”. The spirit of it is that they are placing the economic values of the nuclear facilities above the basic human rights to safe and healthy life.