Intro

Radiation comes from two main categories - Naturally occurring and Manmade.

Natural Sources

Manmade Sources

The above colorful graphic can be found just about everywhere the nuclear industry has taken control over the debate about radiation and safety. By suggesting that it only produces 1% of the total amount of radiation the public receives per year, this industry is getting away with the act of murder.

Not all radiation is the same. For example, the above chart says that 14% of radiation exposure comes from cosmic sources, or mostly radioactive Helium, that lasts less than a second. Compare that to manmade sources like Plutonium and hundreds of other manmade radiation that can last from decades or even millions of years. Similarly, the horrible impacts on health from the concentration of radon gasses in buildings, is mostly ignored. The nuclear battle rages from the claim that radiation is good for you - Hormesis, to the nutritional concept of radiation - Free Radicals - to the radiation Phobia claim.

One of the most unethical tactics imaginable is corporate America's use of the Comparative Risk Model that is used to suggest what levels of danger are publicly acceptable. Thus the general public is told that radiation from nuclear power is comparatively safe compared to the impacts of smoking, coal exhausts or from radon gasses, flying, car accidents, or eating bananas. This is completely different than the growing use of the Precautionary Principle in Europe that calls for reduced use, if dangers are unknown scientifically or unclear to the public.

The Background Radiation Scam

Radiation experts unilaterally decided that emissions from manmade radiation will be redefined as 'background' or naturally occurring radiation one year after it is created. As a result, we now have at least a six fold increase in the "natural" level of radiation since the 1940's.

The primary agenda of the nuclear industry worldwide is to hide the fact about the astronomical amounts of radiation that they are producing and what the economic and health impacts are from it. This industry is funded and developed through the cold war technology of nuclear weapons development.

"I'll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn't have any life: fish or anything. Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin...Now when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible... Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it... I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. Have I given you an answer to your question."

Impacts

Pretty much everybody knows Homer Simpson's take on the dangers of radiation. Is he right to be terrified? Or has the industry's tactics like nuke speak convinced people not to worry about it? What we know about the biological effects of radiation has been in constant flux since its discovery, over a century ago. The history of how radiation impacts have been managed by authorities is rife with scandals from the days of the radium girls up to the 1990's with experiments impacting hundred's of thousands of unknowing americans.

We can't sense radiation, but it can have many different health impacts depending on what type it is, how much is released, how long it lasts or the pathway into our body. We usually only hear about iodine, cesium, and a handful of others, but there is over a thousand different types of radiation that can also affect our health. During a major release, the first concern is what way the wind is blowing and how fast.

Nuclear opponents says that there is no safe level, while the Nuclear Industry has been caught up in scandals that go back decades over attempts to hide the real impacts. It has been said that their tactic of hiding the impacts of manmade radiation is a random an act of premediated murder!

The real problem is that one side continues to underplay the dangers using every trick in the book to hide the fact that radiation has different impacts depending on your age, sex or state of health, not to mention that there is no way to identify what did what and when. In a way, the perfect crime, or to them just a numbers game.

The problem doesn't just lie with major disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl, but continues to be the growing inventory of radiation being produced by the nuclear industry. The industry is rife with radiation leaks into the environment as well as the what to do with the growing inventory of radioactive materials that will remain deadly far into the future.

Major accidents can quickly release immense quantities that carry on the winds in whatever direction it is blowing at the time. Coastal areas between San Diego and Los Angeles can change in up to 3 or 4 directions a day with even more dramatic directional swings that depend on what weather patterns are passing through, which climate change issues will only increase.

Wind can quickly carry large quantities of radiation far beyond the 10 mile Emergency Planning Zone (EPZ) defined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). International standards requires the EPZ to be 50% larger that the US standard. The concern about a major release of radiation played a major role in the closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Station, which is within 50 miles of over 8 million people as well as being downwind from the the state's massive agricultural area.

TMI

The largest radiation disaster in US history happened at the Church Rock Uranium Mill located on Navajo land (New Mexico) on July 16th, 1979. It was overshadowed by the March 28th nuclear meltdown at Three MIle Island (TMI). The government waited for days before finally agreeing to evacuate mothers and children out to five miles away from the damaged reactor. Regulators claimed that very little radiation escaped into the environment with most of it retained in various buildings. After the disaster, activists documented thousands of extra cancers within 20 miles of the nuclear facility, saying far more radiation was released than acknowledged. Two thousand people filed a class action suit on their health impacts but was blocked by a judge, while access to important health data was excluded from independent doctors.

The public was not told for years that nearly half the reactor fuel melted down. While claiming the only real health effect from the disaster was mental stress. One researcher found an increased death rate from heart disease. Cleanup costs reached over $1 billion that included removing trainloads of contaminated material and boiling off millions of gallons of radioactive water.

Chernobyl

The 1986 Chernobyl Disaster

In what is publicly acknowledged as the world's worst manmade disaster, the roof from unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear faciility was blown off during an experiment, exposing the world to the reactor's deadly radiation on April 26th 1986. It took 10 days to put out the radioactive firestorm and seven months to build a massive sarcophagus over the reactor building to finally block radiation from being released.

Up to 800,000 workers were conscripted from across the Soviet Union to get control of the openly exposed reactor core. Over 400,000 people were eventually evacuated, while radiation spread around the globe. Glue was poured over miles of forrest land around Chernbyl to contain the radiation from spreading. Mikael Gorbachov, the head of the Soviet Union at the time of the disaster said that Chernobyl played a central role in the collapse of their country, while the financial cost would be hundred's of billions of dollars or greater than all the nuclear energy ever produced by the Soviet Union.

Dangerous levels of radiation quickly spread across much of western Europe. The levels were so high that reindeer of the artic Lapplander people, over a thousands miles away had to be destroyed. Some reindeer are still having to be destroyed today, while mushrooms and other plants are also banned. Milk products in countries across Europe were also destroyed while contaminated farm animals in the UK were finally released from strict radiation monitoring in 2012.

In 1995, the Belarussian government issued a report stating that 220,000 people in their country had suffered serious health effects with over 125,000 people dead. The government would later fall back into Russian hands even arresting doctors if they spoke out about what they were seeing. A scientist from Chernobyl claimed that tens of thousands of cleanup workers had died by the early 1990's and that the Russian government had intentionally lost most of their health records.

Scientists were picked by the United Nation's nuclear agency to do an investigation of Chernobyl's health impacts. Their final report used Russia's estimate that only 4% of the reactor's radiation escaped vs. far higher previous estimates of up to 50% and more. This incredibly low radiation estimate was then used to claim that only four thousand people would die. They even accepted the Russian claim that fear mongering caused radiation phobia that instead caused most of the health impacts.

Using the exact same data as the United Nations, the Union of Concerned Scientists came up with an estimate of 25,000 deaths stating that the UN investigation failed to include the health impacts to the entire world, rather than cherry picking data just from the most contaminated areas around Chernobyl.

Greenpeace would do its own study estimating that the disaster would result in over 200,000 excess cancers and 100,000 deaths. The group Physicians for Social Responsibilities and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War came to similar conclusions.

In 2010 Alexey Yablokov from the Russian Academy of Sciences released a study estimating that 1 million people had died. He used many reports that had never been translated into english. There are serious claims that the nuclear establishment in Russia supressed documentation of what happened at Chernobyl, besides intentionally losing the health records of hundreds of thousands of clean up workers that suffered the most.

Why was the United Nations estimate of how many people died from the Chernobyl catastrophe so low compared to other studies? The answer is hidden within radiation scandal after scandal during the nuclear era as proponents used censorship, propaganda and the cold war to keep the nuclear agenda from being shut down under public scrutiny. And at the heart of the battle was radiation and its impacts.

Five years after the bombings, Japanese and American scientists would start a detailed database doing extensive surveys of survivors that continues up to the present. That database would eventually become the primary model for estimating the impacts of radiation on humans. Critics have long noted major flaws from bias to exclusion of important candidates from the database that skew its results. Not to mention that the Americans never attempted to treat any of the Hibukusha.

Over the last 60 years Japan and the US have spent over $100 million on the survivor study and database now managed by the privately controlled Radiation Effects Research Foundation. The United Nations uses this model to set radiation standards, and is why their Chernobyl estimates are so low. In 1987 new findings suggested that radiation was up to 16 times more dangerous than previously acknowledged. But scientists from the Livermore Nuclear Labs in California made claims that they had proven the exact opposite, reducing the impacts in 1992.

The 2012 Japanese government report on Fukushima acknowledged that the nuclear industry had control over the scientists selected to oversee radiation research as well as representatives they sent to the United Nations nuclear agency and any of their deliberations over radiation impacts.

From the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 to the Atoms for Peace program within the United Nations is being managed by the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAEA, whose conflicting goal is the promotion of nuclear power while also being a quasi regulatory independent agency that answers only to the UN Security Council's big five nuclear countries. From the days when the nuclear weapons infrastructure was intentionally experimenting with radiation in a highly unethical manner on humans, every so called radiation protection body of the main nuclear powers were filled by nuclear proponents with the goal perpetuating the nuclear agenda as a matter of national security.

The bottom line is that the nuclear industry should not be trusted.

Fukushima

Fukushima Disaster

After the 9.0 earthquake, the Fukushima Daaichi facility lost electrical power , and the ability to cool the nuclear fuel at four of its six reactors. The earthquake and Tsunami would be bad enough, but then Northeast Japan would be caught up in an undending nuclear crisis that will take decades or more to deal with. Three of the units would have explosions caused by the build up of hydrogren gas as well as core meltdowns. Unit four which was not operating at the time would also have an explosion LIKELY due to the loss of water In its spent fuel pond.

Four and half hours after the quake Japan declared a nuclear emergency. Two hours later, the government ordered an evacuation of everyone within 3 kilometers from the facility, while they and Fukushima's owner Tokyo Electric tried to revive power to cool down the reactors. They failed. Following the 6.4 earthquake the next day at 3:29 local workers were ordered to evacuate, with unit 1 exploding 7 minutes later. Two hours later the mandatory evacuation area was expanded to 10 Km and then to 20 Km an hour later.

78,000 people within 20 KM of Fukushima went to evacuation centers outside of the zone to be monitored for contamination, while sheltering was ordered for residents who were between 20 to 30 Km away on March 15th. The government finally agreed to voluntary evacuations in the 20 to 30 Km zone, They also ordered an additional 10,000 people to evacuate on April 22nd as hot spots as far out as 80 Km were found.

It was nearly a week before Tokyo mothers and children were put on alert to watch what they ate, when in fact one of the early radiation plumes on March 15th stretched all the way into northern parts of the city. At the height of the crisis the government was even considering evacuating people out to 190 miles away!

At least 150 elderly people died during attempts to evacuate them, and in one instance were moved directly into the path of the main radiation plume.

Upon declaring the nuclear emergency, the government also increased the allowable radiaton dose by five fold, so that they would have to evacuate far less numbers of the general public. Even so, 88,000 people eventually evacuated under mandatory order. An additional 70,000 people, that would described by U.S. regulators as Shadow evacuees would voluntarily leave the area as well.

Over 25,000 workers have been involved in the cleanup at Fukushima as of the beginning of 2013 with half of them receiving serious radiation doses. There are also industry workers who have refused to wear radiation monitors. A German news team snuck into the exclusion zone in 2011 where all temporary workers stay. Workers told them that were required to signed agreements to never talk to the media.

Over 80% of Fukushima's radiation drifted east across the Pacific Ocean. According to an independent monitoring network here, small levels of radiation reached the northwest United States with a few spots in Southern California. Of concern are the two massive Pacific Ocean garbage debris fields that were likely contaminated by radiation in addition to the 20 million tons of waste from the 2011 Tsunami that has already started hitting the west coast.

Estimates of how much radiation was released at Fukushima varies from the official version of about 1/5th that of Chernobyl to more than Chernobyl. This overlay in pink and red shows the heaviest contamination areas of Chernobyl on a properly scaled map of Japan.

Early health symptoms have started showing up including at least one case of Thryoid cancer from the disaster. The United Nations released a report in February 2013 claiming that nobody would be harmed by the disaster, while four other studies gave estimates of up to 3,000 eventual fatalities, all based on the amount of radiation released.

Fukushima Briefs

Disasters

Nuclear Disasters - Under Construction

History

The history of nuclear disasters are many, going back to the earliest days of its scientific discovery. Probably the biggest disaster comes from its growing usage by mankind and attempts to bury its misuse. The history of Emergency Planning and response around nuclear power stations started soon after the 1957 fire that hit the Windscale facility in the United Kingdom. That history has been controversial to say the least. It is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that has the authority over safety planning at nuclear reactors. The Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA would be put in charge of monitoring offsite planning in the late 1970's.

The March 28th 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania would dramatically change Emergency Planning which had been extremely lax prior to that. After three different investigations by the President, the NRC and a special Insurance investigation group many recommendations resulted in new safer regulations. However, In many cases they were later rolled back by intense pressure from the nuclear industry.

After Three Mile Island, the states of California, New York, Massachussetts and New Hampshire actively sought to stop reactors from opening on legal grounds concerning inadequate evacuation plans. New York would sucessfully stop the Shoreham reactor on Long Island. While the Seabrook reactor in New Hampshire was on the verge of being killed when the lame duck president Ronald Reagan passed executive order 12657 in November 1988 overruling state opposition to its operation over the issue evacuation planning.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Emergency Planning regime is one of the most complex procedures imaginable. It can take dozens of hours just to sort out how their guidance documents, regulations and actual emergency response plans fits together. Not to mention how dozens of federal and state agencies are then supposed to come together in an emergency.

The plan to protect the public from a serious incident at San Onofre or any other nuclear facility revolves around the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's standardized 10 mile evacuation planning zone. The public would be warned by sirens. Then city and county emergency workers as well as local school officials would spring into action.

But in the case of an earthquake, it will impact everyone's ability to respond to anything but their own personal safety. The intense shaking will result in fires, explosions and loss of power throughout the facility as most personel will have to escape from toxic fumes or structurally unsafe circumstances. Yet, emergency planners assume that they will have hours, if not days to determine the severity of the event before telling the public.

Only level four of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's emergency classification system includes offsite releases of radiation - known as a General Emergency. The main causes of major emergencies isn't publicly acknowledged. Nor have safety planners developed any link to the International Nuclear Emergency Scale with Chernobyl and Fukushima being defined as level 7 catastrophes.

When radiation does escape offsite, safety regulations established in 1991 by the Environmental Protection Agency called Protective Action Guidelines come into play. These guidelines state when the public should be evacuated based on the flawed Hiroshima Survivor studies of what constitutes unaceptable levels of radiation. In a full blown emergency the guidelines acknowledge that it will be impossible to protect the public around major cities, suggesting a priority of protecting pregnant women.

The guidelines stipulate how the government will handle how much radiation people get based on economic tradeoffs using cost benefit analysis formulas. The generic term describing this trade-off is called As Low As Reasonably Allowable or ALARA. These economic rather than health based decisions will start to be made by federal emergency planners 4 days after the start of disaster in what is called the Duration of Exposure plan. The pre-planned time it would take to bring all of the agencies together with experts and decision makers. They would then look at radiation releases and then take the appropriate ALARA driven actions. These plans even include pre-made press releases and questions for the media to release to the public.

However, if San Onofre's emergency coordinator has evidence that it wouldn't be advisable to wait for federal decisionmakers to act, he can turn to the facility's Protective Action Recommendations on whether to start evacuations or not. Meanwhile, preselected representatives from the regions emergency response agencies called the Interjurisdictional Planning Committee will travel to the Joint Information Center located at San Onofre to start organizing the response to the nuclear emergency.

Contrary to general public understanding the entire 10 mile emergency planning zone will not be evacuated when an emergency is declared. In 2006, the Interjurisdiction Planning Committee suceeded in a proposal that only requires the inner 2 mile area be immediately evacuated, with other zones called Protective Action Zones handled based on what initial radiation levels are detected and what way the wind is blowing.

The state's electric ratepayers are charged up to $3 million dollars a year for nuclear emergency planning that include secret drills that exclude public input. There are many serious flaws in how these plans are developed, or how they would shelter the public not being evacuated from radiation - Imagine being in a building about to fall over or with broken windows! The idea that two hundred thousand people will need to be evacuated and that it can be done in less than 17 hours, when the the Three Mile Island disaster demonstrated that there would be a massive shadow evacuation take place far beyond the inner 10-15 miles as defined by planners.

In 2004 the Sandia Labs did an investigation into nuclear emergency evacuation planning across the country. One of the most prominent findings from the study was that large scale evacuations are effective in saving lives and reducing injuries. Of the 230 evacuation reviewed, 50 were carefully looked at. However, the study never looked at a single earthquake related evacuation even though one took place during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco where it took over four hours to evacuate 40,000 people who were watching the first game of the world series.

During the height of the Fukushima disaster, US monitoring teams detected radiation levels that exceeded US mandatory evacuation guidelines over 50 miles away. As a result of these high readings, Americans in Japan were ordered to evacuate at least 50 miles from Fukushima. Even though Japan only ordered people to evacuate out to 30 km, the government was secretly considering doing so up to 190 miles. A year afterwards, the country changed the mandatory evacuation zone out to 30 km, the International standard, or 5 miles larger than ours.

Shortly after the disaster, California Senator Barbara Boxer expressed concerns about the country's evacuation zones as well as public statements that our reactors were seismically safe. She would order the Government Accountibility Office to evaluate the "Risk Informed" standards at reactors here. At the same time, immense political pressure was used to canceled plans to hold state senate hearings about emergency plans. Over a year after Fukushima the report would finally be released showing that even though the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have long come to rely on Risk Informed safety planning, California had not upgraded its Probablistic Risk Assessment models for earthquakes for up to 20 years.

Senator Boxer failed to call on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to require regular upgrades to risk standards even though some of the most important changes in seismology have taken place during those years. It is these complex computer generated models that play a central role in determining whether or not a nuclear facility might have a catastrophic event as mentioned earlier with Tsunami risk models in Japan. For example, the Fort Calhoun nuclear station in Nebraska has experienced three five hundred year or greater floods in the last 17 years - Something that should never happened but has.

Following Fukushima Senator Boxer has also been monitoring the Nuclear Regulatory Commision's lessons learned: especially looking at seismic safety - station blackouts and emergency planning that the agency wanted put in place. But Representative Darrell Issa whose 3rd largest financial donor - the owner of San Onofre - played a key role in forcing the ouster of agencies chairman who was pushing for the safety changes.

In 1980 California evaluated the size of the states emergency planning zones, which it has the legal authority to do. Its own investigations showed that most of Orange County would be effected by radiation in an event of a catatrophic release. That study showed that serious contamination levels could travel out to 35 miles away from San Onofre.

After the Chernobyl disaster California ordered another investigation of the state's emergency evacuation plans at all nuclear facilities. The year long investigation's final report noted that it never looked at the potential of changing the size of the evacuation zone, only how emergency planners might do a better job.

Immediately after the Fukushima disaster settle down, the Japanese people sought answers on who was responsible for what happened. Documentaries in Japan and the US attempted to put the blame on the Tsunami. But the government's initial investigation of what happened showed that both the owner of the Fukushima reactors as well as the government made serious beurucratic errors that dramatically worsened the situation.

But when the final investigative report came out in July 2012, the findings stunned the world with its primary conclusion that the nuclear industry had taken control over government regulatory agencies and used its power to protect itself from real safety requirements. The year long investigation included survey's and public forums laying out detail after detail of how real safety plans had been watered down. Public safety concerns were quashed by the media that was also controled by the nuclear industry, while promoting their agenda.

Health Impacts

In the 1960's Dr. John Gofman, a health physicist who was put in charge of a government study to prove that low levels of radiation were safe found the opposite. He later left the government and spent the rest of his life documenting the dangers of radiation, even suggesting that atomic scientists should have to stand trial from their human radiation experiments.

He has written extensively on the dangers of radiation and the industry's control of the Hiroshima survivor study. It is the bible on estimating cancer risks with Its built in flaws that are failing to protect us. There is no safe level of radiation with women and the young and unborn the most susceptible. Because of the industry's control over what is really safe - the public should be highly suspicious of the nuclear industry's claims - as born out in a recent European survey showing that 75% of Europeans distrust them.

Environmental Impacts

The environmental impacts from such large disasters as Fukushima are many, complicated to unravel and will take years if not decades, or longer to recover from. Even though there were at least 7 major plumes that spread across Japan, 80% of the radiation released went east into the Pacific. A substantial portion of this went directly into the water offshore, where Tokyo Electric was required to pour concrete out into the ocean for kilometers to stop the highest contamination from spreading. Japan's close relationship with fishing resulted in most fisheries offshore from Fukushima being closed down due to radiation.

Highly radioactive trees inland from Fukushima were cut down to make room for hundreds of massive tanks to store highly contaminated water from the facility. What to do with a nearby radioactive national forest is still unkown, let alone the streams and wildlife. Contaminated wreckage has been spread across Japan and incinerated, schools across the region had to have their topsoil scraped and disposed of. There are major scandals about how all of this work has been done, with contractors caught throwing the topsoil into local rivers, or only doing cleanup within a few feet of newly setup radiation monitor posts.

Contrary to the nuclear industry's public relations tactics, the land around Chernobyl is not a wildlife haven. Studies show serious impacts on plants, insects, birds and especially butterflies - not to mention the reindeer nearly a thousand miles away.

Radioactive contamination of soil in Japan has shown up hundreds of miles away from Fukushima with the highest levels found around the exclusion zone. From mutant plants to food stocks 50 times the allowable level for consumption, Northern Japan's agricultural output was no longer trusted worldwide, with bans on all produce and animal products in place.

Economic Impacts --

The contamination of food and land has serious economic impacts, not to mention the loss of income from tourism. The costs to Japan from Fukushima have been estimated to go as high as $250 billion, but could go much higher. The fifth largest electric company in the world, Tokyo Electric Power Company was taken over by the government with tens of billions of dollars paid out of pocket by taxpayers to keep it from going under as it suffered an 80% drop in its stock prices soon after the disaster hit. The country as a whole lost confidence in all nuclear facilities nationwide, forcing them all to be shut down and replacement power found. Cleanup and liabilities costs outside of the nuclear facility will be in the tens of billions of dollars while it is unclear who will compensate those that lost everything because the country had a ceiling on nuclear liabilities in place.

Economic estimates depend on the size of the disaster. The Three MIle Island cleanup cost over $1 billion in the 1980's, while Chernobyl estimates vary from $200-700 billion.

Similar estimates for Fukushima are already in the hundred's of billions, besides the $300 billion estimate from just the quake and Tsunami impacts. In 2013 the French Government's radiation safety agency said that a disaster in France could cost up to 400 billion Euro's. A few weeks later, a secret 2007 investigation by the same agency was leaked for a nuclear disaster near Paris. The price varied run from 760 billion to 5.8 trillion euros!

The only known US estimate done for an accident at San Onofre took place in 1982, and had to be forced out of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by an act of congress. That report estimated economic impacts of over $180 billion per reactor at San Onofre or over $425 billion today.

The California Energy Commission was charged with doing an economic and safety analysis of the state's reactors, producing their report in 2008. The report only looked at the cost of replacement power from a disruption at any of the nuclear facilities. It didn't look at the costs of what would happen if San Onofre failed due to a disaster similar to Fukushima!

After a 1957 US insurance industry study said that a nuclear power disaster would be uninsurable, the US passed the Price-Anderson Act that limits the liability for a disaster - currently set at $12.6 billion.

The 14,000 single family homes in Dana Point are worth over $8 billion dollars - all of which would be in the permanently contaminated exclusion zone after a disaster similar to Fukushima. San Clemente which is even closer, has over 23,000 single family homes worth over $16 billion. There are over 443,000 single family homes in Orange County with an estimated value of $295 billion dollars.

The total value of individual homes only gets larger if Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego Counties are included - almost reaching $1 trillion dollars. According to Forbes magazine Los Angeles is the 17th largest urban economy in the world, having a greater size than 47 other US states or more than the total the 17 poorest states.

It is near the breadbasket of the United States - has the largest shipping port in the Pacific, an immense tourist industry, Hollywood and millions of jobs that could be impacted. All of which would be in serious jeopardy, if not the entire country's economy if a major catastrophe were to ocur at San Onofre.

Just as the major earthquake in Japan and Fukushima were never thought possible, this presentation reveals why it isn't worth the gamble of ever allowing the aging San Onofre nuclear facility to operate again. Because of immense political pressure, Southern Califorians have not been fully appraised of true scale of the economic risk they are taking or given the democratic right to decide if the facility should be closed or not.

Recovery script

The true cost of such a major disaster can never be quantified, especially to those who lose their health, or all that their families have ever worked for. Merely throwing a big number at these kinds of events does a disservice to those most impacted. The earthquake in Japan was bad enough, but the meltdown took tens of thousands of people's land and wellbeing away forever.

The historic nuclear scandals in america have intentionally been played down because the big nuclear companies also owned our major TV companies.

In a recent European survey it was found that 75% of those interviewed distrusted the nuclear industry. The same tactics used to quiet the Japanese public was first started here. Our biggest nuclear companies like General Electric that owned NBC, or Westinghouse that owned CBS were highly biased in protecting their own business interests rather than the public.

? about Davis Besse as the 50% candidate ... before or after fuku???

Reminder - final segment of tsunami section - correct tsunami hight script from 30 feet to 25-30 feet.

inflation #

1982 100 - 2013 index = 232 so $186 = $428 Billion today

Fukushima compensation for victims leftovers.... :(

Compensation damages from the accident are another matter. At the height of the disaster, the 80,000 people who were forced to evacuate were promised compensation. However, most have never received a dime due to the complex filing process, and others are refusing to file because they are being told that they must go back to homes that they as of yet don't trust to be fully safe, or lose compensation. Those who evacuated beyond the acceptable zones are not being compensated even though over 70,000 fit into this category. The government has agreed to help the utility cover the hundreds of millions of dollars estimated just for evacuation impacts that as of yet don't include the loss of property. The Japanese government set up a trust of over $250 billion to deal with losses.

*** Unuses material end---

Economic Comparison - So Cal economy is bigger than the bottom 20 states in the us

Epilogue Comment

Due to the fact that radiation is invisible with most of its health impacts showing up many years after the fact the relative sizes of Chernobyl and Fukushima are not yet clear:

Smoking

THE AMERICAN NUCLEAR PLANT: TOBACCO

Over 5 million (440,000 in the US) people die worldwide die each year from cigarette smoking. Most people still think that this is because of nicotine... you know... all those ads about lowered tar and nicotine! The medical danger, however, may be from radiation, according to Dr. R. Ravenholt, former director of World Health Surveys at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia.

To protect itself from predators, the tobacco plant leaches heavy metals out of the soil, including polonium-210 and lead-210. The major source of the polonium-210 is phosphate fertilizer, which is used in growing tobacco. According to Dr. Edward Martell, a radiochemist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, there is enough polonium-210 in tobacco to cause at least 95% of the deaths from lung cancer. A one-and-a-half pack a day smoker receives a dose of 8 rem per year to his/her lungs, or the equivalent of 300 chest x-rays. This dose is 3 rem greater than the allowable lifetime dose for adults.

Other scientists have determined that up to 75% of the radioactive particles in the smoke are not absorbed by the smoker but left floating around for others to inhale. This is probably the reason that non-smokers living with smokers also have a higher incidence of lung cancer.

Debate

The issue of whether or not radiation is safe or not is of immense consequence. If you are reading this, you are in a minority, as most people only receive information about this from the mainstream media. As a result what they hear is almost exclusively what the nuclear industry wants them to hear.

No one has died from Nuclear Power in the US

vs.

Random - Premediated Murder

The above Public Relations claim would be like the U.S. car industry getting away with the statement that nobody ever died from filling up their cars at the gas station, while ignoring what's happening on the road. The fact that the car industry cannot hide the impacts from people driving cars is common knowledge, yet, the public is totally unaware of the fact that most the safety impacts comes from the mining and production nuclear fuel.

There are two completely undeniable facts in this world today about radiation. The amount of manmade radiation, from burning fossil fuels, medical testing, nuclear weapons and power are going up and so has the rate of cancer. The claim that poor diet is the primary cause of cancer hides the fact that still underlying this that people with poor diets or stressed out immune systems can't hide from the fact that it is still radiation causing these deaths. Healthy young adults can are the best at healing themselves from the ongoing damages of radiation, while children, or anyone with a compromised immune system are slowly being overwhelmed by radiation around them.

Here's just how criminally liable the nuclear industry is. For years, they have been claiming that millions of deaths worldwide have been caused by the radiation from coal exhausts. Yet, they only use this claim as a "Comparative Risk", rather than actually suggesting that anything change in terms of protecting the public!

Another example of just how skewed the public awareness and action to reduce radiation impacts is moving in the wrong direction simply because most people are not being informed of the fact. Most Americans are now fully aware of the dangers of 2nd hand smoke, but not that most of that danger is comes from radiation! Even worse is the fact that testing for radon, or other health hazards in homes isn't required.

Resources

There's an immense number of resources online where you can go find out more about radiation. This section is broken down by a whole variety of resources. This will you find the best stuff out there. If you spot any additional materials you think we should have here, please let us know.

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