It is not the 16-metre wall of water turning towns to tinder.
Nor is it the empty school halls where the fallen had fled.
Or the ravaged faces of those who had lost everything.
It is the innocent pose of a toddler, arms spread as if to embrace his mother. A man in a protective suit runs a geiger counter over his tiny body.
He is being tested for radiation after the meltdown of three reactors at the Daiichi nuclear plant. One third of Fukushima's children were affected.
Yet we seem to have collective amnesia about the event.
A coterie of columnists continues to bask in the nuclear glow. On his Channel 10 show yesterday, Andrew Bolt expanded on the theme of his blog headlined, "Fukushima fact check: no deaths, just 10 people with some radiation".
He quotes Gerry Thomas from the Chernobyl Tissue Bank: "Not an awful lot (of radioactive material) got out of the (Fukushima) plant." Thomas then praises the quick and thorough response by the Japanese government.
I must be living in a parallel universe.
The Economist magazine has collated reports into the catastrophe over the past year, and puts it succinctly:
“The reactors at Fukushima were of an old design. The risks they faced had not been well analysed. The operating company was poorly regulated and did not know what was going on. The operators made mistakes. The representatives of the safety inspectorate fled. Some of the equipment failed. The establishment repeatedly played down the risks and suppressed information about the movement of the radioactive plume, so some people were evacuated from more lightly to more heavily contaminated places”.
For two months, cabinet Ministers as high as the Prime Minister denied there'd been a meltdown.
They said it was Level Four. It was eventually raised to the highest level, Seven – the same as Chernobyl.
Theoretical physicist Professor Frank von Hippel from Princeton University, who's worked on nuclear policy for more than 30 years, says up to 1000 people will die from cancer as a result of being exposed to radiation there.
So much for "no deaths".
Estimates of mortality rates from Chernobyl have recently been raised to around 27,000.
These denialists seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance.
Source: http://thehoopla.com.au/japans-nuclear-refugees//
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