Breathless Fear Mongering Over Japan Continues

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff

“a large enough crisis may shock otherwise reluctant policy makers into instituting productivity enhancing reforms.” Michael Bruno, Chief Economist World Bank

Yesterday it was reported that Graham Andrew, a senior official at the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced that though the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was bad, it had not gotten worse since the day before in spite of reports from various politicos in Japan’s neoliberalized government to the contrary. Well, that just won’t do for the crisis junkies as that they need to cultivate this situation as best they can for their pure profit motives. So, this morning we are facing a new report from yet another Japanese neoliberal yes man making even more disastrous claims. However, those claims don’t stand up to the light of day.

Here a few of this morning’s breathless headlines…

• Fox “News” – Japan Reaches Out to U.S. in ‘Race Against the Clock’ to Avert Nuclear Disaster
• CNN – Japanese nuclear crisis on par with 3 Mile Island
• ABC News - Japan Nuclear Crisis: Emergency Raised to Level of Three Mile Island
• New York Times - Frantic Repairs Go On at Plant as Japan Raises Severity of Crisis

This is what Graham Andrew said late yesterday:

“The current situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant remains very serious … [but] there has been no significant worsening since yesterday,” Graham Andrew, IAEA

And this is what is being “reported” today with huge attention grabbing headlines shouting DANGER DANGER DANGER!:

“High levels of radiation have been found 18 miles from Japan’s quake-damaged nuclear power plant, the country’s science ministry said Friday.

Experts said exposure for just six hours would result in absorption of the maximum level considered safe for a year, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported.

The ministry said up to 0.17 millisieverts per hour have been detected 18 miles northwest of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, according to NHK.” MSNBC

“Up To” .17 millisieverts per hour eh? For 6 hours? Really? Is that really the “maximum level considered safe for a year”? Let’s take a look at that…

“A person’s radiation exposure due to all natural sources amounts on average to about 2.4 millisievert (mSv) per year. A sievert (Sv) is a unit of effective dose of radiation. Depending on geographical location, this figure can vary by several hundred percent.

Since one sievert is a large quantity, radiation doses are typically expressed in millisievert (mSv) or microsievert (µSv), which is one-thousandth or one millionth of a sievert. For example, one chest X-ray will give about 0.2 mSv of radiation dose.” IAEA website

So a person’s normal radiation exposure per year is figured to be about 2.4 millisieverts per year according to the leading nuclear agency in the world, the IAEA. Now that is what people normally get, so unless EVERYONE DIES every year, it seems that 2.4 mSv are BELOW the “maximum level considered safe” for a year.

How does 2.4 mVs compare with the numbers from the report from MSNBC? Well let’s see…

They claim 6 hours at 0.17 mSv is equal to the maximum level a human can stand for a year. Do you start to see the problem with their math?

6 times 0.17 mSv = 1.02 mSv which is less than HALF of 2.4 mSv

Unless everyone on the planet dies every year, their numbers aren’t even close.

Also remember they also stated that the numbers were “up to” 0.17 mSv meaning that the reading was fluctuating and they did not take the average, they took the upper range so that they could make it seem worse than it was.

Also look at what they buried in the article after the big headline screaming about the growing danger of radiation…

“However, NHK reported that lower levels of radiation — 0.0183 to 0.0011 millisieverts per hour — were found at most observation points. These were higher than normal but posed no immediate threat to health.” MSNBC

At “most observation points” there is nothing to be alarmed about and according to these new observations, the radiation levels actually seem to be dropping just like the IAEA said the night before.

The question is “why?”

“In political discourse, the phrase “privatizing profits and socializing losses” refers to any instance of speculators benefitting (privately) from profits, but not taking losses, by pushing the losses onto society at large, particularly via the government.” Wikipedia

Why would certain individuals try to make the situation seem worse than it actually is? Especially when those individuals seem to be associated with the company that made the reactors in the first place.

MSNBC is still partially owned by General Electric (GE) and GE made the 6 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the heart of the current “crisis”. GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt also happens to be a well placed adviser to the Obama administration so it would seem at first glance to be counter productive for GE to be hyping the situation beyond what is actually happening.

But that is where you would be wrong.

GE has already sent engineers to Japan and are “helping” with the assessment of the problem. They are at ground Zero so to speak as the conflicting “facts” are coming out of Japan only to be countered by the experts at the IAEA.

“GE said it has tapped a network of more than 1,000 current and retired engineers. The company is working through its venture with Hitachi and has been directly advising the Japanese and U.S. governments, the paper said.

“The difficulty at this point is that a lot of the data coming in is conflicting at times,” James Klapproth, a chief engineer at GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy Inc told the paper.” Reuters

Knowing that GE is there and helping produce the scary exaggerations about the situation at the plant, one has to wonder “why?’.

The answer is simple: in this rigged economy, we privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

Soon there will be a congressional committee which is tasked with “investigating” risks to our own nuclear facilities and then they will decide just how much U.S. tax-payer money they have to hand over to GE so they can “refurbish” their nuclear facilities to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen here in America. You can expect that to take place very soon. The number of course will be in the billions and it will be handed over in the end to GE who will do absolutely nothing with it except to offset their losses that they have already accrued due to this disaster.

That is why they have to make this a horrible threat to the American people and that is why they have to hype it as much as possible. To socialize their losses.

“Almost $12bn (£7.4bn) has been wiped from the value of the company since Monday, and a retired nuclear engineer revealed how he and several colleagues resigned from GE in 1975 because of his safety concerns over the design of the Mark 1 containment unit used at the plant.” The Independent

GE is facing major losses already and they are sure to rise in the next few weeks UNLESS of course, they can get yet another huge cash infusion from the gullible tax-payers of America to retro-fit those Mark I reactors and stop storing all those spent fuel rods on top of the damn core. This we will have to pay for, as it will be sold to us, because the situation as is represents a dire national emergency to our national security.

In a real free market economy, GE would just be S.O.O.L. They would have to accept the fact that they aren’t going to post a profit this quarter and eat their losses. But this isn’t a free market economy, it’s a crony economy and the CEO of General Electric works as the leading economic adviser to the White House. They also just happen to own one of the largest “news” outlets in the country, so yes, they will hype this threat, make it threaten Americans, and then look to present congress with a plan to socialize their inevitable losses in such a way that they come out in the end in an even better circumstance than they were at the beginning. Contrite and hung-headed GE executives will be paraded in front of some congressional committee, they will hem and haw and in the end, they will walk out laughing after congressmen get to grandstand for their next campaign season and you will have to eat 12 billion in losses for GE and their stock holders.

They will turn a profit from this disaster by imposing the costs of this crisis on you the tax-payer, you mark my words. But first, in order to do that, they have to scare the shit out of you. They have to hype the looming “crisis” as the next biggest threat to you and your children after al Qaeda, Global Warming, and the H1N1 virus.

That’s “why?”