Fukushima Fallout

It remains to be seen whether the increases in radiation far away from Fukushima will be “dangerous” or not.  There is no doubt that sea creatures near the source of contamination in Japan have already suffered a lot.  Because the Japanese are a “traditional culture” (and therefore can’t change anything about themselves), they MUST continue to eat fish, even though this action now will be killing them slowly.  I heard last night on the news that the population of Japan actually fell 240,000 last year.  This is because the population/resource levels in Japan have reached the limit of the islands’ human carrying capacity, and so life is too hard.  In some sense, this means that a life in Japan is no longer worth living.  (Try telling this to the US Chamber of Commerce/Corporate America/Wall Street, ha-ha.  Their “religion” of “growth” will eventually bring the US to the same sorry state.) 

 

Nevertheless, it would probably be a good idea to not eat any more seafood.  About 20 years ago, it was discovered that 17% of Danish males are now sterile.  (The females are also suffering, but it’s much harder to devise clear tests for female fertility.)  The normal rate is about 2% to 3%.  My chemist friend reported this to me about 5 years ago.  The reason is that the Danes were eating seafood from the Baltic Sea, which contains a lot of industrial solvents dumped in it from Communist days, plus the fallout from Chernobyl.  The other reason is that Denmark makes a lot of beef, ham, chicken, and cheese, and to increase efficiency, they were using a lot of herbicides and pesticides and hormones in the process.  I thought my chemist friend told me that Danish legislation has now solved the problem, but in a recent conversation with him, he said that the legislation and public warnings have been successful only by stopping the rate of sterility from increasing further.  That is a success of sorts, but still represents a real problem.

 

Denmark is a small country with a relatively intelligent population, so the identification of the problem was fairly fast, and corrective action also.  The US is an entirely different situation, however, as we can expect denial and coverup for decades – that is just the American Way.  Mostly this is because the Great Corporations are in charge, and therefore PROFITS are more important than LIVES.