Berkeley Nuclear Scientists On Fukushima Diiachi

The annoying cougher gets better.


Does the public have a fundamental right to know about releases of radiation?

Yes sir. Absolutely. It’s important that the members of the public that have the competence and capability to do this continue to do this. You have this problem inherent in the system, the lying bastards theory you were referring to and that is you have a lot of competent people that work in the government or in the national laboratories of the industry that can’t talk for one reason or another. Then you have people who have no idea what they are talking about and they talk all the time. And then you have people in academe that may have some capability in this area and they owe it to the public to explain things as best they can.

As best we can tell the Japanese have been entirely and completely forthcoming. Every measurement they have made has been made public right away and there is not evidence of anything but that. They have been candid about confusion they faced when they had different measurements of the same thing by different groups. They have been candid about their confusion in their interpretations in some of the difficult measurements they have made and analyses. So, they deserve commendation for their candor which was unusually complete as best anyone can tell on our side of the pacific and I think that is of course a wonderful mark of their culture.

This was the general  impression I also had and I paid very close attention to the information for weeks. I do believe there were problems with not answering some of the questions the press was asking and NHK World News would always cut away when the discussions got heated. The engineers in Japan were giving so much information including lots of radiation readings that they were making people mad about it. I guess they were blinding them with science. Engineers for the most part aren't good at communicating with the public, that is why those who teach are the best choices for explaining the science to the public.

We didn’t have very much information at first not because they were hiding it but because they didn’t. I don’t have any evidence that there is anything they knew that they didn’t tell not only us, but others around the world.

About Tepco: The information they are getting at Berkeley mainly comes from the Japanese government. They are communicating with Tepco’s engineers, not Tepco’s management and pointed out that it was not the engineers who have been indicted for fraud in the past at Tepco. Anyone who knows anything about engineers knows most of them would find it very difficult to not be extremely truthful about facts and information.

This is well documented in Chernobyl that the disease burden of the anxiety, fear and the disruption was worse than the disease burden from the radiation because people….got scurvy because they wouldn’t eat fresh vegetables, they got depression…In public health…the whole area of stress hormones and how they impact the body is a very important area. They are actually as bad for your body as any environmental chemical we have ever seen. Under stress we flood our bodies with chemicals that are more dangerous than things that come in from the outside.

This is of course why the government in Japan was trying to keep people calm. They have had lots of disasters/trauma and have learned how to keep traumatized people from getting PTSD or how to keep the symptoms at a mild level. They have had mass information to the public about how to talk to the victims of the earthquake/ tsunami to help minimize their trauma and PTSD. The public is also taught how to help people heal and emphasize letting everyone tell their story without asking them direct questions which might cause more distress for them. This is something our country needs to learn from them. Our mental health system can’t even handle PTSD in the military or in those who have been workplace bullied. All one has to do is remember how the victims of Katrina were treated. We have many systems set up that cause PTSD such as our prison systems, the courts, workplaces and law enforcement. Then most of our mental health professionals as I have learned the hard way know nothing about PTSD, misdiagnose people who have it with some kind of personality disorder label (especially females) and in my case my PTSD was made worse by the crazy, nutty misdiagnoses which have ranged from telling me there is nothing wrong with me to paranoid with psychotic features, both were wrong, as well as most of the other crazy diagnoses. It is both entertaining and very sad, along with traumatic to have to put up with this level of incompetence and abuse when you are seeking help with trauma. They are the opposite of therapeutic here in Alaska with some exceptions in Anchorage. Our government in many ways causes stress diseases and then makes health care nearly impossible for those being affected, instead they are blamed for having PTSD which is another very harmful thing that makes the problem worse.

At the end of this video they offer good advice about getting to the truth. You have to read information from many sources to get to the truth. Figuring out the agenda of each individual or group is a good place to start.

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/UCBAirSampling