Canadian Government Covered Up “Massive Amounts Of Radiation In Air”
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A Major Canadian Paper Reports That The Government Covered Up Massive Amounts Of Radioactive Material From Fukushima In Canadian Air” And Are Continuing To Manipulate Radiation Monitoring Data.
The Intel Hub
Alexander Higgins
August 4th, 2011
While the alternative media has reported on a cover up of the Fukushima nuclear fallout throughout the disaster, we haven’t seen a mainstream news source do much more than act as a stenographer for the government and the nuclear industry through the entire ordeal.
This could clearly be seen in the nuclear fallout maps.
Japan Nuclear Radiation Fallout Forecast For US West Coast On April 6th, 2010
To be fair, Forbes blogger Jeff McMahon called out the government for switching their so-called safety levels but we really haven’t heard much from him since. The rest of the media has been silent.
Today a major Canadian paper lashed out at the government of Canada after finally coming to the realization that the cronies knew about and covered up “massive amounts of radioactive material from Fukushima in Canada”.
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Before I send you to the link, I would like to clarify the caption beneath the photo of the expert they interviewed which reads as follows:
Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, says that while radiation coming from Fukushima will lead to higher cancer rates among Canadians, the risk posed to individuals is very small.
Shame on this man for spewing the nuclear apologist talking point that while the population is at a higher risk the risk to an individual is small. The Feds spit out the same bs, saying that if 1 in 2,200 people are going to get cancer then there is a risk the overall population but not to the individual.
Forbes’ McMahon did an excellent job of objectively explaining that for the 1 in 2,200 who get cancer there is a risk.
That kind of statement failed to reassure the public in part because of the issue of informed consent—Americans never consented to swallowing any radiation from Fukushima—and in part because the statement is obviously false.
There is a question whether the milk was safe.
In spite of the relative level of Fukushima radiation, which many minimized through comparison to radiation from x-rays and airplane flights—medical experts agree that any increased exposure to radiation increases risk of cancer, and so, no increase in radiation is unquestionably safe.
Whether you choose to see the Fukushima fallout as safe depends on the perspective you adopt, as David J. Brenner, a professor of radiation biophysics and the director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center, elucidated recently in The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists:
Should this worry us? We know that the extra individual cancer risks from this long-term exposure will be very small indeed. Most of us have about a 40 percent chance of getting cancer at some point in our lives, and the radiation dose from the extra radioactive cesium in the food supply will not significantly increase our individual cancer risks.
But there’s another way we can and should think about the risk: not from the perspective of individuals, but from the perspective of the entire population. A tiny extra risk to a few people is one thing. But here we have a potential tiny extra risk to millions or even billions of people. Think of buying a lottery ticket — just like the millions of other people who buy a ticket, your chances of winning are miniscule. Yet among these millions of lottery players, a few people will certainly win; we just can’t predict who they will be. Likewise, will there be some extra cancers among the very large numbers of people exposed to extremely small radiation risks? It’s likely, but we really don’t know for sure.
via Fukushima: What don’t we know? | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
A few people certainly will “win,” which is why it’s so interesting that the EPA’s standard for radionuclides in drinking water is so much more conservative than the FDA’s standard for radionuclides in food.
Now on to the reports from the Canadian Paper, Georgia Straight.
Japan’s Fukushima catastrophe brings big radiation spikes to B.C.
After Japan’s Fukushima catastrophe, Canadian government officials reassured jittery Canadians that the radioactive plume billowing from the destroyed nuclear reactors posed zero health risks in this country.
In fact, there was reason to worry. Health Canada detected massive amounts of radioactive material from Fukushima in Canadian air in March and April at monitoring stations across the country.
The level of radioactive iodine spiked above the federal maximum allowed limit in the air at four of the five sites where Health Canada monitors levels of specific radioisotopes.
On March 18, seven days after an earthquake and tsunami triggered eventual nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, the first radioactive material wafted over the Victoria suburb of Sidney on Vancouver Island.
For 22 days, a Health Canada monitoring station in Sidney detected iodine-131 levels in the air that were 61 percent above the government’s allowable limit. In Resolute Bay, Nunavut, the levels were 3.5 times the limit.
Meanwhile, government officials claimed there was nothing to worry about. “The quantities of radioactive materials reaching Canada as a result of the Japanese nuclear incident are very small and do not pose any health risk to Canadians,” Health Canada says on its website. “The very slight increases in radiation across the country have been smaller than the normal day-to-day fluctuations from background radiation.”
In fact, Health Canada’s own data shows this isn’t true. The iodine-131 level in the air in Sidney peaked at 3.6 millibecquerels per cubic metre on March 20. That’s more than 300 times higher than the background level, which is 0.01 or fewer millibecquerels per cubic metre.
“There have been massive radiation spikes in Canada because of Fukushima,” said Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.
“The authorities don’t want people to have an understanding of this. The government of Canada tends to pooh-pooh the dangers of nuclear power because it is a promoter of nuclear energy and uranium sales.”
Edwards has advised the federal auditor-general’s office and the Ontario government on nuclear-power issues and is a math professor at Montreal’s Vanier College.
In a phone interview from his Montreal home, he said radiation from Fukushima will lead to higher rates of cancer and other diseases among Canadians. But don’t panic. Edwards cautioned that the risk is very small for any particular individual.
“It’s not the risk to an individual that’s the problem but how much society is at risk. When you are exposing millions of people to an insult, even if the average dose is quite small, we are going to see fatal health effects,” he said.
In another report the paper points out how the government is manipulating the data so that they can under report the amount of nuclear fallout.
Confused by all the nuke lingo about becquerels and sieverts and what it means for your health? So were most of the nuclear experts we talked to for this story.
It also doesn’t help that Health Canada’s data on the radioactive fallout from Fukushima is so sparse and confusingly reported that it’s hard to figure out whether or not it exceeds government limits.
Health Canada reports on monitoring data for only three or four of the hundreds of radioactive substances spewing out of the crippled Japanese nuclear plant.
[...]
“They’re measuring only a fraction of the radioactive fallout from Fukushima,” said Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, speaking from Montreal.
[...]
Source:Georgia Straight
Sites such as The Intel Hub, reported that low but still harmful levels of radiation were hitting Canada and The United States west coast from the beginning while the corporate controlled media and even some of the alternative media claimed that no radiation was hitting anywhere but Japan.
Reports such as this one are only further confirmation that radiation from Fukushima did have an effect on Canada and the U.S. and our health and regulatory agencies actively worked to cover up the dangers posed by it.
Alex Thomas contributed to this report.
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