This Week on GR
March 11, 2021
Welcome back to Gorilla Radio’s Home Edition, recorded March 2nd, 2021 Sept. 17, 2016
This March 11th marks the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima
tsunami-engendered nuclear disaster. And, what have we learned?
Ten
years after, even as Japan continues cleaning up the mess, there is no
solution to the question of just what to do with irradiated debris
already collected, or how to deal with the contaminated cooling water
still being generated every day, and now amounting to millions of
litres.
In fact, far from getting a handle on the problem, things are only getting worse; as JapanToday reports, “The
decades-long challenge to scrap the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant… is
becoming more complex as recent remote-controlled probes have
highlighted just how damaged the reactors are.”
And yet, the nuclear industry is enjoying a renaissance, buoyed by
concerns for climate change, and an unlikely partner in NASA and its
collaborators who recently landed nukes on Mars.
Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at State University of New
York/College at Old Westbury, and author of, ‘The Wrong Stuff: The
Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet’, and ‘Cover Up: What You
Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power’. He’s also the host of
the nationally syndicated television program, Enviro Close-UP with Karl
Grossman, and is an associate with the media watch group Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). Karl’s articles too appear at
CounterPunch.org, and Nation of Change, among other places, where I
found his latest, ‘Plutonium—the most lethal of all radioactive
substances—in space’.
Karl Grossman in the first half.
And; what about the Olympic Games? In 2016, the IOC announced not
only would Japan host the 2020 Games, it would do so in the nuclear
shadow of Fukushima Prefecture. But, Fate intervened in the form of the
Covid-19 pandemic.
But, but; the IOC and Japan determined to carry on
come pandemic Hell, or atomic high waters, rescheduling Japan 2020, to
July 2021. And, despite 80% of Japanese polled saying the games should
be postponed again, new Tokyo Olympic organizing committee president,
Seiko Hashimoto is reassuring the public it will be safe for the
Games to go on saying, “The situation around coronavirus doesn’t go easy on us.”
About Fukushima’s lingering nuclear radiation and the threat it poses, Hashimoto had this to say, [crickets].
Robert Hunziker is an environmental journalist whose climate clarion
calls appear in numerous journals and multiple languages around the
World and across the internet. He’s also appeared in a variety of media
to talk about global climate change and has written extensively about
the ongoing aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I spoke to
Robert waaaaaay back in 2016 about the then newly announced winning
Tokyo Olympics bid, and Japan’s “progress” cleaning up the World’s worst civilian nuclear disaster.
Robert Humziker revisiting Fukushima in the second half.
But first, Karl Grossman and Earth’s nuclear envoy to Mars.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: https://cfuv.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.com
