by William Skink

While people are consumed by this election charade, much more serious things are brewing that will affect our ability to live on this planet.

CNN reported over a week ago that the first US nuclear reactor to go live in 20 years just went online. What virtually no one is reporting on, though, is how bad the nuclear disaster in Fukushima continues to be, so bad that even robots can’t approach the radioactive cores, or even locate where they are. Counterpunch has been one of the few places I’ve gotten any information from regarding this disaster. From the link:

It is literally impossible for the world community to get a clear understanding of, and truth about, the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This statement is based upon The Feature article in Columbia Journalism Review (“CJR”) d/d October 25, 2016 entitled: “Sinking a Bold Foray Into Watchdog Journalism in Japan” by Martin Fackler.

The scandalous subject matter of the article is frightening to its core. Essentially, it paints a picture of upending and abolishing a 3-year attempt by one of Japan’s oldest and most liberal/intellectual newspapers, The Asahi Shimbun (circ. 6.6 mln) in its effort of “watchdog journalism” of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In the end, the newspaper’s special watchdog division suffered un-preannounced abrupt closure.

The CJR article, whether intentionally or not, is an indictment of right wing political control of media throughout the world. The story is, moreover, extraordinarily scary and of deepest concern because no sources can be counted on for accurate, truthful reporting of an incident as powerful and deadly dangerous as the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Lest anybody in class forgets, three nuclear reactors at Fukushima Diiachi Nuclear Power Plant experienced 100% meltdown, aka The China Syndrome over five years ago.

The molten cores of those reactors melted down to a stage called corium, which is a lumpy hunk of irradiating radionuclides so deadly that robotic cameras are zapped! The radioactivity is powerful, deadly and possessed of frightening longevity, 100s of years. Again for those who missed class, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) has no idea where those masses of sizzling hot radioactive goo are today. Did they burrow into the ground? Nobody knows, but it is known that those blobs of radioactivity are extraordinarily dangerous, as in deathly, erratically spewing radioactivity “who knows where”?

A nuclear disaster worse than Chernobyl, and it’s barely a blip on people’s radar. It’s truly amazing how a crisis this threatening can be disappeared just like that.

The fukushima disaster will only worsen the ongoing mass extinction we are witnessing, with 2/3 of animal life possibly gone in 50 years:

The world is facing the biggest extinction since the dinosaurs, with seven in 10 mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles wiped out in just 50 years, a new report warns.

The latest Living Planet report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) estimates that by 2020 populations of vertebrates will have fallen by 67 per cent since 1970.

Extinction rates are now running at 100 times their natural level because of deforestation, hunting, pollution, overfishing and climate change.

The only way anything will happen is if those who control the vast consolidation of wealth decide to do something. Because of the scale of the problem, they are the ones who must choose between geopolitical domination games or keeping the planet inhabitable.

The kind of wealth that has amassed, though, may have permanently disconnected these people from the capacity to see the rest of the global population as anything but useless eaters.

62 of the richest individuals now control as much wealth as half the global population. That is insane. What will they do to protect their wealth if it’s threatened by the demands of the useless eaters?