Portside

Reader Comments- 2014 Elections; Jim Crow Returns; Toni Morrison, Angela Davis; U.S. Used 1,000 Nazis; Syrian Labyrinth; Draft Could Be Next; Responses to Joel Klein; Nobel Peace Laureates Call Full Torture Disclosure; Activists Block an Israeli Shipping Ship; Women of Afghanistan; Saudi Arabia and ISIS; Fukushima; Announcements-Miners Shot Down-Film Screening-Nov 10; Elections-Who Won? Who Lost?-Nov 14; Folk music greats honor David Amram-Nov 20; PM Press Book Sale

While the American reactor industry continues to suck billions of dollars from the public treasury, its allies in the corporate media seem increasingly hesitant to cover the news of post-Fukushima Japan.

As regulators look to restart two reactors in southern Japan, workers at crippled Daiichi plant talk of dangers, low pay.

Japanese children can now be exposed to 20 times more radiation than was previously allowed, a level comparable to the yearly limit for German workers.

Reagan crew members reported that in the middle of a snowstorm, a cloud of warm air enveloped them with a “metallic taste.” The reports parallel those from airmen who dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima, and from central Pennsylvanians downwind from Three Mile Island. Crew members drank and bathed in desalinated sea water that was heavily irradiated from Fukushima’s fallout.

The lessons of history beckon.

'This is an issue of human survival.'

While a depleted, discredited and disorganized nuclear utility moves to restart its other reactors, its stricken units at Fukushima continue to hold the rest of us at the brink of apocalyptic terror.

Radiation can be slow to cause cancer, taking decades to kill. But children can suffer quickly.