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permanent health checks,” Grover said, and Fukushima residents complain
that they have not been allowed access to their own health-check results.
Last March, Human Rights Watch leveled the same charge.^ “We are
really not seeing basic health services being offered in an accessible way
and we are not seeing accurate, consistent, non-contradictory information
being disclosed to people on a regular basis” Jane Cohen, a researcher at
the New York-based rights group, told Reuters. Of the 24,228 workers
who risk radiation exposure at the reactor complex, only a mere 904 are
eligible for free cancer screenings being provided by the government and
Tepco, the daily Asahi Shimbun reported Nov. 22. The authorities have
limited the scope the $600 checkups to workers who were exposed to over
50 millisieverts between March 11 and mid-December 2011, but
thousands of workers are demanding that the time limit be abolished.
Disinformation and denials confounded by science
Official lullabies, denials and attempted cover-ups are desperate
shields against the enormous economic and legal liability that would
follow any acknowledgment of the depth and breadth of radiation’s likely
effects. Tepco said Nov. 6 that it may need 11 trillion yen, or $137 billion,
to cover its damages. Tokyo already set aside ¥9 trillion in July as part of
the federal bailout and takeover of the utility. Minister Edano hinted last
May that the government may cover some of the costs of decontaminating
certain limited areas. Comprehensive decontamination is not even being
considered because, as the science ministry reported in Nov. 2011,
radioactive fallout from the triple meltdowns was found in every one of its
57 prefectures.#
The journal Science reported this fall that 40% of the fish caught off
the coast of NE Japan are contaminated with radioactive cesium at levels
well above what the government allows.** Author Ken Buesseler of the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution concluded that there is either a
source of cesium on the seafloor, or it is still being dumped into the ocean
by Tepco.
Referring to the millions of gallons of cooling water still being
poured into the three destroyed reactors and their waste fuel pools,
Buesseler told Radio Australia Nov. 20, “Some of that water is getting