The race to rehabilitate radiation continues apace at everyone’s favourite Deep State mouthpiece, the BBC.
After Tuesday’s inept attempt on the Today programme to push the case for cutting-down safety levels at the forthcoming (possibly) Hinckley Point C nuke, the PM Programme yesterday ran a slicker piece from – where else? – Fukushima, basically saying that everyone has overreacted to the 2011 post-tsunami radiation escape there.
This time, though, the expert on hand was actually a qualified scientist with a track record in studying the effects of radiation on people.
Professor Geraldine Thomas, of Imperial College, crunched through the wreckage of a home abandoned in the Fukushima exclusion zone in the company of its owner and the BBC’s Tokyo reporter, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes.
Her verdict: although the average radiation level in the zone is 50% higher than the normal background dose you get everywhere, that’s not enough to harm anyone. Implication: don’t worry, rebuild, go home.
From a propaganda point of view, the only bum note was struck by Rupert W-H as he signed off saying: “If the danger from radiation is being exaggerated then it is making the human tragedy at Fukushima much worse than it should be.”
Should be? It’s so BBC to inadvertently imply that there’s a scale of how tragic, costly and terrifying a nuclear accident can be before it’s considered de trop by the powers that be.
Keywords
As the Absorb-a-Millisievert-with-a-Smile campaign develops, keen observers should watch out for certain keywords including ‘death’, ‘radiation’ and ‘on-site’. On Tuesday I though it was a mistake for the pro-nuke person to mention Fukushima but I was wrong.
The idea seems to be to turn ‘Fukushima’ into a shorthand for a situation where the public danger from radiation can be spun as turning out to be less bad than first feared (or, in spin talk, ‘was grossly exaggerated’). Where no-one died from radiation exposure, at least off-site. And where evacuating can be portrayed as causing far more death, misery and destruction than radiation – never mind that reactor buildings are burning and exploding at the time, or that no-one on the site can get at them or to the spent fuel pools.
If the debate over Hinckley Point C’s safety levels can be framed in this way, they can marginalise awareness of many other real issues such as the idiotic cost of the project and the potential scale of non-fatal health impacts from a future accident.
For those, you have to look back past Fukushima to Chernobyl, whose 30th anniversary on 26th April must now seem uncomfortably close to the pro-nuclear lobby. It’s surprisingly hard to get a handle on the scale and geographical spread of issues such as birth defects and genetic disorders arising from the Chernobyl accident. The World Health Organisation has put the potential toll of premature deaths as 4,000 although many believe the WHO’s estimate to be much too low.
Time will tell. But when someone rocks up on Today in year or two, saying a corners-cut version of Fukushima is good enough for Hinckley C if it saves a billion, just nod along with them and say “What could go wrong with that?”
QuadRanting 