"The reactors withstood the worst nature could throw at them."
"The SCRAMs went off perfectly."
"The shut-downs will be temporary."
"American reactors are far stronger than Japanese ones."
"This was a once-in-a-century fluke, and no one was hurt."
"Even so, we must have nuke power to fight global warming."
"The media has distorted the utility's good-faith attempts to inform the public."
"Those rad-waste barrels were tipped over by eco-terrorists."
"Tritium is good for you."
"Nuke power is a 'zero emissions' technology, therefore the reported leaks could not have occurred."
"Those anti-nuke so-called scientists have been discredited."
But most importantly, expect a tightly enforced media blackout.
It starts when all who question the industry are automatically "discredited."
Dr.
John Gofman, universally acknowledged as one of the world's leading
nuclear and medical researchers, was once in charge of health research
for the old Atomic Energy Commission. When asked to determine how many
people would be killed by radioactive emissions from "normal" reactor
operations, he found it would be about 32,000 Americans per year.
The
AEC demanded he revise his findings. Gofman refused. So he was forced
out of the AEC and "discredited" despite credentials that continue to
dwarf those who replaced him.
The list of physicists,
engineers, medical researchers and others similarly purged for
fact-based reporting is too tragic to reconstruct here.
But it
even includes a park ranger at the Pt. Reyes National Seashore who
noticed in the spring of 1986 that the number of live bird births had
plummeted compared with the previous ten springs. The only logical link
was to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, brought down by a California
rainstorm ten days after the explosion.
The ranger soon found himself out of a job.
On
the other hand, the industry still falsely asserts that no one died at
Three Mile Island. It even produced a "doctor" who traveled through
Europe asserting that the enormous radiation releases spewed by the
explosion at Chernobyl would ultimately save lives.
Predictably,
the Kashiwazaki catastrophe has disappeared from the American media.
But in Japan, the news has transcended the truly horrifying.
According
to Leo Lewis in The Times, talk is rampant of a "Genpatsu-shinsai,"
defined by Japan's leading seismologist, Katsuhiko Shibashi, as "the
combination of an earthquake and nuclear meltdown capable of destroying
millions of lives and bringing a nation to its knees." Shibashi warns
that the recent 6.8 magnitude shock exceeded the design capabilities of
the Kashiwazaki nuke by a factor of three. A Kobe University research
team is reported as saying that if the quake had been 10km further to
the southwest, a "terrible, terrible disaster" would have resulted.
Prof.
Mitsuhei Murata of Tokai Gakuen University is quoted as warning that a
quake at the Hamaoka nuke could bring "24 million victims and the end
for Japan." Japan's earthquake experts assume the probability of an 8.0
quake within the next 30 years to be 87 percent.
As in the US,
Tokyo Electric has long denied that its seven Kashiwazaki reactors were
sited atop a fault line, only to have it turn out to be true. As at
Three Mile Island, vital data has already disappeared from the
Kashiwazaki disaster, and the exact quantities of radiation released
are unknown. Radiation at both sites escaped well after the reactors
were shut down.
As in the United States, Japanese earthquake
experts have warned since the 1960s about the dangers of reactor
construction, only to be ignored and "discredited."
Undoubtedly the Japanese PR nuke spinsters will continue to attack and ignore them.
Here,
2400 central Pennsylvania families will still be denied a federal trial
on the death, disease and mayhem spewed upon them by Three Mile Island
nearly thirty years ago. And the seven dead Challenger astronauts are
not available for comment on the "perfectly safe" O-rings that killed
them just prior to the "non-credible" earthquake that struck the Perry
nuke.
Any possible problems with a new generation of reactors are equally non-credible. Just ask a flack.
Writings 
As you read this, swarms of extremely well-paid PR flacks are spinning the Kashiwazaki nuke quake into an argument for building more reactors. They will deploy utter absurdities and personal attacks, followed by the sound of media-complicit silence. 
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