Japan “lying through their teeth”: Suzuki
Posted November 7, 2013 8:58 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It’s a stark warning from Canada’s most famous environmental crusader about Japan’s damaged nuclear plants: David Suzuki suggests a big chunk of North America might need to be evacuated if Fukushima prefecture is hit by another big earthquake.
At a recent water ecology symposium in Alberta, Suzuki claimed the Japanese government has been “lying though their teeth” about the extent of the disaster caused by the massive earthquake and tsunami of 2011.
“Fukushima is the most terrifying situation I can imagine,” he said, in a video posted on YouTube (posted below).
“Three out of the four plants were destroyed in 2011 and the fourth has been so badly damaged that the fear is that if there’s another earthquake seven or above, that building will go and all hell breaks loose.”
Suzuki says the probability of a magnitude 7.0 or above earthquake in the region within the next three years is over 95 per cent, putting more than 1,300 spent fuel rods at risk in the fourth building at Fukushima.
“They have to be kept in water all the time and they have no way of getting it out. As you know, they are pouring water in and that water is leaking out. Now they have a cockamamie scheme of trying to freeze the soil to form a frozen wall. They don’t know what to do. We need to gather an international group of experts to go in with complete freedom to do what they suggest. Right now the Japanese government has too much pride to admit that,” says Suzuki.
“I have seen a paper which says that if, in fact, the fourth plant goes in an earthquake and those rods are exposed, it’s ‘Bye, bye Japan’ and everybody on the west coast of North America should evacuate.”
Operators of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) announced plans yesterday to begin the painstaking and dangerous process of removing the fuel rods from the crippled reactor.
The Fukushima meltdown in 2011 is the second-worst nuclear accident in history, after Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986.
The cost of the decontamination efforts so far has surpassed $50 billion US.
