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The money trail can be tough to follow - Westinghouse, Duke Energy and the Nuclear Energy Institute (a "policy organisation" for the nuclear industry with 350 companies, including TEPCO, on its roster) did not respond to requests for information on funding research and chairs at universities. But most of the funding for nuclear research does not come directly from the nuclear lobby, said M.V. Ramana, a researcher at Princeton University specialising in the nuclear industry and climate change. Most research is funded by governments, who get donations - from the lobby (via candidates, political parties or otherwise).

“There's a lot of secrecy that can surround nuclear power because some of the same processes can be involved in generating electricity that can also be involved in developing a weapon, so there's a kind of a veil of secrecy that gets dropped over this stuff, that can also obscure the truth” said Biello. "So, for example in Fukushima, it was pretty apparent that a total meltdown had occurred just based on what they were experiencing there ... but nobody in a position of authority was willing to say that."

This is worrying because while both anti-nuclear activists and the nuclear lobby both have openly stated biases, academics and researchers are seen as the middle ground - a place to get accurate, unbiased information. David Biello, the energy and climate editor at Scientific American Online, said that trying to get clear information on a scenario such as the Daiichi disaster is tough.

"'How is this going to affect the future of nuclear power?'That’s the first thought that came into their heads," said Ramana, adding, "They basically want to ensure that people will keep constructing nuclear power plants." For instance, a May report by MIT’s Center For Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (where TEPCO funds a chair) points out that while the Daiichi disaster has resulted in "calls for cancellation of nuclear construction projects and reassessments of plant license extensions" which might "lead to a global slow-down of the nuclear enterprise," that  "the lessons to be drawn from the Fukushima accident are different."

"In the United States, a lot of the money doesn’t come directly from the nuclear industry, but actually comes from the Department of Energy (DOE). And the DOE has a very close relationship with the industry, and they sort of try to advance the industry’s interest," said Ramana. Indeed, nuclear engineering falls under the "Major Areas of Research" with the DOE, which also has nuclear weapons under its rubric. The DOE's 2012 fiscal year budge request to the US Congress for nuclear energy programmes was $755m.

"So those people who get funding from that….it’s not like they (researchers) want to lie, but there’s a certain amount of, shall we say, ideological commitment to nuclear power, as well as a certain amount of self-censorship."  It comes down to worrying how their next application for funding might be viewed, he said. Kathleen Sullivan, an anti-nuclear specialist and disarmament education consultant with the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs, said it's not surprising that research critical of the nuclear energy and weapons isn't coming out of universities and departments that participate in nuclear research and development.

"It (the influence) of the nuclear lobby could vary from institution to institution," said Sullivan. "If you look at the history of nuclear weapons manufacturing in the United States, you can see that a lot of research was influenced perverted, construed in a certain direction."

Sullivan points to the DOE-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California in Berkley (where some of the research for the first atomic bomb was done) as an example of how intertwined academia and government-funded nuclear science are.

"For nuclear physics to proceed, the only people interested in funding it are pro-nuclear folks, whether that be industry or government," said Biello. "So if you're involved in that area you've already got a bias in favour of that technology … if you study hammers, suddenly hammers seem to be the solution to everything."

And should they find results unfavourable to the industry, Ramana said they would "dress it up in various ways by saying 'Oh, there’s a very slim chance of this, and here are some safety measure we recommend,' and then the industry will say, 'Yeah,yeah, we’re incorporating all of that.'" Ramana, for the record, said that while he's against nuclear weapons, he doesn't have a moral position on nuclear power except to say that as a cost-benefit issue, the costs outweigh the benefits, and that "in that sense, expanding nuclear power isn't a good idea." 

The Center for Responsive Politics - a non-partisan, non-profit elections watchdog group – noted that even as many lobbying groups slowed their spending the first quarter of the year, the Nuclear industry "appears to be ratcheting up its lobbying" increasing its multi-million dollar spending.

Among the report's closing thoughts are concerns that "Decision-making in the  immediate aftermath of a major crisis is often influenced by emotion," and whether"an accident like Fukushima, which is so far beyond design basis, really warrant a major overhaul of current nuclear safety regulations and practises?" "If so," wonder the authors, "When is safe safe enough? Where do we draw the line?"

The Japanese public, it seems, would like some answers to those very questions, albeit from a different perspective.  Kazuo Hizumi, a Tokyo-based human rights lawyer, is among those pushing for openness. He is also an editor at News for the People in Japan, a news site advocating for transparency from the government and from TEPCO. With contradicting information and lack of clear coverage on safety and contamination issues, many have taken to measuring radiation levels with their own Geiger counters.

"The public fully trusted the Japanese Government," said Hizumi. But the absence of "true information" has massively diminished that trust, as, he said, has the public's faith that TEPCO would be open about the potential dangers of a nuclear accident.

A report released in July by Human Rights Now highlights the need for immediately accessible information on health and safety in areas where people have been affected by the disaster, including Fukushima, especially on the issues of contaminated food and evacuation plans.

A 'nuclear priesthood' Biello describes the nuclear industry is a relatively small, exclusive club.

The interplay between academia and also the military and industry is very tight. It's a small community...they have their little club and they can go about their business without anyone looking over their shoulder. " This might explain how, as the Associated Press reported in June, that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was "working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nationalise ageing reactors operating within standards or simply failing to enforce them."

However, with this exclusivity comes a culture of secrecy – "a nuclear priesthood," said Biello, which makes it very difficult to parse out a straightforward answer in the very technical and highly politicised field.  "You have the proponents, who believe that it is the technological salvation for our problems, whether that's energy, poverty, climate change or whatever else. And then you have opponents who think that it's literally the worst thing that ever happened and should be immediately shut back up in a box and buried somewhere," said Biello, who includes "professors of nuclear engineering and Greenpeace activists" as passionate opponents on the nuclear subject.

In fact, one is hard pressed to find a media report quoting a nuclear scientist at any major university sounding the alarms on the risks of contamination in Fukushima. Doing so has largely been the work of anti-nuclear activists (who have an admitted bias against the technology) and independent scientists employed by think tanks, few of whom responded to requests for interviews.

So, one's best bet, said Biello, is to try and "triangulate the truth" - to take "a dose" from anti-nuclear activists, another from pro-nuclear lobbyists and throw that in with a little bit of engineering and that'll get you closer to the truth. "Take what everybody is saying with a grain of salt."

Since World War II, the process of secrecy – the readiness to invoke "national security" - has been a pillar of the nuclear establishment…that establishment, acting on the false assumption that "secrets" can be hidden from the curious and knowledgeable, has successfully insisted that there are answers which cannot be given and even questions which cannot be asked. The net effect is to stifle debate about the fundamental of nuclear policy. Concerned citizens dare not ask certain questions, and many begin to feel that these matters which only a few initiated experts are entitled to discuss.  If the above sounds like a post-Fukushima statement, it is not. It was written by Howard Morland for the November 1979 issue of The Progressive magazine focusing on the hydrogen bomb as well as the risks of nuclear energy.

The US government - citing national security concerns - took the magazine to court in order to prevent the issue from being published, but ultimately relented during the appeals process when it became clear that the information The Progressive wanted to publish was already public knowledge and that pursuing the ban might put the court in the position of deeming the Atomic Energy Act as counter to First Amendment rights (freedom of speech) and therefore unconstitutional in its use of prior restraint to censor the press.

But, of course, that's in the US, although a similar mechanism is at work in Japan, where a recently created task force aims to "cleanse" the media of reportage that casts an unfavourable light on the nuclear industry (they refer to this information as "inaccurate" or a result of "mischief." The government has even go so far as to accept bids from companies that specialise in scouring the Internet to monitor the Internet for reports, Tweets and blogs that are critical of its handling of the Daiichi disaster, which has presented a unique challenge to the lobby there.

"They do not know how to do it," he said of some of the community groups and individuals who have taken to measure contamination levels in the air, soil and food

 Japan's government has a history of slow response to TEPCO's cover-ups. In 1989, that Kei Sugaoka, a nuclear energy at General Electric who inspected and repaired plants in Japan and elsewhere, said he spotted cracks in steam dryers and a "misplacement" or 180 degrees in one dryer unit. He noticed that the position of the dryer was later omitted from the inspection record's data sheet. Sugaoka told a Japanese networkthat TEPCO had instructed him to "erase" the flaws, but he ultimately wrote a whistleblowing letter to METI, which resulted in the temporary 17 TEPCO reactors, including ones at the plant in Fukushima.

the Japanese nuclear lobby has been quite active in shaping how people see nuclear energy. The country's Ministry of Education, together with the Natural Resources Ministry (of of two agencies under Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry - METI - overseeing nuclear policies) even provides schools with a nuclear energy information curriculum. These worksheets - or education supplements - are used to inform children about the benefits of nuclear energy over fossil fuels.

There’s reason to believe that at least in one respect, Fukushima can’t and won’t be another Chernobyl, at least due to the fact that the former has occurred in the age of the Internet whereas the latter took place in the considerably quaint 80s, when a car phone the size of a brick was considered the height of communications technology to most. "It (a successful cover up) is definitely a danger in terms of Fukushima, and we'll see what happens. All you have to do is look at the first couple of weeks after Chernobyl to see the kind of cover up," said Biello. "I mean the Soviet Union didn't even admit that anything was happening for a while, even though everybody was noticing these radiation spikes and all these other problems. The Soviet Union was not admitting that they were experiencing this catastrophic nuclear failure... in Japan, there's a consistent desire, or kind of a habit, of downplaying these accidents, when they happen. It's not as bad as it may seem, we haven't had a full meltdown."

Fast forward to 2011, when video clips of each puff of smoke out of the Daiichi plant make it around the world in seconds, news updates are available around the clock, activists post radiation readings on maps in multiple languages and Google Translate picks up the slack in translating every last Tweet on the subject coming out of Japan.

it will be a heck of a lot harder to keep a lid on things than it was 25 years ago. 

"Right after the meltdowns some workers were not even given face masks with filters in them," says the Communist Party councillor from Iwaki, a city 45 kilometres from the nuclear plant. "Others had to share rubber boots. Some of the boots had holes in them that let in radioactive water in," he says.The operator of Fukushima,TEPCO, does admit that there was a shortage of gear at the plant but the situation has now improved, according to TEPCO spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai.

"The situation was chaotic in the early stages of the accident," he tells me. "There were cases where groups of workers had to share a Geiger counter. But now all workers have their own device, as well as suits. And all radiation exposure is measured and controlled," he says. But Iwaki City Councillor Hiroyuki Watanabe says the situation at Fukushima is still chaotic. He's collected dozens of files on safety breaches at the plant, as well as the alleged underpayment of workers.

"Subcontractors working for TEPCO have ripped off their employees," he tells me. "Some workers are paid as little as $80 a day," he says.The former Fukushima worker we spoke to confirmed this, saying he left because his subcontractor wages were much less than those paid to TEPCO employees.For its part, TEPCO pleads ignorance when it comes to what its subcontractors pay its employees.

"We do not know what kind of wages they're paid or the particular conditions they're working under," says TEPCO spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai.

The Engineer “One engineer who has played a front-line role in helping cool the meltdown of Fukushima’s three reactors spoke unwittingly to The Economist.” The engineer revealed to the Econominst the in May, “The hardest work was done by the low-level labourers. They had so much rubble to clear, he says, that they often keeled over in the heat under the weight of their protective gear. Taken out in ambulances, they would usually be back the following day.”

"We are aware of the need to show our policy," a NISA official said. However, the agency does not appear to be close to deciding on where the contaminated waste will end up.

That delay has led to the secrecy among municipal officials. "It would be difficult to gain the consent of residents when we try to secure a waste disposal site," a Fukushima municipal official said. "The national government does not mention anything about how we can specifically cope with the situation under such circumstances." The situation is expected to worsen.

Since the Liberal Democratic Party selected him as prime minister in September 2006, the hawkish Abe repeatedly called for Japan to move beyond the postwar formula of a strictly defensive posture and non-nuclear principles. Advocacy of a nuclear-armed Japan arose from his family tradition. His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi nurtured the wartime atomic bomb project and, as postwar prime minister, enacted the civilian nuclear program. His father Shintaro Abe, a former foreign minister, had played the Russian card in the 1980s, sponsoring the Russo-Japan College, run by the Aum Shinrikyo sect (a front for foreign intelligence), to recruit weapons scientists from a collapsing Soviet Union.   The chief obstacle to American acceptance of a nuclear-armed Japan was the Pentagon, where Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima remain as iconic symbols justifying American military supremacy.The only feasible channel for bilateral transfers then was through the civilian-run Department of Energy (DoE), which supervises the production of nuclear weapons.

Camp David Go-Ahead   The deal was sealed on Abe's subsequent visit to Washington. Wary of the eavesdropping that led to Richard Nixon's fall from grace, Bush preferred the privacy afforded at Camp David. There, in a rustic lodge on April 27, Bush and Abe huddled for 45 minutes. What transpired has never been revealed, not even in vague outline.   As his Russian card suggested, Abe was shopping for enriched uranium. At 99.9 percent purity, American-made uranium and plutonium is the world's finest nuclear material. The lack of mineral contaminants means that it cannot be traced back to its origin. In contrast, material from Chinese and Russian labs can be identified by impurities introduced during the enrichment process.

The flow of coolant water into the storage pools ceased, quickening evaporation. Fission of the overheated cores led to blasts and mushroom-clouds. Residents in mountaintop Iitate village overlooking the seaside plant saw plumes of smoke and could "taste the metal" in their throats.   Guilty as Charged   The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami were powerful enough to damage Fukushima No.1. The natural disaster, however, was vastly amplified by two external factors: release of the Stuxnet virus, which shut down control systems in the critical 20 minutes prior to the tsunami; and presence of weapons-grade nuclear materials that devastated the nuclear facility and contaminated the entire region.   Of the three parties involved, which bears the greatest guilt? All three are guilty of mass murder, injury and destruction of property on a regional scale, and as such are liable for criminal prosecution and damages under international law and in each respective jurisdiction.

An unannounced reason for Cheney's visit was to promote a quadrilateral alliance in the Asia-Pacific region. The four cornerstones - the US, Japan, Australia and India - were being called on to contain and confront China and its allies North Korea and Russia.. From a Japanese perspective, this grand alliance was flawed by asymmetry: The three adversaries were nuclear powers, while the U.S. was the only one in the Quad group.   To further his own nuclear ambitions, Abe was playing the Russian card. As mentioned in a U.S. Embassy cable (dated 9/22), the Yomiuri Shimbun gave top play to this challenge to the White House : "It was learned yesterday that the government and domestic utility companies have entered final talks with Russia in order to relegate uranium enrichment for use at nuclear power facilities to Atomprom, the state-owned nuclear monopoly." If Washington refused to accept a nuclear-armed Japan, Tokyo would turn to Moscow.

Throughout the Pantex caper, from the data theft to smuggling operation, Bush and Cheney's point man for nuclear issues was DoE Deputy Director Clay Sell, a lawyer born in Amarillo and former aide to Panhandle district Congressman Mac Thornberry. Sell served on the Bush-Cheney transition team and became the top adviser to the President on nuclear issues. At DoE, Sell was directly in charge of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, which includes 17 national laboratories and the Pantex plant. (Another alarm bell: Sell was also staff director for the Senate Energy subcommittee under the late Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, who died in a 2010 plane crash.)   An Israeli Double-Cross   The nuclear shipments to Japan required a third-party cutout for plausible deniability by the White House. Israel acted less like an agent and more like a broker in demanding additional payment from Tokyo, according to intelligence sources. Adding injury to insult, the Israelis skimmed off the newer warhead cores for their own arsenal and delivered older ones. Since deteriorated cores require enrichment, the Japanese were furious and demanded a refund, which the Israelis refused. Tokyo had no recourse since by late 2008 principals Abe had resigned the previous autumn and Bush was a lame duck.

The Japanese nuclear developers, under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, had no choice but to enrich the uranium cores at Fukushima No.1, a location remote enough to evade detection by nonproliferation inspectors. Hitachi and GE had developed a laser extraction process for plutonium, which requires vast amounts of electrical power. This meant one reactor had to make unscheduled runs, as was the case when the March earthquake struck.   Tokyo dealt a slap on the wrist to Tel Aviv by backing Palestinian rights at the UN. Not to be bullied, the Israeli secret service launched the Stuxnet virus against Japan's nuclear facilities.   Firewalls kept Stuxnet at bay until the Tohoku earthquake. The seismic activity felled an electricity tower behind Reactor 6. The power cut disrupted the control system, momentarily taking down the firewall. As the computer came online again, Stuxnet infiltrated to shut down the back-up generators. During the 20-minute interval between quake and tsunami, the pumps and valves at Fukushima No.1 were immobilized, exposing the turbine rooms to flood damage.

The Texas Job   BWXT Pantex, America's nuclear warhead facility, sprawls over 16,000 acres of the Texas Panhandle outside Amarillo. Run by the DoE and Babcock & Wilson, the site also serves as a storage facility for warheads past their expiration date. The 1989 shutdown of Rocky Flats, under community pressure in Colorado, forced the removal of those nuclear stockpiles to Pantex. Security clearances are required to enter since it is an obvious target for would-be nuclear thieves.   In June 2004, a server at the Albuquerque office of the National Nuclear Security System was hacked. Personal information and security-clearance data for 11 federal employees and 177 contractors at Pantex were lifted. NNSA did not inform Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman or his deputy Clay Sell until three months after the security breach, indicating investigators suspected an inside job.

The White House, specifically Bush, Cheney and their co-conspirators in the DoE, hold responsibility for ordering the illegal removal and shipment of warheads without safeguards.   The state of Israel is implicated in theft from U.S. strategic stockpiles, fraud and extortion against the Japanese government, and a computer attack against critical infrastructure with deadly consequences, tantamount to an act of war.   Prime Minister Abe and his Economy Ministry sourced weapons-grade nuclear material in violation of constitutional law and in reckless disregard of the risks of unregulated storage, enrichment and extraction. Had Abe not requested enriched uranium and plutonium in the first place, the other parties would not now be implicated. Japan, thus, bears the onus of the crime.

The International Criminal Court has sufficient grounds for taking up a case that involves the health of millions of people in Japan, Canada, the United States, Russia, the Koreas, Mongolia, China and possibly the entire Northern Hemisphere. The Fukushima disaster is more than an human-rights charge against a petty dictator, it is a crime against humanity on par with the indictments at the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals. Failure to prosecute is complicity.   If there is a silver lining to every dark cloud, it's that the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami saved the world from even greater folly by halting the drive to World War III.

“We had no idea what we were doing here, in our bare feet, digging out radioactive uranium,” Mr. Ariga said,

This quiet mining town, nestled amid gentle green mountains, is located in Fukushima Prefecture, the rural district that is home to the radiation-spewing nuclear plant that bears its name, just an hour’s drive over mountains to the northeast. The accident five months ago has prompted aging residents like Mr. Ariga to speak out about how Fukushima, a name that has now become synonymous with civilian nuclear disaster, also has an older, lesser-known link to an even darker side of atomic energy.

“Maybe it is Fukushima’s unlucky mission to stand as a warning against the dangers of nuclear power,” both civilian and military, said Etsuo Hashimoto, a retiree and amateur historian who volunteers at Ishikawa’s one-room mineral museum, where rocks with printed labels collect dust on shelves.

Mr. Hashimoto stood before the museum’s single display panel describing the imperial army’s attempt here in 1945 to mine uranium and develop ways of refining it for use in building a bomb. Compared with the United States’ vast Manhattan Project, historians describe Japan’s two bomb-building programs — the imperial navy also ran a separate project — as minuscule, last-ditch efforts, hindered by a lack of resources and pessimism among the projects’ own scientists that such a weapon could actually be completed.

Now six months after the disaster, the smoking gun has finally surfaced, not on a Japanese paddy field but inside a pile of steer manure from a pasture near Sacramento, California

The sample of cattle dung and underlying soil was sent to the nuclear engineering lab of the University of California, Berkeley, which reported on September 6:

We tested a topsoil sample and a dried manure sample from the Sacramento area. The manure was produced by a cow long before Fukushima and left outside to dry; it was rained on back in March and April. Both samples showed detectable levels of Cs-134 and Cs-137, with the manure showing higher levels than the soil probably because of its different chemical properties and/or lower density. One interesting feature of t the Sacramento and Sonoma soil samples is that the ratio of Cesium-137 to Cesium-134 is very large - approximately 17.6 and 5.5, respectively. All of our other soil samples until now had shown ratios of between 1 and 2. We know from our air and rainwater measurements that material from Fukushima has a cesium ratio in the range of approximately 1.0 to 1.5, meaning that there is extra Cs-137 in these two soil samples. The best explanation is that in addition to Fukushima fallout, we have also detected atmospheric nuclear weapons testing fallout in these soils. Weapons fallout contains only Cs-137 (no Cs-134) and is known to be present in older soils ..Both of these samples come from older soils, while our samples until this point had come from newer soils.

The last atmospheric nuclear blast at the Nevada Test Site occurred in 1962, whereas the manure was presumably dropped less than 49 years ago. Over the past year, the approximate life-span of a cow patty, the rain that fell on the plain came not from a former province of Spain. Within that short time-frame, the only possible origin of radioactive fallout was Fukushima.To think otherwise would be lame.

Sun-dried manure is more absorbent than the rocky ground of Northern California, which explains the higher level in Sacramento dung than in the Sonoma soil. As a rule of thumb, the accuracy of radiation readings tends to improve with higher concentration of the test material.The manure acted like a sponge for the collection of radioactive rainfall. Its ratio of Cs-137 (resulting from enriched uranium) to Cs-134 (from a civilian fuel rod) is more than 17-to-1. Larger by 1,700 percent, this figure indicates fission of large amounts of weapons-grade material at Fukushima.

The recent higher readings were probably based on either late releases from a fire-destroyed extraction facility or the venting of reactor No.3, a Toshiba-designed unit that used plutonium and uranium mixed oxide or MOX fuel. Unannounced nighttime airborne releases in early May caused radiation burns in many people, as happened to my forearms. Those plumes then drifted toward North America.

Enrichment of uranium for nuclear warheads is prohibited under constitutional law in Japan and by terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Since no suspects have been charged by prosecutors, this cannot be a plot by a few individuals but stands as the crime of a national entity.

Yellow-Cake Factory 608   Fukushima Province has a history of involvement in atomic weapons development, according to a New York Times article by Martin Fackler titled "Fukushima's Long Link to a Dark Nuclear Past" (Sept. 6). Following the lead of Japanese news reports, the correspondent visited the town of Ishikawa, less than an hour's drive south of the Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant. There he interviewed Kiwamu Ariga who as a student during the war was forced to mine uranium ore from a local foothill to supply the military-run Factory 608, which refined the ore into yellow-cake.

Several research groups worked on building a super-weapon for militarist Japan. The Naval Technology Research Institute was best-positioned due to its secret cooperation with the German Navy. Submarine U-234 was captured in the Atlantic after Germany's surrender with a cargo of uranium along with two dead passengers - Japanese military officers .Soon after departing Norway, U-864 was bombed and sunk, carrying a load of two tons of processed uranium..

In the article for the Atlanta Constitution, dated, Oct. 2, 1946, David Snell reported that the Japanese military had successfully tested a nuclear weapon off Konan on Aug. 12, 1945. There are detractors who dispute the account by a decommissioned Japanese intelligence officer to the American journalist, stationed in occupied Korea with the 24th Criminal Investigation Detachment of the U.S. Army. A cursory check on his background shows Snell to have been a credible reporter for Life magazine, who also contributed to the Smithsonian and The New Yorker magazines. A new book is being written by American and Russian co-authors on the Soviet shoot-down of the Hog Wild, a B-29 that flew over Konan island soon after the war's end..

Due to its endemic paranoia about all things nuclear, the U.S. government had a strong interest in suppressing the story of Japan's atomic bomb program during the war, just as Washington now maintains the tightest secrecy over the actual situation at Fukushima.

The emerging picture shows that nuclear-weapons development, initiated in 1954 by Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and supervised by Yasuhiro Nakasone, was centered inside civilian nuclear plants, since the Self-Defense Forces were bound by strict Constitutional rules against war-making and the Defense Agency is practically under the direct supervision of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Funding came from the near-limitless budget of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which today claims financial insolvency without explanation of how its vast cash holdings disappeared. A clandestine nuclear program must be expensive, since it would include the cost of buying the silence of parliament, the bureaucracy and foreign dignitaries.

Following the March 11 disaster, TEPCO sent a team of 250 emergency personnel into the plant, yet only 50 men were assigned to cooling the reactors. The other 200 personnel stayed out of sight, possibly to dismantle an underground plutonium-extraction facility. No foreign nuclear engineers or Japanese journalists were ever permitted entry into the reactor structures.   Radiation leakage from Fukushima No.1 prevented local police from rescuing hundreds of tsunami survivors in South Soma, many of whom consequently went unaided and died of wounds or exposure. Tens of thousands of farmers have lost their ancestral lands, while much of Japan's agriculture and natural areas are contaminated for several generations and possibly longer, for the remaining duration of the human species wherever uranium and plutonium particles have seeped into the aquifers.

TEPCO executives, state bureaucrats and physicists in charge of the secret nuclear program are evading justice in contempt of the Constitution. As in World War II, the Japanese conservatives in their maniacal campaign to eliminate their imagined enemies succeeded only in perpetrating crimes against humanity and annihilating their own nation. If history does repeat itself, Tokyo once again needs a tribunal to send another generation of Class-A criminals to the gallows.

Hundreds of stacks throughout the laboratory released unfiltered gaseous waste directly from plutonium-processing hoods. The LAHDRA Project Team has developed a system of priority indices and determined that between 1944 and 1966, plutonium was the most significant contaminant released. LAHDRA estimated that the total amount of plutonium released by LANL throughout its history, even with the improved filtering systems in later years, exceeded 170 curies. [...]

This report compiles the available information about the waste disposed of at each Material Disposal Area and into the three canyons, including any recent soil and water sampling results. Some of the sites with the highest deposits of radioactive contaminants include MDA’s C, G, and H with respective inventories of up to 49,679 curies, 1,383,700 curies, and 391 curies. Routine sampling of soil and water is regularly performed and radionuclide contamination above background levels is often found at the burial sites (e.g. TA-21). [...]

The waste discharge at LANL began in 1944 during the development of the atomic bomb. Due to time pressures, secrecy of the project, and general lack of knowledge at the time about the dangers of radioactive materials, the laboratory took poor precautions in its disposal of radioactive and other hazardous wastes during its early years of operations. Initially, the waste, in the form of liquids, drums and cardboard boxes, was released into the canyons or deposited into unlined pits completely untreated; poor records were maintained about the volumes and activities of these releases. By the 1960s, the waste disposal practices significantly improved and better records were kept. [...]

The potential for LANL-origin contaminants to reach the Rio Grande River may vary, depending on the underground formations and the types of waste disposed of at each disposal site. The potential may be quite large, as the 2006 Santa Fe Water Quality Report stated a “qualified detection of plutonium-238”was detected in Santa Fe drinking water supplies4. The US DOE has also reported the detection of LANL radionuclides in Santa Fe drinking water since the late 1990s5. Plutonium is the main ingredient in the core or trigger of the nuclear weapons that were developed and produced at LANL, and approximately 423,776 cubic feet (ft3) (12,000 cubic meters (m3)) of plutonium contaminated waste is buried in unlined disposal pits, trenches, and shafts at the LANL site. This early detection of plutonium in Santa Fe drinking water may be an indicator of an approaching plutonium contamination plume in Santa Fe groundwater. And of course, plutonium is only one of many LANL-origin contaminants. [...]

As previously discussed, information pertaining to the wastes disposed of by LANL is not always complete or fully available and so many of the types and quantities of waste disposed of at various LANL technical areas remain unknown.  [...]

Jain was among the eight people who were affected by radiation poisoning. He, like the others, had been exposed to cobalt-60, which had leaked from an irradiation machine being dismantled in the area. Jain refused the Rs 200,000 (A$ 4,000) compensation offered to him by the government and is instead suing Delhi University, from whose labs the machine originated. The university had bought the gamma irradiation machine in 1970 but it had not been used since the mid-1980s.

In the last few decades, India has quickly become the world's dumping ground for all sorts of waste, including hazardous material like old electronic gadgets or 'e-waste'. A large force of both formal and informal workers is involved in the acquiring, processing, and managing of this waste, yet, experts say the necessary checks and balances are missing.

This radiation then shows up in the finished products made from recovered materials that are exported back to the world. In 2007, radioactive steel originating from India was found in Germany and later that year, French officials reported that buttons for elevators, which had been made from recycled steel from India were emitting radiation.

"Waste flows from rich to poor and that's the nature of that flow," says Sinha. "I find it slightly amusing to say that processing waste is perhaps an economic activity and it will add to your GDP. I get the sense from the government that they are quite comfortable about this waste coming in." He says they routinely turn a blind eye to many of the things that are happening in the industry, which could be potential threats not only for the people involved in dealing with this waste, but the ecology and the country as a whole.

What happens in India, however, will have global reverberations, warns Chaturvedi. "India is exporting all kinds of things, in addition to the people who're being exposed and getting on planes," she says. "I think the point is how India's own secrecy is making it pretty much a radioactive menace for the rest of the world."