ecowatch | A stunning new report indicates the U.S. Navy knew that sailors from the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan took major radiation hits from the Fukushima atomic power plant after its meltdowns and explosions nearly three years ago.
If true, the revelations cast new light on the $1 billion lawsuit filed by the sailors against Tokyo Electric Power. Many of the sailors are already suffering devastating health impacts, but are being stonewalled by Tepco and the Navy.
The Reagan had joined several other U.S. ships in Operation
Tomodachi (“Friendship”) to aid victims of the March 11, 2011 quake and
tsunami. Photographic evidence and first-person testimony confirms that
on March 12, 2011 the ship was within two miles of Fukushima Dai’ichi as the reactors there began to melt and explode.
In the midst of a snow storm, deck hands were enveloped in a warm
cloud that came with a metallic taste. Sailors testify that the Reagan’s
5,500-member crew was told over the ship’s intercom to avoid drinking
or bathing in desalinized water drawn from a radioactive sea. The huge
carrier quickly ceased its humanitarian efforts and sailed 100 miles out
to sea, where newly published internal Navy communications confirm it
was still taking serious doses of radioactive fallout.
Scores of sailors from the Reagan and other ships stationed nearby
now report a wide range of ailments reminiscent of those documented
downwind from atomic bomb tests in the Pacific and Nevada, and at Three
Mile Island and Chernobyl. A similar metallic taste was described by pilots who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and by central Pennsylvanians downwind of Three Mile Island. Some parts of the atolls downwind from the South Pacific bomb tests remain uninhabitable six decades later.
Among the 81 plaintiffs in the federal class action are a sailor
who was pregnant during the mission, and her “Baby A.G.,” born that
October with multiple genetic mutations.
Officially, Tepco and the Navy say the dose levels were safe.
But a stunning new report by an American scholar based in Tokyo
confirms that Naval officers communicated about what they knew to be the
serious irradiation of the Reagan. Written by Kyle Cunningham and
published in Japan Focus, “Mobilizing Nuclear Bias” describes the interplay between the U.S. and Japanese governments as Fukushima devolved into disaster.
Cunningham writes that transcribed conversations obtained through
the Freedom of Information Act feature naval officials who acknowledge
that even while 100 miles away from Fukushima, the Reagan’s readings
“compared to just normal background [are] about 30 times what you would detect just on a normal air sample out to sea.”
On the nuclear-powered carrier “all of our continuous monitors alarmed at the same level, at this value. And then we took portable air samples on the flight deck and got the same value,” the transcript says.
